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TNO 2(3).
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 2, NUMBER 3 MARCH 1995
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This month: Public relations on the Internet Running an on-line newsletter Social networks and democracy What does "free" mean?
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Welcome to TNO 2(3).
This issue includes a series of short articles by the editor. The first is addressed to public relations people who wish to practice their craft on the Internet. The bottom line is that the Internet provides the public relations profession with a marvelous opportunity: learning to communicate in a rigorously honest fashion in a democratic environment where manipulative practices do not work.
The next article summarizes some lessons I've learned from running this newsletter for the last year or so, followed by two brief comments, one on a famous article about the threat to democracy posed by the decline of bowling leagues in the United States and the other on some recent attempts by ideologically minded folks to remove all meaning from the simple, unambiguous word "free".
This issue also commences a new TNO department, the wish list. Back in TNO 1(7) I remarked upon the phenomenon of technological fantasizing, the activity of inventing new cyber technologies in one's head as part of daily life. I am certain that I am not the only person who engages in this type of routine fantasizing, but I do like to think that I am more ambivalent about it than just about anybody else you're likely to meet. (A reporter in the San Diego Union-Tribune (P.J. Hufstetter, 1/10/95) astutely referred to Wired magazine as the Playboy of the 1990's, both because of its male demographics and because of the vaguely erotic nature of numerous men's attachments to computing machinery. The analogy is worth extending.) The purpose of the wish list, then, is to spell out some of each month's half-developed fantasies for new kinds of useful computing and networking systems, to dwell on the issues that those systems raise, and to think reflexively about the nature of technological fantasizing itself. Lots of people have gotten rich on their technological fantasies, and the line between science fiction and business management is frequently unclear these days. But that's even more reason to think about the fantasies as fantasies -- given that the stuff of some people's dreams is now rapidly transformed into the material conditions of other people's lives.
A footnote. An article in the 1/30/95 issue of Forbes magazine points out that people are not exactly flocking to buy stuff from all those heavily hyped Internet shopping services. Flowers, pizzas, magazines, you name it -- people would rather buy them the old-fashioned way. Of course, so far as Forbes is concerned this means that the Internet is basically a batch of hype. But another possible conclusion is that people actually want to use the Internet for what it's best at -- getting connected to other people in mailing lists, interest groups, political movements, interactive games, and so forth. We've got plenty of shopping malls. We need more street corners, more pubs, more union halls, more seminar rooms, more barn raisings, and more quilting bees. The Internet can keep on being all those places if we take good care of it.
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Public relations on the Internet.
This quarter I have been teaching both a seminar on public relations and a class on computer networking as communication. This juxtaposition has provided me with an occasion to think about an important topic: the practice of public relations on the Internet. Few people outside the profession of public relations have much idea what public relations work actually consists of; likewise, it's hard to explain the Internet to anybody who hasn't used it awhile. The intersection of these two topics, then, can be obscure. But this obscurity is going to dissipate as PR people discover the Internet. It will be important for the net community to be prepared for PR, and vice versa. This particular article is addressed to PR people, based on a couple of informal presentations I've made to groups of PR people in the last month.
Lots of books have been appearing over the last couple of years that purport to explain "how to use the Internet". If you read them, though, you discover that they are all (or all the halfways legitimate ones, so far as I am aware) basically technical books: how to log on, how to read your e-mail, how to telnet someplace, how to set up a web page, how to get on a mailing list, what's available where, and so forth. But this is only a small part of the information that belongs under the heading of "how to use the Internet". It is, so to speak, the bottom layer, the technical foundation. But a foundation isn't much use in itself without the considerable superstructure that connects the day-to-day mechanics of net use with the larger goals of the organization. What's needed, and still basically absent, is this next layer of knowledge: how to use the Internet strategically as an integrated part of the rest of what an organization is doing. Paper isn't going away; television isn't going away; meetings aren't going away; the telephone isn't going away. Clearly, whatever you do with the net, it will be one element in a larger ecology of forms of communication. Using the net requires its own technical knowledge, but more broadly it requires its own practical knowledge -- how to use the net in practice, as part of a larger strategy, to get the stuff done that the organization is supposed to be about.
