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TNO 2(8).
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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 8 AUGUST 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: Privacy and authoritarian culture The GII as a library Consumer guides on the Web The dynamics of HTML standards Reinventing shamanism
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Welcome to TNO 2(8).
This month's issue features two articles by guest authors. Chris Borgman's article is based on her powerful presentation at the Conference on Society and the Future of Computing. Her thesis is that the Global Information Infrastructure is best understood as a library that raises all of the human and technical issues of information indexing and retrieval that librarians have been working with on a large scale every day forever.
Rich Lethin, who has long filtered the cypherpunks newsgroup for the Red Rock Eater, has contributed an article about the BBN Auto Mechanics List, a voluntary cooperative venture in rating Boston area auto mechanics. We all want to think that this successful model for mutual assistance on the net can be generalized, but it's not that simple. The central question for me concerns critical integrity: what are the conditions that encourage people to try in good faith to provide honest evaluations of things? In a world of publicists, the answer to this question might be depressing.
And I've written a brief article analyzing another argument against a broad right to privacy. (I've already collected a batch of such arguments in TNO 1(10).) A larger theme is the return of authoritarian cultural forms. We know all about authoritarian government, and we don't like it very much. But I fear that we've forgotten about the seductions and oppressions of authoritarian culture. For a crash course in the subject, let me suggest Morris Shechtman's "Working Without a Net" (a book for people whose angry authoritarian fathers have convinced them that a steady diet of harsh criticism is a sign of love, it comes highly recommended by the Speaker of the House) and Cal Thomas' book "The Things That Matter Most" (with its completely unabashed celebration of censorship). I'd like to suggest that you: (a) figure out in detail what's wrong with the arguments in these books; (b) figure out why decent, intelligent people might nonetheless regard them as necessary responses to the world as it is; and (c) write down what you've learned.
About the quote from Ralph Reed that has become TNO's permanent motto: for the next several months I'm going to offer some brief commentaries on it. I hope these commentaries don't seem too didactic; it's just that I really want the full meaning of Reed's statement to get across. This month let us notice that he is talking about a "structure". He means a membership organization. In his case, of course, it's the Christian Coalition, but the underlying principle applies widely. He's not just talking about getting everyone on the net. He's not just talking about getting his views out to an abstraction called "the public". He's not just talking about sending out political action alerts to the ether and hoping that someone somewhere will act on them. He's talking about building an organization. What does that mean? It means having chapters and membership lists. It means giving everyone a chance to discover their own strengths and passions and the support to enact those things within the framework of the organization. It means creating a sense of belonging, productive activity, personal growth, successes, and shared goals. Have you been involved in such an organization? Have bad experiences convinced you that organizations are necessarily boring, static, or oppressive? Have ever had a chance to learn the skills of working with others democratically within an organization? These questions are good starting points for defining your vision and deciding what you want to be remembered for when you die. This issue of TNO brings the demise of "Company of the Month", one of the original TNO departments. It has gotten to be more hassle than it's worth. Maybe it'll be back from time to time.
A footnote. What's wrong with American culture these days that the only funny comic strip in the newspaper is "Dilbert", which concerns the intrinsically hysterical topics of computer nerds and office politics? Do you suppose that Gary Larson would start drawing "The Far Side" again if we organized a petition on the Internet? In any event, we really must do something about the lame strips that have replaced him. Maybe we can get Steve Bell, who draws the extremely funny comic "If" for The Guardian, to come to the United States. Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton have to be lots more fun to draw than John Major and Tony Blair.
Jerry Garcia 1942-1995 RIP.
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Privacy and authoritarian culture.
