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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 5 MAY 1994
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This month: How to help people use computers The unfortunate "frontier" metaphor E-mail and global non-profit organizations Crusade against misleading bouncemail New tracking technologies
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Welcome to TNO 1(5).
This issue includes an article by Arun Mehta about the role of electronic mail in global non-profit organizations such as Amnesty International. Democracy means including everyone in making the decisions, and maybe we can become more democratic by learning how to use e-mail as part of running our organizations. You have to get together in person eventually, of course, so it's a matter of finding the arrangement of work that makes the most of the scarce and valuable travel resources available to people who aren't affiliated with elite institutions.
Also in this issue is another how-to, this time addressed to computer people who find themselves involved in helping others to use computers. Much "helping" does more harm than good, but a few simple guidelines can make a huge difference in how much the person learns by being helped and whether his or her self-esteem is supported or warped by the experience.
Finally, I've included a longish meditation on the metaphor of "cyberspace" as a kind of "frontier". As networks spread in our communities, it becomes much more reasonable to adopt different metaphors that describe the multiple and complicated intersections between the network and the rest of the world.
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Cyberspace turned inside out.
It's common to refer to the net as a "frontier". With all due respect to the good works of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I find this metaphor unfortunate. It draws upon a whole set of myths of the Old West: the idea that the West was empty when the Europeans found it, the idea that the West was developed by rugged entrepreneurs without the assistance or intervention of the government, the notion that the West needed to be civilized, and so forth. The electronic frontier is not something we find; it's something we make. And it's not someplace far away; it's right here in front of us. The term "cyberspace" is unfortunate for the same reason; the net is not a separate space, different in kind from other spaces, sealed off from the corporeal world and obeying different laws.
To counteract this notion of cyberspace as a higher and purer dimension of reality, I think it's useful to investigate the ways in which the net interpenetrates the more conventional geographies of societies and communities. I've had the chance to do just that over the last month in my role as program chair of the CPSR Annual Meeting, which will be held in San Diego on October 8th and 9th of this year. (The formal announcement of this meeting will be ready soon.) For this year's meeting, we want to look at the ways in which socially responsible computer people can work with their communities, and particularly with the professionals whose job it is to use information for the good of those communities -- librarians, educators, public health people, community organizers, and so forth.
Unfortunately, the university where I work, UC San Diego, is both physically and socially isolated from the community of San Diego. Certain parts of the university have extensive ties to the elite networks of business and government in the region, but my sense is that most folks in San Diego have only the vaguest idea what UCSD is. That's partly because UCSD is on a mesa in the middle of a wealthy neighborhood ten miles north of downtown. But it's also partly because of the institutional barriers that separate universities from American society in general.
Organizing this meeting, then, has been a fine opportunity to call around town and find out what people are doing with computer networks. Even though San Diego does not have a community networking movement as such, nonetheless I began to get a sense of a community starting, in a decentralized way, to hum with networks:
* San Diego, for example, has about 1100 BBS's (computer bulletin boards), a substantial portion of which can exchange messages with one another.
* Attempts are being made, some of them with the help of the San Diego Computer Society, to get community councils and neighborhood watch groups and the like onto BBS's.
* The BBS's are used intensively by local military people to exchange information on the practical details of life in the military.
* Several commercial Internet service providers are in operation.
* The colleges and universities are all on the Internet, as are many high-tech companies. The school district is ethernetting all its middle schools to the district office.
* The local World Trade Center is about to connect to a global network of its counterparts.
* The local Catholic Charities long operated a BBS to coordinate the work of public and private social service agencies in the county; the county government is installing a higher-technology network to carry on this work.
The list goes on. Part of what's so impressive about it is the complicated and remarkably seamless mix of initiative: individual volunteers, non-profit organizations, businesses selling access to the net, businesses using networks to do their business, schools and universities, the military, and so forth. And it's not a frontier anywhere; it's just San Diego being San Diego.
