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TNO 2(7).
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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 7 JULY 1995
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"You have to organize, organize, organize, and build and build, and train and train, so that there is a permanent, vibrant structure of which people can be part."
-- Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition
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This month: Community and democracy
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Welcome to TNO 2(7).
This issue of TNO consists mostly of an unusually long article that draws together many of the themes that previous issues have been developing. I hesitate to call it a "theory of democracy" because that seems too grand and because I'm not entirely certain of its originality. It is partly a reaction to my reading of Friedrich Hayek, partly an interpretation of the literatures on the associational basis of society, and partly a routine account of public relations. Along the way I offer some first thoughts about the place of computer networking in the basic democratic machinery of society. I have not tried to follow this theme all the way through, though. Perhaps others will wish to do this.
In order to keep this issue (just) under 50K bytes, I have kept the recommendations this month to a single book that relates to the theme of the article. I know for a fact that we'll have many more excellent things in next month's issue.
Ralph Reed's profound quote, already cited in TNO 2(5), has returned as TNO's permanent motto. I hope that you will read it afresh every month and ponder its meaning. The political movement that Reed represents is winning fair and square, and Reed's quote explains as succinctly as possible why this is. Do you agree with him? Are acting as though you agree with him? The whole purpose of TNO is to be useful to people who agree with what Reed is saying and who believe that technology can be part of the much larger project of reviving the values of democracy.
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Community and democracy.
For some reason not wholly clear to me, I have a powerful need to understand how the professional world works and then to explain it to anyone who cares to listen. On one level this project is political: what elites inherit through their upbringing, almost more importantly than money and contacts, is a system of advanced social skills whose nature is systematically hidden from everyone else. These skills may be largely tacit in nature; I cannot tell for sure. Making them explicit for myself, bit by bit and year by year, has made the world look completely different to me. Perhaps above all, I am continually impressed by the extent to which everything in the world is a collaborative construction of far-flung networks of people. Sometimes this is obvious: a car is built by hundreds or thousands of people organized by markets and hierarchies. But sometimes it is not obvious at all: words, sentences, conversations, speeches, memos, papers, and meetings are likewise "built" by enormous networks of people. Mikhail Bakhtin described some of these phenomena as they manifest themselves in literary texts; this article offers some informal first thoughts on the machinery through which collective voices arise in real life. (For a slightly more formal version of one part of this story, see my paper entitled "Institutional circuitry", to appear in Information Technology and Libraries.)
Let's define a "community" to be a set of people who occupy analogous locations in social or institutional structures. This is not the ordinary use of the term "community", and it will take a moment to explicate it fully. First some examples. The people who are in charge of the parking lots on American university campuses are a community. The Republicans who ran for elected offices in the 1994 elections were also a community. The repair technicians at a photocopier company form a community. The business people who are implementing or planning to implement "reengineering" programs in their companies form a community. And so do the children in a particular grade school classroom. The fire fighters who drive a given model of fire truck form a community. The folks who live in a given political jurisdiction form a community, of course. The "locations" in these examples vary widely. They are notable for their relationships: virtually every parking lot manager has a community of parkers and a police department to contend with; virtually every Republican candidate has a Democratic opponent to contend with; virtually every copier repair technician has customers to contend with; and so forth. Everyone might belong to a variety of different communities, and these communities can be defined in broader or narrower terms (the community of San Diego residents versus the community of California residents; drivers of Mack fire trucks versus all fire fighters; etc). The locations might correspond to formal institutional titles or they might not; but in every case they correspond to a relatively stable universe of structural relationships, and this is what makes them "locations".
We can readily observe some patterns among these communities. The community members have certain interests in common. The institutions are also structured to effectively place them in competition with one another in certain ways. These shared and conflicting interests are "objective" in the sense that they are imposed by the institutions; this is a distinct from the question of how the people themselves understand their interests.
