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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 2 FEBRUARY 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: Arguments against privacy Books about political networks The economics of noise Stereotyping the Internet censors Names for newsletters
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Welcome to TNO 3(2).
This month I have gathered together another batch of arguments against a broad right to privacy. They are no more impressive than the batch that I reviewed in TNO 1(10), but nonetheless I have been hearing them frequently; maybe you have too. For each argument I have provided what I regard as an adequate response. Even if you agree with my responses, though, it does not suffice for someone to circulate such arguments on the Internet. Given the great complexity of emerging privacy issues, I believe it is crucial for defenders of freedom to bring these arguments, or others like them, to a broad public. When someone is suddenly faced with a form asking for their whole life history, it's probably too late for them to start inventing arguments. Nobody is born knowing the full range of arguments about privacy issues, particularly when the opponents of privacy employ rhetorical conflations and ambiguities that they may never have thought through themselves. But if people are armed with good arguments then they'll know how to say "no" when they're handed a pen and asked to sign away their informational lives and when they hear about some invasive new technology that is falsely portrayed as the inevitable epitome of progress.
I've provided another reading list as well, this time on the social networks through which individuals and communities conduct their political lives. I've construed this topic broadly, so that the bibliography includes a broad range of references on formal theories of politics, as well as references on economic networks. I hope that these references will be useful to people who are trying to use computer networking technology to reinvent democracy.
This month's "wish list" devoutly wishes for quiet and explores how technology might help. Along the way it discusses further the concept of economic externalities. Information technology creates harmful externalities in great abundance, but perhaps it can help eliminate them as well. The crucial issue is whether such scenarios have any contact with reality.
A footnote. When I was in graduate school, one of my roommates was the bass player for an excellent pop band called Sensible Shoes. Sensible Shoes was rather a good name, and it fit well with the kind of music they played. Now it so happened that another band, in Los Angeles, was also called Sensible Shoes. The two bands were aware of one another's existence, but they didn't bother themselves very much about the conflict, figuring that they would have to talk further in the unlikely event that one of them actually got a national record contract. This kind of conflict is common. The English Beat, for example, got the "English" part when they came to the US and had to contend with an obscure American band that was already called "The Beat". And Dinosaur Jr. got their "Jr." to ward off legal trouble from a band of aging rock stars who called themselves The Dinosaurs. The underlying difficulty here is simple: there are untold thousands and thousands of bands and only so many good names to go around. I had occasion to think about this recently when a guy in San Francisco started an Internet newsletter -- really more like an op-ed column that he distributes on the net -- called The Online Observer. When I got the first issue of this publication I was unhappy at the similarity to The Network Observer, which was by now a very well-established publication (at least in my own mind), and tried with no success to get him to find a new name. Later on, though, I cooled off. The way I see it now, just about the whole point of the Internet is to allow newsletters and other such activities to become at least as common as bands. If this actually happens then neophyte newsletter editors will be going around asking their friends to help them come up with newsletter titles, just as musicians do when they are starting new bands. The fact is, I filled several pages of my notebook with words and phrases trying to come up with something less generic than The Network Observer (which was about my second or third idea for a title when I started this newsletter), without any success. Eventually newsletter editors will be forced to invent whole new genres of names. The best names for rock and roll bands, as my bass player roommate pointed out, sound like this: Grateful Dead, Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, Simple Minds, Sonic Youth -- two syllables (first one stressed) then one syllable, adjective-noun, with the short form sometimes being the noun -- as in The Stones and The Dead. But after a while those names ran dry (just as the computer industry is running out of company names like Apple, Intel, and Lucid -- one word, two syllables, accent on the first syllable), leading in short order to names like Pop Will Eat Itself. Perhaps real democracy in communications will be around the corner when Internet newsletters sprout up with names like that. Do "Feed" and "suck" count? I don't think so, but time will tell.
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More bogus privacy arguments.
