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TNO 2(6).
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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 6 JUNE 1995
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This month: Reforming computer science The Exon bill -- the day after Computing and the people Stealth spam Corporate privacy policies
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Welcome to TNO 2(6).
This issue of TNO includes three short articles by the editor. The first one prescribes a change in attitude for the field of computer science, from automating other people's lives to working with the people who have deep knowledge of the particular worlds where computers are used. The second reflects on the conflict between Republicans over the Communications Decency Act, which may be a model for many other such conflicts among conservatives down the road. And the third offers some first thoughts on the sense in which computer technology is increasingly "popular" -- that is, shaped by the collective action of ordinary people for their own purposes. Plus two short notes: one on electronic junk mail and another on conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City bombing.
This month's wish list gathers a batch of small items that have been bothering me, mostly about books and magazines. I've also included a review of Jeff Smith's book "Managing Privacy" that Wired magazine wouldn't print.
David Henkel-Wallace
A footnote: Reporters have to stop confusing the Internet with Usenet and acting as if the Internet were coextensive with the public discussion groups that reporters can easily listen in on. Both of these problems are evident in the following article:
Julie Chao, Internet pioneers abandon world they created, Wall Street Journal, 7 June 1995, page B1.
It's an article about physicists who have stopped reading the Usenet discussion groups on physics because they're full of uninformed speculation and polemics. Gee whiz -- I'm surprised that the physicists didn't forget those groups a decade ago. But the idea of physicists literally abandoning the Internet is like -- like what? -- like the idea of Chicagoans abandoning sports. Who, for example, invented the Web? Let's encourage reporters to look at the real uses of the Internet in scientific communities -- and every other kind of community. It's just that doing so requires a little more effort than listening in on a news group.
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Computer science is dead.
I have a doctoral degree in computer science, but I now teach in a social sciences department. Though I would like to think I'm starting a trend, the evidence is not strong. Even so, the evidence is strong that the academic discipline of computer science is in trouble. I was first alerted to this fact a few years ago when my officemate from graduate school quit a top-rank computer science faculty position to work for Microsoft because he wanted to be where the action is. He's right: the agenda for computer science research has shifted from academia to industry.
But the problem runs deeper than that, and I think that computer science needs to fundamentally reinvent itself to avoid shrinking into irrelevance. Here's the problem: we are told that computer technology is being continually revolutionized, but it doesn't really work that way. Instead, computer science has historically laid down one layer after another of settled art, little of which must be greatly revised later on. Lots of people got tenure for designing parsers, for example, and now we know how to do that. An earthquake did occur at the fault line between processor design and compiler design in the 1980's, but that has settled down. Programming language design was a difficult matter once, but now it isn't, and the market has decided that it's satisfied with C and C++ anyway. There's no accounting for taste, but there it is. (For a more general analysis see Andrew Friedman's brilliant historical book "Computer Systems Development", which I recommended in TNO 1(9). See also Peter Denning's recent articles about the future of the engineering field generally.)
So what happens next? The technical methods of computing are like a lake that is silting: once somebody finally figures out how to make distributed operating systems, it'll be all over. The most likely exception is in the theory of computation -- the mathematical foundations of the field, where really interesting research on "interactive proof" methods will probably bring us a lot more useful stuff from the same place that public-key cryptography came from. Plenty of other computer research will remain to be done, of course, but the emphasis may shift elsewhere. No longer will the world need hordes of computer scientists who know a little about medicine or engineering or business; instead, it will need hordes of doctors and engineers and business people who know a little about computers and a great deal about a particular world where computers are used.
The field of computer science can save itself, though, if it gets a new attitude. It has to stop looking at the whole world as a bunch of technology-driven "application domains" and instead develop a spirit of partnership with people who know substantive things -- things about organizations, about managing information, about sickness and health, about democracy. Although numerous computer people are sympathetic to such an approach, many of the basic concepts and methods of computer science make it difficult to put into practice. One obstacle is the field's understanding of formalization: to implement something on a computer, you have to translate it into mathematical terms that can be coded. But the resulting formalisms rarely correspond to the way that users think about things. Furthermore, computer scientists know almost nothing about how computer use fits into the lives and activity systems of the people who use them. Instead, generations of systems analysts have used models that derive from industrial automation -- rather than from the intention of providing support for skilled people with complex lives. The approach, whether explicitly or implicitly, is not "we will work with you and help you build tools" but "we will represent you and replace you".
