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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 11 NOVEMBER 1994
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This month: The Internet lingua franca Users' groups as collective action A bunch of new network resources
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Welcome to TNO 1(11).
This month's issue is mostly taken up by a longish article by the editor about computer users' groups as a form of collective action. It is widely held that knowledge about computers will increasingly influence both economic success and political participation, so we had better understand the social dynamics of technical knowledge. I can't offer any finished conclusions, but I can suggest some good questions to ask. What kinds of social networks does computer knowledge circulate in? How are these networks going to evolve as computers become more pervasive? How will they be structured in gender and class terms? Perhaps most importantly, will they provide the basis for democratic action in relation to the larger social implications of computing? I briefly consider two types of such networks: users' groups and organizations that are considering getting networked.
A brief article describes a useful message I got from someone on the net who had trouble following some uncommon vocabulary in a how-to I wrote for the net community. Will we evolve an Internet dialect of English, shorn of local slang and extended with network jargon? Should we want to?
The "follow-up" section discusses the extensive correspondence provoked by my article about the gendered metaphors of network use in TNO 1(10). It also provides instructions for fetching the text of Karen Coyle's talk at the 1994 CPSR Annual Meeting (which I had mentioned in my article) and describes several new sources of information on the net, most of them on the World Wide Web.
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Writing in English for a global audience.
Long-time TNO readers will be aware of a twenty-page guide to professional networking that I wrote, entitled "Networking on the Network". (See TNO 1(1).)
This is the most ambitious of several continuously revised essays I've written about professional skills. My strategy is to write out my own ideas, send them out far and wide on the net, invite everyone's comments, keep revising my copy, and make sure that every copy I send out includes both a date and instructions for fetching the current version. When I get good comments, I save them up and then make a batch of revisions. Sometimes people (on or off the net) will suggest extra topics and I'll go back and add more paragraphs here and there. Over time the essay has gotten pretty comprehensive, although it is still weak on the larger concepts involved in organizing things.
I've gotten several comments from people outside the United States, for example telling me about cultural differences. Most recently I received a very helpful message from a student in Germany listing English words and expressions that he had difficulty understanding. I thought these lists might be of interest because so many people on the net are now writing for a global audience, including many people who are still learning English or who speak different dialects of English:
"Here is the list of all the words which are either slang or were not shown in my (rather large) dictionary): cuteness, to track down, space cadet, jerk, to pass the salt, politicking, prune back, to sweat it, and hype. I add a list with words I was very unfamiliar with. Other foreigners might have the same problem: illicit, mundane, to fawn, reciprocate, supplication, insidious, revile, injunction, inadvertently, admonish, ledger, relentless, and millennial."
So what do you think? I can easily imagine someone in Germany having difficulty with these expressions. Should I rewrite my essay to remove all of them? It wouldn't be that difficult. I'm inclined to change about half of the words (especially space cadet and jerk) and leave the others. Some are difficult cases because I don't know how culturally specific they are (cuteness, sweat it, hype, to fawn). Others are easily enough replaced with simpler synonyms (to track down, illicit, reciprocate, supplication, inadvertently, etc) and still others seem difficult to replace since their meaning is fairly specific (insidious, relentless, and millennial).
I wonder if we can negotiate an Internet lingua franca that is based on English but that does not include a lot of slang, local cultural references, and difficult words. Do we even want to do this? Certainly we want to be aware of whether people can understand us. At the same time, we don't want to be constrained to an inexpressive subset of the language, much less submit to any sort of centralized language authority. That's not how the net works. But I do think that the request for simpler language and less local slang is a reasonable one.
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New roles for user groups.
A few weeks ago I got a call from someone who runs a human rights group for her county. In practice they are a network of human rights activists around their county, and they would like to get themselves on the net. Some of their reasons for this are organizational: it's easier to stay coordinated if you have efficient communications. But one of their reasons is more specific: one of their jobs is to respond quickly to hate crimes. If someone gets beaten up in a particular locality, they need to get the word out quickly to the people who can contribute something helpful: background information about that particular category of hate crime, liaison to the press, pointers to support services for survivors, connections to attorneys who can assist the survivor through the legal process, and so on.
I get a lot of calls like this. The calls fall roughly into two categories, according to the caller's principal perceived need: either technical support or political advice. I usually cannot provide either of these things in sufficient quantities, but I've got enough of a Rolodex by now to pass the people along to others who might be able to help. I've done zero follow-up, though, so I have no idea whether my pointers have actually been helpful. In any event, these calls have set me to thinking about several important things, all of which pertain to the very complex and increasingly consequential sociology of knowledge about computer networking.
