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TNO 1(6).

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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 6 JUNE 1994

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Welcome to TNO 1(6).

This issue includes an article by Kali Tal about the VWAR-L mailing list, where Vietnam veterans and others have gotten together for mutual support and to debate the meaning of the Vietnam war. This is obviously a highly charged subject, and many of the list's dynamics concern the relationship between the possibilities of e-mail and the possibilities of physical violence. The net is part of reality after all.

Also featured in this issue is Marsha Woodbury's article on the impending changes in journalism and its relationship to librarianship in the age of networking. Photographers are worried, journalistic education is changing, and we may even see a renaissance of investigative reporting. Just do it.

Also included are two brief articles by the editor. The first is a brief case study in corporate attempts to redefine the concept of "privacy" so that collecting huge databases of personal information about you and sending you vast amounts of unsolicited correspondence can be viewed as protecting your privacy and not as violating it. Clearly it's time to remind ourselves what privacy is. The second article is a not-entirely-original speculation about the day, supposedly soon to come, when large amounts of information are available in the wireless ether. Some of the possibilities are scary, no doubt about it, but others are at least intriguing. For example, maybe we will be spared some of the manipulations of sales people.

Plus all the usual TNO departments: this month's recommendations, company of the month, abstract of the month, and follow-up, which this month includes several recommendations of new gopher and WWW services to try.

If you like TNO, please pass it along to your friends and mailing lists. To fetch back issues, send messages that look like this:

To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send tno-january-1994

To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send tno-february-1994

And so forth.

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Orwellian privacy.

In a fascinating interview in Upside magazine (June 1994 issue, pages 36-55), George Gilder is asked about the privacy issues associated with emerging computer network technology. He makes two points which are worth quoting at length because they reflect an increasingly widespread corporate "line" about privacy. His first point is:

Some of the fear of invasion of privacy is misplaced. What is really an invasion of privacy is a telemarketer who gets you out of bed or the shower. They don't have any idea who you are, no notion of what you want. That's what really offends you. Ignorant intrusions, not intrusions from companies that really do understand your needs and know when you like to be called and the kinds of things you buy and don't buy. They might even be conscious, through your entry into some bulletin board, that you want to purchase a new car or house. They call you and try to solve your problem. That is much less of an invasion than an intrusion by a company that doesn't know anything about you.

In other words, your privacy is best respected when companies know just about everything there is to know about you. Why does this seem backwards? Because it is. Gilder -- and the numerous other industry types who promote this argument -- are trying to drain all content from the word "privacy" by putting the emphasis on the "invasion", and then pointing out that some invasions are more annoying than others. But it's important not to let such arguments go unchallenged. Privacy has a much larger meaning than that. Privacy includes a broad right to control the uses to which one's personal information is put. It includes, in particular, to know who has such information and what they're doing with it. This is quite the opposite of Gilder's picture, in which the only real problems are the ones that are solved by accumulating ever greater amounts of information.

Gilder's argument works by blurring the argument between calls that are solicited and calls that are, in some vaguer sense, wanted. One of the ways he does this is sneaky: tossing in the notion of a "bulletin board" on which I post the fact that I am looking to buy a certain item, which may or may not constitute a solicitation for sales calls. But mostly he tries to identify the theme of "privacy invasion" with unsuccessful calls, ignoring altogether the question of whether the calls have been solicited or not. The idea is that, by accumulating information about me, sellers can tailor their pitches more specifically to my situation, thereby making more likely that their calls will be wanted, in the sense of being usefully relevant to my situation.

The problem here is that nobody can read my mind. It's always going to be a probabilistic matter, and it will profit a company to call me just so long as the expected return-on-investment of their phone pitch is positive. Telemarketing is cheap: the call is usually local, the job pays $6 or so per hour, the calls can be made from a low-rent district, and an unsuccessful pitch takes less than a minute. If a successful sale brings in a hundred dollars in profit, it's worth calling anybody for whom the statistical likelihood of a sale is greater than roughly 1/500. That means that I will get 500 calls for each call that offers something that I actually want to buy. This result is independent of how much information about me is stored in the companies' computers, so long as that information cannot make perfect predictions about who will buy what. Pretty much the opposite of the picture Gilder paints.

