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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 6 JUNE 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: Ralph Reed's new book Running a filter list on the Internet Software for professional networks
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Welcome to TNO 3(6).
This issue begins with a review of Ralph Reed's new book, "Active Faith". Sorting through all of the debate about the Christian Coalition, my conclusion as always is that they are doing good basic social organizing and that everyone should study and learn from them. I have mentioned the Christian Coalition frequently in TNO because they provide so many lessons in the practical mechanics of politics. These mechanics include technology, but the technology only makes a difference if it's an integral part of a coherent strategy and organizational form.
I've also summarized the lessons I have learned in three years of running the Red Rock Eater News Service, the mailing list to which I send whatever I find interesting. The general category that includes RRE is called, I gather, a "filter list". Filter lists are a low-cost, low-effort way to get useful information out to large numbers of people -- large, anyway, by Internet standards. RRE's membership, for example, is approaching 4,000 (perhaps 75% of them in the United States). On the other hand, these excellent people only amount to one Internet user in 10,000, one English-speaking human being in 200,000, or a few percent of the circulation of an American political magazine.
This month's wish list sketches a family of programs and data conventions for building and maintaining professional networks. I have no idea if such a scheme would actually work. The interest of the exercise lies in the patterns of congruence and tension between the workings of the technology and the workings of the social system -- in this case, the social system of the research world.
A footnote. Let us once again praise "Dilbert". When I came across a book of Dilbert comics that had been translated into Norwegian (subtitle: "Nerdenes Konge"), I decided that I had to understand the deeper significance of, as the French would say, the Dilbert Phenomenon. Fortunately for me, this imperative coincided with the publicity for Scott Adams' hardcover Dilbert book. I conducted my research by scrutinizing the relevant primary sources while sitting on the floor in the humor section of the bookstore waiting for a friend. I realized something that Adams himself had more or less said in interviews, that his early strips were unfocused and often unfunny, and that he only hit its stride once he decided to focus on workplaces and base his comics in large part on reports he gets on the Internet from his readers. This is clearly as an important discovery. Everybody knows that employees in large companies want to do a good job, and indeed that their human dignity is tied up with the integrity of their work, but that they often can't do good work because of the four layers of managers above them, all of whom pursue their individual career strategies and speak their endlessly changing languages without much knowledge of the reality of the work. But we've always known all of this in an abstract, piecemeal fashion. By channeling these folks' war stories in syndicated cartoon form, Adams has turned himself into a regular voice of the people. Yeah, okay, so it's totally goofy to discuss Dilbert in academic terms; I won't carry on analyzing Scott Adams as an organic intellectual, lest I become the inspiration for a cartoon myself. But I do think we should figure out how to generalize the model that he represents. Note that Dilbert's success is not just about the Internet -- it's about a synergy between two media, the Internet and the newspaper -- and that it is not just about the voices of the employees or the voice of Scott Adams -- it's about the closed loop between the two voices, with each playing its own distinct role in shaping the other. Tell you what: let's declare a three-month moratorium on discussions that treat this thing, "the Internet", as the monolithic prime mover of history. Instead, let's get practice naming the synergies and tensions between the Internet and other media, and let's remind ourselves that media have value for a civilized society when, and only when, they provide the means for new voices to emerge and to say things that matter.
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Assessing the Christian Coalition.
Given my boundless respect for the political skills of Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed, I snapped up his new book, "Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics" (Free Press, 1996), the moment it came out. It is a fascinating and sophisticated text that repays close reading. The first thing that struck me is that it provides a powerful argument for the religious left. That's very much the way the book is constructed: it portrays religiously motivated political action as the norm rather than the exception over the last hundred years of American life, with special attention to the temperance movement, the civil rights movement, and a series of social justice movements based in the working class. Reed places some emphasis on the scope and sophistication of the temperance movement, articulating lessons for his own movement from the tactical reasons for its successes and ultimate demise. But he is not eager to identify the Christian Coalition with the temperance movement, whose agenda he regards as discredited. Nor, much less, does he wish to identify with the historical religious right, which he treats, with persuasive eloquence, as a swamp of racism. He offers little historical detail on racist uses of religion, though, and among other Christian conservative political movements he gives passing mention only to a 1950's anti-communist group.
