577 lines
30 KiB
Plaintext
577 lines
30 KiB
Plaintext
From rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Sat Apr 16 11:33:15 1994
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Date: Fri, 15 Apr 1994 19:32:58 -0700
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From: Phil Agre <pagre@weber.ucsd.edu>
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Subject: TNO 1(4)
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
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VOLUME 1, NUMBER 4 APRIL 1994
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Welcome to TNO 1(4).
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This issue of TNO contains two brief articles by the editor.
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The first is an edited version of my comments at CFP'94 about
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the role of advanced networking skills in building a democratic
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culture. The second is a case study of the responsibility of
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network mailing list operators in a world where both well- and
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ill-informed e-mail messages can circle the globe in hours.
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Also included are TNO's regular features. The recommendations
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this month are all high-quality newsletters -- I recommend that
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you subscribe to them, and if you have technical skills then
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I also recommend that you see if they'd like any help getting
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themselves an Internet presence. In general I think it's a good
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idea to help virtuous people and organizations get on the net.
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Networking and democracy.
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[This is an edited version of my comments on the panel that
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Steven Hodas organized at the Fourth Computers, Freedom, and
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Privacy Conference in Chicago in March 1993.]
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Our task today is to understand and shape the tremendous changes
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that 1994 is bringing to the institutions of communication. Not
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only are new forms and media of communication flourishing, but we
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in the United States are also witnessing the most comprehensive
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overhaul of telecommunications regulation since the 1934
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Communications Act.
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It is fitting, then, to turn for guidance to the leading public
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philosopher of that era, John Dewey. Dewey was writing in a time
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when the meaning and practice of democracy were actively debated,
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and when broad segments of society were actively involved
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in shaping the social organization of communication and its
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institutions. "Of all affairs", Dewey said, "communication is
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the most wonderful". (All quotes are from "The Public and Its
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Problems".) People are constantly engaged in shared activities,
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but it is communication that makes a community by putting names
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on things, giving them a public reality, and allowing them
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to be reflected upon and discussed. "Knowledge", Dewey says,
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"is a function of association and communication; it depends
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upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted,
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developed, and sanctioned." Human relationship and human
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communication, in other words, are skills, and these skills must
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be passed down within a culture and must be taught and learned
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if the culture is to maintain its democratic character.
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In fact, Dewey asserts, "The prime condition of a democratically
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organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does
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not yet exist." Democracy is something that must be actively
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built, and we can build it by discovering and teaching the skills
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of human communication. Although these skills are important
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and subtle even in the most non-technological of worlds, I would
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like to suggest that the rapid expansion of computer networking
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provides us with a tremendously important opportunity to reflect
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on human communication and its place in democracy, and to build a
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network culture that provides everyone with the skills necessary
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to act as a fully drawn agent in society.
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The need for such skills is evident to anyone engaged in network
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interactions today. Active listening skills are needed to help
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ensure productive network discussions; conflict resolution skills
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are needed to help avoid flame wars; negotiation skills are
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needed to facilitate local self-regulation of network communities
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as opposed to external law-making; networking skills are needed
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so that people can share their experience and energy with others
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with similar situations and goals; and community-building skills
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are needed so that democracy can operate from the bottom up and
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not be corrupted from the top down.
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I want to briefly describe two experiments in teaching what
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I call "advanced social skills" on the net. The great thing
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about the net is that you can learn advanced social skills even
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if you don't have any basic social skills, since there is little
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need for the kind of clever improvisation required at cocktail
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parties.
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My first experiment in codifying advanced social skills is an
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essay called "Networking on the Network". It's written mainly
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for graduate students, though the underlying ideas apply more
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widely. It's about creating an intellectual community for
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yourself by approaching relevant people, exchanging papers with
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them, and keeping in touchw ith them on the net and elsewhere
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later on. Nobody is born being able to do this, and graduate
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schools' haphazard efforts to teach it help to reproduce the
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social stratification of research communities by giving a special
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advantage to people who grew up in places where such skills were
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actively being practiced. I wrote the first draft of this last
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year, and Peter Neumann kindly mailed it to the four corners of
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the earth through the Risks Digest. Since then I have received
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numerous suggested improvements, including some valuable
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suggestions for people who are not based at elite institutions in
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industrialized countries, but who can nonetheless employ the net
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to engage in dramatically better professional networking than
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they could before.
