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