Having dissociated himself from the history of conservative political uses of religion, then, Reed invests considerable effort in portraying the Christian Coalition as the inheritor of the American religious left. He starts by going out of his way to emphasize the continuity of religious motivations on the left through the 1970's. This requires him to argue, not at all convincingly, that Franklin Roosevelt was inspired by Christian faith to promulgate the New Deal. It also requires him to assert that the religious left basically disappeared in the 1970's, and that the liberal movement became essentially secular at that time as opposed to a badly managed coalition of tendencies. He makes no mention of the religious left's role in the 1980s' peace movement, or of its role in supporting resistance to the savage oligarchies in Central America that some Reagan-era conservative Christian organizations heavily supported.
His idea in editing history in this way is that Pat Robertson's 1988 presidential campaign and the Christian Coalition have picked up the baton of religious work in politics that the left had dropped. He explicitly argues that the old religious left and the new religious right (a phrase that Reed curiously excoriates as an expression of bigotry without explaining why) are equally concerned with social justice; he uses the leftist phrase "social justice" repeatedly, although he does not provide any detailed accounting of what exactly the left and right have meant by this phrase -- not to mention the Catholic Church, whose members the Christian Coalition has begun recruiting through a newly formed organization called the Catholic Alliance. He does an interesting and very complicated dance with the legacy of the civil rights movement, often drawing parallels between it and modern-day conservative evangelicals and then quickly backing off from any suggestion that this white social movement's experiences and grievances can be compared with the racist oppression that motivated the likes of Martin Luther King.
(Although Reed is particularly cautious about it, this effort to dress conservative evangelical issue campaigns, specifically the anti-abortion movement, in the clothing of the civil rights movement is not at all unique to him. Listen to a song called "Breakdown" by the Christian musician Michael W. Smith, from his new album "I'll Lead You Home", in which a speech by Martin Luther King about the repression of civil rights marchers is interleaved with electric guitars and a social-decay message. Smith isn't in the same league as Steven Curtis Chapman, who I recommended in TNO 3(3), but he exemplifies an important principle that the classic labor movement and the American Communists at their height knew well, but that the modern left is forgetting: a successful social movement must provide symbolic forms into which people can pour a wide range of feelings and experiences, not just alienation.) Reed's book is a monument to modern publishing technology. It discusses events that occurred as recently as March and April, covering the South Carolina primary and the wave of fires at black churches. Some glitches testify to the speed with which it was sent to press -- superscripts are missing for the first several endnotes, the name of the Promise Keepers organization is repeatedly mangled, and the text includes at least one garbled sentence -- but it is definitely a quality production, very well thought out as an intervention in the political summer before the 1996 elections. Just about every criticism ever made against the Christian Coalition is addressed, and it is here that the book's most disturbing feature lies. Although he quotes every last hard word ("hate", "stealth", etc), Reed virtually never recounts the concrete evidence upon which these charges have been based. He does allude to the occasional passage from a fund-raising letter than gets endlessly recycled in the fund-raising letters from the other side, but we do not learn which passages he has in mind or whether he still stands by them.
(This is a standard public relations tactic: reduce the issue to a vague formula and adduce three facts that seem to spin things in a different direction while distracting attention from valid criticisms by picking invalid criticisms to stand for the whole bunch. As such, it is further evidence that American politics, as a professionalized practice, has been completely absorbed by PR. Reed is himself very much a professional, completely under control; the contrast with Pat Robertson could not be greater.)
Lacking evidence, then, the charges against his organization and movement start to seem mysterious, and he proposes to resolve the mystery by repeatedly suggesting that the real motivation behind the charges is antireligious bigotry. It is certainly true that some stereotypes of Christian conservatives have been motivated by antireligious bigotry, and that certain charges against the Christian Coalition have been unfair, for example some people's lazy habit of equating them with the Klan. Reed's professed antiracism may be good politics, but I have seen no evidence that it is a lie. At the same time, it's grating to hear Reed complain that religious conservatives have been "demonized" when Pat Robertson routinely uses his television program to insinuate that his opponents are literally agents of Satan. And I found it really remarkable that Reed could go on so indignantly about charges of stealth political tactics against his organization without discussing the evidence that has been brought forward to support them. This evidence, as is well known, includes his own famous description of himself as a guerilla operating at night, the explicit description of the stealth strategy at Christian Coalition meetings several years ago, the testimony of people in communities where the strategy has allegedly been practiced, and academic analysis documenting severe distortion of opposing politicians' records in Christian Coalition voters' guides -- which, by the terms of the Coalition's tax status, are supposed to be nonpartisan. He does mention in a different context that war metaphors have proven inexpedient, but he does not recant the substance of what he has used those metaphors to say.
