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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 5 MAY 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: Rethinking hyperlinking Libraries and collective cognition Advice for liberals High-tech marketing
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Welcome to TNO 3(5).
This issue is a collection of footnotes on topics that will be familiar to regular readers of TNO. The first article concerns the design of Web pages. A major problem now is that it's hard to know what you'll get when you click on a hyperlink. I think the whole model of hypertext is misguided or at least inadequate: just underlining or highlighting a word doesn't tell me what's behind it. The key is stable, well-designed genre conventions.
Next I continue last month's discussion of digital libraries. This month's version of the story overlaps with last month's, but it cuts through the issues from a different direction. It's important to think about "digital libraries" as something beyond great masses of digital documents with a user interface on them. Instead, let's think about the diverse ways in which networked computing and professional librarians can support the diverse ways that communities think together. I'm not a librarian, so I have limited authority to pronounce on these matters. What I am is a heavy user of libraries who wants to ensure that the world's highly evolved library system is not ruined in a generation by the willy-nilly imposition of simplistic models of information derived from computer science.
This month I have also assembled some advice for liberals. My theory is that every social movement develops blind spots once its leaders have established a steady income for themselves. The problem is that these leaders' whole identity is defined in terms of the battles they won in the past, not the battles they face in the present. As a result, they literally cannot see the new movements that arise from the grievances that their success has created. In any case, something has to explain the dearth of cogent refutation by liberal spokespeople of the detailed arguments of the ascendant conservative movement. Right now we seem to be at a lull, as Bill Clinton shape-shifts himself into the center and the conservatives stand about speechless at the destruction caused by Pat Buchanan's primary campaign. But the fundamentals are unchanged. Maybe the liberals will take the opportunity to rebuild, and maybe they won't.
Once again I am collecting arguments against privacy for a future issue of TNO, perhaps in July. The most common argument against privacy that I have omitted in previous issues, it would seem, is "you needn't worry if you have nothing to hide". This argument is deeper than it looks, as I'll explain in the next round-up. In the meantime, please send me any arguments against privacy that you encounter. I am particularly interested in arguments that pertain to specific issues such as medical or financial privacy. I have concentrated primarily on bad arguments against privacy, but if I find any good ones then I'll mention those as well.
A footnote. This month I happened to see the last half-hour or so of "Johnny Mnemonic". Skip forward if you don't want to know how it ends. In the climactic scene, the leader of an underground organization broadcasts the cure for an AIDS-like disease, which a global pharmaceutical company has kept secret because it can make more money by treating people as they die. Preparing to bounce this video signal off a satellite by means of jury-rigged machinery controlled by a telepathic dolphin (of course), he prefaces the broadcast by telling everyone to turn on their VCR's and explaining that the company hadn't wanted the information to get out. Despite my hardened shell of cynicism, part of me felt a ridiculous rush of identification with this guy, as if I were Fighting The Power by running a large global mailing list. It's an excellent fantasy: the technoanarchist masses are out there, counter-hegemonic VCR machines at the ready, waiting to be activated by the right information. No need to listen, no need to converse, no need to write articles or direct films that people can understand, no need to travel into neighborhoods where you can't get good coffee -- no need to do anything but uplink video. The film pulls off this fantasy in part through the character of the underground leader, a hip-hop DJ type with strange facial markings. His blackness is employed as a sign of political authenticity, even as hip-hop's appropriation of technology is transformed from an intricate cultural dialogue to a broadcast model that encourages the heroic nerd without requiring this nerd to go outside. E-mail and video are indeed important, and information is important too. But they have to be part of something.
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Rethinking hyperlinking.
The WorldWide Web, for all its flash and color, still resembles the early days of radio: the sound quality may have been crackly and the reception intermittent, but much of the pleasure came from the very idea of it. We look at the Web through special glasses that let us neglect the reality in favor of the fantasy of what it will someday become. When this effect wears off, we will suddenly start asking whether those Web pages are actually useful for something. A Web page can be cool in complete isolation, but it can only be useful in the fullness of mundane practical reality. Right now we don't mind waiting fifteen seconds to follow a link because we think of it as a one-time thing. But once we get back down to business we'll be waiting fifteen seconds once per day, or once per phone call, or once per page of an electronic magazine. Then we'll mind.
