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TNO 3(1).
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 3, NUMBER 1 JANUARY 1996
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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: How to wreck a community network The economics of standards Doing the Java war-dance Chain letters and publicity stunts
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Welcome to TNO 3(1).
This month Doug Schuler explains some of the ways that community networking projects can inadvertently come unraveled. A lot of experience has accumulated with these projects, and all of it points toward the need to involve people and their organizations deeply in the work so that it doesn't end up being driven by technology or money. Doug is a founder of the Seattle Community Network and his book "New Community Networks: Wired for Change" comes out later this month. Also this month I've provided a mostly-annotated bibliography of references on the economics of standards. Regular readers of TNO will know that I regard this topic as crucial. Information infrastructure behaves very differently from other social and economic phenomena, and if the information infastructure of the future is going to reflect democratic values then it's because a good-sized social movement has figured out how to intervene in a remarkably complex set of social dynamics that are simultaneously technical, political, economic, and imaginative.
This month's "wish list" follows up on this theme by offering a manifesto for the construction of the widely heralded Internet- centered computational universe. If such a universe is actually coming then it provides a rare opportunity to do a lot of things over again right. If the users of the world want the newly emerging standards to be open and to support democratic values then now is the time for them to get organized and articulate the connection between standards, self-interest, and the common good.
Meanwhile, a brief article complains about ill-conceived chain letters on the Internet.
A footnote. At the moment it seems likely that a strong version of the Communications Decency Act will become part of the final version of the US Congress' telecommunications bill and sent to Bill Clinton. Many people have observed that the language in this provision as it now stands is clearly unconstitutional under current law, inasmuch as it restricts speech that is not just "obscene" but "indecent". Yet I have heard nobody ask what must be an obvious question: if the folks from the Christian Coalition are as smart as they seem, why have they insisted on language that will present such an easy target for civil-liberties litigation? Aren't they afraid that all of their hard work will go to waste? It's worth considering the possibility that they have done this deliberately in order to raise the stakes. Once the courts strike down their language, which they have sold to their large and well-organized constituency as a necessary means to protect children, they will have some high-quality ammunition to use in organizing a movement for the reconstruction of Constitutional law away from 20th century interpretations and back toward those of the 19th century. Assuming I'm right, what would such a change mean? It would clearly have significant consequences for First Amendment law. But it would have even greater consequences for regulatory law: a return to a broad "freedom of contract" legal theory could instantly bring back the tumultuous economic conditions that just about tore the country to pieces in the late 19th century -- not a family-friendly prospect. The underlying problem is that the Constitution was written in a world without computers or corporations by people who assumed that communication across large distances was inherently difficult. (See the tenth Federalist paper, Madison's famous treatise on factions.) The world is different now, and major technological changes inevitably place the law under great tension. It's a difficult problem to be sure, but I don't think we can solve it by turning back the clocks.
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Chain letters bad and good.
During the 1995 Christmas season, a message went round the Internet claiming that the publisher Houghton-Mifflin would donate a certain number of children's books to a good cause if a certain number of Internet users sent electronic mail to a certain address by a certain date. As Christmas came and went, a second message went round stating that they had only received a third of the messages they had requested. This second message provoked a lot of speculation: was the first message real or a hoax? When one person sent the follow-up message, which didn't even claim to have been written by H-M, to several mailing lists (lists, by the way, whose connection to children's books was not at all clear to me), others questioned whether it was legit, whereupon someone else sent a message saying he had called up H-M and verified it, but then of course most people on the lists did not know who this person was, and so forth and so on.
I won't take a stand on the question. On one hand, the message didn't seem extravagant enough to be a hoax. But on the other hand, to be honest, it was too dumb to be real. I am imagining some publicist somewhere, who knew a little about the Internet but not very much, thinking that this would be a no-cost pre- Christmas stunt to position H-M as a hip, high-tech, big-hearted publisher of children's books, unleashing this thing on the net with little sense of the dynamics that it might set in motion.