Many people think of computer use as a solitary activity, in part because of the stereotype of the asocial technical nerd. But computer use has always been a highly social matter, and in recent years it has gotten much more so. Most computer users aren't computer people, yet they need continuing access to computer expertise to keep their computers working. In organizational settings this access is organized through highly ritualized relationships between a user community and a technical staff, often with software to help manage the steady stream of requests for assistance.
Workplaces also have a variety of other social mechanisms for circulating computer knowledge. One important roles is played by the advanced users who make a point of keeping their technical knowledge current; these people often provide a much-needed communication channel between ordinary users and experts, as well as providing informal mentorship to the apprentice users around them. (See the wonderful paper by Bonnie Nardi and Jim Miller, Twinkling lights and nested loops: Distributed problem solving and spreadsheet development, in Saul Greenberg, ed, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware, London: Academic Press, 1991.)
But as computer use spreads into other settings, like people's homes, small organizations, and poor nonprofits, new social organizations of computer knowledge start to arise. Part of the democratization of the computer is the democratization of computer knowledge, which increasingly becomes community property in the same way that automobile knowledge is community property. Some people know a lot more about either computers or automobiles than others, and people go to great lengths to enter into stable relationships of trust with others who possess this knowledge. Going to an unfamiliar computer/automobile repair shop selected from the yellow pages is a notoriously dangerous matter, so it's important to have a neighborhood mechanic who needs to tend to his reputation, a brother-in-law who fixes cars on the weekends, a quick night-school repair course to learn the basics, books that explain how to avoid getting ripped off, and so forth.
This distribution of computer/automobile knowledge through the community is obviously not entirely equitable. Both kinds of knowledge are, of course, distinctly identified as belonging to men, and the circulation of this knowledge occurs principally in strongly homosocial settings. People who have weak social networks are more apt to suffer -- one consequence of this is that middle-class people whose social networks are structured vocationally tend (as a rough generalization) to have less access to automobile knowledge than do working people whose social networks are structured through family and local geography. It will be interesting to see whether computer knowledge develops similar class-based dynamics as well.
Perhaps the most important site for the circulation of computer knowledge in communities is the local users' group. Most cities have dozens or even hundreds of users' groups, mostly defined in relation to particular languages, operating systems, applications packages, and so forth. Many Macintosh users' groups have hundreds or thousands of members. These groups might organize a monthly meeting where people can go to get free software, ask technical questions, advertise their services, hear presentations by vendors, or do some personal and professional networking.
Users' groups are fueled by a fascinating confluence of different interests, among which the most fundamental is computer users' need for technical information. Some people, like professional computer consultants, have a powerful interest in keeping their knowledge up-to-date, a task made incredibly difficult by the extreme speed with which the computer market evolves. Other people, like individual computer hobbyists, may not care very deeply about computers as such, being drawn to such organizations by particular contingencies that arise in the course of doing something else -- "whenever I do such-and-such, the computer bombs out with such-and-such a message; what's going on and how do I fix it?".
Users' groups are an interesting example of collective action, and it is important to understand their properties as such. It is widely held that access to technical information will be a crucial determinant of both economic survival and democratic political participation in the future; if so, the dynamics of users' groups will strongly condition the future development of society. Not having conducted formal research on these matters, I don't want to speculate about them. I would, however, like to suggest some of the ways that users' groups might (or might not) become increasingly important in the future.
Recall the anecdote I told at the outset about the person who is trying to get her (social) network of human rights activists on some (technical) network to facilitate their work. One immediate problem is critical mass: it's no use getting a few people on the net unless the people they need to communicate with are also on the net. The social geography of network-use is a complex matter that warrants more investigation; the boundary between the networked world and the unnetworked world, for example, runs clean through the middle of my own department, and this makes for tensions about the meanings of technology and information in my professional life.
But for now let's look at the question in an idealized way, starting with a community of people who are currently not networked. Most likely the idea of becoming networked will not occur to everyone simultaneously. Rather, particular individuals will get enthusiastic about the net and will set about persuading the others to join in. Their challenge will be to convince a critical mass of people that getting on the net is worth it for them. Maybe the necessary critical mass decides that the net holds benefits for themselves individually, without regard to the community's workings. Or maybe not, in which case everyone will be waiting for everyone else to get on the net, and it will be necessary to make some kind of collective decision to get networked.
This is a nuisance, but it is also an opportunity. Let's say that a certain nonprofit organization has made a decision to get all of its staff and activists on the net, and that we're talking about a couple hundred people. This organization is now in a strong bargaining position with the various network service providers. What might they want in exchange for their collective business? A group discount? A special area set up on the service for private discussions among people associated with the organization? A customized interface (e.g., menu entries) for those users? Storage of various files? Support for a listserv-like distribution list for information from the organization? Support for distinctive forms of interaction in that group (e.g., instantly displaying notification of certain kinds of alerts)? I don't know what negotiating agenda would actually be most helpful, but various groups could use the net to compare notes about what they've asked for, what they've gotten, what they've been told is possible and impossible, and so forth.