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Here we see the net playing two roles, as a site for democratic
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communication skills to be practiced, and also as a site for
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those skills to be articulated, written down, and shared with a
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global community. Note that "Networking on the Network" is not
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a manual of etiquette; its central concern is not with preventing
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anti-social behavior, but rather with providing people with the
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tools they need to do something they want to do, namely build
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professional communities for themselves. These tools are not
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just about the net. To the contrary, they place the net in the
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context of a specific set of institutions and their particular
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workings and underlying social logics.
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Why aren't such things written down more often? Sometimes they
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are, though there is little market for the books because so few
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formal courses are taught about them, and because hardly anybody
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is told that such skills exist. Or else these skills are
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disparaged as "politics" and "knowing people" and thus made to
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seem inaccessible or unimportant. But they are neither. I think
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the reason they are so often glossed over is what I call the
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Expert Effect: experts have usually forgotten what it is like to
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be a beginner. That's why manuals for computer systems so often
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fail to address the first questions that beginning users actually
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have. In general, textbooks tend to start with Chapter Three,
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omitting a whole layer of practical skills and tacit social
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understandings of how those skills are embedded in cultures and
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institutions. As a result, the only people who can genuinely
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understand the materials in the textbook are the lucky few
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who have picked up the necessary pre-understandings through
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apprenticeship, or through the heroic cognitive feat of figuring
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it all out from scratch. By writing down these background
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understandings, as best we can anyway, and making them widely
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available, we can give access to a much wider range of people.
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My second experiment was a shorter essay called "The Art of
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Getting Help". This was provoked by complaints about the
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unfortunate practice among some network-enthusiastic teachers of
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telling students to engage in research by posting basic questions
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to listservs and newsgroups. The original impulse is good, but
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what's missing is the skill of asking questions -- the art of
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getting help. I see the need for this skill most painfully in
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the undergraduates I teach, many of whom cannot ask for help
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without feeling as though they are subordinating themselves to
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someone. Some of them are even afraid to ask a librarian for
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help, for fear of asking a stupid question.
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The power relations of conventional education have misled
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these students. The truth, of course, is that needing help is
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an ordinary, routine part of any activity that is not totally
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spoon-fed. Nobody is born knowing, for example, that it helps
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to ask not "can you do this for me?" but rather "how can I do
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this for myself?". (If they can do it for you, they'll probably
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just do it. And if not then you've asked a less threatening
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question.) By writing such things down and circulating them
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widely on the net, I hope to provide students with the experience
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of being competent, resourceful agents in the world, capable of
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finding out what they need and thus capable of finding their own
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way in the world rather than submitting to someone else's.
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These are just two experiments, of course, and many more are
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needed. A few basic ideas about listening, for example, go a
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long way. Likewise a few basic ideas about negotiating, and a
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few basic skills about reaching consensus. What would happen if
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we wrote them down and circulated them widely? Obviously many
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such things have been written down in books, and publicizing
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those books is a good thing to do. But a lot of people are
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specifically interested in communicating on the net, so it
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would be great if all of those ideas could be adapted to network
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use. At the same time, it's important to emphasize that the net
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is not an end in itself, and that all such activities should be
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understand against a broader background, including other media
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and other institutions.
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In conclusion, I see at least two big differences between 1934
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and 1994. In 1934, the culture of democracy was much more vital
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in the United States. This vitality was reflected in the public
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debate of that era, its flowering of popular organizations of
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all types, and in the public-interest model of communications
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that was embedded in the 1934 Communications Act. In 1994, by
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contrast, American democracy is suffering from the top to the
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bottom. The rule of money and pundits in Washington is not a law
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of nature; it is not inevitable. Rather, it fills a vacuum left
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by the decline of democratic culture, a trend caused in part by
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the educational practices that so disempowered by students.