What this person, if he or she exists, does not understand is that anybody who has been on the net awhile has become accustomed to a whole menagerie of e-mail microbes -- such as the "Good Times" message, the "modem tax" rumor, and the "$250 cookie recipe" stories -- that have been circulating on the Internet since time began (a few years ago). These messages each suggest that their reader would be doing a good deed by the simple act of forwarding them to everybody they know. In this regard they are the Internet equivalent of the boy in England who supposedly wants to get a world-record number of postcards before he dies, or the urban myth, propagated by people who send clippings from local newspapers to their relatives in other towns who then create rumors that get reported in the local newspaper, about the peel-off "tattoos" that supposedly contain LSD. If you're a publicist, please consider that if you attempt such a stunt then anybody who knows the net at all well is going to place you in the same category as these not-so-prestigious phenomena.
Of course, there do exist good reasons for sending out messages
for broadcast across the net. But these messages must be
constructed very carefully in accordance with formats that have
developed over time. For example I've discussed the case of
political action alerts in TNO 1(1). When these are done well,
as in the case of the excellent alerts from the Voters' Telecom
Watch
In the case of the putative publicists, my point is not that they were out to mislead anyone. But a problem with messages originating in publicity stunts is that -- by their nature -- they are each sui generis, so that nobody understands what are the appropriate places to send them. As a result, I expect that an awful lot of people are grumbling to themselves about what they regard as inappropriate postings. You can do positive PR on the net (see TNO 2(3)), but you shouldn't fool around with dynamics that you don't understand.
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How to kill community networks.
Hint: We may have already started...
Doug Schuler Seattle Community Network douglas@scn.org Community networks (often called Free-Nets or civic networks) are geographically centered computer systems that support the local community with a wide range of free or low cost information and communication services. While just a handful of systems were operational in the late 1980's, perhaps 300 operating community networks now exist and hundreds more are being planned. The National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN) reports that the total registered users on their affiliate "Free-Net" systems is nearing 400,000 people.
For purposes of this essay, I'd like to further restrict what I mean by a community network: A community network is designed, used, administered, and owned by the community. These additional constraints "disqualify" (here at least) several popular non-profit and government projects and nearly any for-profit venture.
The Community Network Vision
One of the most intriguing documents to emerge from the community networking community is a list of goals that developers have set for their systems. With few exceptions, the goals (offered by attendees at the 1994 Ties that Bind conference) were unabashedly idealistic. They included the "development of civil society in a post-apartheid South Africa", "civic networking at the local community level", "economic revitalization," "environmental consensus building and education", "providing open forums where free speech is encouraged", and "bridging the gap that currently exists between people" to name just a few. Taken as a whole, the goals reveal the optimistic belief that a more equitable, egalitarian, and convivial future is possible -- if people are willing to work towards it. This vision is quite different from those offered by corporate interests, either major political party, or the semi-official cyber "visionaries" currently on the lecture circuit. In addition to providing a vision, these goals establish a basis for action for thousands of experiments in community-building. These local experiments include community computing centers, employment services, electronic memorials, social and political activism, economic development, health- based self-help forums, teen counseling, assistive technology, electronic pen pals, training and distance learning, homework assistance and many others too numerous to mention.
Perhaps the unfolding of time will belie this optimism. Or perhaps not. At this moment in history, while new communication paradigms are being shaped, it may still be possible to play a leading role. But this moment won't last forever. And effectively seizing this moment will require persistence and hard work. As abolitionist Frederick Douglass reminds us, "Without struggle there is no progress".
Killing the Concept: Three Approaches
Community networks may continue their rise in importance or they may fade into obscurity. Community networks will not be killed by a stroke of the pen, a judge's degree, or a rejected funding proposal. If they wither away it will likely be for reasons that we see today; attitudes that can sometimes be found within today's community network movement. These counterproductive attitudes include:
Community networks are utilities, like electricity or gas. The lack of money is the biggest obstacle to their success.* Community network projects are technological projects.
This last attitude has three consequences: Don't involve the community; have "professionals" guide the project; and don't think politically.
Death by Utilitarianism
If a community network is seen as a utility, like electricity or gas, that is always available and is paid for with a monthly check, then it can be provided by the government or by business with little or no involvement from community members. This would mean another lost opportunity for citizen participation and another lost opportunity to help rebuild the community.