But an attitude of symmetrical partnership, necessary as it is, will not suffice in itself. We also need what I call "bridging concepts" -- that is, medium-sized concepts that make it easy to move back and forth between serious ideas about technology and serious ideas about the social worlds where technology is used. Listening to the speakers at the conference on Society and the Future of Computing that we recently organized in Colorado, and reflecting on other valuable things I've read lately, I managed to articulate ten candidates for these bridging concepts, which I'll present here in the form of imperatives for the field of computer science:
(1) Designers must rethink the physical forms of interaction with computers.
At the conference, Joy Mountford from Interval described some of the ways that professional designers were doing just this. The existing physical forms of interaction with computers (keyboards and screens) are alright for some purposes, but for many others they lead to hand and eye injuries. Though I am hardly the most overworked computer user in the world, I had prescription glasses made (out of my own pocket) to help correct an atrophy in the muscles that shift focus from near to far. Computer scientists don't think much about the physical form of interaction with computers because, by and large, they imaginatively identify with the systems themselves rather than with the lives of the people using them. Research on interfaces for people with disabilities is helping to stimulate thinking about alternatives, but much more remains to be done for everyone else.
(2) Systems must fit into users' diverse ways of life.
People from different backgrounds -- cultures, professions, and so on -- live different lives, and so it seems likely that they will need different computers. But how do computers and ways of life fit together? A focus on individual users' thought processes does not suffice to answer the question; indeed, it can contribute to weird stereotypes about the different thought styles or learning rates of different groups of people. What about people who must switch back and forth between tasks on their computer and tasks on other machines? What about people who share a computer with several others? What about people who maintain relationships with others through several different media, including both computer and non-computer media? How do different cultures organize the teaching and learning of family members? And so on. A major problem is that nobody can get tenure in a computer science department, at least in the United States, for investigating such questions. This needs to change.
(3) Workplace computing must provide tools for people, not automation that replaces people.
Much of computer science derives historically from industrial automation, and the idea that computers are meant to replace people is more deeply ingrained in the field's methods and concepts than many computer scientists want to admit. The big news, though, is that the old assumptions behind automation no longer hold. So many activities have become automated by now that today's jobs require highly skilled workers to keep track of complex processes while participating in constant change. Interface designers like Ben Shneiderman have emphasized this shift from the technical side, while industrial researchers like Patricia Sachs and labor researchers like Joel Yudken are remarkably unanimous about the point as well. Computer scientists often do make representations of people's work, but these representations have largely been preludes to software specs -- to automation. The hard problem, which new research is only beginning to address, is how such representations can support work by supporting the thinking and group effort of the people who are doing the work.
(4) Interface design must move beyond a focus on users to a focus on learning communities.
Even when they live or work alone, people are very much bound up in social networks. As Jonathan Grudin has pointed out, "the user" is a dangerous fiction. This fiction did have some truth to the extent that computer-using jobs were rationalized, using the "one best way" prescribed by time and motion experts. But in the new world, the emphasis is shifting to continual learning. The best learning is that which takes place through dealing with actual problems. People who work together routinely teach and learn informally, for example, by telling stories about their experiences. How can technology support this kind of informal learning in communities? Roy Pea and Elliot Soloway are studying this question in classroom settings, and Julian Orr and others are studying it in workplace settings. Computer science, though, has a hard time conceiving of social relationships and processes that are not directly captured by computers. This will need to change.
(5) The new technologies of privacy protection must replace system designers' habit of tracking human activities in ever-greater detail.
Public-key cryptography and the whole world of related emerging privacy technologies have, as Marc Rotenberg points out, changed the way we think about technology itself. Many theorists have associated technology with social oppression, so that critics of oppression have found themselves positioned as anti-technology. Now the tables are turned: the bureaucracies that resist strong cryptography are the real anti-technologists. But the field of computer science has plenty of catching up to do as well. For the most part, the use of computers to invade privacy doesn't result from a conscious decision to invade privacy. The situation is actually much worse, since the most basic step in system design is to choose which entities in the world to represent (people, vehicles, packages, transactions, etc) and to create identifiers for them. The resulting records end up in databases that then get reused for secondary purposes and merged with other databases. But public-key cryptography lets us start over by designing in privacy protection from the start. This won't be easy, and it will require much more innovation so that designers can produce systems that collect precisely the minimum amount of information necessary to serve a given function. But I think it can be done.