A larger question here pertains to the future evolution in the market for network access provision. The conventional wisdom, subscribed to by America Online and Microsoft for example, holds that the future lies in providers that offer access to the widest possible range of services within a common interface. (See for example the very interesting article on "marketspaces" in the current (I think it's Oct/Nov/Dec 1994) issue of Harvard Business Review.) This tends to assume, though, that customers will approach these services as individuals. Another possibility is that users will frequently organize themselves into groups, for example through the organizations they work for or belong to. In this case, it will be important for service providers to customize their offerings to the needs of particular groups. In particular, it will be important for the service providers to understand how computer networking is part of the larger lives of these groups, and for the groups themselves to understand these same things well enough to ask for whatever arrangements will best benefit them.
I've been speaking just now of specific organizations rather than users' groups more generally. But it would not surprise me to see users' groups become more like users' unions, organizing to exert pressure for better support services, more useful features, new releases that actually fix bugs, greater customizability, and other things. This sort of thing already happens in an implicit way through the social networking of advanced users who develop a consensus among themselves about the virtues and vices of new products and system releases. Wise companies keep their ear to the ground for this type of discussion, sometimes by monitoring e-mail discussion lists about their products. As more and more users join network discussion lists, this effect will intensify. The next step is to move beyond sharing opinions to actually organizing -- involving stakeholders, developing agendas, taking action to back up their positions, and so forth. The necessary infrastructure for these activities largely exists already; what is needed is the cultural background of advanced social skills that this kind of democratic action requires.
It may seem silly to imagine groups of Microsoft Windows users acting like protest groups and presenting demands. This sense of silliness derives partly from our cultural images of protest, which at least in my own country derive largely from strikes and anti-war protests. Most likely the organizing of users' groups will employ different cultural forms. After all, who needs to carry picket signs around when the relevant public is on e-mail? The sense of silliness may also derive from our stereotype of the details of computer functionality as socially and politically unimportant. It's definitely infuriating to get thrown into DOS with an inscrutable error message, but who has time to organize a revolution about it?
But as computers become more pervasive in our daily lives, their workings will have increasingly profound consequences. Imagine what the world will be like once the so-called Intelligent Transportation Systems (which were called Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Systems until the folks in charge realized that the latter phrase was bad public relations) become widespread. These are systems that employ computer networking to collect road tolls, distribute traffic information, enforce regulations on commercial vehicles, and ultimately provide for fully automated cars driving in convoys down the fast lane. The workings of these systems will someday soon become a matter of urgent concern to pretty much everyone. It is far from decided, for example, how (and even whether) privacy will be protected in such systems. Maybe they will maintain digital records of everywhere you've driven in the last year, and maybe these records will be susceptible to secondary use by marketers or to subpoena by the authorities. The users' groups for such systems will have an serious interest in influencing their operation. Some of this influence can be exercised by individuals simply refusing to participate. But this will probably be about as easy as refusing to carry a credit card. Stronger measures will be needed, and well-organized ITS users' groups might provide the only practical recourse.
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This month's recommendations.
Vicki Smith, Managing in the Corporate Interest: Control and Resistance in an American Bank, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. A rare and fascinating study of the internal politics of a large American bank that is undergoing all kinds of morale-crushing restructuring. Many restructuring programs such as "reengineering" are aimed at getting rid of middle managers, and the advertisements for these programs routinely portray middle managers as obstructionists who, it is said, "resist change". Smith, though, portrays in some detail the impossible situation that middle managers in this bank were being put in, as well as their heroic attempts to maintain some semblance of social cohesion and morale among their staffs as the company pressed endlessly for quantitative measurements and arbitrary speedups. Of particular interest is Smith's detailed account of a training session for these managers in which the new interpersonal order of the company was defined. These trainers, in the best Human Potential Movement tradition, steadfastly refused to acknowledge the structural and logical contradictions in the company's program, employing a wide variety of rhetorical and interactional devices to reframe any problems in terms of individual psychological shortcomings.