Having said this, it should also be said that some portion of the "stealth" problem is the fault of liberals who remain almost completely unaware of the whole parallel universe in which Steven Curtis Chapman and Michael W. Smith are big stars and in which Ralph Reed is a pragmatic moderate. If you want to know what the religious right is up to, my friends, you can go right ahead and attend a conservative evangelical church. And this, I think, is by far the most important point to be made about Reed's book: even after all of the rhetorical tricks and tactical dodges have been laid out and weighed up, the bottom line, as Sara Diamond constantly and correctly emphasizes, is that the social movement that Reed represents is winning fair and square. The reason for this is very simple, and it can be found in the quotation from Reed that is found at the top of every issue of TNO: the Christian Coalition invests a large proportion of its resources organizing its institutions, training its people, and building its movement. They use technology, they build infrastructure, they learn from their mistakes, they repress self-indulgence, they keep refashioning their rhetoric and agenda to present their opponents a smaller target, they extend their coalition, they minimize the ad hominem, they reach out to make personal contact with the people they want on their side, and they pick fights they can win. And they do all of this on their own resources.
Given my interest in such matters, I was disappointed at first that Reed's book did not present more detail on the mechanics of the Christian Coalition's organization. But of course he had no reason to write about this: his people know all about it already. He writes largely from his own perspective as the head of the organization, and it is certainly instructive to hear his political analyses of various situations and to read his accounts of particular conversations, for example the meeting at which (he claims) he got the House to put the Communications Decency Act up for a vote despite having to rush off across town in a waiting car to appear on the Coalition's television program in five minutes. Although nobody in human history has ever had the political acumen that Reed presents himself as having, I don't fault him for making things seem easier than they could possibly have been. My point is that opponents of the Christian Coalition who might read this book looking for hints and clues in reconstructing a darker backroom story are largely misguided. If you're looking for shadows, you can certainly find them:
Reed protects his organization's tax status by glossing over the moments where the Coalition explicitly sets out to support a specific candidate in an election.
Several passages make more sense once you're aware of the internal factional politics of the anti-abortion movement.
The reader gets little realistic sense of the coordination and negotiation that goes on among different organizations and factions in the conservative coalition.
Reed offers no answers to the atheist group who observed that the Christian Coalition's claimed membership is several times larger than the officially stated circulation of its membership magazine.
In response to charges that the Christian Coalition implies that people who disagree with its political positions are not good Christians, he replies with the non sequitur that the Coalition regards its positions as justified on non-religious grounds as well.
The title "Active Faith" suggests that something is passive or otherwise deficient about religious faith that is not expressed through political action.
He stretches reason to argue that Paul's instruction in Romans to render "taxes to whom is due taxes, honor to whom is due honor, respect to whom is due respect" constitutes a "biblical injunction" to "register to vote, become informed on the issues, and go to the polls".
Anybody who has actually read Pat Robertson's "New World Order" will laugh at the bland account of it in Reed's book.
Finally, he finds himself in the unenviable position, given the wide backing that Pat Buchanan received among the anti-abortion rank-and-file despite Reed's pragmatic preference to align with Bob Dole, of having to defend Buchanan against charges of anti-Semitism and pass over in silence Buchanan's abundantly documented racism.
These are, of course, all matters that people should know about. But in my opinion the essential truth about Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition is out in the open for anyone to see. Reed is grasping a historical moment to do something that's just about as straightforward as it could be: organizing, building, and training a social movement and political coalition based on a coherent, consciously elaborated ideology that speaks to genuine concerns and grievances that a large portion of the electorate share and that other contemporary movements are not adequately addressing. So long as Reed's opponents remain in denial about these facts, preferring to fight the shadows of their enemies from olden days, they will continue to lose.