With that in mind, then, let us imagine a world, one otherwise similar to the existing world of professional communications work, in which anybody who doesn't like your direct mail can easily and cheaply turn right around and tell you so. Now imagine a world in which anybody who doesn't like your direct mail can easily and cheaply turn right around and tell your whole mailing list just what they think about you. That, my friends, is the Internet. The Internet holds some real dangers for people who are in charge of managing the image that an organization projects to the outside world. Anybody can use the Internet to circulate poor opinions or unfavorable information about you, and as the recent Pentium case shows, interesting news, good or bad, can travel the length and breadth of the Internet in hours. It's next to impossible for anybody to control what happens on the net. Nobody formally governs the net and no particular set of written-down rules adequately describes its functioning. Instead, the denizens of the net run things according to their own continually negotiated sense of what's right. The net, in short, is the world's closest large-scale approximation to democracy.
Looked at in a positive light, then, the net holds tremendous promise for allowing PR people to actually put in practice the ideals described in PR textbooks: open, symmetrical, two-way communications between an organization and the publics that have a stake in its operation. It has long been difficult to conduct this kind of two-way communication, for the simple reason that the mass media don't work that way. If you are getting your message out to the public by persuading reporters to write or broadcast stories about you, then that's one-way communication. And it's sneaky one-way communication as well, inasmuch as the organization is rarely identified as the instigator of the article, and the people who see or hear the story have little opportunity to discuss among themselves what they think about it, much less make their voices heard in response.
The Internet changes this. If you want to communicate with a certain public then get your "Whole Internet Catalog" down off the shelf, look for the relevant mailing list, sit down at your computer, and send a message. Simple, right? Actually, of course, it isn't that simple at all. The difficulty has shifted from the laborious hustling of reporters to something else. But what exactly?
Put yourself in the shoes of the people on a given mailing list. These people all have other things to do, of course, but a few times a day or week they sit down at their computer and read their e-mail. Some of it will be from the people on that mailing list, probably as part of an ongoing dialogue that has its own history, its own vocabulary, and its own background of shared references, memories, precedents, values, and assumptions. If you just send out your own message, with no sense of this whole background, then you're likely to seem like an odd, presumptious stranger. And if your audience gets any sense that your agenda is basically more about taking than about giving then they are likely to get downright mad at you. This is what happened to that so-called Internet expert who decided that he would promote his book by sending form-letter messages to a hundred-odd news groups, each customized with a bit of relevant text from the book. These messages were widely reviled on the net (and justly so), whereupon a German anarchist decided that they constituted spam (which they did) and that therefore he was justified in running a "cancelbot" to automatically erase them (which he wasn't). When things like this happen, people in the PR world sometimes start going off into manipulation and control, under the bogus guise of calling for "consensus" about what behavior (revenge-taking behavior, that is, not PR behavior) is acceptable on the net. Out here in reality, though, no such consensus-building process is necessary, for the simple reason that control-oriented PR people are just about the only folks who are not already in alignment with the perfectly functional uncodified rule that you can't play on the net unless your basic operating mode is one of giving rather than taking.
Most PR people, I like to think, would prefer the difficult but more satisfying route of losing their one-way habits and learning to participate in the net on a symmetrical, two-way basis. How might this be done? Well, nobody knows for sure. All I can do here is offer a few observations based on stories I've heard and things I've been involved in myself.
The Internet is full of computer people, and as you might imagine they use the net pretty heavily to talk about computers. Usenet has numerous news groups devoted to particular computers and software packages. These are the cyberspace equivalent of the user groups found by the score in most larger communities. These discussion groups are clearly a gold mine for companies that need to know what their customers are thinking, and it is common for PR and marketing people to monitor these lists. Of course, these companies have other ways of finding out what their customers are thinking, and they have to decide whether they get enough extra information from paying someone to monitor these mailing lists, but often they do. My sense is that the companies do not care to spend a lot of time actively intervening in the lists, except occasionally when technical people have technical information to communicate. This might seem counterintuitive, given that people on the lists must occasionally say bad or wrong things about the company and its products. But generally, if somebody says something unfair or mistaken then somebody else will correct them without the company having to throw a fit. But to my knowledge no real studies have been done, and I doubt if any reliable generalizations can be made right now.