Here, now is Gilder's second point:

So a lot of the so-called invasions of privacy will be a positive experience for most people. Computer communications can be sorted through, and you can keep what you want and kill what you don't. Increasingly, as your communication is channeled through computers, you will increase your control over it. It's the dumb terminal, the phone, with is the model of the violation. It violates your time and attention because it's dumb. If you have a really smart terminal that can sort through the communications and identify them, you can reject anything you don't want.

Once again he has found a way of side-stepping the issue of whether a sales pitch is solicited: the pitch is a phenomenon of nature that simply exists. The privacy violation is not caused by these "communications" but by your telephone! In other words, it's your job to secure the technology to sort through the piles of unsolicited sales pitches that companies send you. The word "smart" makes such a development sound natural and inevitable, even though advertisers will have a great incentive to circumvent such screening. At a minimum, advertisements would have to be labeled and organized in standardized ways to allow these smart terminals to parse them and inspect their contents. As a matter of architecture, Gilder's proposal is not far different from having a passive store of advertising material that individuals' software "agents" can actively search through for desired materials; the difference is that it is now the responsibility of individuals to prevent the receipt of materials they do not wish to receive, rather than actively soliciting the receipt of materials they do wish to receive.

As computer and network technology changes, lots of words and concepts will change their meanings. This is both inevitable and reasonable. But it also means that we will have conflicts about what words ought to mean. "Privacy" is one of those words, and we should be vigilant in defining and defending an expansive understanding of it.

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The wireless consumers' movement.

The computer industry is certain that we will all someday soon carry around a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) such as the Apple Newton. The problem is, what will we do with it? Let me propose one answer. Let's found the wireless consumers' movement. We'll need a bar-code scanner and cheap wireless packet communications that we can plug into the PDA. Then when we're shopping, we need only point the scanner at the UPC bar-code on a given product to retrieve the information about it from Consumer Reports, the Wine Spectator, the New York Review of Books, or whatever. Reviews of the products would pop up on your screen, hypercard-style, with buttons you can press with your pen to get further details, comparisons with other products, and so forth. You'd subscribe to these various services, paying per month or per screenful.

This idea can be extended considerably. Merchants can choose to make their prices and other information available on servers for these products, so that when you scan a certain bottle of wine at one shop, another shop can automatically tell you that they have it for a few dollars less. Obviously you wouldn't receive this information unless you wanted it.

But it works best after you've already bought the product. Press the "evaluation" button and scan the barcode on the bottle of wine you just drank (book you just read, etc), and a page pops up with various buttons on it. (And of course you can customize this for each product class if you like.) Maybe you can tap a number for how much you liked it. Maybe you can call back up what the critics said, and press a button to make note of whether you agreed or not. After a while each critic will have a "scorecard", so you can develop a sense of which critics share your tastes.

Another mechanism could automatically correlate the judgements made by everybody using the service, and then statistically predict which products you might like, given what others with a history of similar tastes have liked.

Several people think that information like this might become a commodity. Your judgements and preferences are valuable information to producers. Your PDA could offer you certain amounts of money to sell this information, with one price to sell it without any demographic information about you attached, another price to sell it anonymously but with your vital stats included, yet another price (maybe much higher, depending on the market) to sell it with your name and address, and so forth. But this might not work: someone could just go down a grocery store aisle, entering bogus preference information for every product just to collect the cash. It's probably just as well.

Another consumer application of wireless computing would be ways to reveal the costs of consumption. Markets put real work into telling you the price of things, but they also put real work into hiding the true costs of consuming them. A superstore might have the best prices, but you probably have little idea how much extra it costs to drive there. So maybe your car should have a running meter on it, like an odometer only measured in money instead of miles, telling you how much you've spent driving it lately. I'll bet that the sight of this meter ticking away the dollars will be enough to send lots of people back to their nearby neighborhood shopping districts and away from the superstores, not to mention back to living in the city and not in the suburbs. The same idea could be applied to thermostats and electrical devices.