One manifestation of this interconnection is the success of a speakers' series we organized this spring in order to stir up interest in the annual meeting. The series' publicist, Dave Noelle, did marvelous work making posters and sending them around to newspapers in the usual way, but we also attracted quite a few people through e-mail messages that had gotten passed along through the city's networks. Furthermore, I was surprised to discover that several of our audience members had heard of me through the simple Internet facilities I operate in a couple spare hours a week.
This is obviously a very small beginning, but it contrasts mightily with my experience the first fifteen years I was on the Internet (some of them, obviously, before it was even called the Internet). In those early days, I was a member of the world of academic computer research, mostly as a graduate student at an elite laboratory funded by the US military. I and my cohort of fellow net users thought of ourselves as simultaneously central and peripheral: being at MIT and places like that, we were obviously central to something. Yet our research was so "pure", and so few concrete demands were ever placed on us, that we could think of ourselves as wholly inconsequential. We could do absolutely whatever we pleased on the net, perfectly confident that none of it would have any consequences in the real world -- the world where people have real jobs, go broke, get sued, get elected, get fired, and so forth. All of this is changing, of course, and I think that a lot of the shock and horror that these changes are evoking have their origin in this particular kind of relationship to the world -- privileged yet detached, central yet isolated, plugged in yet disconnected.
This is not to say that I approve of each of the manifestations of the Internet's sudden intersection with its surrounding reality. Massively broadcast advertisements, large-scale flame wars, exclusion of outsiders from mailing lists, vandalism (as opposed to good clean hacking), lawsuits filed over net messages, and so forth are all unfortunate. But they are not unfortunate because they represent invasions of a pure, disembodied nirvana. They're just unfortunate in the same way as war and rudeness and reaction and greed are unfortunate. They obey the same laws, they are part of the same system, and they are all part of us, just as we are part of them. To heal them is not to defend a siege but rather to heal the world in which we live.
But the ideology of cyberspace is not restricted to these ideas about the Internet. I think that it reflects something much deeper, something that I have heard David Noble call "masculine transcendentalism". It's a sort of spiritual system. We might, schematizing outrageously, try contrasting two types of spirituality: immanent and transcendental. Immanent spirituality seeks connection with the fullness of things as they are: most often with nature, though conceptions differ. Transcendental spirituality seeks to rise above things as they are and to purify the self by leaving behind corporeal reality, and particularly the human body, for a higher and more abstract reality. These kinds of spiritual practice are very roughly gender-coded, with immanent spirituality often being associated with women's practices such as witchcraft and transcendent spirituality often being associated with men's practices such as certain types of ascetic meditation. These assignments are obviously far from iron-clad, but nonetheless they can take on great force within the context of particular cultures.
In tracing the emergence of science, Noble suggests that the urge toward mathematization in science is structured as a variety of masculine transcendentalism: the urge to raise reality to a higher and purer plane. Be this as it may (and I do believe that it has a great deal of truth to it), his theory applies alarmingly well to the fantasy-systems around computers. The fantasies around virtual reality, for example, are textbook cases of masculine transcendentalism: the escape from the body to an alternative world which is perfectly orderly, perfectly under control, and perfectly responsive to the gestures of its inhabitants. Gibson's Neuromancer, which has provided the vocabulary for a great deal of such fantasizing, was written precisely as a critique of this fantasy-system. (In fact, he says, in an interview in the San Francisco Bay Guardian that I have lost, that he was motivated to write the book by D. H. Lawrence's literary celebrations of bodily pleasure as a way of knowing the world.)
Cyberspace, too, is a form of masculine-transcendentalist fantasy system. Note the easy confluence between the transcendentalism and the metaphor-system of invasion and colonization implicit in the metaphor of a "frontier". In each case, loosely connected networks of militant individualists venture out to impose order on previously unruly territories while simultaneously passing beyond the former constraints of physical geography and social entanglement. So long as this transition is incomplete, the pioneer lives the dual lives described in Vernor Vinge's "True Names": one of me grows out there in cyberspace while the other of me atrophies down here in the world.