(6) Technologists must respect and support the extensive expertise of information management professionals.
... that is to say, librarians. It is embarrassing to watch computer scientists reinvent indexing and retrieval technologies that librarians discarded in the 1950's. I don't think most computer scientists have realized that, as Christine Borgman and others have persuasively argued, managing large collections of information is a specialized skill that is quite independent of the (equally valuable) skills of computer people. The emergence of digital library research may redress the problem; the big question is whether computer scientists will pay attention and give due respect, or whether this research will move into other fields and other departments.
(7) As distributed information technology is used to reduce transactions and coordination costs, it must not undermine workers and their families.
Electronic commerce promises to interconnect buyers' and sellers' computers, thereby removing a lot of useless paperwork from the world's business operations. As Rolf Wigand points out, one effect of this innovation is to reduce transaction costs: the costs of making contracts in the market. This is good when it brings lower prices at the consumer's end of the whole pipeline. But economic theory predicts that reduced transaction costs will have other effects. One of these, potentially, is an increase in contingent work: that is, work that people do on a "flexible" short-term contract basis. This system is great for people who want flexibility in their working lives. But it's lousy for people who need stability -- most especially people with kids. Children need security, and we should worry whether they can get it in a world where parents must change jobs every few months, weeks, or days. Distributed computing also reduces coordination costs, which are the costs of holding a far-flung business operation together. To some extent this effect counteracts the reduction in transaction costs. But it also gives centralized management much better tools for controlling work at a distance. Computer people should become aware of how these forces play out in practice, and they should investigate how their systems might help increase efficiency without also increasing the control and instability in people's lives.
(8) Technical standards-setting processes must be opened to a broader range of stakeholders --- long before the standards become irreversibly entrenched in the market.
Technological markets need standards so that products can work together and so that people can know what they are buying. Standards have enormous consequences, since it is easy for a standard to become entrenched in the market without necessarily being compatible with the best technical solution or the most humane social arrangements. Standards are still largely set by remarkably informal voluntary arrangements. Plenty of power politics is often going on behind the scenes, of course, but standards-setting processes still seem like one venue where social concerns can be explored before designs become faits accomplis. It is possible, for example, that many standards can be influenced toward privacy protection -- simply because nobody had been thinking about privacy before, or because nobody had been adequately informed about technical options for protecting privacy. Who, we might ask, are the full range of stakeholders in technical standards-setting, and what would it take to get them a place at the table? Some plane tickets would help, and regular reports about standards activities on the Internet would help too, but substantive dialog is needed as well.
(9) Citizens and professionals alike must become aware of the ways that information infrastructure architectures either support or inhibit democratic participation.
Computer people have been talking about democracy a lot lately, influenced in part by organizations like CPSR and EFF who have articulated connections between information infrastructure and democratic participation. The Clinton administration has done little of substance, but their NII rhetoric has stimulated some remarkably broad-based discussion of telecommunications policy issues. At the top of the list is the distinction between a symmetrical switched architecture, in which anyone can produce their own content, and an asymmetrical architecture like the US regional phone companies want to use to deliver "interactive" video services. Of course, only a few percent of the population understand this distinction. But that's a good start, and more can be done to spread the word.
(10) Information technologists must recognize that the success of democracy depends most crucially on citizens' experience of empowerment and skills of organizing.
All this talk about democracy, though, can get shallow. Langdon Winner has pointed out the sometimes facile connections between information, knowledge, power, and democracy that often make the issues seem easier than they are. In the end, what really matters is whether people feel empowered to organize themselves to exert some control over their own lives. The best technology you can possibly build is useless unless people have these social and political skills and feel that it would make some difference to try using them. Perhaps learning how to use the net can be an occasion to reinvent the skills of democracy, and perhaps the skills of democracy will help us understand what kinds of information infrastructure we should be building next.
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The conservative culture wars.
After the Internet community and civil libertarians spent months busting their butts trying to defeat the Communications Decency Act, Newt Gingrich just about killed it with one breath. Never mind that the bill was introduced by a retiring Democrat; the real political action around the CDA was among conservatives. By threatening to shut down the whole Infobahn in the name of morality, the Act precisely diagnosed a huge division within the conservative movement.