Another pattern is that the members of a community are frequently in ongoing communication with one another. This is clear enough when the members are routinely brought together into a shared physical space. But it is also true when the members' physical locations are distant. One purpose of clubs, unions, Friday evening drinking groups, and professional societies is to bring the members of a community together periodically. It is by no means inevitable, however, that the members of a community will interact. Nor is it inevitable how they will interact. I will call these things the community's "forms of association". Note that a community can have elaborate forms of association without any two of its members ever being in the same place -- they can associate over the phone, through talk radio, through magazines, through the Internet, through the efforts of a small number of outsiders who carry news of one another from place to place, or whatever. In practice numerous modalities of association may be combined in customary ways. Forms of association are contingent -- they could be different than they are -- and they are historical -- they arise through concrete processes that leave their marks. And, of course, they are relational -- they depend in crucial ways on the ensemble of relationships that constitute a given location.
This is very abstract, so let's make it concrete through a day in the life of your average manager. Managers the world over have highly developed forms of association. These vary by country, sector, organizational level, and so forth, but they bear family resemblances due to the basic workings of bureaucracy. Managers live dangerous lives -- in some sense anyway. Credit and blame are constantly being assigned for large, complicated processes over which nobody has full control. Decisions must be made that depend on more information than any single individual could ever master, and they must be articulated and defended in terms that orient to a constantly shifting set of political alliances. It is not surprising, then, that managers exhibit a powerful orientation to the experience and thinking of others in their community. The university campus parking lot managers, for example, will be well aware of the practices on other campuses. They will maintain an elaborate topography of these campuses; they will know which ones are considered to be on the cutting edge of parking lot management. If one campus decides to try setting parking prices according to a market-based allocation mechanism, for example, then all of the others will be watching. This "watching" will be subserved by a variety of mechanisms, many of them well-institutionalized: consultants, newsletters, rumor mills, and so on.
In many ways this is a good system since it permits people to put their heads together. It is what Ed Hutchins calls "distributed cognition": thinking that is distributed across a whole network of people rather than just being located in one person's head. If you ask how the University of Walla Walla made its decision about how to charge for parking spaces, you cannot formulate a serious answer without appealing to some collective construct such as the community of university campus parking lot managers. It is worth noting that this picture forces us to revise, or at least amend, the picture of the economics of knowledge in the newly influential work of Friedrich Hayek. Hayek depicted the economy as a sprawling network of people who know their own local conditions extremely well, all dealing with one another through the arm's-length mediation of the price system. But the reality isn't much like this. Of course, people are arranged in some kind of social network -- that's almost a tautology. But they also put their collective heads together in ways that have a lot more regularity than Hayek's extreme localism can admit. These collective minds do have their economics, and money certainly changes hands in the conferences and newsletter subscriptions that subserve the process, but this whole architecture is not just a sprawling mass, and it is not just a "spontaneous order" of localized market arrangements.
The analysis to this point also makes clear what the majority of Internet discussion groups are really for. Even those of us who use the Internet intensively have been too heavily influenced by reporters' representations of it, which (as I remarked in the introduction to TNO 2(6)) have focused on those areas of the net that reporters can easily peek into -- especially the murky mess of Usenet. The whole bogus issue of "rudeness on the Internet" derives from that bias. What it ignores is the thousands upon thousands of discussion groups for professions and subprofessions and subsubprofessions of all sorts. Here, for example, are some excerpts of a big directory of discussion lists for librarians, all arbitrarily taken from the Bitnet section of the directory:
ARCLIB-L@IRLEARN.UCD.IE Irish and UK Architectural Librarians CALIBK12@SJSUVM1.SJSU.EDU California K-12 Librarians CALL-L@UNB.CA Canadian Academic Law Libraries CIRCPLUS@IDBSU.IDBSU.EDU Circulation and Access Services CIRLNET@RUTVM1.RUTGERS.EDU Community of Industrial Relations Librarians EXLIBRIS@RUTVM1.RUTGERS.EDU Rare Books and Special Collections LABMGR@UKCC.UKY.EDU Academic Microcomputer Lab Management LIBIDAHO@IDBSU.IDBSU.EDU Idaho Libraries and Librarians SHARP-L@IUBVM.UCS.INDIANA.EDU History of the Printed Word TQMLIB@CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU Total Quality Management for Librarians