Lately I have been encountering an insidious argument for the limitation of personal privacy. Here is the only written-down version of it I've seen:
Modern Americans enjoy vastly more privacy than did their forebears because ever and ever larger numbers of strangers in our lives are legimiately denied access to our personal affairs. ... Privacy, however, makes it difficult to form reliable opinions of one another. Legitimately shielded from one another's scrutiny, we are thereby more immune to the routine monitoring that once formed the basis of our individual reputations. Reputation ... is a necessary and basic component of the trust that lies at the heart of social order. To establish and maintain reputations in the face of privacy, social mechanisms of surveillance have been elaborated and developed. In particular, various forms of credentials and modern ordeals produce reputations that are widely accessible, impersonal, and portable from one location to another. *A society of strangers is one of immense personal privacy. Surveillance is the cost of that privacy.* (Steven L. Nock, The Costs of Privacy: Surveillance and Reputation in America, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993; page 1.)
So: privacy is a threat to social order; it must therefore be constrained or restricted; external surveillance serves this purpose; and the result of surveillance is a kind of objective publicity that restores social order. (Note that this is a stronger form of another common argument, that pervasive surveillance effectively restores industrial society to the condition of the agrarian village, where the social order was maintained through everyone knowing everyone else's business.) This argument contains numerous fantasies; let me just identify a few of them. The first fallacy is the confusion between privacy and secrecy: if people have lots of privacy, the argument goes, then nobody will know anything about anybody else. But privacy is not the same as secrecy; instead, I have privacy when I control which matters are secret and which are disclosed, and when, and how, and to whom. People may have total privacy and still choose to tell everyone everything. In practice, privacy permits people to disclose the things they wish to disclose.
The second fallacy is encapsulated in the phrase "one another", which posits a symmetry and equality of individuals that does not exist. The most serious issues of privacy in modern society do not concern private individuals' dealings with one another on an equal footing; those are regulated reasonably well through individuals' right to disclose or conceal what they wish, together with their right to choose whom they have dealings with. Privacy problems arise, instead, in situations of gross asymmetry or inequality in power relations. We don't worry terribly about whether I must disclose my marital troubles to my neighbor, but we do worry about whether I must disclose my marital troubles to the government.
These fallacies combine to produce some serious and dangerous conclusions: if individuals' ability to conceal and refusal to disclose certain information about themselves is construed as a threat to social order, then it follows that people must be compelled to disclose this information. And if asymmetries and inequalities within society are neglected, then surveillance -- the systematic coercion of disclosure that powerful institutions exercise against individuals -- is legitimated and even morally required.
Lurking within this argument are several subsidiary fallacies. One of them is hidden in the term "reputation", which presupposes a particular model of information: namely, that you are only able to develop trust in me by gaining access to information about me that is public -- i.e., accessible to everyone. If relations of trust are held crucial to social order, and if relations of trust are held to require access to publicly available personal information, then it follows that society must compel public disclosure of personal information -- not just disclosure to particular parties, but public disclosure. But the second step of this argument is clearly false: for you to trust me, you don't need everyone to know anything about me; you simply need to know it yourself. (And even that isn't clear.)
I could go on, but I won't. My basic point is that arguments about privacy frequently encode, through their conflations and omissions and ambiguities, an authoritarian model of culture in which people must be actively controlled by outside institutions in order for society to hold together. I think that libertarian conservative arguments about the evils of government, whatever their merits, have helped us to forget -- or, at least, are not helping us to remember -- what an authoritarian culture is like. It's a culture in which most people have been convinced that everyone else must be monitored, regulated, and shamed to maintain social order. Let's learn to recognize authoritarian cultural forms, because they're coming back.
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The global information infrastructure as a digital library.
Christine L. Borgman Department of Library and Information Science University of California, Los Angeles cborgman@ucla.edu
The National and Global Information Infrastructures (NII and GII) offer the promise of creating a global digital library in which anyone, connected anywhere on the network, can search for information independent of time, place, or form. Public discussions of the "information superhighway" suggest that the global digital library nearly exists already, or that it soon will be accomplished. Even technical and policy documents suggest that we are close to achieving universal access to information resources, such that anyone can find what they want or need in the glut of information that exists already. While such claims attract public support for building the computing network, research funding for those proposing technical solutions, and customers for computing network services, they obscure the complexity of the information retrieval problem. They also obscure the role of libraries in providing access to distributed information resources. This short paper summarizes four issues that need to be addressed if the GII is to serve as the Digital Library of the Future. We discuss these issues in more depth elsewhere (1).
