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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 2, NUMBER 5 MAY 1995
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This month: The future of targeted communications Worldviews in community networking Internet discussion groups suck Privacy politics after Oklahoma City
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Welcome to TNO 2(5).
No matter what happens, my book manuscript is going in the mail to New York on June 10th. Therefore, the primary purpose of this issue of TNO is to get a bunch of thoughts off my mind so I can get back to my revising. The articles are shorter, the topics are more far-flung, and the tone is grouchier than usual. I also have a particularly odd set of recommendations. I'll let you know when the book comes out.
Here is the quote of the month. Truer words were never spoken:
"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 of the Christian Coalition Time Magazine, 5/15/95, page 35
Hey liberals! What have you done lately to support the training of activists for your favorite cause? If the answer is "nothing" then it's time to get your act together.
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Your Personal Message Environment.
I've been engaged in a lot of technodystopian fantasizing about something I will call your Personal Message Environment (PME). You already have a PME, but it will grow much more sophisticated with the progress of two important trends: the rapid spread of devices for tracking people, cars, and objects; and the rapid interlinking of all the world's databases through networking.
What is your PME? As you go through the day, a large number of messages are aimed at you by organizations that have an economic interest in your knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes. These messages include advertising, but they also include PR (which often influences the writing of newspaper articles and many other more neutral-seeming messages without you knowing it), the things that sales people say to you in stores, the things your boss says to you at work, and so on. The organizations that aim these messages at you have a powerful interest in what they call "targeting" -- getting their messages to the right people, and getting the right message to each person. And the more they know about you, the more effectively they can target a message to you.
This is an economic choice, of course, so the degree of targeting (that is, the degree to which messages are tailored to individuals) will be determined by the costs and the payoff associated with each successive degree of tailoring. The costs include the costs associated with learning about you, keeping track of you, deciding what message it would be most remunerative to deliver to you, actually delivering the message to you, and so on. In practice, of course, most messages are delivered to large categories of people (e.g., the viewers of a television program) based on ideas about their average attributes (e.g., their ages, genders, and incomes).
But new efficiencies in the collection and movement of personal information may change things. As the costs of learning about you, tracking you, and delivering specialized messages to you go down, it follows that the degree of tailoring may increase. Let us imagine what this would be like if greatly extrapolated. Suppose that TRW or Equifax had a generalized real-time personal information server that organizations could both contribute to and draw upon. This service would require a fee, of course, but the computers would all be talking to one another on the net, constantly bidding for information and making targeting judgements on the fly based on current market conditions. This information will be available anywhere, anytime that a machine has an opportunity to deliver a message to you. When might these opportunities arise?
* Sales and customer service. Sales people will be able to get a rundown on you before they talk to you, as soon as they find out your personal identifier. They might find out, for example, which related products you have bought in the past, the composition of your family, your line of work, and so forth. They will say that this is all "to serve you better". That might be slightly true but mostly it's baloney. What it will really let them do is tailor their sales pitches to your perceived level of sophistication and other factors relevant to the sales negotiation (how good a negotiator is this person? how much does s/he know about the product? how badly does s/he need to buy? how much can s/he afford to spend). All of this will put you at a relative disadvantage during the negotiation process.
* Roadside advertising. If your car-of-the-near-future uses AVI-based toll collection, GPS-based tracking, or any other mechanism that makes its location known to TRW or Equifax's far-flung network of real-time information providers, then this information can be merged with other information about you to tailor a variety of messages. Roadside advertising signs, for example, could change from minute to minute depending upon the demographics of the people who are driving by right at that specific moment. The signs might advertise different products from moment to moment, or they might provide different pitches for the same product. When people of a certain ethnic group drive by, change the sign to portray such people enjoying the product and exclaiming its virtues in that group's own idiom.
* Customized product literature. Nowadays product literature is printed in huge batches and given out indiscriminately to anybody in certain large categories of potential customers. In the future, though, on-the-spot custom printing will make it possible to print literature tailored to the people you're giving it to, based on the information that the great web of automatic interchange of personal information has accumulated about them. Marketers and brochure designers will learn how to design whole families of brochures, each one generated from a grammar of tailored possibilities and laid out automatically in software.