(See gopher://info.lib.uh.edu:70/00/tools/netinfo/library for much more.) These forums may not be promising places to troll for a colorful story, but they are where the real action is sociologically. Imagine what the world would be like if every community -- in the sense of the term I'm using here: the people who share a certain institutional location -- had its own Internet discussion group. Of course, various factors will influence whether the people in a given community would actually benefit from an Internet discussion group:
how numerous they are how often they have questions that pertain to that particular location how fast the world around them is changing the forms of association that they have in common (or don't)* how much conflict is currently going on in the institutional relationships that define the location* how much conflict is going on among the community members themselves whether they share a common language what kind of access to the technology they have whether they have access to sufficiently compatible systems and so on
So far I have made it sound as though everyone in a community plays an equivalent role in the community's collective thinking. But this is rarely the case. The actual division of labor in a given community will depend on many aspects of its relationships and its history, and these will have to be studied concretely in each case to get a full understanding. But some patterns do recur. The patterns I have in mind are driven by change and pertain to the role of innovators and leaders. Innovation in professions is often (but not always) surrounded by an ideology according to which brilliant individuals come up with "new ideas" through hard work, innate genius, sparks of creativity, and so forth, so that one might regard it as mysterious that someone else didn't come up with the same "new ideas" years or decades or centuries earlier. My experience has been that it rarely works this way. Instead, innovators are people who (as common idioms put it) "see which way things are going" and "get ahead of the curve". As the world changes, everyone in a given community is going to face a common problem. And in practice, particular individuals position themselves as the thought leaders in relation to those changes. The thought leader's role is to get on top of an issue: see it coming, gather positions and arguments about it, network with people who are relevant to it in various ways, and articulate it in terms that supply useful raw materials for individual community members' own thinking in their own situations. This, of course, is not an easy task, and the social capital that these folks accumulate is usually well earned. The conditions that permit individuals to play this thought-leader role vary, and different people bring different strengths and strategies to the job. Networking like mad helps a lot; if you notice the same issue coming up repeatedly in conversations with community members, and if the community members do not realize how common the issue is, then that's an opportunity to do a service for both oneself and the community. Although original thinking on the matter is an advantage, all that is needed to be helpful is to assemble everyone else's thinking in some useful form.
Thought leaders accumulate capital in a variety of ways. Some of these are straightforwardly financial, as when they earn money for books and magazine articles, as consulting fees, or through grants. But the capital can take other forms. Most especially, community members' willingness to commit resources to expose themselves to a synthesis of thinking on an emerging issue gives the thought leaders an opportunity to expand their professional networks in the course of organizing conference panels and the like. This social capital is then covertible into other forms of capital in a wide varieties of -- usually unforseen but usually unsurprising -- ways. Professional communities in particular have routinized much of this process: whole genres of writing and interaction are devoted to it and whole publications are often devoted to uncompensated articles written by people trying to establish themselves as thought leaders. It is rare for anybody to be taught the "moves" through which one accumulates capital in these worlds, or the "moves" through which various kinds of capital are converted into one another in the course of a career. People go through whole careers without quite understanding the process, while other people have a highly cultivated instinct for it. Why is this? Part of the reason, as I mentioned above, pertains to social class: if you watched your parents live their lives through the associational forms of distributed cognition through which thought leaders acquire capital, then you will probably grow up with a tacit awareness of the phenomena and a powerful head start in learning the skills. But it's not all a matter of social class. Some people who did not grow up around successful professionals have good professional-skills mentors in college -- this is one of the purposes of public higher education, and it's a purpose that public universities should much be much more explicit about serving. A few others manage to get themselves into productive apprenticeship relationships to masters of the craft in their jobs. Other people manage to get the idea in one world by working through rough analogies to processes of distributed cognition and capital accumulation through thought leadership in worlds with different class structures -- local politics, labor unions, social competition through parties and the like, street gangs and organized crime, support groups, lodges, social movement organizing, and so on. My point, though, is that not enough people ever get these things explained to them, and that this is a powerful and remediable force for social inequality.