1. The Global Information Infrastructure should be viewed as a single Digital Library with access for all.
In the ideal case, the GII will be a decentralized, distributed "virtual" library that interconnects all the databases and other resources on the Internet and subsequent computing and communications networks. The international library community already has created an institutional framework for such a system through shared cataloging databases, interlibrary loan agreements, document delivery services, and other forms of access to information resources held elsewhere. By utilizing the technical framework of the GII and the institutional framework of library cooperation, it should be possible to search the GII as a single Digital Library to identify, locate, and obtain information resources, no matter where or in what form they exist. In theory, the global digital library could increase international equity in access to information and offer the freedom to read, a privilege often denied within individual countries. However, freedom of information is not one of the basic tenets of the GII policy proposals, despite the efforts of various human rights groups.
2. The Digital Library should provide pointers to information resources that exist in all media, whether online or offline.
Discussions of the Global Information Infrastructure and Digital Libraries often implicitly assume that digital libraries consist entirely of digitized content and that the full content of all information resources soon will be online. The value of online catalogs and indexes that point to offline materials receives little recognition outside the library community, which we attribute to misconceptions about the nature of communication technologies, information resources, and information organization. First is the misconception that digitized information will supplant, rather than supplement, information resources in other forms. New technologies create and fill new niches, while prior technologies often continue to evolve and fill other niches, as the history of communication has shown. The centuries of human knowledge that are stored in non-digitized formats will continue to be valuable, and only a very small portion of these resources are likely to be converted to digital form. Paper and other durable hard copy formats will complement digitized formats.
Second is the misconception that the information that exists on the Internet is an adequate substitute for the holdings and services of libraries. The volume of information on the Internet pales in comparison to the holdings of the world's research libraries, most of which has been carefully selected. Very little of the "free" information on the Internet has passed through an authoritative review process -- much of it is self-published or otherwise ephemeral in nature. The reader or user of such information bears the burden of determining what are accurate or credible sources, lacking the imprimatur of reviewers, editors, and publishers, or the judgement of the librarians who select the materials.
Third is the misconception that catalogs of information resources lack value unless the full content exists online. In searching for information, one must first identify the existence of information resources and their location before they can be obtained, whether online or offline. The greatest value of the GII as a Digital Library will be to provide pointers -- catalogs, indexes, abstracts, document surrogates, and other representations of content -- not only to online information resources but to the centuries of information resources that will continue to exist only offline.
3. Implementing the social policy to create the Digital Library will be even more difficult than implementing the technology policy.
Information technology will enable the global digital library -- it will not create it, or necessarily even promote it. A single Digital Library with access for all will be realized only through the efforts of individual countries, institutions, and people. The slogan "think globally, act locally" applies to the Global Information Infrastructure as much as it does to the environment.
The open systems and interoperability principles stated in the NII and GII proposals are necessities for a global digital library that provides access to information resources in all formats, in all languages, and on systems operating on all technical platforms. Setting, promoting, implementing, and enforcing interoperability standards is very difficult even within one country. The Internet achieved interoperability through cooperation among the government, education, and non-profit sectors; these sectors now must co-exist with competitive commercial ventures. Creating interoperable systems between countries with technology policies that rest on different political, economic, social, and cultural traditions is even more difficult. Telecommunications connectivity is far lower in most parts of the world than in the United States, policies for access and usage vary widely, and the range of hardware and software platforms varies even more. The principles of open, unmediated access to information and the freedom to read that Americans take for granted do not apply in all countries that are connected to the Internet. We must account for conflicting standards and policies in creating a global network, for what works in the United States does not necessarily work elsewhere.