* Video monitors in public spaces. Airport waiting rooms have acquired large numbers of video monitors in the last few years, many of which are tuned to a CNN channel designed specifically for airport waiting rooms. But hey, the airlines know who is waiting in those rooms, so why not automatically schedule content on those monitors that fits the aggregate attributes of those people? To assist with this process, a new type of marketing will arise: real-time marketing. Marketing people will sit at computer monitors which display relevant attributes of particular groups of people, together with a set of automatically generated heuristic analyses of the economic arguments for various message patterns, and they'll decide, "okay, let's go for the upscale car ads and conservative political news show for the forty-seven affluent people on this flight who are headed to the Hawaiian golf tournament, and forget about the others because they're too mixed a group to pin down". Such decisions will need to be made thousands of times a day, but the decisions will be monitored and gradually automated using expert systems.
* Anything you get in the mail. This is already pretty far along, as a quick phone call to R. R. Donnelley Information Services in Chicago can readily verify for you. The primary constraint here is automatic content generation and small-batch printing, and both technologies are advancing quickly. Soon the primary constraint will be the expertise for tailoring messages based on second- and third-order attributes of individuals, not just the half a dozen major market segments that old-fashioned marketing focuses on, so that literally thousands of different pitch letters, brochures, etc will go out to different people as a routine matter.
* Point-of-sale advertising. This is also pretty far along as well at a lot of supermarket chains. But they have not gone very far in mixing supermarket and non-supermarket information. Sure, if you buy Pepsi then you get Coke coupons -- big deal. But think about it: there you are, standing at a known location on the face of the earth. The cash register ought to be able to send out a call on the net: "Hey everyone, we found her! Anybody got any messages for her that you feel like delivering in a supermarket checkout environment?" At this point some more automatic bidding will take place: the amusement park is willing to pay $0.02 to print you a coupon, the concern promoter is willing to pay $0.09 to give you the upcoming concert schedule for the bands whose albums you've bought recently at the record store, and the day-care center is willing to pay $0.16 to give you a map showing that it's located right along the route from your job to your house. The day-care center will win the bidding, and the map will get printed out and handed to you as a matter of course.
You get the idea. Like all such scenarios, this one mixes both good and bad. Maybe you really will be grateful to hear about this conveniently located day-care center. But how do you feel about being tracked in real time in this fashion? Will you be able to turn it off? What will society be like when everyone effectively lives in a separate message environment from everyone else? And how will people mess with the system? Maybe you can borrow the tracking devices belonging to someone with a different race, class, and gender for a week. Won't that be an education?
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Ties That Bind.
At the beginning of May I attended the unbelievably virtuous Ties That Bind conference, organized by Steve Cisler at Apple Computer. It's a conference for community networking people, and you will rarely meet a more interesting, dedicated, action-oriented group of people in your life. I went there because I want to do some kind of research project on the forms of association that go with computing -- user groups, for example, as well as BBS's, computer clubs, and informal networks of people who share expertise as part of their daily interactions. I hunted down a dozen or so of the people attending the conference, explained my project, and asked them what I should be looking for. The answers were wonderfully interesting and diverse, and you will no doubt be reading about them in TNO as things go along.
In this particular article, though, I want to describe the range of ideas I thought I saw at this conference. What I found most interesting was the painful process of technology-driven kinds of innovation starting to merge with preexisting worlds of people who are committed to helping communities. Roughly speaking, I saw three traditions of thinking and action on this subject:
* Marketing. Besides Steve Cisler, the other driving force for the conference was Mario Marino. Mario made some money in the computer industry and he has set up a foundation to help the community networking movement revitalize the public institutions of the country. This is wonderful and Mario is a great guy whose heart is in the right place. In listening to him, it's clear that his worldview comes from selling computers to people. It's a marketing style of thinking: you have a product, but nobody has any obligation to even give you the time of day unless you learn their agendas and their interests and their language and learn to explain the virtues of your product in those terms. This is a good message for computer people to hear, because it is easy to get into a rut where you are convinced that computers are the future and anybody who doesn't agree with you is exhibiting "resistance to technology" or "resistance to change" et cetera.
* Nonprofits. The world of nonprofit organizations is enormous and far-flung, with its own magazines and consultants and career ladders and gossip networks. It's quite a significant part of the economy. One large segment of it consists of professional foundation people: the people who read grant proposals and give money out to the ones that seem best thought out and most aligned with the foundation's mission. These are folks who spend much of their lives saying "no" to people, and if they are doing their jobs then they also spend much of their lives explaining what sorts of proposals they are looking for. They have evolved a whole discourse about communities and community development and so on, and they view computer networks as one piece in this much larger preexisting puzzle. In particular, they don't even want to hear about your community networking project unless you have teamed up with real organizations that are delivering real services to real people. This too is a good message for computer people to hear.