Community networks as utilities offer little excitement. The commercial network providers don't sell their services as merely utilitarian. Their system may make your life more exciting (or so the ad copy implies). In print ads for the "new" Prodigy, a sultry "Loni" (who loves to "pseudo chat" on Wednesdays at 9:37) is shown lounging against a car provocatively declaring "Let's just say I don't hang out in the knitting forum". The other commercial services offer a smorgasbord of virtual excitement, edification, and entertainment all for a small monthly charge. Although community networks may not want to entice users with sex (although an on-line Dr. Ruth would be a valuable service!), they should be made as useful, interesting, and exciting as they can be.
We know that information and communication services provide benefits unequally. University of Washington professor Philip Bereano's reworking of the old maxim makes the point clearly: "Only the naive or the scurrilous believe the Third Wave claim that 'information is power'. Power is power, and information is particularly useful to those who are already powerful." Information is actually quite plentiful: we are already on the receiving end of a firehose of information with neither the tools or the time we need to give it adequate consideration. If all this information were power then surely there would be enough power for everybody! We find that the opposite is closer to the truth: the asymmetry of power is becoming greater every day, and computer networks are probably contributing to the problem. The powerless are becoming increasingly isolated. Their opinions are infrequently sought; their concerns are often not even acknowledged.
Therefore it isn't enough to provide more information. People with no access to power -- let alone to computers -- and whose voices are seldom heard need to be partners in the design of new services. These services could include job information and electronic forums for laid-off workers, crisis referral information and information on civic assets -- churches, organizations, meetings, projects, and programs. Most importantly, the services need to be tied to community programs: literacy, economic development, job training, activism, cultural events, education, and others. And tying community networks to community programs and community organizations is diametrically opposed to the idea of information as a utility to be metered out by a telephone or cable television company down an information super pipe way.
Death by Fiscal Longing
A common complaint among community networkers today is that they don't have enough money. While this complaint is true enough, it sidesteps the real issue which is the lack of community understanding and support. While money is indispensable to a community network system -- for telephone lines, hardware, office space, and staff -- its acquisition should not become the sole motivation of the organization. I've heard more than one developer say that if they didn't get one grant or another they'd be forced to start charging users. Although a very small fee might ultimately be justifiable, this decision may begin a gradual shift in emphasis from a public library model to a commercial model -- like Prodigy or America Online, a profound change indeed.
If the focus is on money then the focus is unlikely to be on community outreach. If the focus is on money, especially on getting large amounts of it in the short run, then the organizers will be more likely to accept a deal -- any deal -- with a large organization that could swallow them or cause them to water down their principles. Finally, focusing on the acquisition of money in the short run blinds organizers from envisioning sustainable models for the networks.
Death by Software Engineering
Attention to the technology itself is valid but should not predominate. While software engineers may know how to build programming language compilers and word processing applications, they don't know how to build community. In general, the world does not proceed by the same orderly and inflexible logic of computers. And trying to conceptually force-fit the world into such a framework can make the community networking project seem irrelevant, uninteresting, unrewarding, and elitist. If community members perceive the project in this way they are unlikely to have any enthusiasm for it.
Community network developers, perhaps because of a focus on the technology, have done little to advance their cause politically. Unfortunately, many people now fear and mistrust politics and feel that participation in the democratic arena is obsolete (thus leaving decision-making to those without such doubts). But the democratic arena, for better or worse, still exists, and it is a proper place in which to debate and discuss the future of democratic technology.
The fear of politics can unnecessarily expose the entire movement to external threats. Currently Democratic Senator Exon and others are pushing legislation to enforce "on-line decency" in a way that will force Free-Nets and other community networks into the uncomfortable, unwanted, and wholly impractical role of network censor. Although a stronger challenge could scarcely be imagined, the community network community -- with some exceptions -- is strangely silent.