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The second difference, though, is more heartening. We can see
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now, I think, the possibility of a renaissance of democracy
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enabled both by new communications media, most particularly
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computer networks, and by the renewed interest in practical
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communication skills. The skills of using the net to get things
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done in your own life and your own community are also the skills
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of democracy. We can use these skills to rebuild democracy,
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and to organize ourselves around the necessity of a democratic
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definition of the institutions of human communication.
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The Internet public sphere: A case study.
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Regular readers of TNO will be aware that I run a mailing list
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called The Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE) and that I am quite
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interested in the nature and ethics of political action alerts
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on the Internet. Recently I received in my mailbox a message
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raising alarms about an experiment being proposed at the Scripps
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Institute of Oceanography (which, as it happens, is located
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at the same university as I am, although I have never had any
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dealings with them). The basic idea was to put some big speakers
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on the ocean floor, make some loud noises, and measure them at
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great distances. I had previously seen some magazine articles
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reporting concerns that this experiment might harm some fish
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and sea mammals by adding to the already considerable level of
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artificial noise under the ocean. In particular, it has been
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argued that some whales might be deafened, thus preventing them
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from engaging in social life and probably thereby killing them.
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Having read these articles, I passed this message about the SIO
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experiment along to RRE without having read it very well. This
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was probably a mistake. The message, which you can fetch by
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sending a message like:
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To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu
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Subject: archive send whale-flame
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was, whatever the justice of its cause might have been, confused
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in a fairly straightforward way about what a "take" means in the
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arcane language of the bureaucracy of ecological matters. (It
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doesn't just refer to killing a creature, but to affecting it in
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any way.) Now, if RRE were a private, inconsequential mailing
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list then this would not matter. The fact, though, is that
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RRE now has well over 1100 subscribers in 34 countries. (Here,
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by the way, are the country codes: at au be br ca ch cz de dk
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es fi fj fr hu ie il in it jp kr mx nl no nz pt se sg si th tr tw
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uk us za. Does anybody know what "at" and "si" are?) These 1100
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subscribers, moreover, are extremely diverse in their occupations
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and connections, so that something sent out over RRE is capable
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of finding its way to the four corners of the networked world in
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a few hours. The message in question, indeed, was already quite
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widely distributed on the net by the time I encountered it, and
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the issue had already been covered (I am told) on CNN, so that
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the relevant laboratory and agencies were already overwhelmed by
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complaints of varying degrees of reasonableness.
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I received a number of complaints, too, all of them polite and
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some of them lengthy and articulate, about my having forwarded
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this message so widely. I won't provide details of these notes
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or their authors, but nonetheless I think it is useful to address
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the issues they raised.
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I should also mention that I received two responses to the
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original message. One was a set of notes that an oceanographer
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at SIO, Susan Hautala, took at a presentation of one of the
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scientists whose proposal was being disputed. These notes had
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originally been sent to a small local list of oceanographers, but
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had rapidly spread around the network in the wake of the original
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message. The second response was a message by Pim van Meurs that
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included a deposition that had been filed by John Potter during
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a hearing on the experiment. Although I believe in providing
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equal time to people whose actions are disputed on the net, I
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had originally hesitated to pass Hautala's message along to RRE
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since it seemed informal and thus possibly unreliable. After some
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prodding from a few RRE subscribers, I sent Hautala a note asking
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whether I could use her message. She expressed surprise that her
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message was in wide circulation (it had evidently been circulated
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without her permission), but she gave me permission to circulate
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a *revised* version of it. I passed along the van Meurs/Potter
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message more readily, since it seemed much more obviously legit,
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declaring it the end of the topic. You can retrieve the revised
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Hautala message by sending a message like:
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To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu
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Subject: archive send hautala-notes
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and you can retrieve the van Meurs/Potter message by:
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To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu
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Subject: archive send potter-deposition
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Most of the time, though, I wasn't sure what to do. What were
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my responsibilities? Did I even *have* any responsibilities?
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I am way too busy to spend any real time on such things, and I
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certainly didn't want to get caught up in anything that was going
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to take more than five minutes to resolve. It might be helpful
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to distinguish legal, moral, and pragmatic issues.