The problem is actually computing the costs. You could program the thing with a rule of thumb, like $0.25 a mile to drive. But it would be a lot more compelling if the computer behind the meter could be kept up-to-date on the actual costs. This should be relatively easy for thermostats and electric sockets, since the utility company can easily broadcast its current rates (if it's somehow motivated to do so). Cars are harder since so many costs must be included. "Blue Book" used-car values could be available on-line for calculating depreciation. Approximate prevailing gasoline prices could be broadcast as well. Insurance companies or home bookkeeping systems could tell your computer how much you've paid in premiums. Maintenance costs could be approximated as well. And so forth. All of this information would reside in various databases -- some private, some public, some that are free, some that you have to subscribe to. The result, perhaps, could be substantial decreases in all of the ills assocated with driving: highway deaths, pollution, wasted time, emotional stress, and so forth.

Now, all of these thought experiments carry an obvious dark side: they all presuppose a tremendous amount of infrastructure which they do not in themselves justify. So what else will all of this infrastructure be doing at the same time? What's appealing about these scenarios, of course, is that they are all voluntary; they do not require you to identify yourself to anybody else's computer. But if your car is keeping track of this information, maybe your insurance company wants to be automatically told how you use your car, lest you be classified a high risk.

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The Net Gives New Life to Journalism

Marsha Woodbury Director at Large, CPSR Doctoral Student College of Education University of Illinois marsha-w@uiuc.edu

When people talk about the NII journalism, they think in terms of our daily paper being delivered on a screen. But the metamorphosis is deeper than that. We journalists are scrambling to keep up with today's changes, as we can link to resources that we used to dream about. We can reach out to each other and our readership in wonderful ways. As a journalist trying to ride this wave, I am constantly thrilled with what we can do now, yet overwhelmed with keeping up.

The good news is that this growth in the boundaries of journalism bodes well for freedom and democracy. And the transformation goes far deeper than the outsider might realize.

First let's look at the transformation in roles and responsibilities. For example, "print" and "broadcast" used to be the two divisions in journalism schools. Soon the NII, or Infobahn, will allow video clips to be part of the story, and all journalists will need to be conversant with good writing and good broadcasting. Multimedia delivery is here. The division of the future will be between advertising and public relations on one hand, and news reporting using multimedia on the other.

Computer-Assisted Reporting

For the past few years, journalists have been using databases and spreadsheets to generate their work. The Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) recently published a compilation of 101 stories about exploring digitally stored information, often off 9-track tape. Up until the Net began mushrooming, computer-aided reporting (CAR) involved combining multiple databases to reveal government or business misconduct.

A classic example is running a database of all school bus drivers in a state against all drivers with drunk-driving citations. Sure enough, some bus drivers have had multiple drinking violations. Reporters used to pry many data bases out of the government. However, more and more are available on-line, and that should increase.

Control

Editors and photographers feel they are losing control over their products. Computers have been used for the composition of newspapers far more than for CAR. Programs like QuarkXPress (TM) and Pagemaker (TM) are used to design pages, a process called "pagination." As page make-up is done on computers, designers have the added ability to be "creative" with headlines and other text traditionally left to copy editors, which causes some conflict.

Photographers are struggling with the implications of digital photography, and the easy manipulation of pictures. Anyone in the pagination process can alter a digital photo, for example, removing an unsightly beer can--an alteration that once could only be done in the darkroom. Frankly, photographers are worried.

News Librarians

Another change involves news librarians, who used to be mainly responsible for the paper's or TV station's archives. Today, these information professionals are out in the newsroom, their names in by-lines. They are working shoulder-to-shoulder with staff writers, and they are recognized for their skilled contribution. Computer-aided stories are now daily fare.

For example, a San Francisco journalist sought the membership of the exclusive Bohemian Club. The club refused. A search through the on-line version of Who's Who, picking out all entries who listed their affiliation with the Bohemian Club, gave the reporter an impressive partial list of members.