Is it too early to work with legislators or to hire lobbyists? Is model legislation needed? Developers are building local technological models but perhaps it's time to build local social and political models as well. In many cities there are government efforts to put information on-line and provide other services. While many of these efforts appear to be as unapproachable as the commercial services, government is still (in theory at least) answerable to the public. Developers need to be working with local governments to insist on strong community participation and oversight and to ensure that they receive other information in addition to that which their friendly telephone, cable television, and computer companies may supply. Developers also need to be working with the local PEG (public access, education, and government) community because they have waged similar struggles in the past. And community network organizers in communities all over the world might begin to contemplate what types of relationships they need to build with each other.
Conclusions
While the counterproductive attitudes I have described may contain the seeds of self-destruction for community networks, there is no ill intent within the community of community network developers. Many developers (myself included) are relatively new to the idea of community development and organizing, having come from technical backgrounds such as computer science or software engineering. We may also be naive. We expect the righteousness of our cause will prevail or that democratic, community-oriented computer networks are inevitable. Even a cursory look, however, at the history of communication technology will reveal the unwarranted optimism of this view.
The medium is currently malleable enough to be coaxed into various shapes. On many levels there is a struggle for these "shapes" of cyberspace. The struggle is waged with ideas, debate, and investment (both of time and money) and everybody who discusses these issues, influences policy, or builds on-line systems is involved. It is largely a struggle of consciousness: Who will define this future and what future will they define? Will pay-for-byte, pay-for-view, and home shopping crowd out public dialogue and deliberation, educational programming, and alternative voices? Will there be a public place in cyberspace for seniors, youths, or people with disabilities? The time may be short -- and those with other views might move faster and more decisively and more persistently than community networkers.
Determining the nature of public cyberspace -- and whether it exists at all -- will be due in part to the efforts of community network developers. To this end, developers need to form strategic alliances with community organizations. When organizations begin working independently through their own channels, the momentum will grow rapidly. Developers need to go to these groups and tell powerful, idealistic, and transformative stories. Computer companies, telecommunications and cyber-pundits are not the only ones capable of crafting alternative futures for cyberspace.
While working with other community organizations is crucial, developers also need to register lots of users -- tens and hundreds of thousands -- and make sure that they are finding the information and services that they need. Make sure also that they are engaged in a dialogue about the future of free, public computing. The community network message is simple, yet it is powerful and compelling. In spite of the high intensity rhetoric to the contrary, people still "get" public libraries, free fire and police protection, free public universal education, and free public, community cyberspace.
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Bibliography on the economics of standards.
Several issues of TNO have touched on the remarkable and highly consequential economic phenomena that attend technical standards, particularly with regard to issues of interoperability, and this month's "wish list" is about to carry the analysis further. One of my goals in TNO is to explore the implications of these phenomena for a broader range of political and social issues, with particular reference to the ways that the Internet community can organize itself to intervene in order to encourage both technical advance -- through coherent, extensible, well-designed open standards -- and social justice -- through broad access to the means of association that computer technology and especially computer networking may be able to provide. So here are some of the more useful references. I have also included several references to the economics of information infrastructure more generally. All of these references will be helpful to anyone who wants to get deeper into the issues raised by the "economics" section of my article on genres for new media in TNO 2(11).
Brian Kahin and Janet Abbate, eds, Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. This extensive edited collection is probably the best starting place for exploration of these issues.
Carl F. Cargill, Information Technology Standards: Theory, Process, and Organizations, Maynard, MA: Digital Press, 1989. An influential book distinguishing various types of standards, various stages in the standards-setting process, and various roles that standards can have in a single organization's processes and strategies.
Caroline S. Wagner, Carl F. Cargill, and Anna Slomovic, Standards and the National Information Infrastructure: Implications for Open Systems Standards in Manufacturing, Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1994. An excellent and unfortunately obscure paper arguing for a policy of government support for standards-setting activity, inasmuch as standards are often public goods.
Cristiano Antonelli, ed, The Economics of Information Networks, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1992. See especially Antonelli's own survey article, "The economic theory of information networks", which includes an impressive taxonomy of different kinds of externalities that operate on the economics of information networks.
H. Landis Gabel, ed, Product Standardization and Competitive Strategy, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1987. See especially the first chapter, by Joseph Farrell and Garth Saloner, which I have already recommended in TNO 2(8).