In TNO 1(10) I collected a set of invalid arguments against a broad right to privacy that I had encountered. Also, in TNO 1(6) I reported the astonishingly cynical argument, articulated in this case by George Gilder but apparently widespread, that massive collection of personal information actually protects privacy by allowing commercial firms to target their unsolicited sales calls more accurately. Since then I have encountered several more mistaken arguments against a broad right to privacy. Most have arisen in the context of privacy issues associated with automatic toll collection on highways (see TNO 2(4)), but they all have much broader application. Here they are, all in composite form, with some appropriate debunking. I encourage everyone to be on the lookout for arguments like these. Do not let a single instance of these arguments go unrebutted. Raise your hand in conference discussions, write letters to the editor (people do read them), contribute responses in online discussion forums, and just generally provide people with the arguments they need when interested parties start to confuse the issues.
* "Most people are privacy pragmatists who can be trusted to make intelligent trade-offs between functionality and privacy."
This argument, a favorite of public relations counselors, employs a common PR technique: burying its principal thesis as a hidden premise of an outwardly commonsensical proposition. The fact is, the emerging technologies of privacy protection based on strong cryptography, temporary identifiers, and the like can frequently ensure that functionality does not trade off against privacy in any important way. The problem, of course, is that most people don't know this. If they are told they can have functionality or privacy but not both then they will engage in an exercise of weighing them against one another. Moreover, the scales of this weighing process can easily be tipped by drawing attention to cases where the functionality in question is particularly needed by children or poor people or emergency medical patients etc. The outcome of such exercises is virtually preordained -- some privacy protections, but none that affect the interests of the largest and most organized privacy invaders in any material way. The "trust" business tries to shift the issue from lack of information to lack of intelligence, as if privacy activists were paternalistically trying to prevent people from making their own choices. Usually, in fact, the issue at hand concerns a proposed or actual system in which people are technologically prevented from making the choice they probably most want: functionality and privacy together.
* "Our lives will inevitably become visible to others, so the real issue is mutual visibility, achieving a balance of power by enabling us to watch the people who are watching us."
If the institutions that watch us are so powerful that we cannot possibly stop them from watching us, why in the world should we be able to do something considerably harder, namely forcing them to submit to surveillance by us? The underlying problem, in my opinion, is a quasi-millenarian vision of computer technology in which computers are a kind of global mirror, passively and accurately reflecting more and more of reality in their stored representations; it follows that any incompleteness of these representations is simply a temporary glitch that progress will surely overcome. Such proposals never come with any credible political strategy for actually achieving this reciprocity of surveillance, and I think their proponents tacitly believe that power relations between people will automatically be swept away by the inherent logic of the technology.
* "Once you really analyze it, the concept of privacy is so nebulous that it provides no useful guidance for action."
Many people have observed that the term "privacy" has been used to name a wide variety of interests and concerns which are hard to subsume under any single definition. It seems to me that many institutions would find it convenient if all discussion of privacy issues were to grind to a halt at that point, unable to proceed for lack of clarity, and that they sometimes even encourage this muddled outcome by good-naturedly pointing at one conceptual difficulty after another. This smoke-spreading tactic should be recognized for what it is. When any particular privacy issue arises, or when any particular technological proposal or desired technical functionality is presented, it is usually easy enough to indicate the places where average intuition detects a privacy concern once the potential for concern is point out. It can take real work to conceptualize these concerns in a way that provides a useful basis for action, but doing so does not require that we define privacy-as-such-in-general. The difficulty of general definition, after all, is not limited to the concept of privacy; it is shared by most abstract concepts of any importance -- for example, truth, property, rights, tradition, and so on.
"People want* these systems, as indicated by the percentage of them who sign up for them once they become available."
This argument turns on an important ambiguity in words such as "want". In the case of automatic toll collection, we can imagine two scenarios. In the first scenario, a proposal for automatic toll collection is put before the citizenry at an early stage, before any decisions have been made about highway services should be funded, with experts and lay citizens given space and time to present arguments pro and con. In the second scenario, decisions are made quietly, with minimal public awareness and input, after which systems are implemented and presented to the public as faits accomplis, and individuals are presented with the decision of whether to sign up for them or not. In each scenario, people have been asked whether they "want" a particular proposition, but it's probably not surprising that the answers they give in each case are often radically different. To my knowledge in every case when the first scenario has been enacted, people have answered unambiguously that they do not want automated toll collection. But when faced with the second scenario, people with busy lives and virtually no prospect of changing the rules of the game will simply make an economic decision from among the options that are practically available to them. The result will then be reported as "what people want", thereby feeding another round of fatalism and cynicism about pervasive surveillance and regulation of people's lives.