4. Information retrieval is a hard problem.
The paradox of information retrieval is that a person must describe the information that he or she does not have. Claims that we are close to solving this paradox rest on two misconceptions: an incomplete understanding of the information retrieval process, and the scaling problem.
a. The information retrieval process.
Information retrieval rarely is a single act of formulating a query; rather, it usually is a process that begins with some vaguely-felt need of wanting to know something and gradually evolves to the point where one can describe some attributes. Once the need can be phrased sufficiently to begin searching, the question itself may change through multiple iterations of finding and using information resources. Thus people usually approach an information retrieval system with a partially-formed query to be negotiated.
When searching for information, a person is seeking knowledge or meaning (e.g., what? why? how?) but must formulate a query in terms of the content (e.g., words, numbers, symbols) of extant information entities (e.g., documents, objects). As an information retrieval system, the GII can deal directly with information only as entities with content; meaning must be left to the interpretation of each searcher.
Historically, information retrieval research has focused on the most easily computable aspects of the process -- starting with a well-formed query and matching that query against the content of information entities -- ignoring the information-seeking process and the context in which the question is asked. Information retrieval systems are effective only to the extent that they can assist in answering question, rather than the extent to which they can match queries. Query matching is a process that intelligent agents can accomplish; true information retrieval is not. Query-matching systems were designed for highly skilled searchers, usually librarians -- the original intelligent agents. In contrast, the global digital library must serve a population of information seekers that is heterogeneous in terms of age, language, culture, subject expertise, and computing expertise, most of whom will be perpetual novices at information retrieval. The easy part of the retrieval process may be nearly solved; we have barely begun research on the hard part.
b. The scaling problem in information retrieval.
The ease of finding information is a function of heterogeneity and size of the database, as well as the ability to articulate the question in searchable terms. Finding information is simplest in small databases with homogeneous content because the meaning of symbols (terms, images, etc.) is constrained and the amount of "noise" in retrieval is tolerable. As the heterogeneity of the database(s) searched increases, the variety of ways in which each concept might be described increases, the variety of meanings for each symbol increases, and the number of irrelevant matches (noise) increases. The global digital library must support searching of information resources in multiple languages, multiple character sets, and multiple media, not just mono-lingual text, further increasing the complexity of the searching process. The keyword full-text search tools now appearing on the Internet are being applied to relatively small databases, by library standards, and already are encountering all the content control problems well known to librarians -- variant word endings (e.g., index, indexes, indexing), indefinite references (e.g., it, that, which), synonyms (e.g., heat, thermal), homonyms (e.g., Paris, France; plaster of Paris), indirect references (e.g., "the matter we discussed yesterday"), concepts for which no explicit term appears in the document (e.g., history, democracy, social effects, strategy, statistics), and difficulties in determining the relative emphasis on each concept. The old programming slogan GIGO applies -- "garbage in, garbage out." Information either can be organized as it is entered into the system to simplify later retrieval, or it can be organized on the way out -- leaving to the searcher the burden of sorting through masses of irrelevant information.
Conclusions
The technology and policy of the Global Information Infrastructure offers unprecedented opportunities -- and challenges -- for creating the Digital Library of the future. If we view the GII as a single global digital library, it should be possible to identify, locate, and obtain information resources no matter where or in what form they exist, online or offline. To accomplish this goal, we must tackle the fundamental paradox of information retrieval -- describing the information that the information seeker does not have -- by assisting the user in articulating the question. We have made a start on these questions in small and homogeneous databases with skilled searchers, but now must address them in the context of information resources and user populations that are very large and heterogeneous. The technical problems may be easier to solve than the social problems, given the vast range of economic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries crossed by the Global Information Infrastructure.
Note
1. A series of papers and a book are forthcoming from this research. The following papers are in print or in press as of this writing:
Borgman, C.L. International issues in access to information, or Can the Internet bring democracy to closed societies with few telephones or computers?. Proceedings of the Computers, Freedom, & Privacy Conference, March, 1995, Burlingame, CA. pp. 66-70. New York: Association for Computing Machinery.