Paul A. David, Clio and the economics of QWERTY, American Economic Review 72(2), 1985, pages 332-337. A famous article about how standards get entrenched in the economy -- that is, become "de facto" standards -- even when they do not represent the best available technical approach.
W. Brian Arthur, Self-reinforcing mechanisms in economics, in Philip W. Anderson and Kenneth J. Arrow, eds, The Economy as an Evolving Complex System, Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1988. A more theoretical consideration of the mechanisms through which economic phenomena can produce the conditions for their own perpetuation and expansion, so that whichever option gets an initial jump in the econmy then gets reinforced even though it may not be the best one by some objective standard.
Robert E. Babe, ed, Information and Communication in Economics, Boston: Kluwer, 1994. I find that the economics of information technology standards is, as you might expect, greatly clarified in the context of the economics of information. This volume is quite eclectic, and Babe's own historical review is the chapter that is most relevant here.
Lisa Bud-Frierman, ed, Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, London: Routledge, 1994. This is a terrific collection of papers on the connection between infrastructure, standards, information, and ideology in the history of business. Geof Bowker's article at the end sums up a truly profound point: that the practice of talking about the whole world within a common repertoire of categories, though taken for granted and treated as something entirely natural and given, in fact presupposes the existence of the infrastructure and institutions to represent the world in a standardized way across its full extent. Mark Casson's article provides a useful outline of how economists think about the role of information in shaping economic relationships. As standards and infrastructure spread, he says, information costs go down, so that transaction costs do as well, meaning that the economy evolves toward the ideal of perfect markets, so that transactions come increasingly to be governed by freshly negotiated price-mediated exchange rather than custom.
Shane M. Greenstein, Invisible hands and visible advisors: An economic analysis of standardization, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43(8), 1992, pages 538-549.
D. Linda Garcia, Standard setting in the United States: Public and private sector roles, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43(8), 1992, pages 531-537.
Michael B. Spring, Information technology standards, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 26, 1991, pages 79-111.
Oliver E. Williamson and Sidney G. Winter, The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution, and Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. This book surveys intellectual developments downstream from Ronald Coase's original 1937 paper on transaction costs and the structure of the firm. The information technologies that he had in mind were the telegraph and telephone, of course, but the point generalizes.
William J. Drake, Europe in the new global standardization environment, in Charles Steinfield, Laurence Caby, and Johannes Bauer, eds, Telecommunications in Europe: Changing Policies, Services and Technologies, Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992. A good article about evolution in the institutions through which standards related to telecommunications are being established.
Nathan Rosenberg, Telecommunications: Complex, uncertain, and path dependent, in Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics, and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. A good, brief summary of the distinctive economic features of telecommunications networks.
George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. One of several theories of technology choice that likens the process to biological evolution through natural selection within a complex ecosystem -- the primary alternative in this area to the neoclassical economic worldview.
Gernot Grabher, The Embedded Firm: On the Socioeconomics of Industrial Networks, London: Routledge, 1993. This isn't about standards as such but about the economics of the increasingly complex and various interorganizational relationships whose shape influences and is influenced by the workings of networking technologies.
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Wish list.
I wish for a completely brand-new set of e-mail standards based on the Web. The basic Internet e-mail standards we have now are okay for the 1970's and for basic things: ASCII text is still the major use that most of us have for e-mail, or more accurately, ASCII text is still passably adequate for the major uses that we now have for e-mail. The problem is that those old standards have become set in stone, not because someone decreed it thus but because there are now dozens or hundreds of systems in use that assume those standards: mailers, mail-readers, Listserv, and so on, and it would be nearly impossible to get everyone to upgrade to more sophisticated standards in a coordinated way. But those old standards have a lot of problems -- for example it is hard to send anything except plain ASCII. MIME was a heroic effort to define a higher-level standard that permitted more complex kinds of documents to be mailed around. It's a good thing, but it only goes so far and it has attained far from universal acceptance.