* "Concern for privacy is anti-social and obstructs the building of a democratic society."
I have rarely heard this argument in the United States, but it is a common argument in social democratic countries such as Norway and Sweden. In such countries most people feel a relatively strong identification with the state. They have highly effective data protection laws, they presuppose a high degree of social consensus about the values that should guide government policies, and they feel that the government is under the effective control of the citizens through the mediation of coherent, well-organized political parties. In such countries I think it actually is somewhat reasonable to regard excessive concern for privacy as anti-social. But only somewhat. Even in a highly functional social democracy, it is still wrong to stigmatize concern for personal privacy except in cases where good evidence exists of organized conspiracies such as tax evasion. Moreover, concern for the smooth functioning of the state, even a state with strong civil liberties protections, is no reason to gather more information on people's lives than is necessary for the delimited ends toward which a given policy is directed. New technology greatly reduces the amount of information that must be gathered to collect taxes, distribute social welfare benefits, regulate traffic, and perform other legitimate state functions, and any state that wishes to regard itself as responsible and modern should be actively shifting its procedures toward these minimally invasive methods as fast as it reasonably can.
* "Privacy regulation is just one more category of government interference in the market, which after all is much better at weighing individuals' relative preferences for privacy and everything else than bureaucratic rules could ever be."
Although we should certainly pay attention if anybody can prove empirically that the market actually does function to protect privacy in accord with people's actual wishes, nonetheless when taken in the abstract this argument involves several fallacies. First of all, "government regulation" and "the market" are not mutually exclusive categories. Only hard-core libertarians deny that it is one purpose of government to define and enforce property rights, and one large category of proposed privacy policies involves the creation of property rights in personal information. I happen to think that these proposals would be both impracticable and ineffectual, but they are nonetheless serious proposals that count as both "regulation" and "market". It has become common to imagine the government as something that swoops down out of nowhere and interferes with an already functioning market, but this picture bears no relationship to either the historical or legal reality of the market. Even if it did, the argument that the market will weigh preferences for privacy presupposes that the market is "perfect" in the sense defined in neoclassical economics -- so that, among other things, each individual knows, and can weigh, the full consequences of every transaction. But this is rarely true, and it is a million miles from being true in the case of the personal information that large commercial organizations capture in their dealings with individual customers. Most people do not understand the consequences of participating in the creation of transaction- generated information. In particular it is extremely difficult for individual consumers to place a value on the surrender of this information, because the consequences are generally opaque, mediated through far-away computer databases whose connections to subsequent sales calls and other involuntary costs are actively hidden. Many privacy policies are aimed precisely at forcing the market back toward "perfection" by supplying consumers with the information they need to make rational economic decisions about whether and when to surrender information about themselves. But these measures, too, are "government regulation". A further fallacy involves the broad categories of externalities that lead to path-dependencies in markets. Infrastructures tend to be highly path-dependent, since once they are created and lots of uncoordinated economic actors make commitments to them, they are very hard to change. And so an information infrastructure -- Internet payment systems, for example -- that does not protect privacy might well get entrenched in the market before any large number of actual or potential customers becomes fully aware of the privacy issues that are at stake. It does not automatically follow that government regulation should steer the direction of these systems, but it does follow that the unfettered market is not leading to privacy protection.
* "There's no privacy in public."