News librarians have been instrumental in stories about everything from car theft to election fraud. Their expertise in accessing digitally stored information is proving essential in keeping up with business and government records now available on-line. On-line databases proved helpful in these two stories. Investigative reporter Duncan Campbell used Knowledge Index to expose the fraudulent claims of an AIDS researcher, and the Brisbane Weekend Independent used the PAPERS file to track down a missing Australian businessman, according to Roland Standbridge, a journalism educator.

Keeping Up With Change

How do I monitor the transformation of my field? It's not easy. I use the Internet, where there are probably 30-40 good Listservs. I subscribe to several: JOURNET, spj-online, the Nieman conference list, and newslib. I get the Visual Communication (Viscom) Listserv as well. The novel element in these groups is the intermixing of librarians, reporters, editors, free-lancers, lay people, photographers, and educators. "Newslib" started as a group for newspaper librarians, and now there are untold journalists lurking there. We all share a passionate interest in on-line sources. The other group that intrigues me is INFOPRO, for professional information seekers, like private eyes and investigative reporters. (I'll put a list of the group names and their Listserv addresses at the end of this article, with instructions for joining).

When I cruise the Net bulletin boards, I alight on "alt.journalism" or "alt.journalism.criticism" groups. There are many more which deal with gathering and presenting information, not to mention international news provided through the "soc.culture" groups such as "soc.culture.new-zealand." I can read about a New Zealand earthquake minutes after the event, whereas such minor news would never make the American papers. A clever journalist can develop hundreds of stories without ever leaving the terminal. On the other hand, who needs a journalist when readers can receive the news directly from the people involved? Questions like that one take up hours of Listserv time!

Journalism Education is Changing

If you teach journalism, your curriculum is changing as are the resources. We journalists must know how to use e-mail, how to search with Gopher and Mosaic and Fetch, how to access libraries and participate in Listservs. These skills are as important as the AP Style Book. Our lab here at the University of Illinois developed a web tutorial for using the Internet, which you can reach at http://gopher.ag.uiuc.edu:70/WWW/AIM/Discovery/Net/intro.html.

The resources for education are blooming, led by John Makulowich, Internet Trainer. He's set up an "Awesome List" on the web, as well as exercises for teachers to give their students, and most recently the KID (Kids Internet Delight) List, http://www.clark.net/pub/journalism/kid.html. I am is awe--our students will be able to put their work up for the whole world to see.

Newspapers have made their text available on-line, and many are "up" with pictures, too. My favorite is the University Kansan Daily Interactive http://kuhttp.cc.ukans.edu/cwis/UDK/UDKpg1.html

Old-time reporters still smell the ink and listen for the clank of linotype and typewriters. Modern journalists are accustomed to the quiet of computers, the changed workrooms, the blending of graphics and print. It behooves the older generation to add computer skills to their wealth of experience, in order to be effective mentors to the new generation.

You, the Searcher

At the CPSR Annual Meeting, which will be held in San Diego on October 8th and 9th of this year, I'll do a workshop on how you can use the Net to gather information. (For more information about this meeting, send a message to cpsr@cpsr.org).

In order to keep up with searching tips, I have to update my own records DAILY.

To give you a brief example of where you might look for information on the Internet--and this is only one small tool--imagine being able to search for a particular word in the thousands of bulletin boards in the Netnews, or Usenet It is possible to keyword search the millions of Usenet messages among the 6000 or more special interest news groups overnight while you sleep. You basically provide a few keywords via an email message and send it to a site. The results, about 20 lines from each match, are forwarded to you by email.

Or how about using Gopher to bring up the a school newspaper, and quickly looking through the archives for articles on hazardous waste?

Every day more government documents are coming on-line, allowing us to "possess" the documents in our offices. The US Embassy Daily Bulletin, produced by the United States Information Agency (USIA) is a huge full-text 40- to 80-page document which is prepared for distribution in Europe. It covers politics, business, economics, and science, and is the best source of European news on the Internet.

Though many people are worried about power being concentrated in the hands of those who own and control the methods of delivery, there is a tremendous freedom for us all to explore the Net. With the amazing proliferation of materials available to us all on-line, we can become more active watchdogs of the government and the press, and the chances will increase for us to participate in areas where we once felt powerless.