Some other companies have made information about themselves available on the World Wide Web and other, similar facilities. Creating web pages is easy and exciting, since you can produce something flashy in a few hours of work -- or easily pay someone else to do it. It is still entirely unclear, though, what role these web pages can play as part of a serious communication strategy. Web pages have the advantage, compared to posting on mailing lists, that you can be as commercial and self-interested as you want and nobody will get mad at you. Whether this is the best course of action depends on who you are trying to reach. If your goal is simply to communicate with your existing customers, for example by providing customer-support information and product updates, then a simple, low-overhead approach is probably best. If you are providing an on-line equivalent to your paper brochure then similar production values are relevant, although you should keep in mind that large color bitmaps take most real users a long time to download. Silicon Graphics is now advertising a service for people who want to produce very fancy bitmaps for their web pages, but I doubt if this is a good idea unless your intended audience is all in the top one percent in terms of the power of their hardware and the bandwidth of their net connections.
If your aim is to reach a broad audience with your web pages, then as a general matter you need to advertise them. One common way to do this is by placing ads in print media. Another approach is to build and maintain web pages that are actually going to be useful to the net community, and then include information about your organization as one of the links that web users can follow if they care to. If you are a law firm then you could create a well-organized archive of on-line legal documents in the area of your specialty. If you are a publisher then you could create an on-line index of your books that can be searched by authors, book titles, subject headings, publication dates, and so forth. Use your imagination -- what information or software can I put on the web that my target audience of net users will genuinely find useful? That's the test: whether you are making a genuine contribution to the net community. If so then you are free to post simple, low-hype messages to newsgroups and mailing lists announcing the availability of your new on-line service. Everybody will know that you're doing this out of self-interest in the end, but nobody will mind.
Another approach is to create a mailing list. This can be the much cheaper electronic equivalent of your paper mailing list for distributing advertising materials and the like. Definitely never, ever add anybody to an electronic mailing list without their permission. The best policy is to let people take their own initiative to add themselves; the net's cultural convention is definitely "opt-in" rather than "opt-out". Nobody knows for sure whether the materials you send to the electronic mailing list should simply be copies of the materials you send to a paper list. Since the electronic list is free, of course, you can afford to send more materials more often, provided you don't make a nuisance of yourself. You can also offer pointers to web pages that provide much more additional information than you could possibly afford to print on shiny paper. But maybe it's worth trying to rethink this conventional notion of a mailing list altogether.
I've been running a mailing list for a while now, the Red Rock Eater (see TNO 1(1)), which consists simply of whatever I find interesting. People subscribe mostly after hearing about it through word-of-mouth, or word-of-e-mail I suppose, from their friends, for example when their friends forward RRE messages to other people and other mailing lists with the RRE headers still attached. Many of RRE's 2400 subscribers are big fans of the list because I keep the signal/noise ratio high, as technical people say, by only sending out items that I feel in my guts are really interesting. If someone doesn't share my tastes then they presumably move along after a while, which is fine. It's not a difficult list to maintain, especially after I stopped looking at the error messages generated by mailers that bounce RRE mail back to me, since most of the material simply comes from other mailing lists. Indeed, an increasing proportion of the material is stuff that people send me because they think it would be good for RRE, so that I don't even have to filter those other mailing lists myself any more.
My point is that RRE has grown something of a loyal following. Howard Rheingold says that the net has a "gift economy": people contribute stuff without the expectation of return, but when they do, other people are willing to help them out in time of need. It's like the patterns of reciprocal assistance in any region whose economy is based on subsistence agriculture: when you pick your apples, you immediately take a bushel to every neighbor within a few miles who doesn't have an orchard of their own. That way, when you break your leg some day, your neighbors will spontaneously start bringing stuff by until you get better. It's that way on the net as well. For example, when the students in my Internet class (mentioned at the outset) were having trouble getting people on the net to sit still for interviews about the place of computer networking in their lives, I hestitated a while and then I broadcast a call for help on RRE, whereupon about two hundred offers of assistance poured in to the class mailing list over the next forty-eight hours. Many people said that they were helping out as repayment for the benefits they got from RRE. Questions arise: Can you create similar good will by operating a simple, useful service like RRE? How far can this model be extended, and what can it accomplish? I don't know for sure, but I do firmly believe that if you approach it without the spirit of being genuinely helpful then it won't work.