In sketching the physiology of communities' collective thought processes, I have tacitly opposed two extreme models: one where all community members play the same role, communicating amongst themselves equally and symmetrically, and one where a thought leader is the sole go-between among all the community members. The reality, of course, is more complicated, and it's important to be aware of that complexity. In particular, it's important to be aware of the associational forms through which community members circulate bits and pieces of thinking among themselves. In Julian Orr's studies of photocopier repair people, these associational forms involved telling "war stories" about ugly copier repair problems, an activity best conducted with the aid of alcoholic beverages. Business people engaged in public controversies circulate stories as well, but they do so within a difference practice based on public relations; the stories are all crafted to provide support for an agenda of "messages" that the community (having done the necessary political solidarity work within itself) wishes to get across to particular publics. (A "public", in PR jargon, is precisely a community that stands in a specific structural relation to one's own community: for example, a company's publics might include customers, regulators, neighbors, activists, journalists, and union officials.) I have referred to this circulation of structured interactional "stuff" as an "institutional circuitry". This circuitry is often partly professionalized, for example when an industry association sends its members a "manual" of facts and stories and quotes that they can use when articulating an industry perspective in one site of public debate or another. Institutional circuitry is defined by the genres of the "stuff" that circulates in them; stories that photocopier repair people tell among themselves sound different from stories that managers tell among themselves because they serve different purposes -- that is, they are located differently in the larger system of institutional relationships.
This discussion of stories should remind us that, in speaking of community "thinking" and "cognition", I have simplified things by losing sight again of the relational nature of the structural locations that define communities. Everyone lives their life in a set of institutional locations, and every situation that arises in life (or, at least, every situation of any significance) is defined (to some significant degree) in relation to these other locations. This is particularly clear in the case of an industry political voice (the example in my Information Technology and Libraries paper concerns the cattle industry). But it's also clearly the case for bureaucrats, whose professional lives are spent fashioning language for a stable universe of structurally related others. The photocopier repair people, likewise, spend much time discussing how to "fix the customer" as well as how to fix the machine, and this "fixing" is conducted through language -- language that nobody could fashion very well on their own, by pure improvisation. People are often not aware of the extent to which the associational forms of their communities serve the purpose of fashioning a collective voice. They may not even be aware of the crucial role of these associational forms in gathering words for their own individual use back "home" in their interactions with their familiar environment of structurally related others. The associational forms, after all, probably serve other purposes as well, including plain old relaxation, the chance to "talk through" the feelings brought on by troublesome events, the exchange of mutually interesting facts (for example through "gossip"), and so forth. The fact is, though, that we are all members of communities that possess complex mechanisms for the collective construction of a voice. Our voices are not simply our own. That is not to say that we are all puppets who say what we are told -- such a system wouldn't work anyway. Nor is it to say that we are conformists who hide behind the average because it's safe -- though some of this is often prudent. Nor is it to say that we are conspiratists consciously plotting the most expedient utterances to use in manipulating others -- though clearly some of this goes on from time to time. To get started, the mechanisms I am describing require nothing more than simple, basic, disorganized self-interest: people trying to deal with their own local situations, discovering that others can provide resources that help with this, associating with them for simple mutual benefit, and then easing into the genres of interaction and the institutional mechanisms that formalize the process and help it scale up. In practice, of course, we inherit these associational forms and institutions from others -- which is to say, we enter a given community's world by being socialized into them. We may permit ourselves to be socialized into these things because we see the cognitive advantages of it, or we might have other reasons for joining in. The bottom line, though, is that the community's institutional circuitry can grow quite complex without anybody ever understanding it, much less designing it.