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Starting a filter list.
For the past three years, I have been running a mailing list to which I send whatever I find interesting. Called The Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE), it currently has about 4000 subscribers in 60 countries. It requires little work, and sometimes it does some good. Such lists, I gather, are called filter lists. Sometimes people ask me how to start such a list. I am afraid I have little technical advice to offer, since Mike Corrigan wrote all the code. (It's all homebrew, so I doubt if it would port anywhere else.) But I can report some hard-earned lessons from three years of running my own list. I've formulated them as general rules, but obviously you should take what you need and leave the rest, following your own evolving sense of things.
* Send a steady trickle of good stuff. Two issues are foremost in potential subscribers' minds, based on bad experiences they've had with other mailing lists clogging up their mailboxes. First they want a high signal/noise ratio, so you must promise to send only good stuff to the list. Second they want a limited number of messages, so you must promise not to send too many -- ten messages per week seems to be the limit. These two points are absolutely crucial, and they are the main points to emphasize in describing the list.
* Define the scope of the list both in terms of a particular subject matter (e.g., "social and political aspects of networking and computing") and in terms of your own subjective interests (e.g., "whatever I find interesting in my guts"). That way you can wander from your official topic occasionally. You will also have an excuse when someone wants something forwarded to your list that doesn't feel right to you. The subscribers are subscribing to you, not to an abstraction, and they will stay on the list if they happen to share your interests.
* Take time to build an audience. Don't expect that you can blast out an e-mail announcement to the net and get an instant humongous subscriber list. It will take time, and you shouldn't start unless you're willing to sustain the effort. Social networks are not very interconnected, even on the Internet, and you can easily have high visibility in one community and zero visibility in another.
* Never add anyone to a mailing list without their permission. If you think someone would like your list, write them a personal note inviting them to join. But don't push it; don't become possessed by a desire to get this, that, or the other person on your list. It will grow naturally if you let it take time.
* Take some initiative to find good stuff to send. Once my list had about 2000 subscribers and two years of happy operation behind it, I could rely on the subscribers for my primary source of good stuff to send to the list. That probably won't work for a new list, though. One approach is to subscribe to mailing lists X, Y, and Z, and send your subscribers the good stuff from those lists. Assuming that your subscribers share your sense about what's good, maybe you can save them the trouble of subscribing to those lists themselves. Decide whether you want to promise to filter those particular lists for all eternity or whether you want to leave it less defined. You can also, if you have time for it, seek out worthwhile stuff by actively prowling the net, or by noticing announcements of conferences etc in print media and writing away for the electronic versions. This will seem like a lot of work at first, but it gets easier as you build an audience who can help you find good things to distribute.
* Make sure you can turn off mailer errors. This requires that your messages include the appropriate field to direct error messages to an address which is not your personal mailbox. Perhaps that address is an alias that directs the messages into a file in your directory. You will get an amazing number of mailer errors, absolutely no matter what you do. Believe me: you will drive yourself insane if you try to reduce your incoming flow of mailer errors to zero. Many of these error messages, moreover, will be badly formed, mailed to the wrong place, or otherwise useless. If you can shunt them into a file then you can look at them at your leisure. Even better, arrange it so that the messages can also be directed into the bit bucket (on Unix this is called /dev/null) for a few months. It's a good responsible practice to weed bad e-mail addresses off your list occasionally, but not every day. Every few months is plenty.
* Do not ever give out your mailing list to others. This is probably obvious, but I'll say it anyway. If you are using Listserv, turn off the feature that lets anyone retrieve the mailing list by sending a command to the server. On the other hand, you cannot make a blanket promise to protect the list. Your system administrator probably needs to see it occasionally, and someone might hack into your system and steal it. Just promise to do your best.
* Do not send mail to individual subscribers unless you really have to. People generally want to feel a degree of anonymity when they subscribe to a mailing list, so you may invite bad interactions if you send a subscriber a personal note saying, "oh, hey, good to have you on the list" or whatever.