Borgman, C.L. (in press). Information Retrieval Or Information Morass? Implications Of Library Automation And Computing Networks In Central And Eastern Europe For The Creation Of A Global Information Infrastructure. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, Chicago, October 9-12, 1995. Medford, NJ: Learned Information.
Borgman, C.L. (in press). Will the Global Information Infrastructure be the Library of the Future? Central and Eastern Europe as a Case Example. 61st International Federation of Library Associations General Conference, Istanbul, Turkey, 20-26 August, 1995: Libraries of the Future. The Hague, Netherlands: International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, POB 95312, 2059 CH. IFLA.HQ@IFLA.NL
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Empowering the consumer: The BBN Auto Mechanics List.
Rich Lethin lethin@ai.mit.edu
Do you worry about marketing wizards using their databases of intimate personal information to manipulate you? Maybe prices will change in the supermarket aisles as you walk by; maybe highway billboards will customize a tailored pitch as you round a turn. If you find these possibilities spooky, there's a technological way to fight back: developing databases to help consumers make informed choices. The general concept is illustrated by the BBN Auto Mechanics List.
The list is a few pages on the world wide web. It rates auto repair and body shops in the Boston area based on feedback that users email to John Bowe, who maintains the page. Each shop has an entry with a grade, from A+ to F, and a few tersely edited comments describing the service and satisfaction that the user got at the shop. Here are two of the 160 entries:
[A] : ABJ FOREIGN MOTORS 91 Marshall St, Somerville - 625-6632 1/95: 1988 Subaru GL wagon. Sears said CV joints needed. ABJ said no, just protective booties, saving lots of money. Friendly and busy, yet quick. 8/91: friendly, honest, know their stuff. Had to keep the pressure on them to get [the work] done by the end of the day. Still.. [an] "A". 12/90: The guys there are smart, reliable, honest, excellent mechanics. What more can one ask?
[D-] : CENTURY TIRE Beacon St, Cambridge 2/95: "Rude and sleazy". Put on cheaper tires than were paid for. Hesitant to credit visa for difference, tried to push overpriced accessories instead. 2/95: "Classic bait-and-switch game". Quoted good price for what he wanted over phone (Nokia Hakipolita Snows for BMW), but pushed junk on him in person. Slow service.
I was familiar with these shops, and the descriptions matched my experiences. So this past winter, for repair of damage from a small accident, I consulted the mechanics list for a good auto body shop. I chose this one:
[A] : MIKE'S AUTO BODY Malden 4/95: Rave review, and a better than expected price (and below Dick's). Happy to drop customer at the T. Even cleaned road grime. Mike's is mildly associated with a local Porsche car owner club, so Porsches are a specialty. 8/94: Suspension and related work on Porsche 911 Turbo. Excellent work. (The Porsche folks in Germany would be proud.) Genuinely interested in satisfying customer. 8/91: Very good quality, and price is right. Priced job WAY below Dick's.
and saved about $300 versus the competitor's quote. The 4/95 entry is mine.
How much impact is the list having on Boston repair shops? John helpfully supplied me with the list's access log, to allow a some guessing/estimating. Last month, 1300 unique machines accessed the page, up from 550 the month before. Some of those were from foreign countries and should be disregarded; to quickly estimate the proportion of accesses that were local, I looked at the 1000 easily-classified accesses from the EDU domains. Half were from local schools (most from MIT). So, roughly at most 650 owners used the list to help choose a repair shop last month.
The list includes 160 shops. If each shop services 20 customers a day, then these shops serviced 96000 customers in a month. If each of the 650 accesses to the list resulted in a customer choosing one of the shops on the list, then less than 1% of all customers were list-informed. 39 of the shops on the list got an A, if each of the 650 browsers went to one of those A shops, those shops' business increased by 2% during the month. So, the impact on the shops is pretty small now, though at least one is aware of the list.
But users who do use the list can save a bunch of money.