When that day comes, I think the Web will have to change a great deal. I would like to suggest that we will want to change some basic categories of the whole hypertext paradigm. Let's consider the hyperlink -- the colored or underlined bit of text that you can click on to jump to another Web page. My big problem with hyperlinks is that I rarely have a clear sense of what I will get if I click on them. That's okay when the ruling metaphor is still "browsing" or "exploring", so that getting lost is normal -- see TNO 1(10). But it's not okay when I have a concrete goal and no extra time for Webspace tourism.
How can Web page designers induce accurate expectations about their hyperlinks? One obvious approach is to explain, with a brief bit of text, perhaps in the margin or on a bullet, what will be found at the other end. And that's good. Web browsers might be able to help in limited ways as well. Ben Shneiderman and others have suggested that a browser display several lines of information for each hyperlink, the way that the URL now appears on the bottom of the screen in some Web browsers when the mouse passes over the hyperlink. And that's good too. But I want to back up and consider the question more fundamentally.
Consider the front page of the Wall Street Journal. It's tremendously well-designed. It has a stable format from day to day. It has six columns, and they always use the six columns in exactly the same way. You always know where to find the feature articles, the humor article, the brief news items, the statistical graph (top center), the summary of articles inside the paper, and so on. And we shouldn't forget the more mundane conventions that other newspapers share: you always know where to find the date, the page numbers, and so on.
The WSJ's front page, then, supports expectations by always putting the same stuff in the same place. But beyond that, it also supports procedures for finding what you want. Business people value their time, and many of them have routines for reading the paper. One common routine is to scan the column that summarizes company reports. The company names are thoughtfully listed in bold type so the reader's eye can catch on companies that he or she does business with, competes with, wants things from, might look for a job at, or whatever. Another routine is just to read the headlines. Of course, the readers of many newspapers scan headlines -- that's why they're there. But the WSJ provides several different headlines, in different type, summarizing the story in several different ways, but always with the same sort of "rhythm".
The WSJ's front page includes many hyperlinks: the pointers to inside pages where continuations of stories can be found. Stories that start on the first page of a given section always continue inside that section, and the WSJ, unlike many other papers, tries not to string a long article across several pages to encourage you to notice as much advertising as possible. The design conventions create strong expectations about what sort of thing you'll find if you follow each link to the specified page.
We can think of these things in terms of "good design". But some conceptions of good design are better than others. We should ask, "good design for whom?" and "good design for what purpose?". The WSJ exhibits good design for people who read it frequently and as quickly as possible. It exhibits average design for people who are reading it for the first time or who are just browsing and exploring. It even embodies particular ideas about what the reader's interests might be -- for example, an interest in tracking particular companies.
As regular readers of TNO will have anticipated, I find it useful to treat the WSJ's front page not as a singular artifact but as a genre. When you buy an artifact like a chair, you can use the same chair repeatedly. Artifacts whose main purpose is to embody information, though, are different: much of their value goes away after you use them once. But your life is probably organized in cycles. You will probably need other informational artifacts of the same general sort in the future, and so you will probably obtain a steady stream of them from the same source. This, as I have explained in TNO 2(11), is the purpose of designing genres. The WSJ's front page is a genre in this sense. Each of article, long or short or tiny, also instantiates a genre in its own right. The overall structure of the newspaper, and the internal structure of each article, fit into certain kinds of activities. This "fit" has several aspects, one for each aspect of the embodied activity of reading the newspaper: goals, institutional relationships, perceptual affordances, properties of the paper, arms and hands, bottom lines versus details, reportage versus opinion, and so on.
On this analysis, the key to good hyperlinking is not necessarily a detailed summary, though summaries are often useful. The key to good hyperlinking is design that fits into the reader's routine activities. If the genre includes stable relationships among its parts then the reader can form stable expectations and incorporate these expectations into routines.