A small number of organizations have engaged in issue campaigns on the Internet. These can take the simple form of monitoring certain mailing lists and posting company press releases as they seem relevant. Posting them in the form of press releases, as opposed to spontaneous-looking messages, makes it clear that you're not really pretending to engage in dialogue, which is okay on many lists as long as you're open about it.
Some issue campaigns on the net are more ambitious. I discussed one of these campaigns in a critical light in TNO 1(12). The problem there was not that a coalition of companies was rallying the net community's support in a case it was arguing in front of the FCC, but that its on-line materials did not make adequately clear the nature of the organization that was conducting the campaign. Although I was a little unjust in my criticism of it (see the follow-up clarification in TNO 2(2)), I think it is fair to say that the standards for such things are much higher on the Internet than they are in the trenches of Washington. In the world of mass media and and one-way communications, you can get away with blandly saying "we are a coalition of public interest groups, concerned citizens, nice old ladies and companies" when in fact all the money is coming from the companies. But on the Internet this won't work, even if you're doing it from habit without consciously intending to mislead anybody. If you do not thoroughly and clearly disclose who you are, who you represent, where the money is coming from, and what the real agenda is underneath, then you can expect that someone else will make their own construction of these things widely available to the net community. On the other hand, if you do disclose all these things then nobody is going to bother you, or if they do then nobody else will listen to them. The net is basically a fair place in that regard, and the net culture has a tremendous respect for free speech.
The larger point here is that the Internet provides the public relations profession with the opportunity for a rigorous self-examination. Straightforward practices based on full disclosure, genuine participation, honest listening, and real contributions to the net community will earn the community's trust and permit a high level of useful two-way communication. Anything else will provide the net community with an opportunity to trash some manipulative PR people, which it will happily do. The choice is up to you.
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How to run an on-line newsletter.
I've been running TNO since January 1994, and since then several people have asked me for guidance in starting on-line newsletters of their own. I cannot say that I encountered any very helpful reference works as I was developing TNO, nor would I want to call myself an expert on the subject. And I would strongly oppose any sort of "rules" about on-line publication. But if the Internet is going to live up to its promise of providing freedom of the press to people who don't own one then we should at least try to write down some guidelines about running on-line newsletters. So here are my own guidelines, and I would encourage others to publish complementary (or even conflicting) guidelines based on their own experiences.
Lay it out in a simple, consistent, visually distinctive format. Neatness counts. Include a table of contents and a summary at the beginning, as well as a publication date, since you can't rely on people to keep your original mail header as they forward your newsletter around the net.
Be able to explain what the newsletter is about in a few words. TNO, for example, is about networks and democracy. Make sure that most everything in the newsletter connects to that simple definition in some way. At the same time, don't try to cram your entire agenda into every article you write. Instead, let each article convey a piece of your larger message while remaining a useful, self-contained whole.
Be provocative but keep the rhetorical temperature down. That is, try not to flame. It's difficult, I know, but it makes a big difference in the long run. One problem with flaming is that you tend to assume that your audience shares all of your assumptions, rather than thinking carefully about what beliefs and values you actually want to assume that readers share with you.
Say something new. Most everything on the net consists of people saying things they've heard elsewhere. People really appreciate it if you say something original.
Find a low-overhead way to work the newsletter into your life so that it provides an outlet for some of those great ideas that would otherwise go to waste. I find that the best way to keep TNO's content fresh is to make simple notes during each month about possible TNO article ideas. Then in the shower, or while driving, I look for simple language to explain the issue. (The language you want is more like an after-dinner speech than like a scholarly paper or newspaper article.) Then when the time comes to actually type in the articles, they flow pretty quickly.