This is not to say that networks are useless. Far from it. But in understanding their huge potential, I would urge us to adopt a different set of metaphors, an immanent conception of the net, that emphasizes the complex and multiform interweavings of electronic community and geographic community, e-mail discussion group and profession, database and landscape. We don't really see these effects so long as participation in computer networking is sparse: if you're the only person on your block that's on the net then you will experience the net in one way; if everybody on your block is on the net then you will experience the net in another way. Every community learns its own way of carrying on conversations in several media at once, and every individual comes to terms with the digital dimension of his or her social identity in his or her own particular way, with particular strategies born of the thousand kinds of creativity and agency that opportunity and adversity nurture within us. In the end, all of us become -- indeed, all of us already were -- hybrids, or cyborgs in Donna Haraway's vocabulary, living our lives in many spaces at once.
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How to help someone use a computer.
Computer people are generally fine human beings, but nonetheless they do a lot of inadvertent harm in the ways they "help" other people with their computer problems. Now that we're trying to get everyone on the net, I thought it might be helpful to write down in one place everything I've been taught about how to help people use computers.
First you have to tell yourself some things:
* Nobody is born knowing this stuff.
* You've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.
* If it's not obvious to them, it's not obvious.
* A computer is a means to an end. The person you're helping probably cares mostly about the end. This is reasonable.
* Their knowledge of the computer is grounded in what they can do and see -- "when I do this, it does that". They need to develop a deeper understanding, of course, but this can only happen slowly, and not through abstract theory but through the real, concrete situations they encounter in their work.
* By the time they ask you for help, they've probably tried several different things. As a result, their computer might be in a strange state. That's not their fault.
* The best way to learn is through apprenticeship -- that is, by doing some real task together with someone who has skills that you don't have.
* Your primary goal is not to solve their problem. Your primary goal is to help them become one notch more capable of solving their problem on their own. So it's okay if they take notes.
* Most user interfaces are terrible. When people make mistakes it's usually the fault of the interface. You've forgotten how many ways you've learned to adapt to bad interfaces. You've forgotten how many things you once assumed that the interface would be able to do for you.
* Knowledge lives in communities, not individuals. A computer user who's not part of a community of computer users is going to have a harder time of it than one who is.
Having convinced yourself of these things, you are more likely to follow some important rules:
* Don't take the keyboard. Let them do all the typing, even if it's slower that way, and even if you have to point them to each and every key they need to type. That's the only way they're going to learn from the interaction.
* Find out what they're really trying to do. Is there another way to go about it?
* Attend to the symbolism of the interaction. Most especially, try not to tower over them. If at all possible, squat down so your eyes are just below the level of theirs. When they're looking at the computer, look at the computer. When they're looking at you, look back at them.
* If something is true, show them how they can see it's true.
* Be aware of how abstract your language is. For example, "Get into the editor" is abstract and "press this key" is concrete. Don't say anything unless you intend for them to understand it. Keep adjusting your language downward towards concrete units until they start to get it, then slowly adjust back up towards greater abstraction so long as they're following you. When formulating a take-home lesson ("when it does this and that, you should check such-and-such"), check once again that you're using language of the right degree of abstraction for this user right now.
* Whenever they start to blame themselves, blame the computer, no matter how many times it takes, in a calm, authoritative tone of voice. When they get nailed by a false assumption about the computer's behavior, tell them their assumption was reasonable. Tell yourself that it was reasonable. It was.
* Never do something for someone that they are capable of doing for themselves.
* Don't say "it's in the manual". (You probably knew that.)
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The role of e-mail in democratic decision-making.
Arun Mehta Indata amehta@ern.doe.ernet.in
The following is based on my experience with Amnesty International (AI) and other organizations, and is entirely my personal opinion.
Democracy is clearly more than the best way to run a country. It can also have a significant role in the functioning of a non-profit organization. Organizations such as AI that take important decisions relating to strategy, direction, structure and finances in a democratic manner find that it helps them to remain relevant and reflect the consensus of their membership, foster commitment and enthusiasm, have little trouble in throwing up fresh leaders, and, not least, be great to work in.