* Community organizing. This last tradition was not so visible on stage as the other two, but in my opinion it is the most important. People have been organizing their communities since the beginning of time, but the modern American traditions of community organizing come from Saul Alinsky, who pioneered a relatively rough-and-tumble style of organizing in Chicago and whose followers have subsequently calmed down and gotten more sophisticated, and from Martin Luther King and the people around him, who went for a more spiritual, long-term, culturally oriented style of organizing. Both styles have much to offer. What's most significant about them is their emphasis on power and empowerment. Computer networks are useless if people are feel intimidated around technology and technical people. And they are also useless if people are too demoralized to use them for any particular project that benefits their community and makes people feel like they have some kind of control over their lives.
I found it exciting and intellectually challenging to watch the people at this conference absorb these orientations toward computers and community, and test them all in the light of their own experiences as librarians, teachers, nonprofit workers, and active citizens. I hope that their experiences meshing the world of computers with the real world of people's lives will spill over into everyplace else that people use computers.
The single most exciting thing I saw at the conference was a presentation from Carmen Sirianni and Doug Schuler about the Civic Practices Network, a nonpartisan project to pool the experiences and expertise of people involved in community organizing projects through the WorldWide Web. The current URL for the CPN is http://fount.journalism.wisc.edu/cpn/cpn.html but it says it will change to http://cpn.journalism.wisc.edu/ Check it out.
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Internet heat death.
Over the past several months, I have been growing steadily more impatient with Internet discussion groups. The Internet has a lot of potential, but I have come to the conclusion that most of that potential is being squandered. Much of what people are doing on the net is great. But much is not. Here is a common dysfunctional pattern: some people decide to "start a discussion group". So they create a mailing list, put a bunch of people on it, and say "okay, let's have a discussion". Maybe they'll send out something interesting to "get discussion started". Several things proceed to happen:
* Since nobody really knows what the list is for, the direction it takes will often be heavily influenced by the first two messages that go out on it -- that is, the initial discussion starter and the first issue that someone raises in response. The harder these first two people try to "start discussion" by being stimulating and controversial, the more powerfully they will set the agenda for the list. People will react to those initial points, and other people will react to those points, and the whole discussion will be sucked into one of fifteen standard conversations that everybody in that world has had before.
* This initial explosion of messages will cause many people to panic and say "help! you're flooding my mailbox! get me off this list!"
* Notwithstanding the excessively narrow focus of the initial discussion, the people on the list will come up with five different ideas about what the list is supposed to be for -- without it ever occurring to them that alternative ideas exist. They then start grouching at one another for abusing the list. Or even worse, they start scowling inwardly at one another for abusing the list without ever raising the issue -- or not raising it until they're full of anger and resentment about it.
* Nobody can decide when to take a branch of the discussion "off-line" to private messages. This problem is especially bad on those systems which do not have a concept of a "thread" (roughly, a series of messages with the same Subject line), so that people can choose not to receive any more messages on a given thread. But of course, most mail-readers on the Internet (as opposed to Usenet or the Well, for example) have no such concept.
* After an initial burst of discussion, the list falls into something resembling heat death. The level of traffic goes down, and nobody is sure what to do next. Everybody was just reacting to other people's messages anyway, so zero traffic becomes a stable pattern.
* The next step, after a couple months of silence, is for someone to post a political action alert to the list -- whereupon a batch of people will try to get themselves off. But of course they did not save the automatically generated message that explained how to do this, and the intervening silence has removed any sense of concern for the well-being of the list, so they do it by sending messages to the whole list. This, of course, causes other people to do the same thing, whereupon someone tries to prevent this effect from snowballing by sending out a helpful, constructive message like "hey, you idiots! didn't your mama teach you anything? why don't you just unsubscribe by sending a message to greeblex@blort.snort.com?"
Internet discussion groups can work well despite these dynamics, but only in special circumstances. For example, it helps if the community on the list has a steady stream of external events to react to. Since the list operates in a mostly reactive mode, they'll always have something to talk about. The sustained level of traffic might be high, but then people will leave the list until it settles down to a level that suits the people who remain behind. Another scheme that works well is to have a list which is oriented almost exclusively to one-shot announcements -- but then that's not a discussion list anymore.