Where do you come up with things to write about? Don't set out with a grand plan. Just read broadly and talk to a wide range of people, and as you do so, take note of your personal responses -- emotional reactions, intellectual free-associations, patterns, things that ought to be named and discussed, and so on. Write these reactions in a notebook, or explain them in plain language to other people, and trust that some of them will develop into newsletter articles without you having to fake or force anything.
Write for people who are reading on computer screens. Keep it brief and get to the point. Paragraphs should be shorter than those in books but longer than those in newspapers. Try to use plain language; minimize technical and political jargon. In ASCII versions, keep the lines of text narrower than 72 columns. Keep the total length of each issue below 49,000 bytes, since some mailers reject anything longer than 50,000 bytes including headers. You probably cannot rely on anybody to consistently read that much anyway.
Include a department in every issue that provides pointers to web pages and other net resources that you find interesting. A large proportion of your readers will find this the most valuable part of your newsletter. "How to" features (like this one) are also popular. Lots of people want something that's immediately useful and will ignore anything else.
Before sending out your first issue, write "DRAFT -- DO NOT CIRCULATE" all over it and send it to a dozen friends and a dozen people who already run Internet newsletters with a low-pressure request for criticism and comment. Several people maintain web pages with pointers to existing newsletters; the standard search tools ought to locate them quickly enough.
Publish it both on the Web and in ASCII form. The ASCII version is the more important of the two because people will forward the ASCII version around to one another by electronic mail. If you do have a web version, make sure the ASCII version includes the URL for it, and that the Web version includes instructions for subscribing to the ASCII version and fetching back issues.
Include a clear copyright notice that tells people what they can and cannot do with the newsletter. Think about whether you want the copyright notice at the top or the bottom of each issue. Also think about whether you want people clipping out particular articles to pass around. I personally do not, and will make a special ASCII version of a single article when people want to pass just that article around, but I decided it wasn't worth the trouble of explaining my policy about this in the copyright notice. You might decide differently, for example by saying that your newsletter can only be passed along in its entirety.
Speaking of copyright, do not include any copyrighted information in your newsletter without obtaining permission. In the United States anyway, everything original that is written is copyrighted by default, even if it doesn't have a copyright notice on it.
Think twice before charging subscribers money. It's a lot harder than making it free. If you do plan to charge money for it, provide a shorter ASCII version of each issue for free and include instructions for how to subscribe to the paid version. That way you'll get a lot of advertising from people who pass the free version around on the net. Provided that the free version includes a generous amount of useful content and isn't overly crass in its advertising, nobody will mind. A set of teasers for the paid version, as opposed to a useful, self-contained shorter version of the newsletter, is just advertising and will justifiably annoy people.
Consciously design particular articles to appeal to particular constituencies: librarians, net newcomers, Europeans, graduate students, reporters, etc. That way they'll pass it along to one another, thus increasing your publication's visibility and circulation. This assumes, of course, that you actually have something interesting and useful to say to the constituency in question. In general, you can be sure that whatever you write will get forwarded to people who fit whatever topic you write about. For example, if you make any off-handed nasty comments about economists, you can be certain that a batch of economists will end up reading them.
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Bowling for democracy.
Much of the American establishment is worrying late at night about the conclusions in a paper by Robert Putnam in the January 1995 issue of the generally conservative Journal of Democracy entitled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital". Perhaps you've seen an op-ed piece about it. Putnam observes that American membership in associations is steadily declining. By associations he means everything from the Masons to labor unions to sports leagues to the PTA -- groups organized outside of the government and the market.
This trend, he says, is particularly striking given Tocqueville's eighteenth-century observations about Americans' great affinity for associations. The trend is also disturbing, he argues, both on economic grounds, since a dense network of relationships of trust facilitates the growth and evolution of the economy in a given region, and on political grounds, since this same network of relationships allows issues to be discussed more rationally than is possible when politics is conducted largely through enormous, impersonal intermediaries like national membership organizations and the mass media.