* Try to get software that requires new subscribers to send a second message confirming their intent to subscribe to the list. This solves two remarkably common problems: forged subscriptions intended to flood a victim's mailbox with unwanted mail and badly formed subscription messages that create nonfunctioning entries on the mailing list.
* Be careful about copyrights. If you send copyrighted material to your list without permission, and you're located in a country that enforces the laws, then you can get in trouble. Maybe not that much trouble, yet. Still, you should assume that everything is copyrighted unless there's a good reason to believe that it is not. Articles from newswires are always copyrighted. Treat messages that people have sent to other mailing lists as copyrighted, and get permission before you forward them. (I just send the author a quick note enclosing their message and asking "May I forward this to my mailing list? For details on the list, see ..." followed by the URL for the Web page that describes the list. Then I say "forwarded with permission" at the top of the message when I sent it out.) The lack of a copyright notice absolutely does not imply that the material is not covered by copyright. A message that feels like a professionally written magazine article, for example, probably is; it may have been typed or scanned in, violating copyright, by someone besides its author. Some genres, such as conference announcements, are obviously intended for wide distribution. But that's a kind of implied license, not a lack of copyright.
* Be careful about political action alerts. If you send out a badly designed or misinformed political action alert then you can cause an awful lot of havoc. Consider refusing to send out any action alert that does not conform to a set of guidelines that I laid out in the very first issue of TNO. One particularly subtle guideline is that every action alert should have a stop date (e.g., "take this action until 15 October 1996 and then stop").
* Decide whether you endorse the material you send out. Unless you clearly specify otherwise, people will assume that you intend to endorse every word of every message you send to your list -- even messages that are obviously silly. Consider including a disclaimer in the boilerplate message that new subscribers receive.
* Tell people how to unsubscribe. Many people will not save your explanation of how to unsubscribe from the list. So you need to provide them with several obvious ways to find out. No matter what you do, a trickle of people will send you little messages saying "please unsubscribe me". If you've given them a real chance to find out how to unsubscribe, then you can ignore these messages in good conscience. Alternatively, you can set up a keyboard macro or some other quick means of replying to such a message with an explanation of how to unsubscribe.
* Don't let yourself be baited. You will probably get messages from people who wish to recruit you into mind-games of various sorts, particularly if you send out messages with political content. Refuse. If you are an angel then you can send out polite responses to everybody. Otherwise you might have to delete these messages. I found that I suddenly got many fewer baiting messages after I wrote a long article about baiting in TNO 2(11), though I cannot be sure that it was the article that did it, and not a coincidental increase in Internet civility.
* Have an agenda. In sending a stream of messages to a filter list, you effectively speak in a distinctive voice. Even if you don't add many annotations of your own, your choice of materials to send out makes a statement. While I do recommend being guided by your gut feelings when choosing what to send to your list, I also recommend having an intellectual life that gives your guts something to work with. For example, after the appeals court in Philadelphia struck down the Communications Decency Act, I sent my mailing list the press release from a prime supporter of the CDA, the Family Research Council. Why? In part because it seemed too obvious to send out the court's decision, which was already flooding the net by other means. But more importantly, because I am trying to get the Internet enthusiast community to listen to the language and arguments of their opponents -- who, court decisions notwithstanding, are vastly better organized in plain political terms. I didn't say this when I sent out the press release (though it's a theme I've harped upon in TNO), but it's what I had in mind. I cannot guarantee that everyone will understand my reasons for sending out particular items, but I do think that everyone gets a sense of my voice and judgement and agenda if they care to remain on my list over the longer haul. By continually trying to articulate to myself what I'm trying to accomplish, I help the list maintain focus and express a coherent personality. And by rationing my own commentary as much as I can, I let people draw their own conclusions.
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Wish list.
The world of research, like all social worlds, has elaborate but largely tacit rules. Many of these rules concern the workings of professional relationships and networks. The social networks of research worlds are tremendously important. Sociologists commonly refer to them as "invisible colleges" (see Diana Crane's book by that title), since they are rarely written down and only become visible to outsiders through bibliometric research and the like. They are not at all invisible to their participants, though, who treat them as real and deadly serious. In "Networking on the Network", I tried to help out graduate students by writing down, as best I could, some the rules that govern them. But it also seems to me that networked software could support the development and maintenance of professional relationships.