Mostly, though, Internet discussion lists do not work very well. Very often the problem, in my experience, is that people are being lazy: trying to set up a discussion list in order to avoid the hard work of building a community, agreeing on purposes and goals, establishing a structure and timetable, and so on. Often they rationalize this laziness by appealing to the libertarian ethos of the net: structure means constraint means domination. Lots of people believe that, but it's not true. It's not even true if you're a libertarian: structure imposed from the outside may imply constraint and domination, but structure agreed from within a group through a legitimate consensus-building process should not. In my experience, though, lots of people who tend toward libertarian sentiments just talk about the virtues of association without actually learning how to cooperate and build things with real, live other people. This spirit of politically noble laziness is dragging down the Internet.
In fact, the people who helped me articulate these phenomena work
mostly with kids. Mike Cole
Margaret Riel
What the Internet needs is a vocabulary of structures for e-mail discussion lists. Nobody should bother creating a list until they have a good reason for it that everybody has signed onto. This will mean doing some consultation, building consensus, and accepting that communities take time to grow. It will also mean having a definite goal and structure for the list, including a statement of the conditions under which the list will have achieved its purpose and be shut down. Of course, nobody should force people to run their lists this way. But it would be most excellent if decent standards could be established within which people can create software to support such things. Sure, plenty of companies sell conferencing systems to organizations whose people are required to do things together. But that doesn't mean that those people actually go through the social processes needed to use the systems at all productively, and it certainly doesn't mean that the benefits of those systems become widespread on the Internet.
A lot of the problem, then, has to do with technical standards and the like. But the problem is also cultural. Many people have lost, or never learned, the skills for working together. Although the 1960's counterculture is out of fashion now, it put a lot of effort into learning how to build community, how to organize and empower people, how to run things democratically, how to fight fair, and how to be a powerful human being without having to exercise power over other people. In my opinion, the net needs these skills badly. And so does the rest of the world. People who believe in liberty ensure an authoritarian world unless they teach people how to organize themselves through their own efforts, and the problem of using the net productively might be an occasion to rediscover this.
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How the world works.
Speaking of the New York Times, what the heck has happened to the Times' Business section? They've moved all the information technology news to Monday, which is fine, but the rest of the week they seem to have switch some of their focus away from serious business reporting to fluffy personal finance articles. In the past I would often spend upwards of two hours reading the Sunday Business section alone. But today's Business section (5/29/95) has this trivia quiz about the Dow Jones Industrial Average and an article about couples who fight about whether to invest in commodity futures or no-load mutual funds. Come on.
I suppose I might find this interesting if I had any money in the bank, but I don't. I just want to understand how the world works, and serious business reporting is an important part of that. Business Week is too driven by PR and Forbes is too driven by ideology. The Wall Street Journal is okay, but it doesn't have nearly enough feature articles about industry structures. Thus the New York Times actually filled an important gap, in my view.
So, hey, Times, if you're listening -- enough of this stuff. Let's have some articles on real stories, like the continuing operational changes inside the global banking industry, the dark underside of union-management "cooperation", the emerging transnational class structure of East Asia, the revolution in work measurement, the new right-wing labor law in New Zealand, and the rapid integration of all the world's databases through computer networking.
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Further thoughts on the Oklahoma City bombing.
Now that the dust has started to settle, the jury has reached a tentative verdict in the case: the Oklahoma City bombing was a successful terrorist operation. Terrorists don't expect that anybody will actually applaud their violence, and they are not surprised when politicians across the spectrum use words like "deplorable tragedy". Instead, they usually want to do three things: (1) get publicity for their cause, (2) provoke a wave of repression that will provide ammo for organizers of sedition, and (3) force politicians to take a stand on polarized issues.
Well, number (1) is easy. Number (2): Bill Clinton, who decided in the earliest days of his candidacy to give the authoritarian "national security" establishment whatever it wants as the price for pursuing his social programs and industrial policy, has put the terrible Omnibus Antiterrorism Act on the front burner in Congress, most recently pushing against the Republicans for wider authority for wiretapping. The far right is going nuts about this bill, which is about the best organizing tool they could ask for -- short of another Waco. Number (3): Newt Gingrich, in the early days when everyone was being pushed to take sides, came out forcefully talking about Americans who fear the government. Not just "oppose" or "distrust" but "fear". Case closed.