John told me that maintains the list because he had found it useful a few times when he worked at BBN; he sees it as a way to contribute back to the net. It doesn't take much of his time (he only receives about 4 or 5 messages a week), and he doesn't have any plans to expand it or form a company around it. He's busy with his real job.
The mechanics list resembles a restaurant guide book which gathers its data from cards mailed by selected diners. What distinguishes it, and how has technology enabled it? One key is that the net has reduced the cost and work of distributing and collating the data. In contrast to restaurant guides, there was no established market for mechanic lists, so a publisher would take a risk investing in it. Sourcing the page on the web is effectively free, though: email is free and the incoming text is handy for incorporation into the web page. The electronic distribution also changes the character of the list. The mechanics list gets updated regularly, which improves information quality (users can give quick pointers to inaccuracy) and also makes it fun to send in information and see it incorporated.
Some characteristics specific to the Boston auto repair market probably help make the list work. Boston seems to be the right size: big enough to make finding a good mechanic a challenge, but small enough that the number of shops on the list is manageable. Lots of people are on-line in Boston, and they're a relatively homogeneous bunch of students, engineers and computer scientists, so their expectations and experiences of auto repair are likely to correlate. The student population is particularly transient and thus unfamiliar with the Boston mechanics.
Can the service work with more Bostonians on-line? Would it work in other markets? Maintaining the list will become more than the small distraction it is for John Bowe right now. Maybe volunteers will help or perhaps the list would be supported by donations from happy users. Or, perhaps this process could be automated to scale into a general net-based consumer voting scheme over companies, products, and manufacturers.
There ARE problems with scaling. Beyond mentioning problems of "efficiency", such as dislocation and obsolescence of real people, I'll neglect the consequences and focus on the problems in its workings. There's lots of room for esoteric economic models and vigorous hand-waving here, so I'll use the BBN Auto Mechanics List to try to ground my comments.
The list is vulnerable to abuse. There's nothing to prevent a garage from contributing bogus raves about itself, slamming competitors, or hiring an advertising agency to do this for them. John hasn't noticed any bogus reviews coming in and the content seems accurate so things seem to be working now -- probably because of the list's obscurity. But I'm skeptical that it can continue. In other net forums, such as those discussing new musical groups, people are being paid to hype specific artists. Investment newsgroups have had shills promoting penny stocks. Similar things could happen to the BBN list - though the relative permanence of mechanics (compared to the musical scene or stock markets) makes manipulation a bit more difficult.
Is libel a problem? It looks like the list owner is protected now, with his disclaimer about passing the information on with no guarantees about accuracy. However, the recent Prodigy case provides a precedent for considering small bits of editing to confer responsibility.
Scaling leads to potential for inadvertent degeneracy. It might avalanche toward extremes with bad reviews influencing the objectivity of later reviews, or move to irrelevance with a large variance in perceptions decaying most of the shops' grades toward "average". There are many, many other ways for information exchanges of this sort to fail. (One aspect of the list that fights these trends is that the ratings of garages are not limited to a single grade. The well-edited descriptions help readers make their choices in a more informed manner. The mechanics list occupies a nice position in the representational spectrum, with letter grades available but more descriptive data also available.) Can systems methodologies for gathering this information be designed which fight degeneration?
Why scale up services like this? Recently (6/30/95) the New York Times profiled Providian Bancorp, which provides credit cards to consumers. Providian mails credit solicitations with unspecified interest rates. If a consumer responds, Providian can access their credit history and use statistical techniques to tailor the highest possible interest. The techniques might notice that the consumer has been insensitive to interest rate in carrying a large balance. In this negotiation, the consumer is being put at a disadvantage by the records kept of his past behavior. However, if the consumer could access a database of credit card companies, interest rates, and background on the consumer- unfriendly practices of Providian, they'd be comparably leveraged in the negotiation, and would probably get a better rate. Informed consumers can make better decisions, and this principle works for many other misleadingly advertised products.