Here's a case in point. Our local freenet in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, is PrairieNet, which has a bulletin board devoted solely to the local paper. People can write in about each and every issue, and corrections and additions are far easier for the newspaper to glean.

Look out for e-mail interviewing, more journalism Listservs and bulletin boards, more on-line papers and magazines, more opportunities to e-mail to the press, and more information to keep up with. It's all happening on the Net.

------------------ JOURNET send your message to LISTSERV@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA

spj-online send your message to listserv@netcom.com

Nieman send your message to Nieman-request@nando.net

newslib send your message to listserv@gibbs.oit.unc.edu

Viscom send your message to listserv@templevm.bitnet

INFOPRO write jcook@netcom.com

For computer-aided reporting with A LOT of traffic:

carr-l send your message to lisserv@ulkyvm.louisville.edu ------------------ For first-timers: to join a Listserv group, you send your message to the Listserv:

For example, to join JOURNET, I would send a message to LISTSERV@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA

I would put nothing in the Subject line, and the message would simply say:

Subscribe JOURNET Marsha Woodbury

as in: Subscribe (list name) (my first name) (my last name)

and I'd leave off my signature--the message would look like this:

Date: Thu, 3 Mar 94 16:08 EST From: marsha-w@uiuc.edu To: LISTSERV@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA Subject: --------------- Subscribe JOURNET Marsha Woodbury

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VWAR-L as a network community.

Kali Tal Editor, Viet Nam Generation 18 Center Rd., Woodbridge, CT 06525 fax: 203/389-6104 kalital@minerva.cis.yale.edu

VWAR-L is a discussion list for those interested in the Vietnam War. It attracts many veterans. I do not know what percentage of list members are veterans, but well over 50% of the regular posters define themselves as vets. I studied the VWAR-L for over two years, and I will make the argument that the email environment both fosters the creation of a "community" and shapes the development of that community in very specific ways. (Though I focus on the VWAR-L "community," I have a colleague who engages a transsexual bitnet community in a similar way. She and I have shared many discussions about our work and observations, and have come to some similar conclusions.)

Communities of trauma survivors (in which category I would include, for example, Viet Nam combat veterans and post-operative transsexuals) are not homogenous, though they are formed around a "common" traumatic experience. There is a great deal of stratification in any community of trauma survivors, as evidenced by the "hierarchy of authenticity" which, in groups of Holocaust survivors privileges the Auschwitz survivor as somehow more authentic ("real") than the person who spent the war hiding in some peasant's potato cellar, or, in groups of Viet Nam veterans, privileges the "boonierat" (bush combat vet) over the REMF (Rear-Echelon Motherfucker who spent the war typing memos in the Inspector General's office in Saigon). Furthermore, survivors have different agendas--there is a battle in any survivor "community" over which trauma narrative becomes "normative". In order to "belong" to the group, there is a great deal of pressure on the survivor to revise his or her story so that it conforms to the normative formula. (This is most apparent in the so-called 12-step programs, where "testimony" necessarily takes a particular shape: "My name is Nancy Smith and I am an alcoholic....")

Not all survivor communities depend on high-tech, of course. But I believe that access to high-tech (email) affects the development of particular survivor communities in important ways. There are currently many Viet Nam vet support groups that meet in person. We tended to get three types of vets on the VWAR-L list. One type had never joined any veteran support group; one type used to belong to a veterans organization (usually Vietnam Vets Against the War) but did not join another veteran's group when that group effectively dissolved (some 10-15 years ago); one type currently is involved in one or more veterans' support groups but finds additional support from VWAR-L. If one examines shifting trends in the Viet Nam veterans movement, one finds a shift from veteran's groups based on common political beliefs and shared trauma (GI Forum, Viet Nam Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace, etc.) in the late 1960s through the 1970s, to the post-political "healing"-oriented VVA, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Khe Sanh Veterans, etc. which blossomed (not at all coincidentally) during a period coincident with the construction and dedication of the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Wall in the early 1980s. The shift in Viet vet group orientation--which started in the late 1970s (marked by the effective demise of Vietnam Veterans Against the War as a working organization) and which was, for all intents and purposes, complete by the mid-1980s--was accompanied by a flood of popular culture productions emphasizing a "normative" Viet Nam vet combat experience (from Cimino to Coppola to Stone, etc.). These productions gave us the story of a "senseless" war which was useful only in that it provided a personal growth experience for the combatant protagonist. They also helped depoliticize and then medicalize the image of the traumatized Viet Nam veteran. The result of this trend was that left-wing Viet Nam veterans began to feel as if they were not accorded room in the "veterans" community, particularly since the "normative" vet was absorbed in the "religion" of POW/MIA worship (culturally signalled by the slew of Rambo and Chuck Norris films... Bruce Franklin says you can get into a bar fight quicker by claiming there are no POWs than by claiming that there is no God). These leftwing vets were displaced survivors, far outnumbered by their apolitical or decidedly right wing peers.