The problem with Web pages is that they do not have enough design conventions. Except in unusual cases, a successful Web site will need to fit into a user's routine ways of life, either creating a new set of stable expectations or drawing upon expectations that users bring from their interactions with other Web sites or other media. This means that Web site designers need to ask themselves many questions about their users and their users' lives. I've listed some of these questions in TNO 2(11). One such question is whether the materials are intended for users who use such materials regularly as part of a routine, or for users who will only use those materials once.
Many other problems will have to get sorted out along the way. For example right now it's too hard to tell how a Web page has changed since the last time you visited it. Web pages that are organized as regular publications can appear in entirely fresh "issues" on a regular basis. But what about the nebulous middle ground of "living documents" that just change whenever the designer wants to change them? If the Web server knows who you are then maybe it can synthesize a page that reflects what has changed since the last time you visited. Or maybe not. In any case, we need better conventions than NEW! icons on bulleted hyperlinks. I don't think that these problems can be solved in a completely general way. Each solution will depend on the uses people have for the pages and the genres that make pages useful by supporting stable expectations about them.
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Libraries and communities.
The Internet allows us to define library work on two distinct levels: the individual patron and the patron community. "Community" is obviously a heavily loaded term, but here it refers to a set of people who occupy analogous locations in society -- or, put simply, people who have something important in common. This approach has several virtues. It encourages us to take a person's social identities and roles into account when analyzing their information needs. It reminds us that the center of mass of people's lives is located somewhere outside the library, in the relatively stable pattern of relationships within which they negotiate their way in the world. And it provides us a way of imagining a collective patron: an active, self-conscious social group, whether formally organized or not, as the beneficiary of librarians' assistance.
The hard part is translating these concerns into design. Once librarians do conceptualize their patrons' needs in this broader way, how can they shape the evolution of digital libraries in order to support the broadest conception of the work of librarians and patrons alike? Do the necessary design strategies have consequences for basic architectural decisions -- including decisions that might already have been made for some systems? And how can these strategies be translated into a technical agenda and argued for in ways that win arguments in a technical domain? These questions certainly seem important, and it is quite possible that they are urgent as well.
To answer these questions, it would seem important to know more about how communities use information. In particular it would seem important to develop analytical categories that let us talk about the uses of information in community members' lives. A variety of existing intellectual traditions provide useful hints in this direction, ranging from cultural and linguistic anthropology to symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology to activity theory. To provide some concrete sense of what it would be like to open up these questions in a powerful way, I want to briefly discuss a particular theoretical trend, namely genre theory. A genre, as we all know, is a relatively stable and expectable form of communication. Genres of documents such as research articles, subpoenas, menus, and Interstate Highway signs embody complex relationships between the people who create them and the people who use them.
In particular, these genres embody certain strategies of their creators, and they fit into certain activities of their users. The activities of writing and reading research articles, for example -- I take the case from Chuck Bazerman's book "Shaping Written Knowledge" -- are typified and orderly; they fit into the social system and the daily routines and the career trajectories of the research community. When a researcher "needs information", the "thing" that they need isn't just "information" as a generic stuff. Rather, their "need" is something defined within the categories of that particular community. These "needs" are qualitatively different -- defined in different terms -- from the needs that come up in the institutionally organized lives of stamp collectors or political pundits or high school biology teachers or entrepreneurs.
It seems to me that a central opportunity and challenge of digital librarianship is comprehending, valuing, and supporting the qualitatively distinct kinds of needs that arise within different communities. How can tools be fashioned that are responsive to, for example, an entrepreneur's needs -- tools whose design allows them to fit into the practical activities of actual entrepreneurs' lives? And I think it's important to frame this question in a broad enough way. It is a commonplace that a networked society allows for the strengthening of ties based on commonality of interest, so that "communities" in our sense of the term can engage in collective thinking, collective working, collective organizing, and both old and new forms of mutual assistance. The tools that digital librarians can provide will only be useful if they are useful in that context -- the context of a community's collective life as organized through mailing lists, conferences, newsletters, social networks, traveling consultants, issue campaigns, rumors, parties, and personal correspondence.