Here's how it might work. Let us imagine that every researcher in the world has their own unique "web object". This is a common enough idea, though it's not yet in the newspaper. A web object resembles a home page, except that it has much more standardized structure. And it resembles an entry in a distributed object database, except that it has various visible manifestations, one of which might look like a home page. A researcher's web object would include contact information, interesting web links, and other such home-page stuff. It would also be hooked into a digital library, providing ready access to citations (and, in many cases, full text) of that author's publications. Some people might put a lot of work into maintaining their web objects, whereas others might ignore them once they have been created, except for major transitions like job changes. Some organizations might simply pay someone to create a web object for each member of their research staff. It's crucial that everybody have an interest in creating a basic web object, even if they don't plan to think about it again.
The web object would serve much the same purpose as a home page and online vita. But it would also provide the starting point for much more elaborate functions, and these functions would provide a motivation for individual researchers would be motivated to construct a web object for themselves. These functions start with a program called a professional relationship manager (PRM). The PRM would resemble, in broad outline, the contact management software that sales people use -- although it would probably not be wise to point out the resemblance. My PRM would include an entry for each researcher with whom I have any kind of relationship. These relationships might run the full spectrum, from someone whose book I glanced at once to someone with whom I have collaborated extensively. Each entry would include a pointer to that person's web object, further personal information such as home phone number and spouse's name, full text of my correspondence and notes on other contacts with the person, bookmarks and annotations on their writings, and so on. It needn't be elaborate, and most of the entries might even be rudimentary.
As such, the PRM simply consolidates several existing functions, and one might worry that maintaining it will become a compulsive substitute for doing real work. The real point of the system, though, is the basis it provides for various novel (or newly practical) functions. It would be most excellent, for example, for each field to pool its members' online citations to provide a ready source for authors who need a citation quickly without going to the library. It would also be terrific if each graduate student, as a requirement of advancement to candidacy, had to write a critical survey of research in a field -- not just as a text but as a hypertext with connections to all of the relevant web objects.
Or imagine a PRM specifically to support the editor of a journal. It could keep track of all past and present submitted articles, help in selecting potential referees, and generally track the workflow on the whole editorial process. This information would also be selectively available, courtesy of familiar security mechanisms, to various classes of people: guest editors, members of the editorial board, the publisher, authors who have papers under consideration, librarians, subscribers to the journal, and so on.
Other PRM's might be built to support the staff of a professional society, a publisher, a department chair, a research grant administrator, a program manager for a funding agency, a library bibliographer, a sociologist studying a particular field, a public relations person for a university who brokers contacts between journalists and researchers, or the occupants of any other identifiable institutional role that relates to the research world. Each specialized PRM could be organized with hierarchically nested domains, so that each individual has their own personal information and each group (e.g., members of a research team, publishing house, etc) could have information that is "inherited" by each member of the group. This sort of structure is what object-oriented databases are all about.
Another potential function of a PRM is automatic notification. The University of California library catalog, for example, is willing to automatically notify me whenever a new publication appears that satisfies a given predicate (e.g., it was written by my department chair). This feature, though well-intentioned, is completely useless. I have to type a separate command for each author and each database I want to search in, and then I have to update it by hand every six months. With a PRM, though, I could say something more interesting like "please inform me weekly of new publications in any format by anybody whose work I have cited in my own publications, and daily of new publications by everyone in my PRM who resides at my own university".
As individuals' web objects become integrated with other sources of information, other notification functions become possible. Publishers, for example, would have an incentive to produce their announcements of new and forthcoming books in a database that links to the authors' web objects, so that people who care about those authors can be notified about the books before they appear. Likewise, the universal event calendar that I wished for in TNO 3(4)could refer to the web object for whoever is speaking in a given event, and people with relationships to that person in that geographic area could be notified automatically of upcoming speaking engagements.
Other functions could start from citation information, to the extent that this information is available online. The world is full of potentially useful techniques for bibliometric analysis of research communities, for example, and programs that implement those techniques could be running full-time. Likewise, to the extent that full text is available online, existing systems for automatic conceptual mapping could be used to notify me of publications that might relevant to my research. Experience with such systems suggests that it is crucial to provide me with extensive control over how I get this information, and when I get it, and how much of it I get.