The conservatives have assembled a formidable coalition around an anti-government agenda. But simmering beneath this relatively smooth surface is a cultural division between authoritarians and libertarians. Once the conservative coalition destroys the liberal establishment -- for example by sending the auditors from hell after every liberal non-profit organization that ever got a dime from the government -- then American politics will turn into a subterranean battle between these two forces. Each side will call itself conservative, but they will mean different things by the term. Most corporate leaders, for example, are economic conservatives and cultural libertarians who want opportunities for their daughters and worry that nationalist xenophobia will interfere with the country's participation in the global economy. Many of them are concerned that Pat Robertson and his followers might actually believe the things he writes in his books.
Likewise, the ideological libertarians who define the culture of the high tech world are generally focused on entrepreneurship, contemptuous of government economic intervention, supportive of gay rights, and more interested in freedom for kids than in patriarchal family values. The problem, of course, is that these folks don't have the votes. Libertarian think tanks have unprecedented visibility, but that just means that their ideas are selectively harvested in support of a culturally conservative agenda. Privatization, yes -- but forget about legalizing drugs. The people who run the Republican Party -- including the pundits and theorists and the conservative foundations who fund them -- are well aware that conservative Christians control dozens of state Republican party organizations, and they take great care to make the ideology appeal to them. This leads to some strange results -- for example, the libertarian conservative magazine The National Review has run articles fretting over university radicals' antipathy to science and explaining the threat to society posed by the theory of evolution.
The Exon bill provided another such result. Its main grassroots support came from the Christian Coalition, whose lobbyists were squarely focused on pedophiles "stalking" children on the net. Now, I happen to believe that pedophiles are real and dangerous. But did the Christian Coalition people understand that the Exon bill would have basically no effect against pedophiles, who are surely smart enough to confine themselves to innocent-sounding interactions in cyberspace? I don't know. While the Senate debate was going on, it was certainly frustrating to have people (small numbers of them to be sure) respond to the Voters' Telecom Watch alerts on the CDA with messages like, "So you're against decency?". On the other hand, why did it take the Exon bill for the major net providers to address people's concerns by getting visible about their efforts to implement real technical solutions to the potential problems? This issue will be back.
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Computing as a popular technology.
Computing, perhaps more than any other technology in history, is a popular technology. By "popular" I don't mean "popular" as in "so-and-so is a popular movie star". Instead I mean the original sense of the word -- "of the people". Although we think of computers as impossibly esoteric, the fact is that ordinary people have begun to take hold of computing at a tremendous rate. Computing is a highly plastic technology, meaning that its forms can be changed and adapted endlessly, and it is time to start tracing all the ways in which people taken hold of computing for their own purposes and have then had an influence on their design. Here are a few:
* User groups. People are getting together in groups for mutual
assistance, exchanging software, grouching about bugs, helping one another find good deals and avoid bad deals, and so forth. User groups are becoming powerful distribution channels in the market, like the buyers' cooperatives that have been an important part of community organizing forever.
* Resistance. People can put up a fuss when computers are used
to invade their privacy or otherwise offend them. Sometimes this resistance is organized, as when telephone workers have tried to reduce surveillance of their work by managers. Sometimes it is spontaneous and unorganized, as when people avoid entering data into machines, use the machines in a superficial manner, modify the programming to suit them, and so on.
* Free software. Lots of free software is circulating in the
world, much of it written by people who just want to share. A program circulated on the Internet can be used by many thousands of people in short order, and a whole volunteer distribution system has arisen.
* Market choice. As individual consumers, people can buy stuff
that's good and refuse to buy stuff that's lousy. To do this, of course, they need to talk to one another. As computer knowledge diffuses through communities and social networks, markets will have to respond better to people's needs. Informed people can also make a difference in their workplaces by politicking for the purchase of good systems that support productivity rather than lousy ones that drive people crazy.
* Guerilla networking. Fidonet began as a political project
to provide cheap digital communications to everyone. Regardless of what you think of its quality control, Usenet is very much a democratic "underground". Hundreds of social movements across the political spectrum are getting on the net, supported by specialized organizations such as the Institute for Global Communications. Thousands and thousands of individual computer enthusiasts have set up BBS's in their communities, often with the intention of serving particular interest groups such as SF readers or labor unionists.