This impasse can be broken, though, as Java permits hundreds of useful new applications to be built on top of the WorldWide Web. This really is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get a lot of things right by setting really-thought-through standards, most especially for e-mail. In case it's not clear, what I have in mind is a brand-new kind of e-mail that you use from entirely within your Web browser. I don't pretend to know in any detail the right way to do this. An e-mail message is probably just a URL that your server sends to my server or vice-versa, where the URL points at a form with various standard fields and a link to the body of the message, which of course may have other links to anything it likes. So now it's a trivial matter to mail someone any format of material that their Web browser can handle, and if you send them a format they can't handle then they can just go and download the necessary bit of extra software (as for example with the Adobe reader for PDF). Merging e-mail with the existing Web will also help erode the dichotomy between passive reception of information (e-mail) and active search (Web browsing). The challenge, of course, would be to design something that everyone could upgrade to -- or else we'd just be expanding the morass of incompatible standards. As the MIME experience shows, this is at least as much a hard social process of consensus-building as it is a technical process.
While I'm wishing away here, I would particularly like this new e-mail regime to include an extensive set of building blocks and other support for end-user programming. Individual net users should be able to build their own mailing lists, servers, and other e-mail based mechanisms, with the level of sophistication of these mechanisms depending in a smooth way on their level of programming skill. So for example users would be able to simply fill in a form to create a simple mailing list like the ones that Listserv supports now, with form entries to control things like moderation, the text that is sent to new subscribers, whether nonsubscribers can submit items to the list, whether the list of subscribers is private or openly available or what, and so on. Then someone else could build a system to let people build other kinds of servers that are controlled with e-mail, for example servers that manage file archives (e.g., an archive of the past messages to a list), operate real-time games, or whatever. At last -- a world without Unix sendmail! More importantly, a GUI interface that provides freedom of the press to people who do not otherwise own one. That's what the Internet is supposed to be about, but hasn't really become yet. Maybe such a system could even become a platform, at long last, that will let anyone build their own distributed applications -- it's surprising, in this day and age, how few globally distributed applications are running on public networks.
What will it take to create such a happy world? Obviously it will take a lot of hard technical work. The standards-setting activities at the WWW Consortium have plenty of vision, talent, and good intentions, but they're going to need everyone's help -- and everyone's vigilance. Vigilance will be needed to ensure that the process results in open standards, and especially so that proprietary standards do not get entrenched in the global economy, thereby creating a replay of the Microsoft Windows debacle. Vigilance also involves community spirit: when deciding whether to adopt one of the hundreds of Web-based Internet applications that will appear over the next few years, everybody needs to apply a version of Kant's categorical imperative by asking whether that application would make a good de facto standard for the whole Internet. Often an individual or organization can acquire a local, temporary kind of advantage by adopting a system that then turns out to be a closed standard, so that they pay a penalty if they buy any other supplier's upgrades. Avoiding this situation is self-interest. But individuals and organizations can sometimes also acquire short-sighted advantage by adopting particular applications without first getting a sense of what is good for the whole community: what is open enough, extensible enough, broad enough to include everyone's requirements, able to provide basic functionality to people without the highest-end hardware or broadest bandwidth, and so on. Technology adoption can and should be a matter of broad discussion and debate in the community of users, not just isolated choices by isolated individuals. And I think that recent history has made clear that this is true both for sound economic reasons and for sound political reasons as well. If the user community exhibits this kind of solidarity then the vendors will have no choice but to comply with what the community decides.
The Internet can play a crucial enabling role in supporting this global congress of users. It is a rapid, flexible medium for conducting debates, and it is a place where anybody's views can travel far and wide if they are phrased compellingly enough. But the simple existence of the Internet does not ensure that the necessary discussion will take place, nor does the establishment of broad access to Internet connectivity. What's also required is confidence that technical imagination, which is always also social imagination, is a material force. Information technology is one area where the supply-and-demand equilibration of the decentralized market does not necessary yield the most efficient outcome -- even by the narrow definition of efficiency found in economics. That is because of the extensive range of economic externalities that are inherent in the technology, especially because of the tendency of certain de facto standards to become entrenched in the market. Whereas supply and demand in perfect markets settle down to a single unique optimum, markets involving externalities associated with the interoperability of machinery (hardware, software, networks, protocols, and so on) exhibit what economists call "path dependencies". When the long list of assumptions that constitute "perfect markets" roughly hold true (which they sometimes do), such effects can be treated as a residual category, "external" to the smoothly functioning price system. But information technology turns this picture inside out: the "externalities" become central to the picture and the central phenomenon of neoclassical economics -- the fact that, other things being equal, people buy less or something that costs more and vice versa -- becomes nearly useless as a guide to strategy and policy, or at best simply one principle among several.