These might seem like great demands -- adapting the tools of digital information access to the qualitatively diverse needs of thousands upon thousands of different communities, each with its own categories and customs and geographic distributions and skills and typified forms of activity. The good news is that a networked society also provides the means to address these diverse needs. The future of librarianship, I want to suggest, involves *the collective work of networked librarians to support the collective lives of networked communities*. Digital library systems will enable this radically new style of librarianship if they support three crucial functionalities:
* building indexing and retrieval tools that can take account of the meaningful formal features of diverse genres of materials in diverse media
* permitting distributed groups of library professionals to develop tools for particular communities by building upon a common substrate through the assembly of object-oriented toolkits
* integrating digital information resources with the collective lives of communities, for example through mailing lists and community-specific computational resources maintained by professional societies and the like
Librarians have always adapted their methods and resources to the needs of a diverse patron community. The networked society, though, both enables and requires us to throw this active adaptation to diversity into high gear. A significant danger, I believe, is that emerging digital library architectures will embody a one-size-fits-all philosophy, or else analysis on the level only of tailoring of interfaces to the preferences of individuals. Only once we study and appreciate the profound qualitative diversity of communities' collective lives, genres of documents, and occasions for using these documents in routine typified activities will we be in a position to design information system architectures that are truly responsive to social needs.
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Advice for liberals.
My liberal friends need a lot of help right now. Many of them are living in the past, fighting a different decade's fights. Getting hammered has its advantages, though, and one of them is that it clears the ground for rebuilding. Much of the problem is simply realizing that there's a problem, and that's the starting point for some advice that I've been formulating and reformulating for years now of reading and talking to people:
(1) Wake up. Something is happening and you don't know what it is. Accept that you are getting hosed, and that things are going to get much worse from your perspective before they get much better. Forget about implementing any more of your policy agenda for the foreseeable future. Concentrate on defending what's worth defending, abandoning the rest, and getting used to being the opposition. Yes, the polls look good for Bill Clinton now. But he's selling you down the river. And presidential polls have little to do with the district-by-district shifts that determine the structure of Congress. You simply must face the fact that you are losing the South, which is at least one quarter of your coalition.
(2) Read conservative publications, lots of them, and regularly. Don't just shake your head and say "we know what's wrong with that", because I'll bet that you actually don't. You might start with Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom". Subscribe to Policy Review, Christian America, and The Standard. Read an anthology of P. J. O'Rourke's humor columns and get used to the idea that you are being mocked. When you're ready for the really heavy stuff, read a journal called "Heterodoxy", which focuses on the academic left. You will feel a powerful temptation to blow these people off as nuts. Resist -- what matters is whether the ideas are useful in assembling a new coalition or fragmenting yours. Instead, internalize the arguments, admit to the grains of truth they often contain, and learn not to present such a big target.
(3) Get beyond identity politics. Theories of marginality really are self-fulfilling prophesies. Some people really are divisive. A focus on words and symbols, beyond a certain point, really does draw your attention away from the actual things. Restore your focus on the skills and processes of empowerment, articulating ideologies that forge inclusive coalitions based on democratic values. You may think you're doing this, but you're not. Attack your enemies, not your friends.
(4) Refuse to be stereotyped. Pay attention to the explosion of new stereotypes aimed at your allies ("environmental wackos", for example). Constantly enumerate the stereotypes and identify them for what they are. Note that they are not principally the racial and sexual stereotypes of olden days. Assertively use the media to teach people to recognize the rhetorical devices of stereotyping and the forms of public relations work that depend on stereotyping, and use real, current examples.
(5) Do vastly more opposition research. The fact is, the right has a better mastery of the art of politics than you. Stop dismissing them as stupid, backward, oblivious, hate-driven, or conspiratorial. Some people do, of course, have any combination of those qualities. But you'll blind yourself so long as you stereotype your whole opposition in those terms. The fact is, they understand you a whole lot better than you understand them. The main reason they are winning is that they have read you and listened to you and found real weaknesses in your accustomed modes of argument. You need to do the same for them. This will take time, and it will not be fun.
(6) Stop surrendering powerful words such as family, nation, truth, science, tradition, religion, merit, responsibility, and character. If your opponents have given these words false meanings, persistently restore their true meanings. That is to say, contest the signifiers. Use the words! Forget the whole strategy of the counterculture; be the culture instead. Repeatedly say things like: children need families; crime is bad; our country has many positive traditions; science and technology contribute much that is beneficial; people are responsible for what they do. Use the words right and wrong, true and false, good and bad.