For democracy to work at an international level, a very high degree of networking and information flow is necessary for consensus-building. AI for instance, could, at the same time, try to sort out how decentralised decision-making should be in a million-strong organization so as to enhance effectiveness without losing cohesion, whether homosexuals should be treated as prisoners of conscience (on which people from different religious and cultural backgrounds have radically divergent views) and at the same time find ways to cope with and grow in a world of collapsing blocs, in which the spectrum of human rights violations is inexorably widening. To achieve consensus at an international level is hard, but it becomes even harder when the participants in the debate are unequal in their ability to participate.
In parts of the world where the membership is small, typically in developing countries, the means for full participation are often lacking. Fewer members means less specialisation, so the committed few are snowed under in paper relating to a variety of issues. It is hard enough to file all the paper, let alone respond to it. Often in such countries, phone lines are a luxury, so devoting one to fax is difficult, and reception often poor. With lesser resources, where each fax or long-distance phone call is a major expense, there is often reluctance to spend money on internal matters as opposed to the "real" work that the organization is supposed to be doing. As a result, information flow is mostly unidirectional, i.e. to developing countries, rather than from them.
Organizations such as AI spend large sums of money in bringing national representatives to international meetings where important issues are debated and decided. However, the poorer cousins often cannot effectively participate, lacking the prior discussion and debate back home. Also, people living in developing countries earn a lot less than do those in the economically advanced countries, and therefore are less able to travel internationally. Visits to international meetings are therefore rare treats, and those that go are often the best political manipulators, not necessarily the most capable ones for the relevant issues. Therefore, third-world participation in democratic decision-making is often close to being token. This is a great pity, because a diversity of informed opinion is an essential part of democracy.
While not a panacea, e-mail and related technologies can help alleviate these problems to a significant degree. With dial-up access, it is not necessary to dedicate a phone line. Error-correcting modems eliminate transmission errors, making e-mail the most reliable form of international communication, particularly when people on the move and different time zones are involved. Software to automate cataloging, archival and redistribution, and simplify responding, is fairly common. E-mail is more private than mail that can be opened, tampered with, censored, what have you. And, of course, e-mail is cheaper. Most importantly, whatever comes in via e-mail is processable by computer, so that data from different parts of the world can easily be consolidated, or text put together into a final document. Small wonder, then, that organizations like AI have been making considerable use of E-mail in the last few year, benefiting from dramatic improvements in communications infrastructure in many parts of the globe. Yet, their use of other means of communication and expenditure on travel to international meetings remains high.
E-mail cannot replace face-to-face meetings in the process of consensus-building and decision-making. E-mail, news groups, etc. one can opt out of. A meeting compels attention. What e-mail does do is prepare the ground - exchange of views, internal discussion, etc. can prune the agenda down to the really thorny issues: no time is wasted. In the preliminary discussion on e-mail, only those who feel strongly are active, the rest listen in as long as are interested. But come decision-making time, when there has to be give and take to breach divergent positions, everyone must focus. That can only happen with busy people if they are physically removed from their immediate environments.
Clearly, then, people who cannot travel are at a disadvantage in international discussions. But the degree of disadvantage can be reduced if those who travel make a more serious effort at communicating their experiences with those who do not. Therefore, while a changeover to largely e-mail based communication can bring about almost revolutionary change in the functioning of an organization, it does require a significant shift in attitude and style of working, a process that is insufficiently understood.
Many non-governmental organizations could benefit tremendously from a more effective use of e-mail by its international membership or associated organizations - people doing medical research and collecting data in different parts of the world, for instance. It therefore would be useful if a study could be undertaken on what might be the best way to encourage organizations to move in this direction.
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Crusade against misleading bouncemail.
In TNO 1(3) I announced my crusade against unintelligible, misleading "bouncemail", those messages that mailers send you when they can't deliver your mail. Bad bouncemail is a social menace because it confuses newcomers, who frequently respond by sending multiple copies of their messages to a huge list of people and finally complain, "I keep getting this error message saying my message wasn't delivered". Here's a particularly bad one, from the mailer at io.salford.ac.uk. I've actually edited out a lot of extra header stuff. The original was 35 lines long. (The mailer actually did a number of other things wrong, too, such as failing to use the Errors-To: field to send this thing.)