Certain automatic functions could use individuals' private PRM information in a way that does not violate their privacy. It would be nice to told, for example, about individuals who are very close to me in the professional network, but who are not yet in my database. Researchers could also use the private information in an anonymized fashion, much as epidemiologists use medical records to perform statistical analyses without having to identify the individuals whom the records are about.
Once these automatic functions are in place, individuals would have easy ways to maintain up-to-date home pages. I gather that literally hundreds of firms are building software to generate web pages from underlying databases, and this would be a good application. We're really just talking about a new-age report generator, after all. People could build templates that generate a decent-looking home page from the database entries that mention them (for example: display my name and contact information in these fonts with this indentation, then use our professional society's citation format to display all of my publications for the last two years that are listed in these databases, then a bullet for each of the classes I am teaching this term with pointers to syllabi, followed by this hand-written HTML code for my favorite links and other random stuff). Then other people could grab those existing templates, perhaps modifying them slightly, as a basis for their own automatically generated home page. The important point is that home pages would now be largely virtual constructions that are built on the fly, either daily or whenever someone fetched them, and not just a batch of uninterpreted HTML code.
Automatic systems are fun to talk about, and they might even be useful, but they should not distract attention from the lived work of building social relationships. I would propose that the real test of a PRM comes when I attend a conference. The point of attending conferences is to talk to people, talking to people takes preparation, and a PRM is useful if it supports that preparation. A designer would want to ask: what do people talk about at conferences, and what information would it be useful for them to review beforehand? It would be nice to know who is planning to attend a given conference, for starters: this information is generally available through attendee lists, so it would be reasonable to make it available in an object database ahead of time. Before talking to someone, I want to know what they have published lately -- especially books. I also want to review our correspondence quickly, to help ensure that I connect a person's disembodied e-mail persona with their face. If I am organizing a book or conference in which that person is involved, or might be involved, then I want to have the materials relevant to that project organized in a handy form. If I will have a computer handy at the conference then I can just prepare a file that makes all of this material mouse-click handy. Or else I can print out relevant stuff and have it bound to take on the plane.
The point of a PRM, then, would not be to automate research but to support the often laborious and haphazard process of creating and maintaining relationships in a research community. What would happen in practice? Not all of the results might be happy. University administrators these days are talking among themselves about how to rationalize the administration of universities and research laboratories, and standardized online systems could play a role in personnel evaluations. How often have you been cited? How many other researchers have you listed in their databases? How many people have read your online publications? How many articles have you refereed for journals? The PRM database might also be used to select suitable authors of evaluation letters at promotion time. As soon as the database is used in this fashion, of course, everybody will start skewing their online personae in whatever direction the administrators want to see. It is already common in many fields -- computer science is an extreme case -- for researchers to publish their results in many small increments to pump up their publication count. And mutual citation mafias are common as well. A world of networked object databases could accelerate these effects and create new ones.
The effects on individuals' careers could be even greater. It is already routine for departments and research units to track the careers of potential future "hires", for example the students who are finishing their degrees in other programs. It is commonly forgotten that much of the point of affirmative action, despite all of the hype about quotas and standards, was to formalize and generalize this process, so that hiring was based less on informal networks, and so that institutions had incentives to extend their informal networks to include potential sources of hires from traditionally underrepresented groups. The use of PRM's could make job candidates "visible" to the job market in a strategic way, starting well before the formal hiring season begins. A PhD advisor could use the web-object network to help each PhD candidate build a professional network in preparation for the job hunt, and departments and research units expecting to hire in the future could engage in advance intelligence about various candidates. The whole hiring process could thus shift more toward active recruitment. Job candidates, likewise, could prepare much better for their interviews than they can now, since they would have ready access to publications and other relevant information about the members of the departments where they are applying and interviewing. And all of the same arguments apply to graduate school recruitment and admissions as well.