Many emerging privacy issues involve surveillance of activities that occur in public places such as roads. Some people have the intuition that activities that occur in public places are, by definition, not private. The US Supreme Court, for example, ruled in a case involving police tracking an individual's car that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy on public roads. And I have heard a prominent representative of US law enforcement argue that law enforcement should have unrestricted access to records of individuals' road travels maintained by private organizations, on the grounds that road travel occurs in a public place, so that the resulting records are therefore public records! But the law is clearly failing to respond to ordinary people's intuitions about the nature of privacy here. First of all, people very frequently take steps to protect their privacy in public places, for example by conducting their conversations at a safe distance from others, by lowering their voices, by rolling up the windows, and so on. People develop their expectations about privacy in public places, furthermore, against the background of their experience, which includes their experience of the means that reasonable others have to listen or watch. No reasonable person feels that their rights have been violated if someone sees them entering a shop on a certain date, or if someone working in a neighboring location happens to notice them entering that shop every morning, but they do feel a violation if someone has taken unusual measures to record every shop they have entered across a great distance over a month's time. In the past, these kinds of records have only arisen in cases where someone has been laboriously followed, usually by the police acting with some kind of probable cause. New information technologies, though, make it entirely feasible to track large populations on a routine basis, probable cause or no. This is clearly a new situation, or at worst a qualitative magnification of an existing situation, and it should be treated as novel and thought through without the pretense that it is covered by past precedents.
* "We favor limited access."
This one isn't even an argument but more of a verbal trick. It has become common for would-be privacy invaders to express "support for limited access" or accuse their opponents of being "opposed to limited access". These lines can be confusing, as well they should be. The trick is to make it sound as though privacy advocates are wacky extremists who want absolutely all data to be sealed off from everyone for all purposes; this is opposed to the reasonable-sounding proposition of "limited access". But the whole question is what "limited" is to mean. Few organized interests actually need literally unlimited access to information; they just need the particular very broad access that serves their own purposes, and they are happy to affirm that other kinds of access (by smaller competitors, for example) might need to be restricted.
* "Privacy in these systems has not emerged as a national issue."
One hears this line in the context of automated toll collection as a justification for neglect of privacy issues. It's hard to know exactly what it means, since I have heard it uttered even after privacy has been raised as an issue in numerous large newspapers, analyzed in prominent law reviews, discussed on the Internet, and so forth. What it comes down to in practice, I think, is the assertion that privacy advocates have not mobilized enough of a movement behind automated toll collection privacy issues to force any large organizations to address them in a serious way. This amoral attitude should be recognized for what it is: an abdication of the individual's personal responsibility to reflect on issues of right and wrong, even in situations when nobody has exerted the force necessary to give the issue high prominence in the esoteric circuitry of the policy-formation process. This approach is often rationalized with appeals to professional specialization: we just do technology here; the policy department is down the hall. But of course, nobody over in the policy department gets any points for raising obstacles that nobody is forcing them to raise. The bottom line here is elementary: everyone is obliged to take responsibility for their actions, even when nobody is making them to do so, and this goes double when systematic threats to the very foundation of a free society are plausibly at stake.
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Bibliography on political networks.
A big rift runs through the academic study of the media, which is roughly the opposition between political economy and culture. On the political economy side lie issues of infrastructure, industry organization, social networks, and the formal processes of law and government; on the culture side lie issues of content, symbols, meanings, and identities. Far too many studies focus on one side while ignoring or minimizing or explaining away the other side. Imagine an economic study of art that makes no reference to what the paintings represent or mean, or imagine a study of art that does not discuss how artists in a given milieu manage to eat -- in neither case do we have a real explanation of how certain paintings come to be, nor of the uses that people come to make of them. Yet biases to one side or the other are almost the norm. This unfortunate situation is not simply a matter of narrowness, since studies of political economy and culture have developed different tools and methods and conceptual frameworks over many years. Nor is it a matter of politics; the political economy/culture divide is present on both the left and right. (First think about the tension between socialists and feminists; then think about the tension between economic libertarians and religious conservatives.) It's simply difficult to integrate the two sides into account into a single study or a single theory.
The same division affects studies of politics. One can conduct a study of the content of political movements -- say, for example, the story of how the American populist movements of the late 19th century came to develop their particular understandings of money, industry, race and class relations, and democratic processes. But such a study would not tell us much about these movements' practical ability to organize, coordinate their efforts, mount political campaigns, and ensure that the politicians did what they said they would. In order to understand those things, we need to know about the communications technologies of that day and the prevailing practices for using them, the economics of that day's newspapers, interactions between urban and rural patterns of political organization, and so on.