While his argument is interesting, I have a number of problems with it. First, he makes few distinctions between types of organizations, particularly with regard to their inclusiveness and exclusiveness. If old-fashioned associations served largely to enhance solidarity among homogenous groups of people then perhaps they reinforced social stratification, and if so then we are better off without them. Associations that mostly keep people in line should surely be differentiated from associations that mostly help people pursue their own ends. And associations that organize people against those above them in the social hierarchy should surely be differentiated from associations that organize people against those below them. Of course, everyone is free to create any associations they want, short of criminal conspiracies. My point is that some associations contribute an awful lot more to democracy than others.
Second, he assumes that social networks are implemented solely through formally defined associations. Granted, it is easier to get statistics on associations that are listed in reference works at the library. But communications and transportation technologies are allowing people to pursue their own networks in ways that are not so dependent on organizations and their formal meeting places. Whether this effect compensates for the decline of organizations, though, is a significant question, particularly for political purposes.
Third, in discussing national membership organizations, he does not adequately address the importance of a working system of local chapters, as opposed to sole reliance on direct-mail and fax-tree types of one-to-many relationships. The accountability of a national office to the chapters is a crucial indicator of whether the organization is truly likely to represent its members and avoid cooptation and corruption. This is a matter of degree, and a more qualitative analysis would have to assess historically the health of the chapter structures of organizations such as the Sierra Club. This is an urgent issue in the environmental movement right now.
Fourth, I am unclear on why it makes sense to refer to the stock of social network relationships as "social capital". The idea is roughly that social capital is an economic asset built up over time through people's activities together. Alright, but capital is something more specific than that. Capital is the result of paid labor that someone owns. "Social capital", by contrast, is "owned", if at all, by a community, region, or nation. Calling it "social capital", though, mixes metaphors in just the right way to encourage government measures to build the stuff up -- as a kind of industrial policy. Think of it -- the decline of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks as an issue of national competitiveness! There's some logic to it, I agree. But it's a funny logic.
Fifth, he is dismissive of the capacity of computer networks to contribute to a renaissance of associations. His argument is roughly that people can't really get that intimate with one another on-line. But computer networks are used largely by people who also see one another face-to-face, whether at staff meetings, conferences, or family reunions. They also facilitate the creation of new connections among people that are conducted through other media, not just on-line.
And this brings me to my conclusion. Despite all of my hedges and qualifications, I definitely agree that democracy has its genuine roots in the bonds of association in a community. Let's use technology to do something about it -- not by encouraging the creation of associations at random, but by encouraging the creation of associations that bring diverse people together to pursue ends of their own choosing and assert some control over their own lives and the lives of their communities. Everyone belongs to a lot of cross-cutting communities these days, and therein lies a test for the net: the net is developing in a truly democratic way if it permits us all to participate in associations that cut across all possible boundaries, affirming and empowering us in our diversity and our commonality alike.
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Free means free.
In TNO 2(1) I remarked on attempts by conservative pundits to appropriate words, that is, to give old words new meanings that make non-conservative ideas more difficult to think and express. One such word is the word "free". I've been noticing this lately in the context of discussion of Free-Nets -- that is, computer networks (or, more precisely in most cases, computer bulletin boards) that members of the public can use without charge. When the need for free access to information is argued, it is common for conservatives to query the word "free". In my experience (which has so far been confined to private e-mail or spoken debate at conferences and the like), they take either of two approaches. The first approach is simply to act puzzled and wonder what "free" means. The second approach is to "clarify, in case anybody might have been misled, that somebody somewhere has to pay for it". The conversation usually does not go very far from here, since at this point most people just get confused.
In both cases, of course, the purpose of this type of rhetorical intervention is to set up a standard argument for markets: if the provision of certain services requires the allocation of scarce resources, why shouldn't the cost of those resources be borne by the people who consume the services? This is certainly a valid question, and one that should be openly and rationally discussed; Peter Harter's article in TNO 2(2), for example, is a serious contribution to such a discussion. What is so exasperating is the means by which this argument is introduced, namely through the conceit that something is unclear about the meaning of the word "free".