Richard A. Posner, The Economics of Justice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Most Americans have little understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of the harsh new order that has arisen in Washington, DC. But it's time to start studying up. Richard Posner is the foremost exponent of something called "Law and Economics" whose leading assumption is that the purpose of the law is to maximize economic efficiency (as opposed, say, to ensuring justice). He writes a great deal (for example, check out his most recent book, "Sex and Reason", Harvard University Press, 1992). Those interested in the future of privacy policy will definitely want to read the relevant chapters of "The Economics of Justice". They consist of a rambling set of ex cathedra statements about legal concepts of privacy. Although certainly not dumb, he is generally dismissive of arguments for the protection of privacy. For example, he rebuts the common argument that lack of privacy would encourage an oppressive and bland conformity to public norms, Posner finds no problem with the notion that everyone would have to behave themselves. As large private interests develop behind pervasive electronically mediated invasions of privacy, we can expect such arguments to become much more commonplace. As a result, it is important to be ready for them.
Nathan Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. A set of really smart papers about economic aspects of technology based on detailed qualitative investigations of particular technological industries. He points to numerous important and frequently overlooked phenomena such as the large amount of interlocking, overlapping, and cross-fertilization among these industries. He is opposed to simplistic single-factor theories that derive everything from the isolated properties of machines or markets or societies. He is also a careful scholar and an interesting writer.
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Follow-up.
Many people commented on the article in TNO 1(10) entitled "Is
the net a wilderness or a library?". My favorite comment was
the observation by Ilene Frank
A number of people took strong objection to that article. One kind of objection accused the article of sexism. I'm afraid that I have not been able to determine the precise grounds on which this charge is made. One possibility is that I was taken to approve of various stereotypes about men and women, for example about exploration having historically been constructed as a masculine activity, or to subscribe to those stereotypes myself. But I don't wish to make any statements about what activities men and women (or boys and girls) are inherently, naturally good or bad at. I'm just interested in the gendered meanings that have been attached to certain activities, and in the role of these meanings in influencing who will have access to those activities in the present day. It's very hard to measure the magnitude of this influence, given its subtlety and the wide variety of other factors that are also in play. It's a conjecture.
Other people seem to have interpreted my article as a call for librarians to be installed as the Internet Information Police, making sure that everyone organizes their information in the approved way. I would certainly never approve of such a thing, and I very much doubt that it could even happen. If people want to make information available on the net in a disorganized or specialized or eccentric way then that's their perfect right. My point is simply that we shouldn't claim that the net makes vast amounts of information accessible unless the hard librarian's work has been done to order the stuff so that people can find it.
Several people told me about interesting projects that partly answer my request for tools to let people help one another find information in things like gopherspace and the web:
Raul Deluth Miller
Margaret Riel
Jean Armour Polly
I've heard about other projects as well. It would be great if someone (not me) collected them into a guide, if only to provide inspiration for people making choices about network technology right now. It would be especially great if someone could conduct interviews with people who run on-line help services to see what their experiences have been, and what else might be done.
Speaking of librarians, you really must check out the amazing set of Internet guides available by aiming your gopher or WWW client at una.hh.lib.umich.edu (i.e., gopher://una.hh.lib.umich.edu/ ), then select "inetdirsstacks". For example, an amazing guide to Internet resources for non-profit organizations available at gopher://una.hh.lib.umich.edu/00/inetdirsstacks/pubservice%3atruxnes
Long-time RRE readers know about my interest in something called "issues management", which is a profession that promises to rationalize companies' attempts to influence public opinion and policy-making by integrating aspects of research, lobbying, public relations, and so forth. Well, the other day I got an advertisement in the mail from "Issue Action Publications Inc" (207 Loudoun Street SE, Leesburg VA 22075, USA) for something called "The Critical Issues Audit" ($24.95 plus $3 p/h), which promises to guide you through a process of assessing your own company's exposure to potential harm through changes in public opinion. The idea is to make a rational economic choice about whether and how to invest in efforts to prevent public opinion from adversely affecting your company, and in particular what mixture of investments in research, lobbying, etc is optimal for this purpose. If anybody feels like actually spending the money and sending it a report (without, of course, violating anyone's copyright), I'd be pleased to distribute it.
The Institute of Public Policy Studies at the University of Michigan has assembled a Web page on telecommunications. The URL is http://www.ipps.lsa.umich.edu/telecom-info.html
The American Communication Association has set up a good Web guide to on-line resources for communication research. The URL is http://cavern.uark.edu/comminfo/www/ACA.html
Some paleontologists are digging up a dinosaur in Canada and documenting their work on the web. The URL is http://herald.usask.ca/~scottp/scotty/scotty.html
I'm told that a Noam Chomsky web site has been established on the net at http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/usr/tp0x/chomsky.html or you can ftp to ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/user/cap/chomsky/
The US Environmental Protection Agency now has a pretty thorough set of pages on the Web at http://www.epa.gov/
The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is organizing a Special Issue on Communication and the Design of Virtual Environments. See the JCMC announcement at URL http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/annenberg/announce.html
-------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- ```