(7) Train many more activists. Teach them organizing skills, media skills, basic listening skills, and coalition-building. Build a much better infrastructure to support your activists, connect them to one another, and supply them with tactics and arguments. Build networks to recruit activists, especially in churches and on college campuses, and then use these networks to help activists develop their skills and projects. If you're already doing this, do much more of it. Yes, this will probably require you to divert resources from putting out fires in the short term, but you'll have no future unless you invest in it now.
(8) Build your network of intellectuals. Insist that your think tank people produce their materials in a form that activists can use -- no more long reports that sit on shelves. Direct funding to those organizations that formulate clear, useful, tested messages backed up by a steady stream of reliable facts -- and reevaluate funding for the others. Sustain frequent, substantive contacts, based on equality, between activists and sympathetic academics. Tell the academics who express themselves in flamboyant intellectual codes to imagine what they'll sound like quoted selectively in the newspaper. Build and sustain new media that provide channels of communication between intellectuals and activists, and among activists themselves.
(9) Read the Bible if you don't already. Pretend that it's the Middle Ages and that all political arguments must be couched in theological terms. Maybe that's not quite true yet, but by the time you catch up it will be. Commence historical study of the original transition to a secular culture, to help everyone recall why this once seemed like a good idea. Don't beat up on religion -- beat up on political abuse of religion. When the right presents Bosnia as an example of multiculturalism, present both Bosnia and Northern Ireland as examples of religion in the public square. Spirituality is primarily a liberal force, even when -- especially when -- it is coupled with a strong ethic of personal responsibility.
(10) Learn and teach logical argument, clear writing, and critical awareness of grammar and rhetoric. Forget the postmodernism. Draw public attention to illogical arguments right away, and I mean instantly. Don't just let them slide. Once they become part of the culture, it will take two generations to undo them.
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Wish list.
The street numbers of homes and businesses are usually not very well marked. Looking for a given street address while driving a car is therefore frequently dangerous. This may seem like a petty thing, but it really bothers me and it's interesting (it turns out) to think about. Consequently, I wish for a device in my car, perhaps attached to the dashboard just above the steering wheel, that tells me which street numbers can be found to my left and right. This device might use some sort of simple digital wireless protocol to talk to other devices mounted alongside the street, or else it could use GPS or some other positioning scheme together with a digital map of streets and numbers. In a simple form, the display could look like this:
+-----------------+ | | | | 319 | 320 | | V | +-----------------+
meaning "number 319 is to your left, number 320 is to your right, and the street numbers are decreasing in the direction that you are driving". More elaborate displays could include additional information such as the street name, cross streets in front and behind, current compass heading, speed limit, and distance from a desired destination.
Why are street numbers so hard to see? Maybe because visible street numbers are a public good. Having provided visible street numbers to one passer-by, you've made your street numbers visible to everyone. People can use your street numbers to find addresses besides your own. And if my house is number 207, it is only in my interest to make my number visible enough for my own guests to find, and not for people who are looking for other houses on the street. In many cases these may be the same, but in other cases they may not be. Few shopping centers, for example, seem interested in helping people find them by street address. And some people just don't have guests, or they give directions by the color of the house and expressions like "third house on the left with the Chevy on blocks in the driveway".
Another problem is that street numbers are most often attached to houses by builders, who sell houses based on how they look to people who haven't bought them yet. Such people usually have much bigger problems than discerning whether the street numbers will be visible from the street at night. Much better if the street numbers aren't too obtrusive, marring the overall vista of the house. Then once the house is purchased, more things happen. Plants often grow up covering the street numbers. Guests to the house may be reticent to complain about the trouble they had in finding it. And even if one house does get more visible street numbers, it will probably necessarily break the convention on that street for where those numbers are located and what they look like.