VWAR-L in its first years provided a meeting place for disfranchised vets, a place where the myth of the normative Viet Nam vet was not only regularly shattered, but where bonds of community were forged between vets and nonvets. Membership in the VWAR-L community is determined by who shows up--folks "vote with their keyboards". The latter fact is quite important, and it is due, I believe, to the difficulty of engaging in physically threatening behavior over the net. I have witnessed first-hand the physical intimidation tactics used by, for example, POW/MIA supporters to silence opposition, and by rightwing vets to expel left wing vets from gatherings. We who live our lives mostly outside of the realm of physical threat tend to forget that a threat-free environment can be quite liberating for folks who are used to being afraid of having the shit kicked out of them. Such strongarm tactics were apparently not possible on the VWAR-L. Left wing vets were vocal, and might have outnumbered right wing vets. They often came to the support of nonveterans who posted favorable descriptions of the antiwar movement, and contradicted right wing vets who attacked the antiwar movement as being "anti-vet." A situation in which a civilian antiwar activist could stand up to a group of right wing combat veterans while being cheered on by a bunch of equally tough combat vets who worked with Vietnam Vets Against the War is simply a situation impossible to envision in a face-to-face community. Such an interaction would either never have taken place, or certainly ended in physical violence.

The definition of "community" is debatable. For the first three years of its existence, VWAR-L members signed on and did not leave. During that period VWAR-L lost between five and ten major players--a very low attrition rate. (In fact, at least two VWAR-L members departed the list in a huff, directly attributing their decision to leave to my vocal presence on the list. These two right-wing listmembers claimed that my criticisms of what I considered to be racist and sexist language amounted to a sort of censorship of their words. Since then I have noticed that there is a strong tendency for people who find themselves addressed critically because of their choice of language to claim that their rights of "free speech" are being infringed upon, as if "free speech" means that one's speech is entitled to be "free" from the threat of criticism.) The volume of messages often exceeded 100 a day. Out of 300 listmembers, over 50 were regular posters (at least one post a week). Listmembers informed the community when their children were born, when they were going on vacation, when they got married, when they got divorced, when they were ill, when they had fallen off the wagon, when they needed medical, legal or personal assistance. Several listmembers gave day-to-day progress reports of their attempts to get sober. Others posted their nightmares. They met in small groups (for example, there was a VWAR-L Northwest [God's Country Division]) which met a couple of times a year. All meetings between Vwarriors were described in posts to the list. GIFF files of photographs of VWAR-L members, taken at parties and gatherings, were available by ftp. Backchannel and public communications wove in and out to create a fabric more dense than any casual reader could understand. List-members have met each other and married. They have left "real" relationships with "real" people for equally real relationships with previously "electronic" people. Folks up late at night signed on and checked in to find out who else was awake. Scholarly papers were traded around, librarians (we had at least ten on the list) regularly answered questions and provided references. The spontaneously developed metaphors of the bar and the village were bandied about by Vwarriors a dozen times a day. If this is not a virtual "community" I am not sure what is. One of our resident anthropologists asked Vwarriors if they they thought VWAR-L comprised a community. The unanimous answer was "yes." In my book a community is constituted by its members. And the members of this community were more diverse than would have been possible in a face-to-face community because the low population density of leftwing vets and the tactics of physical intimidation would have precluded it. Email allows for an immediate and often intimate form of contact which reminds people of "real-life" encounters.