* Interest-group organizing. The 1994 Communications Act, which
failed in the last minutes of that Congress despite bipartisan support, was shaped in some ways by a remarkably broad alliance of public interest groups, many of which coordinated their efforts under the umbrella of the Telecommunications Policy Roundtable. Similar projects have begun regionally. Other groups, such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Voter's Telecom Watch, have fought legislation that would have antidemocratic effects on information infrastructure, and a wide variety of people have responded to their calls for political action on these issues.
* Community networking. As I reported in TNO 2(5), people
building computer networks to support their communities are rapidly learning what it takes to actually serve people with technology. Their experience will increasingly feed back into the design of software to support communities.
I think this is a pretty impressive list. Many others will disagree, either because they think that technology charges forward according to its own internal logic or because they think that the whole world is totally dominated by corporations. There's a grain of truth in each of these assertions, of course, but if we believe them then we might as well give up now. It's important to believe that people can act together to take some control over their lives, not only because it's a necessary belief to stay sane -- but also because it's true.
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Stealth spam.
Lately I've been noticing a new variety of junk mail on the net, much more sophisticated than the noisy Canter-and-Siegel variety and much more worrisome for that reason. I call this new junk mail "stealth spam". It's e-mail that seems to be addressed to me as an individual, but which could equally well have been addressed to hundreds or thousands of other people. It achieves this effect through vagueness: "we've heard your name as a good person to talk to", "I think you might find this interesting", and so on. The big problem with these messages is that it takes real work to determine whether they are junk or not, and they increase the risk that actual/real/serious messages might get mistaken for junk. This has happened to me at least once so far. And these "stealth spam" messages are not all from obscure shady operators. At least one was sent by a salesman from Silicon Graphics -- a salesman who will rue the day he heard about the Internet if he bothers me again.
I've seen some other variants. Someone sent a message to the Risks Digest, for example, recounting the good experience he had had with a negative ion machine. Later on, someone else sent a message to Risks explaining that the first message was identical to others that had been posted to many other lists, and that the sender in fact sells ion machines. The new spin was that these messages weren't sent all at once, but were rather dribbled out to one list after another very slowly.
This phenomenon has set me thinking about genres. Paper junk mail is usually easy to distinguish from paper non-junk mail. Why is this? One reason is that it's very hard to make paper junk mail truly indistinguishable from paper non-junk mail. So in order to make sure their mail gets read and not tossed out straightaway, the paper junk mail people have evolved a highly distinctive genre of document, based on elaborate theories and much experimentation, that mutates the traditioal business letter genre with special uses of color and formatting and postscripts and inserts -- and even those yellow sticky notes whose generic name is a trademark.
Why doesn't this happen with electronic junk mail? Maybe it's because, courtesy of the wonder of digital technology, you can make electronic junk mail that's indistinguishable from electronic non-junk mail. This is a real problem.
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One more note on the Oklahoma City bombing.
Over the few weeks, I am told, right-wing activists and journalists will unveil their fully matured conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City bombing. The original theories were pretty wacky, but the latest ones are starting to edge into the realm of plausibility.
Here's a composite: The BATF, and maybe the FBI as well, wanting to create terrorist threats to justify their budgets, decided to frame someone from the militia movement. So they got some fringe characters and fixed them up with provocateurs who pretty much did all the work. The plan was to arrest the guy(s) on the site early in the morning before the bomb blew up. But something went wrong; the guy(s) arrived late and actually managed to carry out the plan. The bomb, furthermore, created much more damage than it had any right to. The reason for this is that a bunch of explosives were stored in the basement of the building, having been kept there by BATF people who were practicing (somehow -- this bit isn't clear to me) for the operation. These explosives were set off by the original explosion and were responsible for much of the structural damage to the building.
Okay, so that's the theory. At least it's one theory; I'm sure that I will get a bunch of messages elaborating or changing or criticizing this version one way or another. Aside from the mass of circumstantial evidence, all of which may be true or not true or covered up or not covered up, this theory is within the realm of plausibility because things like this have happened before. You can go back as far in history as you like and pick your favorite examples. Take, for instance, the Earth First! people who were arrested getting set to blow up an electrical pylon; those folks were pretty thoroughly set up by a government agent. (That does not in itself mean that they were not guilty of a crime, but it does change the picture.) Of course, right-wing activists are not likely to appeal to this precedent, or to the whole long history of government sabotage and harassment against left-wing activists, violent and nonviolent alike. Instead, they will frame the conspiracy in terms of their theory that the United States is actually a socialist dictatorship in which the Constitution has long been nullified. And they will get a lot of deliberate but indirect cover for this view from mainstream politicians and pundits. At least that's what I predict, based on what I've heard on the net. What if their facts are even half right?