Date: 12 May 94 4:38 From: postmaster@salford.ac.uk To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: Returned Mail X-Diagnostic: Mail coming from a daemon, ignored X-Diagnostic: Possible loopback problem X-Envelope-To: rre-request
Your mail was not be delivered to any recipients:
The header from your original message is reproduced below
Date: Wed, 11 May 1994 12:13:40 -0700
From: Phil Agre
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This month's recommendations.
Robert Britt Horwitz, The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. An absolutely lucid, if slightly disorganized, account of the history of telecommunications regulation in the United States. It has a particularly clear theoretical account of regulation of market infrastructure industries, of which telecommunications is an example. Now that telecommunications regulation is a critical issue in Congress and a matter of widespread public debate, Horwitz's book is an indispensable background reference.
Kim Bobo, Jackie Kendall, Steve Max, Organizing for Social Change: A Manual for Activists in the 1990s, Washington: Seven Locks Press, 1991. Networking and community-building are not just things that happen on the Internet. Increasingly, people are integrating their Internet use into other activities, other organizations, and other social movements, and they're learning that using the Internet well requires a world of skills that grow out of long traditions of organizing. This is a good manual of organizing for social causes that encodes these traditions.
Bill Cantor, ed, Experts in Action: Inside Public Relations, New York: Longman, 1984. This is an anthology of case studies about a different kind of social organizing: using public relations methods to mobilize people for a cause. The assumptions and methods are strikingly different, though not entirely, and the various case-studies are eye-opening and often instructive.
Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate: New Interpretations of Greek, Roman and kindred evidence, also of some Basic Jewish and Christian Beliefs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954. A marvelously eccentric account of archaic Greek beliefs about a wide variety of things, including the mystical significance attached to the synovial fluid in the knees. It's still in print, or at least it was in print a couple of years ago -- three cheers for Cambridge University Press.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
Savi Technology 260 Sheridan Avenue Palo Alto, California 94306
phone +1 (415) 328-4323 fax -4407
This year has brought an explosion of tracking technologies: devices that keep a distributed computer system apprised in real time of the whereabouts of a person, automobile, or package, or the status of a social or technical process. Savi Technology makes a particularly straightforward kind of tracking device, the radio-based "Savi-Tag" which can be affixed (for example) to crates in a warehouse. The tags emit their identity codes and receivers on the walls keep track of the codes and maintain a database of the tags' locations. The tags have fairly general computers inside, and can be customized for a variety of digital interactions between the tags and the central computer.
Tracking technologies promise to be big business. Savi is well-positioned in this business in that the US Department of Defense has designated their system as its radio tag standard. This is big news, because the military has been at the forefront of deployment of high-technology logistics systems, and this technology and the people who manage it have recently been migrating to private industry as well. For example, Savi says that its radio tags have been used extensively in the military's operations in Somalia. Savi has also used its system as the basis of an Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) system for automobile toll collection.
So I recommend that you write Savi and ask for product information on their tracking systems. I do not, however, recommend that you harass them. Only get the literature if you're genuinely interested in reading it. Thanks a lot.
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Follow-up.
Several people wrote to comment on my article about the political action alert on ocean noise. Most of them assured me that you probably can in fact be sued for libel for forwarding something to a mailing list. I'm sure they're right. I hadn't intended to make any broad, general statement on the subject. All I meant to say was that the particular message I forwarded was similar to numerous other communications that have been found not libelous in American courts over the last several years.
In TNO 1(4) I plugged "Race, Poverty, and the Environment", a
terrific journal from the Earth Island Institute. Art McGee
Check out the Institute for Global Communications gopher at gopher.igc.apc.org and the British Broadcasting Corporation WorldWide Web page at http://www.bbcnc.org.uk/. The scary new GATT treaty is on the WorldWide Web too. The URL for it is: http://ananse.irv.uit.no/trade_law/gatt/nav/toc.html. Also, check out the Internic's Internet Network News, whose URL is: http://www.internic.net.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 1994 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- ```