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* Legal issues. Was someone being libeled? If so, who was
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doing the libeling? Can someone running a mailing list be guilty
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of libel simply for passing along someone else's message? Well,
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in this case it's clear to me that nobody committed libel. The
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courts, at least in the United States, have repeatedly thrown
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out libel suits against people who raise environmental questions
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about proposed projects -- on straightforward First Amendment
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grounds. Of course, the message also went out to 33 other
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countries besides the United States, and I know that many people
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wonder about the relevant legal issues. But given that all the
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parties to the dispute were in the United States, I'd be amazed
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if other countries' laws applied, or at least made any difference
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for practical purposes.
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* Moral issues. Is it morally wrong to pass along an
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inaccurate message about someone? Surely I can't be responsible
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for fact-checking everything I forward on a mailing list.
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On the other hand, it's easy to imagine scenarios where it
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would clearly be wrong to forward something, so it's at least
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a reasonable question. But in what sense is it wrong? By
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passing a message along to RRE, I'm only saying that it's on the
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net and I found it interesting, not that I endorse it. Indeed
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I've passed along several items which I clearly do not endorse.
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(I recently received an issue of a Republican Party publication
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called "Rising Force" -- I think that was the name -- and I would
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have passed it along to RRE if it hadn't been so unintelligibly
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formatted.) Of course, some people -- such as network newcomers,
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which statistically includes a majority of people on the net
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-- might not realize that forwarding does not imply endorsement.
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And even if they did, that wouldn't be enough in itself to morally
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exonerate me. The only lesson I can draw is to be careful and to
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tell stories that promote further thinking.
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* Pragmatic issues. A common argument was, we'd better try
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to regulate such unruly behavior on the net because otherwise
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someone outside the net might regulate us instead. But I
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really cannot buy this argument at all. First, I wonder if the
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likelihood of outside regulation has much to do with the reality
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of network life, as opposed to some media image of network life.
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Heaven knows that the attitude of much American law enforcement
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toward "hacking" has little to do with its reality. Second, if
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some outside force is going to try to regulate the net, then we
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should not be doing its job for it. It's better to have overt
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censorship than to practice self-censorship, since the former
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can be openly argued against and resisted. I *do* think that
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it's important to engage in cultural self-regulation of the net.
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The purpose of this cultural self-regulation is not to avoid
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official regulation from the outside, but rather to help preserve
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the net as a potential space for the rebuilding of democracy.
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For example, readers of TNO may recall my discussion of political
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action alerts in TNO 1(1), which you can fetch by sending a
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message like:
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To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu
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Subject: archive send tno-january-1994
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Perhaps the main lesson I've drawn from this ocean-noise episode
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is that it might be good, other things being equal, to refrain
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from forwarding any political action alerts that don't conform,
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at least in spirit, to the guidelines I advocated in that
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article. (I should mention, though, that a couple of readers
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observed that I overlooked the most important guideline for
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such alerts: get your facts straight!) I wouldn't want these
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guidelines to become laws or rules or anything like that --
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that shouldn't be necessary, and it wouldn't work anyway. But
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if we can publicize the ethical and useful ways of doing things,
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then those might attain a cultural authority that would be more
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constructive than any rules could ever be.
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Get 'em on the net!
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This month's recommendations are all newsletters that I regard
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highly and that have unfortunately small circulations. So first
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you might consider subscribing to them. And second, if you are
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involved with computer networks and are located anywhere near
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them, you might consider calling them up and offering to help
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them establish a presence on the Internet. Most of them are
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low-budget operations, mostly written by volunteers, so they
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might not care about whether their writing gets distributed for
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free, especially given the large audience it can reach on the
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net compared to the clumsy world of paper. Of course, maybe they
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don't *want* to be on the net, but it's worth a try. In general,
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I think it's a good thing to try to help worthy organizations get
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themselves on the net -- maybe there's a worthy organization near
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you that could use your help in this regard.
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The Public Eye, published quarterly by Political Research
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Associates, 678 Massachusetts Avenue Suite 702, Cambridge
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MA 02139, USA. $29/year for individuals and non-profits, $39
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for other organizations, and $19 for students and low-income
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individuals. Calm, thorough reports on various movements
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in conservative politics. Recent issues have discussed black
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conservatives and the Christian Reconstruction movement.