Everybody knows what "free" means: something is free if the marginal cost of consuming it is effectively zero. Everyone pays for their own share of the public library through their taxes, but then they can check out books for free. Of course the concept requires some slight care in definition (thus the words "marginal" and "effectively"), but not too much. Everybody knows that the library costs money to maintain, but nobody is confused when we speak of checking out library books as "free". Claims to the contrary are disingenuous, unfair, and corrosive of rational debate, since their aim is not to refute an argument (the argument for free public information services) but to render that argument unthinkable and inexpressible by confounding the meaning of one of its central terms, namely "free". My point, then, is not that it is immoral to argue against Free-Nets, but that it is immoral to do violence to the English language in order to make the whole concept of a Free-Net unintelligible.
What strikes me is that I suddenly started hearing claims that something is confusing about the word "free" about two months ago, all at once, in a wide variety of geographic locations and institutional contexts. One possibility is that believers in the free market all suddenly came up with this idea independently and simultaneously, driven purely by their native intelligence and the plain obviousness of their philosophy. Without meaning to impugn either their intelligence or the valid arguments that they do have to make, though, I would lean toward an alternative explanation, which is that these folks all subscribe to similar channels for the distribution of arguments among the partisans of a particular political tendency, in this case free-market conservatism. In TNO 2(2) I spoke of this phenomenon in terms of the industrial organization of public debate, and I pointed out that it is neither restricted to any one political tendency, nor is it something that is usefully regarded as a conspiracy. I should think that free-market conservatives in particular would embrace such an analysis of their own intellectual lives, given their high regard for market analyses of such equally significant topics as family life, the labor market, and the depredations of liberalism. We will have an opportunity to test this hypothesis as my analysis of the economics of public debate develops over the next few issues of TNO.
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Wish list.
I know someone who runs a book shop in a small town. She says that people frequently enter her shop looking for a particular book, but all they know about the book was that its author was interviewed that morning on a certain television show. They might be able to recall vaguely what the author's name sounded like, and vaguely what it was about, but they usually cannot recall the title or any of the other information that is required to look the book up in the CD-ROM version of Books in Print.
These authors don't just appear on talk shows for the ego trip. They're trying to sell their books. Clearly the publishers and the booksellers need to get together here to send bookstores a daily summary of which authors are going to be on which programs promoting which books, together with a synopsis of what the books are about and generally what the authors will be saying in their media appearances. Faxes would be good for this, and even better would electronic mail to a server running inside the bookstore's local system.
This is unlikely to happen, though. The various publishers are all competing against one another; they all run their publicity slightly differently and are unlikely to get together to organize such a scheme. The bookstores are also competing against one another. Both publishing and bookselling are turning into oligopolies, so perhaps such a publicity-tracking operation could achieve sufficient economies of scale within a particular publishing or (more likely) bookselling conglomerate. This would be unfortunate, of course, since it would reinforce the drive toward consolidation in an industry whose decentralization is important to the health of our culture.
The solution, perhaps, is an independent organization that works with both publishers' publicity people and with bookstores to keep this information flowing. The hardest part would be defining standards, both to make the operation efficient and to ensure that lots of sources can feed into it. Small publishers ought to be able to upload their own publicity schedules into the system as easily as the big national publishers, and small booksellers should be able to download publicity schedules for the media in their area as easily as Barnes and Noble can for their national operations. Since the relevant media are evenly divided between national (NPR, Donahue, Liddy) and local (affiliate news, local talk shows, public access cable) channels, such a decentralized scheme would be necessary and advantageous to everyone. The Internet, perhaps using WWW forms, would be an ideal infrastructure for such a system, which once established could operate with little human intervention.
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This month's recommendations.
Yothu Yindi, Tribal Voice (Hollywood). Yothu Yindi is a fusion rock group consisting of aboriginal and white Australians playing electric and traditional instruments. I had resisted listening to this record despite many recommendations because I assumed that it would be an artificial cross-cultural fusion experiment or else boring, didactic political art. Well I was wrong. No matter how many borders these guys cross, the record keeps right on rocking. I particularly like one song, sung in a celebratory staccato in an aboriginal language, in which a particular culture hero hunts down a red squirrel in the dreamtime.