In watching the new press spotlight on far-right organizing in the US, it suddenly hit me one day: the US has become a third world country in one more sense. I recall a discussion in the 1980's about third world countries, particularly in the Middle East, where popular political discourse is often thick with rumors about what the CIA must be up to. The talking heads put this down to the fevered Arab mind and all of that, never thinking that these people might be responding rationally to a world that really was full of CIA covert operations -- if not necessarily the same ones discussed in the rumors. But now we have just the same thing in the United States, with people claiming to have spotted black helicopters belonging to the United Nations invasion force and speculating at great length about intricate government conspiracies of all sorts. These rumors are surely false, but what reality are they a rational response to?
I was on a radio show in Kansas City talking about privacy recently; its host was an avuncular guy who did not seem particularly ideological. But he was so hung up on weird, dystopian scenarios (computer chips planted in our heads by the government, machines watching you 24 hours a day in your house, etc) that the conversation kept falling flat whenever I would try to discuss a real threat to privacy, no matter how serious. Did this guy have the pulse of his listeners? That's his job, after all.
Be this as it may, the issue of civil liberties seems suddenly to have flipped political polarities. I have gotten some notes about my privacy work from people I would not invite to dinner, and the LA Times tells me that Oliver North had Ira Glasser from the ACLU on his show and grunted approvingly the whole time. The ACLU has made some strange calls in recent years, but I must say I still respect their willingness to go to bat for all kinds of pariahs -- from pornographers to tobacco companies to militias. Conservatives have been talking about free speech and other civil liberties a great deal lately. The real test is whether they can apply those principles to anybody except conservatives who are being repressed by liberals. So far I have seen little to impress me on this score, but I have an open mind.
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Wish list.
Lots of people have had the following idea: build an ordinary software application like a spreadsheet, but include an extra program that runs in the background, watches your patterns of usage, and then periodically tries to teach you things or creates new commands that capture common patterns in your interaction with the system. I can see the motivation for such systems in my own experience: very often I'll accidentally learn about some feature of a program that I wish I'd known about years ago. Sometimes I'll actually take the user's manual home and flip through it at bedtime in case some feature pops out and catches my eye ("oh hey, I could use that for when I do such-and-such"), but usually I have better things to do at bedtime. Maybe such schemes will find their niches, then, but I'm skeptical. At the same time, it seems to me that something similar might work much better: the key is using the net to get some people in the loop.
So let's build the same background watching program, but forget trying to make that program "smart". Instead, have the program summarize all the interesting bits and pieces of patterns and statistics that it notices and ship them off across the net to someone whose job is to study usage patterns for that particular program. Or maybe that person's job is to study usage patterns for a particular category of users, like accountants or truck drivers or teachers. Then that person might be "on call" for the users. If a particular user feels the need to learn something new, or is feeling irritated about some aspect of the system, they can push a button or enter a menu command and enter a verbal description of what's bothering them and what kind of guidance they might like. A few minutes later they'll get a phone call (or a voice connection over the net) from a real person who has been listening to their voice message and studying their usage pattern. Maybe that person can suggest a few features to try out. The program itself could come with little canned demos of each feature, or the on-line advisor could select a canned demo that's customized in some way to this users's characteristics.
This is not so far different from the kinds of customer support that companies now provide. It assumes net connectivity between customer and company, which isn't so hard, and it assumes that the product has the necessary architecture to communicate the relevant aspects of its state, including the usage pattern information that the background program has noticed, over the net to the on-line advisor. The difference is that the advisor is now helping the user learn the system -- not from scratch, but incrementally, one or two features at a time. This kind of incremental learning is valuable because it is responsive to the user's actual use patterns and because it is slowed down to a rate that real human beings can digest. It might also be much cheaper than generalized troubleshooting-oriented customer support because the issues are more focused and less confusing, the outcome is more specific, and the process is sufficiently standardized that software can generate a lot of the necessary information automatically. On the other hand, maybe the on-line advisor will end up being basically a sales person, or at least will be instructed to stay on the lookout for opportunities to convince users that they need to buy some extra software rather than just learning a new feature of the software they already own.
Maybe we'll have a lot of services like this in the future -- people whose job is to process certain kinds of information from users all over the world using the net. Last month, for example, my "wish list" suggested having students' term papers copy edited by people in India. And so maybe we'll have a whole class of people who do this kind of work. It might be good work in some ways: a continual set of fresh puzzles and challenges, extremely flexible work schedule, no heavy lifting, enough variety in the physical interaction with the machine that doing it ten hours a day isn't going to destroy your hands, and so on. On the other hand, it's basically piecework. What is the career path for such workers? Do they learn valuable skills on the job that they can use to get into more remunerative kinds of work? Will the labor market be extremely competitive due to the ability of people all over the earth to join the workforce just by switching on their computers and plugging into the net? Serious questions.