We often forget about the struggle between vendors and users over open and closed standards, or else underestimate its scope and consequences, because our attention has been grabbed by the phenomenally successful open standards of the Internet -- specifically the TCP/IP protocols. But the market does not tend to produce things like the Internet, for the simple reason that things like Windows -- the opposite end of the open-closed spectrum -- are much more profitable. Closed standards, though, are only profitable once they get entrenched, and they only get entrenched if their suppliers get a powerful jump on the market. This "jump" has two parts. The less important part is simply being first and/or most aggressive to market. The more important part is a discoordinated user community: if a user community is not working as vigorously to share its experiences as vendors are working to push their proprietary standards, then everyone will end up paying a much higher price than they realize in the long term. This has become obvious enough for operating systems, but many people still don't find it obvious for lots of other systems -- think about Lotus Notes, or the Microsoft/Visa electronic payment specs. Unix is an even worse example since it is an irremediably poor standard that has gotten entrenched in a large segment of the market while also fragmenting into an uncountable number of variants, each of which is entrenched in its own subset of local user environments. If we have our act together this time then maybe we can avoid these sorry phenomena in the forthcoming universe of Internet-based systems.
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This month's recommendations.
Given that TNO 2(12) ended the year with a somewhat peculiar list of Things That Are Not Good, it's only fair to start the new year with an equally peculiar list of Things That Are Good. And so here they are...
Sonic Youth, Sister (SST) and Daydream Nation (Blast First). My theory is that when the universe created Ronald Reagan, it also created Sonic Youth as his corresponding antiparticle. At least that's how it seemed throughout the 1980's, as the demonstrably unpopular president managed to convince the press that he was beloved because he lived in the same dimension of shiny surfaces and unreality that they did, while the world's greatest rock and roll band flew just under the radar of the star-making machinery, turning out one brilliant record after another of emotionally ambiguous vocals and harsh typhoons of noise caused by metal objects being dragged across electric guitar strings. Their 1990's records on Geffen are still worthwhile, but their true works of genius are the bizarre "Sister" and the relatively quiet two-record epic "Daydream Nation".
Foam-rubber ear plugs. I first started wearing foam-rubber ear plugs virtually every night when I lived in a loft five floors above the largest all-night Chinese restaurant in Boston, whose revelrous patrons routinely created traffic jams at 3AM. They improved my life instantly, and since then I cannot tell you how many roommates, songbirds, motorcyclists, car alarm owners, television watchers, hotel managers, and bouncers of upstairs bedsprings owe their lives to these marvels of low technology: cylinders of foam rubber, usually white, measuring perhaps 1/2" inch in diameter and 3/4" inch in length. Two widely available brands are Flents and North, and you can buy them in bulk from industrial supply catalogs (they are often provided to machinists and the like). They are indispensible for traveling, especially if, like me, you often stay in pensions and youth hostels and cheap motels that turn out to be across the street from major freight lines. They only work passably on sounds created within the room you're trying to sleep in, but they work quite well on sounds whose high frequencies have been filtered out by walls.