For all of these reasons, visible street numbers really should be provided collectively. The town I grew up in actually paid for street numbers to be painted on the curb in front of every house, on the grounds that drivers of emergency vehicles needed to find them quickly. But this only worked because cars were not parked densely along the curbs in most parts of that town. Would it be worth setting up a street number grid in the wireless ether so that emergency vehicles can find storefronts? Would delivery services like FedEx be willing to pay part of the bill, provided other other competing services don't get a free ride? And then maybe companies wanting to offer value-added services based on that grid would pay some percentage to maintain or extend it.
A larger theme is that the whole world is becoming encased in all kinds of digital representations. Every person, place, and thing of any interest to any powerful organization is developing what I've called a "digital shadow" that tracks it in real time. The maintenance of digital shadows ultimately requires a coordinate system to be laid out upon the whole world. That is what GPS is about, but it is also happening in thousands of other ways as well. Perhaps all of those thousands of representational practices will converge and we will all be knitted into a global representational grid. This will have many advantages, particularly when regular people consume representations, as in my thought-example here. But it will have many disadvantages as well, particularly when others consume representations of us. We do have time to make choices about this prospect.
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This month's recommendations.
Mary Karr, The Liars' Club: A Memoir, New York: Penguin, 1996. The hype when this book first appeared was deafening, so I waited for the paperback to read it. I read it just in time, it turns out, because the hype has gotten even louder. The New York Times Sunday Magazine, for example, just reported that "the age of the literary memoir is now" and presented Mary Karr as Exhibit A. For once, I can report, the hype is right. (I suppose that means that it isn't even hype, if "hype" is short for "hyperbole" as I have always supposed.) "The Liar's Club" is the true story of Mary Karr's spectacularly dysfunctional childhood in a swampy Nowheresville in east Texas. Her stories are so amazing that I don't think they would work as fiction. She recounts with shattering clarity the perceptions and feelings of a little girl trying to figure out why her mother is so crazy. It's all in east Texas dialect, with sentences such as "I shit you not" that produce great incongruity when she offers her occasional comment in the voice of the grown-up writing teacher that she has somehow become. And a fine teacher I imagine she must be.
Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States, New York: Guilford Press, 1995. American liberals who find it convenient to imagine the right as a batch of marginal nutcases or a monolithic machinery of fascists will benefit from this discerning history of right-wing social movements and their relationship with the government. Diamond traces the emergence in the 1950's of the "fusionist" strategy that somehow unites a powerful coalition of authoritarian and libertarian conservatives today, while also tracing the formation and decline of the more extreme racist branches of the right. Her book is no substitute for reading the original texts and ongoing published debates in the conservative movement, but it does provide some necessary context for them.
Gordon Cook, National Information Infrastructure: The Dark Side in Washington State. This is a special edition of a newsletter called The Cook Report on Internet-NREN, which is perhaps the best independent voice on directions and implications of Internet architecture. This particular issue is, to my knowledge, the only study of the full range of privacy-threatening technologies under development in a single geographic area. Although the details are specific to Washington State, most of the trends that Cook finds there can also be found throughout the United States. Cook's newsletter is one of those high-price, low-circulation publications that everyone hopes will become viable on a lower- priced, higher-circulation basis once such publications can be distributed effectively on the Internet. Which is to say, it's not cheap. The writing is not exactly polished, and much of the book-length report is taken verbatim from dozens of interviews that he conducted over a few weeks. Still, it's a unique and important accomplishment. For details on ordering the report or subscribing to the newsletter, see the Cook Report Web page at http://pobox.com/cook/
Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, New York: Harper Business, 1991. I adore this whole genre -- book-length business cards by management consultants conveying their astounding vision and what they'll do for you once you hire them. They're written by extremely persuasive people who have had a lot of experience refining their sales pitches, and as a result they are incredibly compelling. When I get done reading one of them, I feel this appalling urge to get myself out there and conquer some markets. They have an interesting property that sociologists have noticed in more organized professions: the knowledge they contain is formalized just enough to be convincing and comprehensible, but it's not formalized enough that simply reading the book actually qualifies you to do any of it. (See, for example, Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions, University of Chicago Press, 1988.) Moore's particular