In recent times, the Internet has motivated a revival of interest in this practical dimension of politics -- so to speak, the political economy of political culture. It is inherently difficult to analyze the place of technology in society, and one always needs "bridging concepts" that connect the workings of technology to the workings of society (see TNO 2(6)). The word "network" seems a promising place to start building such concepts because it refers nontrivially both to something technical -- digital communications networks -- and to something social -- patterns of human relationship. The danger, of course, is that a focus on networks will encourage a tendency toward formalism in the study of politics -- a focus on infrastructures, quantitative measures, economic factors, mechanistic metaphors, resources and their mobilization, information as a commodity, and so on -- and a neglect of the content of politics -- social ideas, historical memory, collective identity, information as a world of meaningful symbols, and so on.
With these important caveats in mind, here is a bibliography of useful research on politics and networks, plus a few items that drift into the territory of economic networks as well. I encourage everyone to read this stuff, and I encourage everyone to think about what it would be like to marry this sort of formal/structural analysis with an understanding of contents and meanings. I have cited some of these materials in TNO before.
Craig Calhoun, The infrastructure of modernity: Indirect social relationships, information technology, and social integration, in Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, eds, Social Change and Modernity, University of California Press, 1992.
Brenda Dervin, Information <-> democracy: An examination of underlying assumptions, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45(6), 1994, pages 369-385.
John A. Ferejohn and James H. Kuklinski, eds, Information and Democratic Processes, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Beyond Agenda Setting: Information Subsidies and Public Policy, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982.
Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg, eds, The Sociology of Economic Life, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992.
Bernard Grofman, ed, Information, Participation, and Choice: An Economic Theory of Democracy in Perspective, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Lawrence K. Grossman, The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age, New York: Viking, 1995.
David Knoke, Political Networks: The Structural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Robert Perrucci and Harry R. Potter, eds, Networks of Power: Organizational Actors at the National, Corporate, and Community Levels, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989.
Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, 1993.
Slavko Splichal and Janet Wasko, eds, Communication and Democracy, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993.
Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free- Market Right, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Frederick Williams and John V. Pavlik, eds, The People's Right to Know: Media, Democracy, and the Information Highway, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1994.
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Wish list.
I cannot tell you how many times I have stayed in an expensive hotel with all kinds of free pens and mints on the pillow, only to be kept awake by some ventilation unit that wheezes and rattles obnoxiously all night long below my window, or else (and this is my absolute favorite) a refrigerator in clear view of the bed, with its compressor turning on and (especially) off several times a night with loud shuddering and clonking. And HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) systems the world over are far too noisy, for example in the SSSSSHHHHHH'ing of air through ceiling vents and the WWWWWWWOOOOOOO'ing of air under and around doors. For example, the "faculty study carrels" in the UCSD Library are useless and largely abandoned for this reason.
Machines in general and compressors in particular, then, are too noisy. No doubt some of this noise is inherent in the way the things work. But much of it is random vibration that could have been prevented if the designers had used finite-element simulation methods to discover the principal vibrational modes of their designs and adjusted the designs accordingly. Such methods have been around for a while now, but the rapidly decreasing cost of processor power should make their use more or less mandatory.
Another approach to suppressing noise is through active noise cancellation, which works by "listening" to the sounds in the air, using bandpass filters or a Fourier transform to break them down by frequency, and then generating another sound that contains the very same power spectrum, only with all of the component frequencies shifted precisely out of phase relative to the input. (This is a lot easier than it sounds.) This "anti-sound" might sound pretty similar to the existing ambient noise if played in an otherwise silent room, but when added to that offending ambient noise the result (if you're lucky) is a nearly flat-zero power spectrum -- that is, silence. This technology too has been around for a while, but the availability of cheap processing power should enable it to find much wider application.