There are all kinds of interesting questions raised by what I call the "performative" aspect of email (in every post you write yourself into existence for a particular audience) and lots of questions about the nature of identity politics in a disembodied/ textual space, but I think they complicate, rather than invalidate, the notion that virtual communities exist. When a Viet Nam vet spills his guts on screen for the first time in 20 years, when a man with 100% psych disability from the VA uses the list to keep himself from committing suicide, when people trust each other with secrets and truths they wouldn't share except among friends, when the belief that VWAR-L is a community is strong enough to move folks to do exactly the sorts of things that they would do within a community, doesn't that qualify?

The character of the VWAR-L has changed greatly in the last year. Membership has fallen from over three hundred to less than 150. This drastic exodus was caused in part by an acrimonious and extended argument which developed between left and right-wing listmembers, in which the listowner clearly sided with the right wing. It was also brought about by the strenuous attempt of right wing veterans to "police" the list and to attack (often viciously) listmembers (particularly newcomers) who questioned the normative conservative image of the "veteran". The argument, which took place primarily on the VWAR-L, often transcended the virtual arena, and had an effect on the "real" lives of participants, destroying face-to-face friendships of many years, and resulting in real damage to the lives of some participants--a fact to which I can attest since my own life was damaged in this way. In my tenure on the list I was subject to (in addition to public verbal abuse) circulation of my private email, threats of blackmail, harassing private and public email, and even physical threats to my person which were blatant enough to move the police to take action. I also made good friends and professional acquaintances who supported me in "real life" when the virtual world was causing me a great deal of stress and unhappiness. In short, the "virtual community" was indistinguishable from the "real world community" (and the latter did, in fact, exist in the form of public, personal, and professional face-to-face networks which had been--if not created by--at least shaped by the "virtual community").

I am not trying to hype the virtual environment. VWAR-L is not an ideal community by any means. It's no utopia. It's more like (as one listmember wrote) a self-cleaning aquarium. Some people say that network community is an illusion. But it is precisely the shared illusions which create community, both in the real and the virtual world. As Helen Keller once said, "Security is mostly superstition".

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This month's recommendations.

Deane Juhan, Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1987. An fascinating alternative anatomy of the human body, written for bodyworkers (i.e., practitioners of things like therapeutic massage) in which everything revolves around the connective tissue. Lots of detailed diagrams and explanations of bones and muscles and nerves, with a view to understanding how our bodies develop in response to the ways we use them, and what can be done about it when we use them wrong and mess them up.

Mike Parker, Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to QWL, Boston: South End Press, 1985. A brilliant analysis of "quality" programs in manufacturing, including both an inspired literary analysis of some training materials for "quality circles" and several detailed case studies of quality systems in practice at various types of plants. A valuable corrective to the hype of management consultants.

Daniel C. Hallin, We Keep America On Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere, London: Routledge, 1994. A set of clear and intellectually serious essays about TV news that avoids several simplistic extremes while offering well-supported criticisms and pointing out some worrying trends. Topics include war coverage in Vietnam and Nicaragua, coverage of the President, and sound bites.

Upside. Upside magazine is the source of the worrisome interview with George Gilder that I cited above. It's also a fascinating window onto the thinking of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who have developed a distinctive culture of their own: aggressively libertarian in their social values, disdainful of government without being particularly Republican, and (of course) intensely worshipful of individual enterprise. For a while last year they were referring to themselves as "Somali warlords". Upside is the main cheerleader for this culture. It has promoted the electronics industry's recently intensified political organizing in Washington. The magazine is consistently fascinating, with detailed articles on the workings of markets, the thinking of venture capitalists, the fates of particular companies, and so forth. Monthly, $48/year. Upside, PO Box 469023, Escondido, California 92046-9023, USA.

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Company of the month.