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Race, Poverty, and the Environment, published quarterly by the
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Earth Island Institute, 300 Broadway Suite 28, San Francisco, CA
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94133-3312, USA. $15/year, $30 for institutions, and free for
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low-income individuals and community groups. Each issue focuses
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on a particular topic relating to environmental issues facing
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communities of color.
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Labor Notes, published monthly by the Labor Education and
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Research Project, 7435 Michigan Avenue, Detroit, MI 48210, USA.
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+1 (303) 842-6262. $15/year or $25/year if you can afford it.
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A newsletter of the US democratic union movement, with news about
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union reform and innovative organizing campaigns.
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Unclassified, published six times a year by the Association
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of National Security Alumni, c/o Verne Lyon, 921 Pleasant
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Street, Des Moines, IA 50309, USA. $20/year. Articles about
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the national security system by people who used to work in it.
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They're doing some of the best Freedom of Information Act work
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around.
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Rethinking Schools, published four times during the school year,
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1001 E Keefe Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53212, USA. $12.50/year or
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$20/2 years. Terrific articles about school reform by teachers
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and others, based on real experience and broad social perspective.
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Voces Unidas, quarterly newsletter of the SouthWest Organizing
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Project, Southwest Community Resources, 211 10th Street SW,
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Albuquerque, New Mexico 87102, USA. +1 (505) 247-8832. $10/year
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or more if you can afford it. Community organizing in New
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Mexico, largely around environmental and labor issues.
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Company of the month.
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This month's company is:
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Action Technologies
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1301 Marina Village Parkway, Suite 100
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Alameda, California 94501
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(510) 521-6190
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Action Technologies is a company that puts into action some of
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the unusual views about computing and work that Terry Winograd
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and Fernando Flores described several years ago in their book
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"Understanding Computers and Cognition" (Ablex, 1986). At the
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end of that book they described the initial ideas for a system
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known as The Coordinator, which was a "groupware" tool meant to
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help people in a business coordinate their work through a kind
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of structured e-mail. The Coordinator wasn't just a computer
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program. It was a whole ideology of work, language, and human
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relationships. The idea was that work interactions go wrong
|
|
when people are unclear about what "speech acts" they intend to
|
|
perform by their various utterances -- and, by extension, their
|
|
e-mail messages. Therefore, The Communicator provided facilities
|
|
for labeling e-mail messages as, for example, "requests". The
|
|
Coordinator was rather rigid in practice and has taken a certain
|
|
amount of abuse, but the idea of bringing deep philosophical
|
|
ontologies to the design of computer systems for people to use
|
|
was original.
|
|
|
|
The ActionWorkflow system is the successor to the Coordinator.
|
|
It is based on a more elaborate ontology of human interaction,
|
|
based on the commitments that people make to one another as they
|
|
pass documents and work objects around as part of a division of
|
|
labor. The system works best where the work is already fairly
|
|
well structured; its purpose is to clarify that structure and
|
|
then to keep track of it in real time, providing assorted extra
|
|
facilities like databases, work measurement, and so forth.
|
|
|
|
Installing the ActionWorkflow system in a given work environment
|
|
is more than a matter of clicking on an icon, the company doesn't
|
|
just send you a shrink-wrapped box. To the contrary, getting
|
|
ready to use the system is a philosophical adventure, in which
|
|
consultants speaking formidable languages engage in ontological
|
|
analysis and encode their results within the system's schemata,
|
|
using a graphical language that represents the various work flows
|
|
and the various human relationships in which they are embedded.
|
|
This use of philosophical concepts to achieve a deep integration
|
|
between software and human life may sound arcane, even weird, but
|
|
in my view it is a profound insight and a portent in many ways of
|
|
things to come. Work efficiency these days isn't just a matter
|
|
of reorganizing the physical activities of work; it also involves
|
|
reorganizing the worldviews of workers. And the ActionWorkflow
|
|
system depends on this kind of restructuring of thought just as
|
|
much as it depends on the restructuring of action.
|
|
|
|
So I recommend that you write a letter to Action Technologies
|
|
and request product information on the ActionWorkflow system.
|
|
Read it both as a manifesto of industrial efficiency and as a
|
|
manifesto of philosophical missionaries. I am NOT recommending,
|
|
though, that you harass the people. Only request the information
|
|
if you really want to read it. Thanks.
|
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--------------------------------------------------------------------
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Abstract of the month.