Perhaps a good approach to getting these technologies used is to establish some standards. Of course dozens of standards already exist for workplace noise and its measurement, but I have in mind standards specifically geared to the needs of (say) people who are staying in hotels. Once the standards have been established, a publication such as the Wall Street Journal whose readers include many frequent travelers could then start rating hotel chains and other relevant businesses in terms of their compliance with them, complete with excellent horror stories about the worst offenders. Got a television set chattering away a foot from your head, backed right up against the wall behind your bed, with no adequate noise cancellation? Call the manager, quote chapter and verse of the standards, and threaten to go to the press. It's an excellent wish.
My even more ambitious wish is for a market in quiet. Noise is one standard example of a negative externality in economics: an economic cost which is borne by someone not a party to the activity that caused it. That's why we have those obnoxious car alarms, for example, and why machine manufacturers had so little incentive to explore quiet technologies before workplace health and safety regulations began to address the subject in earnest. An externality is a failure of the market, and markets have many more externalities than you would think from the rhetoric of their promoters. One standard approach to fixing an externality is to internalize it, in this case by creating a market for quietness, so that it sometimes costs money to make noise.
How would this work? If you believe in neoclassical economics then you would start by creating a set of property rights for quiet. Someone who bought a house, say, would also be buying the rights to a certain amount of quiet under certain conditions. (Making noise to call for help in an emergency, for example, would probably be excluded by the law that defined the right. The sirens on car alarms would be not be excluded, though, since there are better ways to protect cars.) Anybody who wanted to disturb that quiet would have to pay for the right. This is obviously extremely difficult to arrange, since the transaction costs would be very high, both for defining the right to be bought and sold, detecting when money is owed, and for collecting it. But digital technology should start to bring it within reach. If I want a machine to emit a noise, for example, the machine can use digital wireless communications to poll all of the noise monitoring boxes within earshot of the prospective noise, using a simple protocol to negotiate a cost with them and then summing the costs up. Then I have to decide if it's worth it. People with stationary noise sources could then negotiate with their neighbors, perhaps buying noise-cancellation devices for them in exchange for lower quiet-disturbance costs. They would also be able to make economic decisions about, for example, whether to buy a power or manual lawn mower. Mobile noise-sources such as cars would be a lot harder, but from the perspective of neoclassical economics the only real problem is that the roads already exist and noise was not factored into the economic decision to build them.
The point of all this is not that it's necessarily feasible, but to explore the contours of a problem. Neoclassical economics has many things in common with computer science, and one of them is that you can while away the hours "designing" elaborate formal castles in the sky that are based on their generative ideas -- digital "mirrors" of concrete reality (an idea ultimately derived from philosophy) in the case of computing and the mathematics of equilibrium (an idea ultimately derived from physics) in the case of neoclassical economics. In each case, one must learn to talk a certain way, so that an unbounded range of affairs of human life can be fitted to the frames that make the formal methods in question work. Both computer people and economists, like many kinds of professionals, have the luxury of being semi-detached from the world: their work has real consequences for people's lives three or four steps down the line, but they can count on the people who implement those steps to cover up all the messy gaps between the theory and the reality, leaving the theorist to dream on in complacent wonder at how it all fits together.
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This month's recommendations.
Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds, Critical Terms for Literary Study, second edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. This is terrific book. It consists of perhaps three dozen essays of perhaps ten pages apiece, each focused on a single key word from literary criticism. If you've learned about literary criticism from the stereotypes you've read in the newspaper then I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the tremendous smartness on display here. I read the first edition almost ten years ago, and it really made me happy to think that there were such smart people in the world, able to write clear, interesting essays that bear a personal stamp while representing a diversity of opinion in a fair way. Each chapter includes an analysis of a particular text using the theoretical concept that the chapter has developed, and the result, for me, is that I have read everything differently forever afterward, from novels to newspapers to computer manuals. The new edition is greatly expanded and thus even more useful in the same way.
Brian Kahin and James Keller, eds, Public Access to the Internet, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. This book brings together most of the best writers on the issue of ensuring broad public access to the Internet, considering topics such as educational access, access for the poor and for minority populations, and Internet pricing and traffic measurement.