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This month's recommendations.
GNU Emacs for the Mac. That's right! The most excellent Marc
Parmet
Organic milk. I'm serious. Like most people, I support organic farming in the abstract but don't end up buying a lot of the stuff in practice. Lately, though, I've been drinking organic milk, and I am amazed at how much better it is than regular industrial milk -- which, I am now realizing, is basically this tasteless white liquid. It costs about 50% more but it's worth every penny. Ask your local store to carry it. The dairy that supplies my local supermarket is Natural Horizons Inc, PO Box 17577, Boulder CO 80308.
Deborah Madison, The Greens Cookbook, Toronto: Bantam, 1987. Some cookbooks, starting with Elizabeth David's epochal works on French country cooking, aim to discover, revive, adapt, and interpret a classical tradition. Others are semiotic displays, inventing "traditions" that mobilize the familiar signs of a geographic region in the form of food on a plate. This whole spectrum is governed by a tussle over authenticity that's enough to make me take Jean Baudrillard seriously for hours at a time. But in my experience, precisely one cookbook is a true work of transcendent genius, and that's "The Greens Cookbook". It is a vegetarian cookbook that is infused by a deep and serious and respectful attention to vegetables -- not to the idea of vegetables, or to spectacles or commodities flown in from the greenhouse, but to the actual cucumbers and the actual beans. And to actual kitchens, with their left-over leaves and rinds that can be made into soup stock, and to the seasons of the year.
Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay, eds, Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. This is the best edited collection of articles on the critical philosophy of technology. Every article is a valuable contribution to scholarship on the subject. It's not easy reading, but it definitely an improvement on the utopian and dystopian versions of technological determinism that pervade much of the literature on, for example, computing in society.
Ceanne DeRohan, Right Use of Will, Santa Fe: Four Winds, 1986. Lately I've been on a campaign to read the most challenging works on psychology and ethics that I can find, and this one has got to take the cake. It is part of a genre that I never, ever thought I would take seriously: the new age "channeling" literature that is supposedly dictated by various spiritual entities. This one in particular is supposed to have been dictated word-for-word by God, and it is full of the stilted diction and strange allegories about Atlantis and environmentalism that characterize the genre. But if you can get past that stuff, I swear, it actually is quite brilliant underneath. It is not for beginners. It's about the Will, the part of you that wants to do things. Most people have large parts of their Will in a box somewhere, either because they had to conform to someone else's stuff as kids, or because they ended up in a twelve-step program, convinced that all their Will wants to do is drink and get into dysfunctional relationships. DeRohan, or God, believes that you aren't healthy until you have gotten all the pent-up emotional wounds out of your system, whereupon you will only want to do things that are basically good. Why is this? I can't summarize the explanation, but it involves a long of very interesting stuff about denial that makes a lot of sense to me. You'll have to decide for yourself.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
Metasystems Design Group 2000 North 15th Street, Suite 103 Arlington, Virginia 22201
phone: (703) 243-6622 web: http://www.tmn.com/0h/MetaNet/bro-mdg.html
I met Lisa Kimball from Metasystems Design Group and read the company's literature at the Ties That Bind conference, and let me tell you, these folks are a breath of fresh air. They are organizational consultants who will help you get yourself on the net -- while making absolutely sure that you understand that getting yourself on the net, all by itself, is probably not the answer to your question. The net is great, but your organization will only get real work done over the net if you have a structure for the work with a flexible set of roles and expectations. A lot of people try to solve problems by getting everyone on the net, and then when it doesn't work the blame the net because it's easier than looking inward at the organizational pathologies that were actually causing the problems. In my opinion, the net community needs a lot of help from people with real, sane ideas about organizations and communication -- like these folks.
Do contact them if you're interested in learning more. But as always, I ask you not to contact them unless your interest is fairly serious, since I wouldn't want companies who get listed in TNO to get a batch of random, useless mail. Thanks a lot.
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Follow-up.
The Copyright Clearance Center is on the Web. This is a good thing because it now costs way too much to clear a copyright when assembling a course reader for students. This is a disaster in small courses whose readers contain large numbers of short articles. Anything that gets the transaction costs down for these readers will help a lot -- I hope they get on-line payment going soon. Their URL is http://www.directory.net/copyright
-------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 1995 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The Network Observer electronically to anyone for any non-commercial purpose. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated. -------------------------------------------------------------------- ```