book is concerned with the life cycle of a high-technology product. He observes that many companies fail to grow beyond their first few customers. The reason, he argues, is that high-tech markets are divided into innovators (the people who love gadgets and will buy anything cool), early adopters (the people who are strongly committed to a vision and are willing to buy and unproven product that supports that vision), the early majority (the people who want new stuff but want it to come in a safe, reliable package), the late majority (the people who don't want to buy new stuff, but will buy it anyway once everyone else has), and the laggards (who actively resist buying new stuff). If you have cool technology and a vision to back it up, he says, then it's easy to get your first few customers. Then comes the great chasm: to sell to the early adopters, you need a totally focused, totally disciplined strategy. That strategy is to pick a niche market that's big enough to provide a year's revenue, connected enough to provide a beachhead into much bigger markets, but small enough that you can concentrate a lot of energy on providing just what they need, in the total tailored package that they need it. This explains a lot, and I was impressed with the analytical rigor with which Moore explains it -- little wonder that the book has been so influential in the industry. Even though these books encode the self-interested viewpoint of a consulting firm, I find it useful to see what follows if we treat them as descriptions of reality. I am struck, for example, at the gate-keeping function of the innovators -- those gadget- oriented people who like the technology for its own sake and have the resources to buy one of everything they find cool. What if the world badly needs various gadgets that are deeply useful but not deeply cool? I am also struck at the uselessness of classical economics for analyzing the matters that Moore writes about. He is heavily focused on the construction of meaning around these systems. His market analysis is psychographic all the way: segmenting people based on how they think, and setting strategy in a way that provides each segment with the facts and stories they need to make decisions according to their own particular style. The point of selling to innovators, for example, is not just that they provide easy money, but that they provide useful technical feedback to the company and valuable referrals to the early adopters who respect their technical sense. Likewise, much of the purpose of a niche strategy in approaching the early majority is that you need to be selling to people who talk to one another so that you can create a clearly defined, sustained "buzz" that positions your product to the exclusion of others. In the end, of course, all books like this one, however compelling, are only single-factor theories. Heaven knows how each of these crucial single factors interacts with the crucial single factors described in all of the other books. Everything sure seems clear-cut and invigorating from that kind of distance these books provide, but let's keep in mind that the day-to-day reality of business is much closer to "Dilbert".
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Follow-up.
Since I ragged on The Red Herring in TNO 2(12), it has gotten somewhat better. Its newsstand price has come down by a third and its copy, now written in large part by venture capitalists, is less self-serving, or at least less obviously self-serving, than it had been. Meanwhile, a friend pointed out that the magazine's title is not completely meaningless; Silicon Valley types refer to a preliminary prospectus for a start-up company as a "red herring", after a section of legalese that must appear in red type to scare away the naive. Still, I really do not understand the enthusiasm that TRH stirs up among some in Silicon Valley. It's as if the computer industry has fully internalized the culture and language of hype, so that the very idea of real professional journalism cannot even be expressed. Very strange.
In response to my wish for a universal event calendar in TNO
3(4), Steven Hodas
My article on libraries in TNO 3(4) elicited two primary types
of objections. The first, probably best articulated by Larry
Etkin
The second common objection to my article, well articulated by
Paul Doty
Web picks.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa has its home page at http://www.truth.org.za
Jamie Boyle from American University has written a comprehensive
refutation, signed by scores of law professors, of the bogus
legal claims that the Dept of Commerce has circulated in support
of its famous "White Paper" position on electronic copyrights.
David Rothman
The Computer Underground Digest is a just-about-weekly digest of current information on Internet-based political activism. Subscription information and archives of past issues can be found on the Web at http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/
Paul Edwards
http://vrx.net/usenet/thesis/hardy.html http://www.cs.columbia.edu:80/~hauben/netbook/ch.6_untold_arpa.html http://www.ccit.arizona.edu/internet/inthist.html http://www.uvc.com/gbell/promo.html
http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~recall/sts161/ (uses Netscape 2.0 frames)
Paul's valuable institutional history of artificial intelligence, "The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America", has just appeared from MIT Press.
The US Department of Education has published a series of fairly useful White Papers on "The Future of Networking Technologies for Learning" at http://www.ed.gov/Technology/Futures/toc.html
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