Simon Broughton, Mark Ellingham, David Muddyman, Richard Trillo, and Kim Burton, eds, World Music: The Rough Guide, London: Rough Guides, 1994. This book is so cool. It's a 700-page guide to the world's music styles in nearly a hundred articles in small type with numerous sidebars. Each article has a recommended discography at the end. I was pretty pleased to already own the recommended records for about a dozen of the articles, but I had to admit complete ignorance of Thai pop, Egyptian classical singing, Indian folk music, Argentinian accordian, and the weird modern history of popular music in Indonesia.
US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Electronic Enterprises: Looking to the Future, OTA-TCT-600, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, May 1994. This is an excellent introduction to the issues around information infrastructure for the businesses and markets of the future. I learned a lot from the report's review of the literature on the crucial place of technical standards in the emergence of market structures. This is a topic of crucial interest for everyone, not just business people, since the architecture of future communications networks will play a powerful role in the ongoing restructuring of the global market that directly or indirectly employs all of us. I certainly don't agree with all of its conclusions, but I do respect it. You can obtain a copy by sending $12 (or US$16 for international customers) to New Orders, Superintendent of Documents, PO Box 371954, Pittsburgh PA 15250-7954. (Postage is included. Make checks payable to Superintendent of Documents.)
Guillermo J. Grenier, Inhuman Relations: Quality Circles and Anti-Unionism in American Industry, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. A relentless and harrowing inside story of psychological warfare by a company fighting a union organizing campaign in a factory in New Mexico. Along with Martin Jay Levitt's "Confessions of a Union Buster" (Crown, 1993) and Gideon Kunda's "Engineering Culture" (Temple, 1992), it is indispensible reading for anybody who finds themselves confused by the experience of "teamwork" and "empowerment". Kurt Lewin is surely rolling in his grave at Grenier's account of the highly developed practices of social control through small-group psychology. After reading this book late at night with the new Nine Inch Nails record ("The Downward Spiral") playing at high volume, I went straight off to bed and had some very bad dreams. I don't recommend this specific procedure, but I do recommend reading the book. Read it in a brightly lit space, preferably with somebody sane nearby to keep an eye on you.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
DataCenter 464 19th Street Oakland, California 94612
phone: (510) 835-4692 fax: 835-3017 net: datactr@tmn.com
DataCenter puts out a publication called Culture Watch, which is basically a clipping service for people wishing to keep track of the religious right. Every month they briefly abstract a couple hundred newspaper and magazine articles on the subject, and you can buy them by mail order for a dollar apiece. They presumably pass royalties along to the copyright holders, but they add value to the articles by collecting, indexing, abstracting, copying, and sending them out to customers. This kind of service is the best argument I know for building a marketplace on the Internet. That way these folks could make the articles much more rapidly available and easily searchable.
Culture Watch is $35 for ten 1995 issues, or $50 for both the 1994 and 1995 issues.
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Follow-up.
Roger Clarke
The Clinton administration's controversial Green Paper on the law of copyright in cyberspace is available on the web at URL: http://www.uspto.gov/text/pto/nii/ipwg.html
Past postings of Jim Warren's GovAccess mailing list are at ftp.cpsr.org: /cpsr/states/california/govaccess and by WWW at http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/states/california/govaccess To subscribe to the list, send Jim a note at jwarren@well.com
Those wild hackers at the MIT radio station WMBR have assembled an extensive web page of radio stations with web pages. The URL is http://www.mit.edu:8001/activities/wmbr/otherstations.html
Also at MIT, Ellen Spertus has a list of non-profit organizations on the web at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ellens/non.html
And a decent collection of net resources for activists on human rights is at http://www.idt.unit.no/~isfit/human.rights.html
You must check out the web archive of a mailing list about moving assets offshore. It's a whole subculture and quite continuous with the general tone of libertarianism on much of the net and in many manifestos of the hacker movement. The URL for the archive is: http://www.euro.net/innovation/Offshore.html I'm told that the way to subscribe to the mailing list is by sending a message whose body is "sub" to offshore@dnai.com.
I was charmed to discover the web page for the Indonesian menu at Bachri's Indonesian and Middle-Eastern Restaurant in Castle Shannon, Pennsylvania. I wonder if they've gotten any business out of it -- http://www.ibp.com/pitt/bachris/indonesian.html
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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 1995 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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