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Wish list.
This month's wishes are small things that have been bothering me forever. It's just possible that they have not been done because nobody ever thought of them.
On-line library catalogs are great. I cannot imagine how anybody did research without them. Their biggest hole, in my experience, is that they do not include tables of contents for edited volumes or anthologies. I can issue commands to search for journal articles by a given author, but I would also like to search for book chapters by that author.
I also devoutly wish that I had an easy way to obtain all of the published reviews of a given book -- or at least a list of citations to all of the reviews. To do this, of course, it would be necessary for on-line periodical catalogs to know what book is actually being reviewed in a given article. In practice, the name of the book being reviewed simply appears in the title of the review, without the machine having an actual pointer to the book's own catalog entry.
Ever tried to cancel a subscription to a magazine? Why does it take six to eight weeks to change your address? Magazines do not care much about their subscription operations, and I'm convinced that they outsource them to the lowest fly-by-night bidder no matter how poor the service. After all, they've got your money, so why pay any attention to you afterward? We'd all like to think that this is a short-sighted strategy, but maybe the market just isn't interested in fixing this particular problem. In case it is, though, maybe on-line services are part of the solution. It would be nice to check on my magazine subscriptions through a nice GUI interface; this approach may even increase single-copy sales. Of course, there's the security problem ...
I read a lot of newspapers and magazines, and often I wish to save a pointer to a particular article for future reference. If all newspapers and magazines are someday published in electronic form then this will be easy, though a lot of other things will become hard. As it is, I have to save the publication, throw it in a box in my office, and then pay somebody to make photocopies that I can use later in my research or for class readers. This is cumbersome and expensive, so I only do it when I'm pretty sure I want to use the article again. Another approach would be for each article to carry, perhaps above the title somewhere, a discreet barcode-like set of dots or lines that I could scan with a simple scanner that could be about the size of two credit cards back-to-back. Then periodically I could aim the scanner at my personal computer and press a button, whereupon it would download all the codes it had scanned recently through an infrared LED. My computer would then look these codes up in a general database over the net and tell me how much it would cost to have a copy of each article neatly printed up and mailed to me.
It bothers me when someone takes a perfectly good paper directory (phone book, Books in Print, parts catalog, etc) and puts it on a computer with one of those low-tech search engines where you have to type in some of the fields, and then it offers to show you a few of the entries in the database. Unless you frequently need to do sideways searches (like looking people up by their phone numbers), this is unbelievably worse than the interface you get with the paper version, which lets you scan whole pages of entries quickly. Why can't the computer-based interfaces look more like the paper interface? Why can't we get whole pages, nicely formatted, to appear on our screens, easily flippable forward and backward? Maybe we couldn't get that when the computers all had 286-grade processors, but starting soon even your basic Nintendo will have more than enough computing power to get us back to the decent interface we started out with. I'm hardly the first person to complain about this, but maybe now is the time to really raise heck about it.
I am so accustomed to e-mail that I often think of the telephone as a variant of e-mail rather than the other way around. (Stop laughing. I'll bet you do this too.) In particular, I often wish that I could call someone and get their voicemail even if they are present and able to answer the phone. Why? Because sometimes the message I have for them is not urgent and requires no dialogue, so that it's better for the recipient to hear it when they're ready to get messages. As it is, when someone picks up the phone we have to do a little negotiation about whether my message is more important than whatever my phone call has interrupted. So it would be nice if I could push an extra button on the phone, or dial an easy prefix (one that's written down on a simple, clear reference card that's posted right on the phone) that will ensure that I get the voicemail instead of the person.
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This month's recommendations.
Carl F. Cargill, Information Technology Standards: Theory, Process, and Organizations, Digital Press, 1989. It seems to me that the future of the networked world depends to a great extent on the market dynamics of technical standards. Once a standard becomes entrenched in the marketplace, it's very hard to change. Just look at ASCII, for example. The market needs standards because products have to work together. But entrenched standards can also create monopolies, retard technical progress, foreclose technical possibilities, facilitate invasions of privacy, or limit the options available for participation in society. So I encourage everyone to become aware of information technology standards. This is the basic book on the subject. It's not the most inherently thrilling topic in the world, but the book is written in a clear, simple fashion that is rooted in the author's experience. It has no references, though, which is irritating. Other interesting authors on the strange economics of standards are Paul David and Brian Arthur.