Cynthia Cockburn and Ruza Furst-Dilic, eds, Bringing Technology Home: Gender and Technology in a Changing Europe, Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1994. This is a fascinating collection of studies of technology in women's lives by a cross-European set of authors coming from different cultural and intellectual traditions. Most of the studies are in early stages, and so they are interesting more for the stories they tell than for finished theories. But the stories are marvelous, and draw out the complicated interactions among different aspects of the women's lives, for example the ways in which unequal divisions of housework have kept women from being active in union affairs, thus helping reproduce unions' inattention to women's workplace technology issues.
Kristine Bruland, Patterns of resistance to new technologies in Scandinavia: An historical perspective, in Martin Bauer, ed, Resistance to New Technology: Nuclear Power, Information Technology and Biotechnology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A useful article that breaks down some myths about people's "resistance" to new technologies. Looking at historical cases in the fishing, timber, and nuclear power industries in Norway and Sweden, she argues that, despite stereotypes of shop floor workers obstinately refusing to change with the times, "resistance" to technology is really a complex form of social choice with many players and many legitimate considerations beyond those of local technical expediency.
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Follow-up.
In response to my hypothesis about the Christian Coalition's strategy on the Communications Decency Act in TNO 3(1), some people recited what I regard as the conventional wisdom: that the CDA and similar measures are the products of People Who Are Clueless About The Internet. A whole system of stereotypes has arisen about these PWACATI's, starting with The Politician Who Has Never Logged On, and these stereotypes provide a cheap explanation for all things. I'm sorry, though, this whole line of argument doesn't wash with me. Some people, of course, really are clueless about the net. But the people who do the major policy work at the Christian Coalition are not rubes who wandered in from the sticks last week. We are talking about sophisticated political professionals who have college degrees and Web pages and high-powered lawyers just like the Internet community's libertarian establishment does. Their statutory language is not an amateur job but a sophisticated attempt to draw out a broad analogy between the Internet and broadcast media while forestalling some of the less fundamental challenges. Given the reasoning in the broadcast precedents, the likely successful appeals will probably have to be based in large part on the availability of Internet filtering methods less drastic than out-and-out content restrictions; this argument, while true, will not be trivial to make. Despite my boundless respect for the Christian Coalition's skills, of course, I regard most of their concrete policy remedies as faulty, short-sighted, and overly broad. And I also regard them as heavy-duty peddlers of vicious stereotypes in their own right. But blowing them off as ignorant fools is a bad idea, not least because they are the major political organization that is articulating the legitimate concerns that many ordinary people have about emerging media technologies. There really do exist aggressive pedophiles and out-of-control addicts to sick, objectifying pornography. Policy responses to these losers' activities must take into account a wide range of technical, moral, and legal issues. The answer, as we all know, does not lie in the creation of broad, simplistic third-party liabilities. But that doesn't mean that the concerns are not legitimate or that nothing should be done. It's quite possible that the window of opportunity for genuine dialogue on this issue has passed, but that's no reason to fill the vacuum with comfortable generalizations and stereotypes.
I've been struck, incidentally, by the number of libertarian conservative polemics that present the CDA as part of a liberal reign of terror; some that have arrived in my mailbox have carried on against Bill Clinton using language like war, Nazis, and Auschwitz. What's odd about this, of course, is that the major political force behind the CDA was not Bill Clinton but the Christian Coalition. (See TNO 2(6).) It's remarkable that these two branches of the conservative movement can pursue opposite policy agendas, each pretending that their main opponent is the liberals rather than one another, without much attention being drawn to the incongruity. Actually, it's not remarkable; it's just more evidence of the complete and utter oblivion into which the liberal coalition and its pundits have sunk. It is as though the entire social structure and political spectrum of the United States has been mapped into different segments of the conservative movement. Sometimes, of course, the movement goes to the trouble of ostracizing elements that do not fit with the dominant coalition's strategy, as in the case of Pat Buchanan's social views (which are far to the right of this strategy) and, well, Pat Buchanan's economic views (which are far to the left of it). Meanwhile, the various elements of the right are unified in their very successful campaign of pulverizing the traditional liberal coalition by systematically articulating issues that set one element of it against another, recruiting the electorally larger elements (the white working class) while stereotyping the smaller (upper middle class professional "elites"). Any effective response to censorship measures such as the CDA must begin with a map of these shifting coalitions and an analysis of the conditions that might permit newer coalitions to emerge on the basis of reinvigorated democratic values. One unmistakable sign of the decline of these values is the rapidly proliferating belief that democracy simply means majority rule. This view of democracy is upheld by cultural and libertarian conservatives alike, but for opposite reasons: the cultural conservatives favor majoritarian democracy as a justification for their agenda of expanded social regulation, while libertarian conservatives emphasize its evils in support of their agenda of curtailed economic regulation. The true spirit of democracy, of course, is considerably broader than that. It starts with social trust, respect for diversity, cultural skills of organizing and debate, broad access to education, and strong respect for the civil liberties of individuals and groups. These conditions are never perfectly met, any more than other sets of values, but they are certainly an improvement upon the overt advocacy of intolerance and the futuristic embrace of a world spinning out of control.