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|
|
Diana E. Forsythe, Bruce G. Buchanan, Jerome A. Osheroff, and
|
|
Randolph A. Miller, Expanding the concept of medical information:
|
|
An observational study of physicians' information needs,
|
|
Computers and Biomedical Research 25(2), 1992, pages 181-200.
|
|
The first author's e-mail address is forsythe@flash.cs.pitt.edu.
|
|
|
|
Abstract: Obtaining and managing clinically relevant information
|
|
constitutes a major problem for physicians, for which the
|
|
development of automated tools is often proposed as a solution.
|
|
However, designing and implementing appropriate automated
|
|
solutions presumes knowledge of physicians' information needs. We
|
|
describe an empirical study of information needs in four clinical
|
|
settings in internal medicine in a university teaching hospital.
|
|
In contrast to the retrospective data often used in previous
|
|
studies, this research used ethnographic techniques to facilitate
|
|
direct observation of communication about information needs.
|
|
On the basis of this experience, we address two main issues: how
|
|
to identify and interpret expressions of information needs in
|
|
medicine and how to broaden our conception of "information needs"
|
|
to account for the empirical data.
|
|
|
|
This abstract comes from the University of California Libraries'
|
|
clunky but nonetheless indispensible Melvyl Medline system.
|
|
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------
|
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|
|
Follow-up.
|
|
|
|
TNO 1(3)'s company of the month, Berrett-Koehler Publishers,
|
|
now has a WWW page. The URL, courtesy of Christopher Allen
|
|
<consensus@netcom.com> is:
|
|
|
|
ftp://netcom3.netcom.com/pub/bkpub/BKPubFrontDoor.html
|
|
|
|
They have some stuff there now, and I'm told that lots more
|
|
is coming. Their primary email address is bkpub@aol.com, and
|
|
the address for their Internet person, Patrica Anderson, is
|
|
bkpat@aol.com.
|
|
|
|
In TNO 1(3) I suggested that someone should put together a guide
|
|
to all the net's files of Frequently Asked Questions. Someone
|
|
has recently done this for Usenet FAQ's, and you can see the
|
|
results by feeding the following URL to your WWW client:
|
|
|
|
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/FAQ-List.html
|
|
|
|
Marie desJardins has written something entitled "How to Be a
|
|
Graduate Student". It's along the lines of the how-to's that I
|
|
praised in TNO 1(1). Here are her instructions for fetching it:
|
|
|
|
"The paper is available by ftp at ftp.erg.sri.com. There
|
|
is a latex file (advice.tex), with two additional input
|
|
files (advice.bbl, the BibTeX bibliography, and named.sty, a
|
|
bibliography style file), and a postscript version (advice.ps).
|
|
To get the paper:
|
|
|
|
ftp to ftp.erg.sri.com, login as anonymous, and give your
|
|
e-mail address as the password
|
|
'cd pub/advice'
|
|
use the 'get' command to take whichever files you want.
|
|
|
|
To generate the latex output, copy the first three files, run
|
|
'latex advice,' then 'bibtex advice,' then latex twice more to
|
|
incorporate all of the references."
|
|
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucsd.edu
|
|
Department of Communication
|
|
University of California, San Diego +1 (619) 534-6328
|
|
La Jolla, California 92093-0503 FAX 534-7315
|
|
USA
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
The Network Observer is distributed through the Red Rock Eater
|
|
News Service. To subscribe to RRE, send a message to the RRE
|
|
server, rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu, whose subject line reads
|
|
"subscribe firstname lastname", for example "Subject: subscribe
|
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Jane Doe". For more information about the Red Rock Eater, send
|
|
a message to that same address with a subject line of "help".
|
|
For back issues etc, use a subject line of "archive send index".
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
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.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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