Richard Saul Wurman, Access Guides. Yet more proof, if any were needed, that architects are cooler than normal people. Although they have started to drift back toward the breathless tone of their competitors in recent years, the Access guides are still the only "tour guides" that you would want for the city you live in. Their claim to fame is that they are organized spatially, so that you can open them to the block you're currently standing on and find out what's there. They include lots of architectural information and generally reliable restaurant and shop reviews. They aren't cheap, but I keep finding that each volume pays for itself the first day I use it. Think of it as the paper version of "augmented reality"; the fantasy is that someday these guides will be software for your heads-up display and the whole world will be annotated the way it is for the Terminator.
Maritza Pick, How To Save Your Neighborhood: The Sierra Club Guide to Community Organizing, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1993. This is the best all-around practical guide to community organizing that I have seen lately. What would it be like to apply its lessons to an Internet community? Or to organize your geographic community over telecommunications policy issues like cable television regulation, library facilities and hours, or local government information?
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Review of Jeff Smith's "Managing Privacy: Information Technology and Corporate America", University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
[Despite having published several of my book reviews, Wired magazine wouldn't publish this one. I gather that the phrase "serious and thoughtful analysis of corporate policy-making" didn't push the right buttons for them.]
"Managing Privacy" is a serious and thoughtful analysis of corporate policy-making about privacy. Based on interviews with managers and observers in several pseudonymous American banking and insurance firms, its centerpiece is a simple but valuable model of organizational responses to privacy issues.
Smith argues that the firms he investigated have generally dealt with privacy issues in an improvised, decentralized, and inconsistent way until provoked into action by some external threat -- usually the possibility of new regulatory legislation. Lacking such a threat, he observes that individual managers have little incentive to explore responsible privacy policies.
He pulls few punches in describing the inadequate approaches to privacy at most of the companies. Few have adequate policies to protect sensitive personal information from being used improperly. And he interviews focus groups of ordinary citizens to document the magnitude of the danger facing these firms: many people are outraged when informed about the practices of companies they deal with. If the public became widely informed about these practices, regulatory legislation would clearly become more likely.
He uses his analysis to motivate some solutions. Since he believes that the threat of regulation is the motivating force behind the implementation of good privacy policies, he proposes that the United States set up a data protection commission. This commission would not have authority to license firms that maintain files of personal information. Instead, it would oversee the creation of industry-wide privacy standards, so the threat of regulation would be available but not normally acted upon.
Despite the rigors of these arguments, Smith's book is fundamentally sympathetic to the dilemmas that confront both companies and individual managers in addressing privacy issues. He retains a tacit faith in the efficacy of internal privacy policies even though genuinely responsible policies might decrease the companies' revenues. Of course, some companies have adopted reasonably substantive privacy-protection policies to avoid public displeasure. Yet in emphasizing the reactive nature of corporate policy-making, Smith underestimates the amount of perfectly proactive obfuscation that certain companies exert on privacy issues through their public relations programs. Smith's book helps us cut through some of this fog, but much work remains to be done. If we really want to control our personal information, first we'll have to clear our minds of the soothing language that is circulated by companies involved in privacy controversies.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
New Society Publishers New Society Educational Foundation 4527 Springfield Avenue Philadelphia, PA 19143
phone: (800) 333-9093
In TNO I have continually argued that democracy is fundamentally a cultural matter, and that the Internet community can contribute to a revival of democracy by spreading the skills of community and organizing. Some of the best practical books on these skills have come out of church-based movements for peace and social justice. New Society Publishers produces some of the best books in the genre, and if you have a serious interest in learning more then I encourage you to write for a catalog.
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Follow-up.
My complaints about Internet discussion groups in TNO 2(5) drew mixed reactions. Some people thought I was saying that all Internet discussion groups exhibit the pathologies I was complaining about. That's not so. An awful lot of them do, and what needs explaining is the ones that do not. Some groups are successful, as I pointed out, because they have a steady stream of external events to react to, so that endless back-and-forth discussions about last week's news get forgotten in favor of fresh events. What are the other dynamics that make groups work? And more importantly, what structures can groups adopt that make these dynamics work right?
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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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