Robert Christgau's "Consumer Guide" in the Village Voice. Being an intellectual, I'm supposed to disapprove of commodity-making exercises like ratings and rankings. Yes, it's easy to reify the rankings so that you taste the score the wine got in the guidebook rather than the wine that's actually in your mouth. Nonetheless, my omnivorous appetite for music prevents me from sampling everything I want to listen to. Most of it is rarely on the radio, and I don't go to enough clubs to keep up with it all. So I read Robert Christgau's more-or-less monthly "Consumer Guide" in the Village Voice. Even though his one-paragraph reviews are written in the Voice's typical insiderish code, they still manage to communicate useful information. The real point, though, is in the grades: A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, etc. He finds, as I do, that the hardest thing is deciding what's a B- and what's a C+, so lately he has stopped listing most everything below A- except when bursting the balloon of an overly hyped "must to avoid". His range is considerable, with greatest strengths in rock, pop, hip-hop, and world music, with some jazz and country and almost no classical. I find his judgements extraordinarily precise, meaning of course that they agree with mine, and I'm really impressed with his ability to distinguish the merely very good from the genuinely permanent. If you own most of his A and A+ records then you have an outstanding record collection, and more importantly you've been forced to acquire a lot of tastes. I do think he has an excessive weakness for eccentrics (such as the unlistenable Peter Stampfel) and for interminable greatest-hits CD's (e.g., the admittedly virtuous archival compilations from Rhino Records), but I can just ignore those. Da Capo Press has published a book of his reviews from the 1980's, which I highly recommend for those who now regret having stuck with the Top 40 through that pretty decent musical decade.
Library Express. The library at UCSD provides its patrons with this amazing service called Library Express, and it makes the professors at other universities jealous when I tell them about it. Here's how it works: I call up the library's catalog on my computer, and when I find a book I want I type "X" (entering a password the first time in each session), and the book shows up in my department's office a few days later with my name on it. I like to stay current with several different fields, depending on what I'm working on at any given moment (right now it's economics, social studies of technology, theories of democracy, and the social organization of public controversies), and Library Express provides me with an efficient way to acquaint myself with all of the relevant work all of the time. I sometimes feel guilty about using it so much. One of the librarians referred to me as a "power user"; he made it sound like a good thing. The fact is, I can't imagine how I could live without it. I learn about books I want to see in several ways: through book reviews, publishers' catalogs, the communication librarian's periodic lists of new acquisitions, and above all the bibliographies of other publications I have read. I keep lists of titles on 3x5 cards (I consume about 2000 3x5 cards a year, a fact I hope to write about for TNO some day), and periodically I request another batch from among the accumulated titles that seem most important. The breakdown of boundaries between disciplines is generally a good thing in my view, and Library Express is one way that busy scholars can maintain bridges across disciplinary boundaries through current awareness of one another's fields.
The Practical Strategist and the Movement Action Plan. Now that the Internet civil liberties community has gotten comprehensively hosed on the issue of online censorship, it might be time to learn how a real social movement is constructed. Two excellent and cheap guides to the process are The Practical Strategist and the Movement Action Plan by Bill Moyer of the Social Movement Empowerment Project (721 Shrader Street, San Francisco CA 94117, +1 (415) 387-3361). Bill (who is not Bill Moyers the journalist) worked in the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King, and these texts distill his understanding of King's procedures for building a social movement. It's important to have a strategy, and it's important to have a set of values that can draw people together noncoercively and provide a background for resolving internal disputes (particularly the ones caused by pathologically divisive people, who as Bill points out are indistinguishable in their behavior from government provocateurs) and helping everyone get in gear for the long haul. They're each $2 plus $1 s/h (with volume discounts) from SMAP at the above address.
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Follow-up.
I've bumped this month's follow-up to February to stay near my self-imposed 50K limit.
Web picks.
Amy Bruckman's Technology Review article on building community on MediaMOO is on the web at the following very long URL, which I have broken into two lines: http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena/ org/t/techreview/www/articles/jan96/Bruckman.html
Some interesting articles about the far right are on the Public Good site at http://nwcitizen.com/publicgood/
The fan club for the Dilbert comic strip is called, as you would expect, "Dogbert's New Ruling Class". The Dilbert home page is located at http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/
Alta Vista is DEC's impressively fast search engine, and it's the reductio ad absurdum of keyword-based searching of the Web. Whatever you give it, it'll instantaneously return a directory of anywhere from 3 to 300,000 tangentially relevant pages. The URL is http://www.altavista.digital.com/
The CIA's Vision, Mission, and Values are summarized at http://www.odci.gov/cia/information/mission.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 1996 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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