It is important to discuss these things for many reasons. I have already mentioned one of them: that mastery of many communities' associational forms is unequally distributed, and this inequality helps reproduce other kinds of inequality. But I think that another reason is even more important, and this pertains to the conjunction of topics that defines TNO: networks and democracy. The roots of democracy lie in associational forms: people learn solidary or division through their associational involvements; communities that can manage to think, speak, and act collectively can defend their interests much better than the ones that cannot; people who define their communities of shared interests in narrow ways will fare differently from people who define their interests in broad ways; communities that can form working alliances with other communities based on shared interests will fare better than those that cannot; and so forth. Too often we think of democracy in formal terms, as something that happens every couple of years at the ballot box. But democracy is something that happens all the time in society; it is the everyday process through which people negotiate their relationships with one another. Such negotiations may appear to our untrained eyes -- and the eyes of the law and the economists -- as historyless improvisations between isolated individuals, but they're not. Even if it were possible for isolated individuals to negotiate with one another, considerable advantages will accrue to whichever individual then decides to go off and get involved in a community of people who occupy analogous structural locations in society. The reason for this is obvious: by participating in such a community, an individual gets access to the thinking of many other people -- people who have probably faced similar negotiations already. As a general rule, I've found, any community that preaches against this broadly democratic conception of society will in fact be discovered to practice it with terrific vigor and a thoroughly honed practice of solidarity. And, of course, anybody who can convince you to abandon your associational forms without also abandoning their own will have an enormous negotiating advantage over you forever afterward.
Now that the stakes here are becoming clear, it is possible to investigate a further question: which associational forms are best? Is it always good to share stories? What kind of stories? Is it always good for a community to have thought leaders who accumulate social capital by gathering the community's thinking on an issue of widespread concern among its membership? What roles should various media play? What are the best genres to employ for various purposes in these media? Part of my great fascination with public relations is that it is precisely a profession that asks these questions in a reasonably general way. I have already remarked on a number of the basic concepts of PR -- publics, messages, facts -- that fit alarmingly well with the theory of democracy that I am presenting. This is, of course, not accidental. PR originated around the turn of the century as part of a broader movement to rationalize society through the establishment of professions -- an openly antidemocratic rule of experts. The job of PR experts was to mediate between the large corporations (which were a brand-new phenomenon in those days) and the public, maintaining their own kind of social harmony by "engineering consent" for the goals of their employers. Since democracy would not go away, the point was to intervene in the tissue of society in a systematic way. The basic logic of PR -- measure the current perceptions of certain strategic publics, formulate messages to address to those publics, collect facts that support theose messages, circulate both the messages and facts through a variety of channels, measure the perceptions again, and restart the cycle -- has changed little since those days. Those underlying concepts have been applied to different venues, and more complex strategies have been built on top of the basic cycle, but the cycle itself persists. What is more, generations of business people have been socialized into the way of thinking that PR developed. The circulation of messages and facts in business is endless, and to the unaided eye it can seem like second nature. Indeed, to the unaided eye it can seem like nothing special at all: just the telling of interesting stories, the exchanging of didja-know facts, the revealing of personal opinions, and so forth. I find the temptation to emulate these practices nearly overwhelming, and I teach a course on PR out of my personal commitment to immerse myself in things that horrify and fascinate me. We don't always think of PR as a political practice: what's political about promoting a new movie, talking to the reporters when a dead body is found in a hotel room, calling up the stock analysts when your Asian operations have just taken a hit from a currency devaluation, or chatting with the neighbors while you're planning to expand your factory? But in the properly broad sense of "democracy" that I've described here, these are all professionalized democratic practices in a way that is perfectly continuous with the polling of electorates, fashioning of messages, collation of supporting facts, and circulation of talking points by political parties. Reading the conservative press, for example, I am convinced that the American conservative movement is staffed by people with rigorous training in PR methods -- and that the liberal movement generally is not. The associational forms of the conservative movement -- parts of which I described in TNO 2(1) -- are, in this sense, perfectly continuous with the PR operations of businesses and industry associations. The PR people promoting a new car probably don't have much contact with the Republican Party central office, but they are part of the same sprawling institutional circuitry. The operating principles of this circuitry do not proceed from any centrally directed conspiracy; rather, they proceed from the associational forms fashioned by public relations and applied to one part of society after another. From this perspective, the great virtue of facts and messages is that they flow very efficiently indeed through this circuitry -- little modules of discourse that can be endlessly recombined for a wide variety of purposes in different locations.