How can automated tools be structured? Are there systems and algorithms that can be developed and deployed to increase the quality of this type of information, and to protect against abuse? Maybe. Game theory might be employed to design mechanisms for voting schemes that are robust against shills using authentication schemes such as digital signatures. Privacy of respondents needs to be protected, and the technologies for anonymity on the net that have recently been developed seem a good starting point. Representational schemes for agents are in development; these might be used as a language of reputation. Finally, learning models and prediction mechanisms such as automatic collaborative filtering might be used to better-tailor preferences for the consumer. It's a complicated system and it would be a cool experiment. Let me know what you think.
However, it's probably not necessary to wait for the deployment an automated huge system right now to have an impact. The BBN Auto Mechanics List demonstrates that a small effort can do a lot of good.
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The BBN Auto Mechanics List is at http://web1.osf.org:8001/faq/bbn-auto-mech.html
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Wish list.
Strange and instructive things are happening these days in the world of the WorldWide Web. Take Netscape. Having given away eleven bazillion copies of its version 1.0 web client and stocked its coffers with IPO cash that it didn't really need, it's time for the Netscape company to start making money. But why should Netscape make any money? After all, the client they've given away for free is perfectly good. The answer is that the client they've given away only works with a certain set of features. Let's focus on HTML. Everyone knows that HTML is not a great programming language, particularly if you want to create complex things like tables. So HTML is going to get some more features. And as the creators of web pages start using those features, the old web clients will slowly stop working.
Now, this process could happen in one of two ways: (1) the W3C (the WorldWide Web Consortium) could define some new standards for HTML and everyone could then go out and support them; or (2) companies like Netscape could start defining their own features without any regard for the W3C process. Of course, these two things will both happen, and they will probably interact with one another as well. The dynamics of the process will be shaped by the interesting special properties of HTML and the Web, but they will also exemplify the larger market dynamics of technical standards. The most interesting of HTML's special properties is that the source code for Web pages is public. If you like the look and feel of someone's Web page, just pull down a menu, grab their source code, and modify it to insert your own content and produce the look and feel you want for yourself. Copy-and-modify programming is important throughout the computer world, but the Web has taken it to new heights.
But here's the catch: if the page you copied uses non-standard, Netscape-specific features, and if you use Netscape yourself, you're unlikely to find out about the problem until much later. If you really like the non-standard feature then you may not even care about the problem, figuring that most people use Netscape anyway and other browsers probably won't crash too badly. HTML features and programming cliches can travel like viruses through this dynamic, copied from one neat page to another. It's a good dynamic in many ways. It lets people get up to speed in HTML programming very fast, since they never have to start writing code from a blank screen. On the other hand, it might cause some havoc for the process of defining standards. Standards are good because, among other things, they keep people from being locked in to a particular supplier's products. Suppose that a Netscape-specific dialect of HTML somehow arose and became widely used. And let's say that other Web browser companies develop their own distinct dialects. Then the Web will slowly break into separate regions, each with its own dialect of the language. Someone who wanted to use a certain subspace of Web pages would have to acquire the Web client that can read those pages. The result would be a fragmented market, with each supplier receiving a high margin but with the total market greatly depressed because the benefits to buyers of entering the market would be much less. Some argue that companies have an incentive to encourage this situation; if Web features are completely standardized then barriers to entry in the market for Web clients will be low, and profits will be low accordingly.
What can we do to prevent such a situation? I would suggest that
the W3C, or some other friend of standards, produce a Web crawler
that checks pages for compliance with the standards. The pages
are all public and various search tools already sweep over them
on a regular basis, so nobody should mind a standards-checking
tool doing the same thing. Every site and every user could set
a switch indicating whether they wish to receive an automated
commentary on their HTML style. (The switch would be set to "no"
by default.) Also, it would be possible to ask for a commentary
on a page right away by feeding a URL to a site which has an HTML
commentary demon running full-time. The commentary might include
things like "warning:
Such an HTML style crawler might have a variety of uses. For example, it could track the spread of new features, producing statistics that would be available on Web pages for anyone to read. Some difficult design decisions would also be necessary. For example, does one crawl the Web from the same starting-points as the standard Web search tools, or from a different set of points? Does one crawl only those pages that can be reached through links in pages already crawled over, or does one also thread the search through other pages in the same directory as pages that are crawled over? Could Web client producers create their own crawlers that search for features that are specific to their competitors' clients, and then send direct mail to those pages' authors suggesting features that are more compatible with the standard?