It is worth noting the engine that makes all of these gears turn: multiple relational databases that are interlinked and thus searchable as if they formed a single database through the use of a common object that represents the same person for many different purposes. That's how we're accustomed to thinking about information on computers. It's a good thing, if a bit rigid sometimes, when it supports generally good applications like the ones I am describing here. Applications tend to be good when the data is under the control of its owners, or under the collective control of the community that it's about. But the same interlinking of databases can also be at the root of serious privacy problems when data about individuals is collected and used involuntarily, or without notification and rights of correction and control of secondary uses.
These are familiar arguments, but distributed object databases may give them a new urgency. Suppose that the world's major maintainers of personal information got together to create a system whereby every human being has precisely one object that represents them. This object might be created at birth, if not before, and it would exist forever. Any organization in the world could proceed to link its database to the shared object, provided that it supported the standard data object protocol. Security systems would, of course, regulate which organizations could conduct searches in other organizations' databases. But each organization would have a great interest in licensing other organizations access to its databases. Each organization would thus effectively have available a gigantic distributed object database, a sort of virtual database that effectively merges all of the individual databases to which it has access. Then it could conduct giant relational queries that would give new meaning to the phrase "data mining". It is a worrisome scenario. It is probably also too simple, but it is a good way to summarize the problem. Perhaps the move toward a standardized object for everyone will start with relatively good applications, since those will cause less protest. But once established, the system could creep with little effort toward relatively bad applications.
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This month's recommendations.
Andrew Feenberg, Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. This book brings together several studies by the foremost scholar of the critical philosophy of technology. Among the book's many strengths are its lucid exposition of difficult philosophical ideas and its combination, rare among philosophers, of scholarship and empirical research. The book is organized in paired chapters, scholarship matched with case studies. A study of Marcuse's critique of technology is applied to science fiction movies. His chapter on the concept of technocracy in Adorno, Foucault, and Habermas will save many people some painful late nights of reading these obscure characters in the original, as well as providing the background for a study of the ethics of AIDS experimentation. A study of the postmodernist philosopher Lyotard is applied to a case study of the Minitel system in France. And a theoretical discussion the work of Kitaro Nishida, which suggests that theories of modernity have not been the sole province of European political philosophy, then provides the background for a study of the game of Go in Japanese culture.
Martha Lampland, The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. This is a historical and ethnographic study of life in a collectivized village in Hungary under Communist rule in the 1980's. Its question is, what are capitalism and communism, not as abstract ideal types but as forms of activity and meaning that people enact in their everyday lives? The villagers, having lived under feudalism through perhaps the turn of the century, something resembling capitalism between WWI and WWII, and a messy approximation to communism after WWII, saw the world in a complex amalgam of different ways. Individualist and collectivist values were both very much present, having arisen historically at the same time and through the same process. Everyone saw scientific socialism as a corrupt farce and invested their main effort in their private plots of land. Yet they generally approved of the efficiencies of collectivized agriculture and the predictability of the cooperative markets. In this complicated middle ground, Lampland analyzes with great subtlety what a commodity is and what it means for labor to be bought and sold. The results should help everyone to feel uncomfortable with the easy answers that come with their political beliefs, regardless of what those beliefs are.
Seminary Co-op Bookstore. This is not the biggest academic bookstore in North America, but I think it's the best, at least for the social sciences and humanities. I can easily spend a day here, and I make time for it whenever I'm in Chicago. 5757 South University Avenue; Chicago, Illinois 60637; +1 (312) 752-4381, 1-800-777-1456, fax +1 (312) 752-8507; books@semcoop.wwa.com; http://www.semcoop.com/
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Follow-up.
Several people have asked me where they can read more about David Noble's concept of "masculine transcendentalism", which I cited in TNO 3(4). I heard him use the phrase in a talk about the place of religion in the history of technology. His book, "The Religion of Technology", has not yet been published, but the last chapter of "Progress Without People" (Toronto: Between The Lines, 1995) is a preview. After hearing me describe the idea in a talk, one person thought I meant that men are inherently defective, or that all men are transcendentalists. But that's not what Noble or I have in mind. The point, rather, is that a historically specific and contingent cultural construction of masculinity has reinforced, and been reinforced by, certain institutions and practices of technology. I hope to write more about this in future issues of TNO.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucla.edu Department of Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles +1 (310) 825-7154 Los Angeles, California 90095-1520 FAX 206-4460 USA -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- ```