The profession of public relations demonstrates the extraordinary power of putting names on things. If you were to read a textbook of public relations the way you read a textbook of mathematics or social theory -- trying to appreciate the complexity and subtlety of its inner conceptual logic -- then you would be disappointed and probably perplexed as well. Nothing in a PR textbook is at all conceptually difficult, and this contributes to the poor reputation that the profession suffers within academia and the world of scientific and technical research. But PR was never intended as a theory that can be appreciated in isolation from reality. Like much business-oriented theorizing, the purpose of PR is to provide structures of perception, analysis, and action that are useful in actual situations, in the full complexity of their details and their background. It is incredibly powerful to ask, "who are this organization's most significant publics?", and to actually make a list of them, and then to ask, "which of these publics can do us the most help or harm?", and then to figure that out based on everyone's knowledge of the industry and the personalities and the precedents, and then to ask "do we know what perceptions each of these most consequential publics has about us?", and then to find out what these perceptions are and write them down, and then to ask "what messages would we like to get across to those people", and then to collect a batch of facts that supports each of those messages, and so forth. No rocket science is required at any of these steps, just the substantive knowledge that answers the questions and the professionalized savvy -- accumulated through the professional institutions that PR people have created amongst themselves using precisely the mechanisms that I have already described here -- that keeps the whole process on track.
Putting names on things, then, permits PR people (and the people who have partially internalized the PR way of doing things by being exposed to it over time) to do several useful things: it lets them orient to the world in a way that helps articulate valuable information; it helps them to marshal substantive, location-specific knowledge within an orderly structure; and it permits comparisons and contrasts to be drawn to partially analogous "cases" that have arisen in PR practice in other places and times. But more fundamentally, putting names on things permits these people to see, and to openly and rationally discuss, their contingent nature. One community, which does not possess the conceptual tools of PR, might have a certain repertoire of messages for which it circulates supporting facts by means of its various associational forms. But another community, which does possess those tools, will be able to ask itself, are these the messages that we really want to be getting across now? Has the world changed in such a way that we want to get different messages across? Of course, communitities often do adapt to significant changes by formulating and propagating new messages without having an explicit concept of "message". The point is that, other things being equal, having the concept makes the process vastly more efficient.
Is the inevitable conclusion, then, that every community in the world should hire PR people and instil in itself the associational forms of business and conservative political activism? I'm not sure that would be such a bad idea, but I'm also not sure it's the right lesson. The broader lesson is about consciousness -- which simply means, the concrete, day-to-day awareness of how the world works. Putting names on things confers a certain degree of consciousness of them, for the simple reason that it makes their contingent nature apparent. When we locate the essence of democracy in cultural forms, we run up against a clash of values: if they are to successfully negotiate their way in a democratic world, communities must possess and routinely use the skills of association, and (it turns out) these skills include the skills of adapting one's messages strategically in a changing world. But we do not normally speak of cultures as carrying this kind of self-consciousness and adaptive flexibility. Instead, when we stand to praise cultures, we tend to speak of them as sources of memory, meaning, strength, resiliency, and continuity. We do not think of PR as a kind of culture, or as a producer of anything that deserves to be referred to as culture, and for many reasons: PR is shallow, culture is deep; PR has methods, culture has contents; PR produces whatever meaning is expedient, culture gathers things together within a common fabric of meaning; PR's practitioners don't really believe what they are saying, culture's participants can hardly help but believe what they have been socialized into; PR requires a community to coordinate its messages through hierarchical control, culture coordinates messages in a decentralized way by grounding them all within a shared system of meanings; PR is a tool of power, culture is a tool of resistance. Such, anyway, is the popular stereotype of PR (which I have to say I largely share) and the anthropological stereotype of culture (which I regard as dangerously half-true).