Following up on my bibliography on the economics of standards in TNO 3(1), here are some more references, the first two of which are available on WWW:
Francois Bar, Michael Borrus, and Richard Steinberg, Islands in the Bit-Stream: Charting the NII Interoperability Debate, at http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~fbar/inter.html I highly recommend this paper as a guide to the issues as they are currently understood, but I think that its analysis needs to be generalized considerably. Briefly, they need to generalize from "operating systems" to "platforms", to apply their analysis recursively on every layer of the emerging NII, to take into account the common trade-off between the potential for innovation on a given layer of a network and the potential for innovation on the layer above it, to move from an economic criterion of NII policy success (level of investment in NII) to a political criterion (broad access to the means of association), and to broaden attention from state regulation (which, as they argue, cannot accomplish much in isolation on these issues) to debate in the public sphere (e.g., in the emergence of the discourse of "openness" as a material force in influencing the trajectory of path-dependent technology markets).
N. Economides, Bibliography on network economics, at http://edgar.stern.nyu.edu/networks/biblio.html
Henry Chesbrough and David Teece, When is virtual virtuous?: Organizing for innovation, Harvard Business Review 74(1), 1996, pages 65-73. An article about the necessity of a single unified firm when innovation requires the imposition of new standards. Read as an exercise in microeconomics, this paper is an example of the profound consequences of the non-neoclassical economic phenomena surrounding standards, in this case for the boundaries of the firm -- a matter that has been most commonly analyzed, since Coase and Williamson, in terms of transaction costs and without regard for the demands of innovation in changing markets.
Web picks.
How often do you hear a Web site being praised with any adjective besides "hip" or "cool"? We're supposed to be serious people here, not adolescent wannabes; why are we constantly using these words? "Hip", of course, is the choice of marketers suggesting that they know how to translate the Ford Taurus into Web pages that speak to an audience raised on MTV and David Letterman. "Cool", meanwhile, is the encomium of choice for the whole subculture of people who are trying to get rich the same way Bill Gates did ("software is cool", "profit is cool", ergo "cool site of the day"). Truth be told, I'd like to be cool and hip as much as the next person. But do those two words exhaust the full scope of your values? Mine either. So let's practice some other words of praise for Web sites, like "useful", "well written", "carefully thought out", "intelligent", "beautiful", and "doesn't require the latest release of Netscape". We'll need some more terms of praise now, since my sense is that the Web has crossed some kind of line over the last few months. I'm tenaciously resistant to technological hype of all kinds, but I have to say that I'm starting to be genuinely impressed with the reality of the Web, as opposed to just its promise.
While I'm at it, curses on web pages with shaded backgrounds! They are unreadable on black-and-white screens. People who build web pages should comply with standards and use both the hardware and software that the median user has available, not the high-end latest stuff and non-W3C-compliant version of Netscape. That way they can have a clue what their pages look like to others. It's scary how many different hardware and software configurations you have to check out to make sure your web pages look okay. Italics, for example, are nearly unreadable on the Macintosh...
The Information and Privacy Commissioner for Ontario has a batch of useful materials, and instructions for fetching his office's reports (e.g., on privacy in intelligent transportation systems) on the Web at http://www.ipc.on.ca/
Hans Pufal
There's a good source of pointers to humanities information at http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/
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