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This month's recommendations.
H. Landis Gabel, ed, Product Standardization and Competitive Strategy, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1987. The computer industry doesn't come close to obeying the laws of supply and demand from neoclassical economics. Why? Because issues of compatibility generate all kinds of strange incentives and strategies. This book contains the best account I've seen of these phenomena. The first chapter, by Joseph Farrell and Garth Saloner, could have been the textbook for Bill Gates' march to eleven-figure wealth -- not by making better products, but getting software to market quickly and then leveraging various compatibility effects to consolidate and expand his market dominance. We'll see a lot more of this sort of thing, and I think it's important for everyone to learn more about it.
Sandra Ingerman, Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self, San Francisco: Harper, 1991. Sandra Ingerman is one of the leaders of an extremely important movement to translate the traditional practices of shamanism to the industrial world. Shamans say that they travel spiritually to the "lower world" to recover people's souls that have fled because of illness, injury, or spiritual attacks by others. This belief is nearly unintelligible in the terms of Western science and religion, and I am not settled about how to understand it. But I have experienced for myself enough of what they are talking about to be convinced of the importance of preserving the practices. If you are not sleepy or under the influence of alcohol or drugs then you can experience the basic idea easily enough for yourself: lie down in a dark and quiet room with someone else present, take several deep breaths, systematically relax all the muscles in your body, say (first out loud and then in your imagination) that you wish to travel to the lower world to meet your animals, call out in your imagination and ask if any animals would like to meet with you, and then narrate out loud whatever you see. (It often helps if the other person instructs you to do all these things step by step.) If any animals appear, ask them what they want or what they have to say. If they ask for something, and you're willing to provide it, imaginatively do so. You'll find yourself in a state halfway between a dream and a daydream: roughly speaking, your own imaginary actions are under your control but the animals' actions are not. A shaman does the same thing while beating a drum about five times a second. (An audio tape of a drum works fine.) The drum intensifies the effect and permits "travel" in elaborate imaginative "worlds". To read Ingerman's book about the process, you'll have to suspend your scientific and religious commitments for a while; you'll be able to make sense of the experience within the framework of your own beliefs later on. If you have been through any serious traumas or screwed-up relationships, or feel like you have a piece missing from yourself, I encourage you to write to Ingerman (PO Box 4757, Santa Fe NM 87502) and ask for a referral to a qualified shaman in your area. These folks are trained and certified by the Foundation for Shamanic Studies (PO Box 1939, Mill Valley CA 94942), founded by Michael Harner. The foundation also works with traditional shamans around the world to transmit their skills to others and to assist in cases where social changes are threatening the survival of shamanic traditions. Some of this work is documented in a magazine called Shaman's Drum (PO Box 430, Willits CA 95490; Quarterly; $15/year in the US). In my personal opinion the Foundation is well worth your support. In case you're interested, the classic scholarly work on shamanism is Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy, Princeton University Press, 1972.
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Follow-up.
Robert Putnam
Web picks:
The Internet Engineering Task Force, which sets standards for the Internet, is on the Web at: http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us
The Institute for the Study of Civic Values has a good collection of resources on community-building at http://libertynet.org/~edcivic/iscvhome.html
The Londoners who are defending themselves against charges of having libeled McDonalds by handing out a leaflet that was critical of the company's environmental practices and the nutritional value of its food have a web page with their original leaflet and other information on the case. The URL is http://anthfirst.san.ed.ac.uk/McLibelTopPage.html
Negativland's intellectual property web site is at http://sunsite.unc.edu/wxyc/legal.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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