The concept of associational forms, then, has a hard job to do. Successful associational forms must not simply circulate a given repertoire of ideas; they must also facilitate the collective rethinking of the world. The problem is not that associational forms actively prevent people from rethinking the world; people are pretty darn smart, and they have an extensive capacity to comprehend new propositions. But, to the extent that their participants do not appreciate their contingent nature, cultures do have their inertia. Metaphors, for example, readily generate whole elaborate worldviews that can be extraordinarily persuasive and extraordinarily difficult to see beyond -- so long as one does not appreciate that other generative metaphors are possible. Practices and procedures, once codified and taught as repertoires of ways-we-do-things, can likewise stop seeming contingent: one can imagine changing this practice or that procedure, but it is much harder to imagine changing the conceptual system underlying the rule-book unless one knows that that conceptual system is and can see it as even capable of being changed. The question is, do a given community's associational forms facilitate the reproduction of its understandings of the world or the conscious reconceptualization of those understandings? This, it seems to me, is the central challenge for democratic practice in our time.
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Wish list.
Can we do away with the concept of "deleting" something? Much of the computer-using world lives in permanent fear of accidentally "hitting the wrong button" and losing their work. This is not a simple phenomenon, but one part of the problem is the concept of "deleting" a file. You're probably familiar with this concept -- indeed, you're probably so familiar with it that it might be hard to imagine how else anything might work. But now that we can plan on having serious processor speed and storage capacity to work with, let's back up and rethink some basic metaphors. The metaphor of a "file" has been around since the earliest days of operating systems. The technical idea is that disk space is an enormously long series of functionally identical words, some of which are allocated to storing particular files while others remain "free". Dynamic memory allocation works the same way, though disk space is usually allocated in artificial blocks of 2^n bytes, where n might be 10 or 12, whereas memory is most often allocated in blocks of a single word or byte. The basic algorithms for all of this were codified in Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming", and subsequent algorithms gained efficiency by arranging things in fancy balanced trees.
The problem for the ordinary user is the binary paradigm: free versus allocated. At any given time you have some definite set of files, each of which occupies some disk space. If you want a file to stay around, you leave it alone. If you want it to go away, you delete it, whereupon the operating system tosses the corresponding disk space back into the "free" pool. Trouble arises, of course, when you delete something accidentally or when you want something back that you've deleted. Getting back deleted files is for many people almost the defining experience of computer use, and untold thousands of people have desperately hunted down the nearest computer guru in their social network to recover lost files. This experience confirms all of the worst and most disempowering expectations about the esoteric and basically hostile nature of computers. Peter Norton, by all accounts the loveliest computer nerd you'd ever want to meet, made good money providing a software version of this salvation, and his advertising traded heavily on the image of himself as your computer-guru buddy whose rock-solid-reliable utilities will save your butt in an emergency if it can be saved at all.
Maybe we can now rethink these things? Some half-measures are already common, like "undelete" schemes and the Macintosh's "trash can". But can we do better? I've long fantasized about enormous offshore storage media warehouses where old files migrate -- fully automated CD-ROM jukeboxes the size of aircraft hangers, where all of my old files lie, fully encrypted, just in case I want to poke back through them. Old files wouldn't be deleted; they'd just fade into the background, and after awhile it might take a minute to get them back. And the metaphors would change to give this concept some intuitive force. I just can't figure out what the right metaphor would be.
Maybe we can also rethink the concept of an application. The traditional idea is: when you log in or power up, no applications are running; but then you open some applications, use them for a while, write out new files reflecting your new work, close them all, and log out or power down. Generations of computer users have lived in constant terror of this model, afraid that a disk crash or wrong move will cause them to -- and you've heard this phrase a hundred times -- "lose my work". As the technology started maturing, more application programs started automatically storing your work in the background. But they didn't change the underlying model, which draws a qualitative distinction between the file on the disk and the running application in memory. But let's ask, what purpose does this distinction serve beyond the convenience of systems programmers?
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This month's recommendations.
Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. This is a brief, plain-language history of democratic social movements in the United States. Its central theme, indicated in its title, is that popular democratic organizations have sometimes provided the "free spaces" that are necessary for people to express themselves politically. These spaces are partly physical -- coffee houses and the like -- and they are partly institutional -- clubs and associations of all kinds. The authors, long-time intellectuals of the progressive populist movement, are equally critical of the right, which has long attempted to define popular associations as divisive bulwarks of the established order, and the left, which has been influenced by Marx's disastrous theory that traditional forms of association are inevitably swept away by a generalized form of solidarity created by a common experience of wage labor. In seeking to revalue organizations like the Farmers' Alliances and the Knights of Labor, Evans and Boyte wish to paint a picture of an endlessly self-renewing democratic tradition -- one that provides models and symbols upon which contemporary movements can draw in their own reinvention of democracy. Their effort enjoys all of the strengths and suffers all of the complexities of social history: it evokes a sense of the cultural traditions that provided the necessary background of the successes of the most visible organizers, yet it also continually risks idealizing movements that contained their own inequities. Nonetheless, I think that everyone who cares about the state of democracy should study these traditions. Sure, none of those clunky old decades enjoyed the benefits of new communications technologies. But we can easily get too impressed with those technologies and forget the basics -- starting with the fact that democracy is a phenomenon of cultural forms and skills, not a phenomenon of technology. It is this fact that shines through most clearly in histories like this one.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
Amazon.com Books
http://www.amazon.com/
Amazon Books is the first on-line company that I've mentioned in this slot because it's the first on-line company that I've actually bought anything from. They're a mail-order book company who have a million-book inventory catalogued and accessible through a clunky but workable WWW interface. This interface, which you can use without registering as a customer or providing a password, is a useful resource even if you don't buy the books.
Will Amazon.com and companies like it further erode the position of local independent booksellers? Not soon, I imagine, simply because not enough people are on the Web and the local bookstore is still good for hanging out and for browsing the actual words in the books. But I do think that independent bookstores will have to redouble their efforts to grow beyond being "just" bookstores to become centers of intellectual and political life for their communities. Can the net play any part in this process? Maybe, if it helps mediate a broader and more complex range of relationships between bookstores and their customers, including ones not necessarily directed to selling books. Some independent bookstores are on the web. (See the web pages of the Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica for an index to these. Their URL is http://www.cinenet.net:80/msbooks/ and if you know of any independent bookstores with web pages that they haven't linked to, do let them know.)
Usually I end this department with a friendly reminder that only the serious should only write away for the (presumably paper, but often now CD-ROM as well) literature of the month's company. But amazon.com, of course, represents itself just fine on-line, and I doubt if unserious visitors have any chance of clogging their web server...
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Follow-up.
Regarding my "wish list" in TNO 2(6), several people wrote to report that many voice-mail systems do permit callers to leave voice messages regardless of whether the recipient is available to answer the phone. I am told that this feature is commonly called "stealth mail". As you might expect, though, every system invokes the feature in a different way, and you often cannot know which system your recipient is using. As a result, most of these features might as well not exist. Hurrah for standards.
Several librarians also commented on my wish list for library catalogues. I am told that indexing tables of contents is very much on the minds of cataloguers, whereas indexing book reviews to the books themselves is a lower priority than connecting electronic catalogs to other kinds of on-line resources. This is strange to the ears of someone trained in computer science, since the first thing you learn in computer science is to put names on everything. We refer to these names as data types and object classes rather than indexes, but that's the principle. Of course, this same principle causes all kinds of problems when what's being named is human beings and their activities. That's the sense, I've argued, in which invasion of privacy is inherent in the traditional practices of computer science. Many of my "wish list" wishes concern this problem -- either wanting to extend the logic of universal naming to things that don't have privacy interests, like book reviews, and to withdraw it from people, who do have privacy interests.
Web picks:
The Global Democracy Network is at http://www.gdn.org/
Ellen Spertus' "Meta-Index for Non-Profit Organizations" is at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ellens/non-meta.html
The Chile-Heads are at http://www.netimages.com/~chile/
Some militia supporters have taken to writing online reviews of press coverage of the militia movement. This is an interesting practice, pioneered in the aggressive style by the "Accuracy in Media" Newsletter and in the genteel style by "Forbes Media Critic". These dispassionate analysts almost invariably discover that coverage supportive of their views is fair and balanced and that coverage not supportive of their views is biased and shoddy. http://www.eskimo.com/~hmcom/4/db/militia/main.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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