This month's company is:

PeerLogic 555 DeHaro Street San Francisco, California 94107-2348

+1 (415) 626-4545, fax +1 (415) 626-4710

The future is here, and every day you use computer networks that span the globe. So why is it so incredibly difficult to write globally distributed software applications? One reasons is the heterogeneity of operating systems and network protocols, each obscure in itself and just about incommensurable with all the others. In a reasonable world you'd have a layer of software that sat on top of those incommensurable systems and provided you with a simple, uniform set of abstractions. The software would come in the form of a kernel that was always running in the background on every machine in the known world, talking to that machine's operating system and hardware, keeping on top of all the weird interrupts and contingencies that come up, and shielding you and your applications from all of that nonsense, with the result that your application doesn't even have to know what kind of machine or network it's running on. Right? Right.

Well, that world has arrived, and the software that brings about this blessed state of affairs is called Pipes Platform from a company called PeerLogic. Just think what the world will be like once any programmer in the world can write a globally distributed application and make it available on the net without any concern for grungy system calls and incompatible standards. We'll have all kinds of interesting games, communications schemes, bulletin boards, databases, and whatever else happens to be widely enough adopted to reach a critical mass of users.

The next step is for someone to write genuinely useable mailer software on top of a system like Pipes Platform. Listserv is okay, but it has an appalling interface and you have to be a hacker to use it. In the future, anybody will be able to create their own e-mail infrastructures, and we won't be stuck with the small number of simple models of e-mail use that we have at the moment.

The problem with this brave new world is that the new ease of writing global applications will be available both to the people I like and the people I don't like. So we can have both global democracy and global surveillance, global community and global hierarchy, global interaction and global accounting. Better get going and spread around the kinds of applications you'd want the world to made out of.

In short, I recommend that you write to PeerLogic and ask for product information. I do not, however, recommend that you harass them. Only get the literature if you're genuinely interested in reading it. Thanks a lot.

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Abstract of the month.

Benjamin Miller, Vital signs of identity, IEEE Spectrum 31(2), 1994, pages 22-30.

Abstract: Technology has made identification of people more important, but some identification methods are easy to fool, some are expensive, and some are too intrusive. Biometric systems are automated techniques for verifying or recognizing the identity of a living person based on some physiological characteristic, such as a fingerprint or iris pattern, or some behavior, such as handwriting or keystroke patterns. The system must be presented with an identity to which a person is laying claim, which the machine can either accept or reject, and it must be able to search stored sets of characteristics and select one that matches those of the person being recognized. Developing a biometric system entails tradeoffs in terms of component cost, reliability, discomfort in using a device, the data required, and other factors. Various approaches to biometrics are described, and psychological and physical obstacles to their acceptance are examined.

This abstract comes from the University of California Libraries' clunky but nonetheless indispensable Melvyl Medline system.

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Follow-up.

Nobody had any complaints about TNO 1(5). I don't know if that's a good thing or not, particularly given its robustly avant garde criticism of some important ideas about technology.

Check out "A Grant Getter's Guide to the Internet", available at the University of Idaho gopher: gopher.uidaho.edu. Pick the menu entry "Science, Research, & Grant Information" and then "Grant Information".

Also, check out the ACLU's gopher at aclu.org and the Digital Freedom Network at gopher.iia.org.

The archives from Gleason Sackman's net-happenings list, which I've mentioned a number of times in TNO, are available, along with a variety of other things, from the Coalition for Networked Information. Telnet to gopher.cni.org, log in as "brsuser", and follow the directions. The interface is pretty terrible, but I more or less figured it out after three tries.

The June issue of the Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine is now out; see http://www.rpi.edu/~decemj/cmc/mag/current/toc.html. It includes useful articles by Brock N. Meeks, Bruce Hahne, John December, Rob Kling, and Gary Ritzenthaler.

Virginia Shea's new book "Netiquette" has some nice things to say about TNO. It's a useful guide to Internet etiquette for those just starting out. You can reach the publisher, Seth Ross at Albion Books, at seth@albion.com. (I'm pleased to report that they've trademarked the term "netiquette". Next I hope they trademark "newbie", thus helping to take another regrettable network neologism out of circulation.)

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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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