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The Network Observer Vol 01 No 06
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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 6 JUNE 1994
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This month: Turning privacy on its head
Wireless consumer information
Investigative journalism on the net
The network community of Vietnam vets
Middleware for global networking
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Welcome to TNO 1(6).
This issue includes an article by Kali Tal about the VWAR-L
mailing list, where Vietnam veterans and others have gotten
together for mutual support and to debate the meaning of the
Vietnam war. This is obviously a highly charged subject, and
many of the list's dynamics concern the relationship between
the possibilities of e-mail and the possibilities of physical
violence. The net is part of reality after all.
Also featured in this issue is Marsha Woodbury's article on
the impending changes in journalism and its relationship to
librarianship in the age of networking. Photographers are
worried, journalistic education is changing, and we may even
see a renaissance of investigative reporting.
Also included are two brief articles by the editor. The first is
a brief case study in corporate attempts to redefine the concept
of "privacy" so that collecting huge databases of personal
information about you and sending you vast amounts of unsolicited
correspondence can be viewed as protecting your privacy and
not as violating it. Clearly it's time to remind ourselves
what privacy is. The second article is a not-entirely-original
speculation about the day, supposedly soon to come, when large
amounts of information are available in the wireless ether. Some
of the possibilities are scary, no doubt about it, but others are
at least intriguing. For example, maybe we will be spared some of
the manipulations of sales people.
Plus all the usual TNO departments: this month's recommendations,
company of the month, and follow-up, which this month includes
several recommendations of new gopher and WWW services to try.
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Orwellian privacy.
In a fascinating interview in Upside magazine (June 1994 issue,
pages 36-55), George Gilder is asked about the privacy issues
associated with emerging computer network technology. He makes
two points which are worth quoting at length because they reflect
an increasingly widespread corporate "line" about privacy. His
first point is:
Some of the fear of invasion of privacy is misplaced. What is
really an invasion of privacy is a telemarketer who gets you
out of bed or the shower. They don't have any idea who you
are, no notion of what you want. That's what really offends
you. Ignorant intrusions, not intrusions from companies that
really do understand your needs and know when you like to be
called and the kinds of things you buy and don't buy. They
might even be conscious, through your entry into some bulletin
board, that you want to purchase a new car or house. They
call you and try to solve your problem. That is much less of
an invasion than an intrusion by a company that doesn't know
anything about you.
In other words, your privacy is best respected when companies
know just about everything there is to know about you. Why does
this seem backwards? Because it is. Gilder -- and the numerous
other industry types who promote this argument -- are trying to
drain all content from the word "privacy" by putting the emphasis
on the "invasion", and then pointing out that some invasions are
more annoying than others. But it's important not to let such
arguments go unchallenged. Privacy has a much larger meaning
than that. Privacy includes a broad right to control the uses
to which one's personal information is put. It includes, in
particular, to know *who* has such information and *what* they're
doing with it. This is quite the opposite of Gilder's picture,
in which the only real problems are the ones that are solved by
accumulating ever greater amounts of information.
Gilder's argument works by blurring the argument between calls
that are solicited and calls that are, in some vaguer sense,
wanted. One of the ways he does this is sneaky: tossing in the
notion of a "bulletin board" on which I post the fact that I am
looking to buy a certain item, which may or may not constitute
a solicitation for sales calls. But mostly he tries to identify
the theme of "privacy invasion" with unsuccessful calls, ignoring
altogether the question of whether the calls have been solicited
or not. The idea is that, by accumulating information about
me, sellers can tailor their pitches more specifically to my
situation, thereby making more likely that their calls will be
wanted, in the sense of being usefully relevant to my situation.
The problem here is that nobody can read my mind. It's always
going to be a probabilistic matter, and it will profit a company
to call me just so long as the expected return-on-investment
of their phone pitch is positive. Telemarketing is cheap: the
call is usually local, the job pays $6 or so per hour, the calls
can be made from a low-rent district, and an unsuccessful pitch
takes less than a minute. If a successful sale brings in a
hundred dollars in profit, it's worth calling anybody for whom
the statistical likelihood of a sale is greater than roughly
1/500. That means that I will get 500 calls for each call that
offers something that I actually want to buy. [This isn't quite
right. See the July 1994 "follow-up". -PA] This result is
independent of how much information about me is stored in the
companies' computers, so long as that information cannot make
perfect predictions about who will buy what. Pretty much the
opposite of the picture Gilder paints.
Here, now is Gilder's second point:
So a lot of the so-called invasions of privacy will be a
positive experience for most people. Computer communications
can be sorted through, and you can keep what you want and
kill what you don't. Increasingly, as your communication is
channeled through computers, you will increase your control
over it. It's the dumb terminal, the phone, with is the model
of the violation. It violates your time and attention because
it's dumb. If you have a really smart terminal that can sort
through the communications and identify them, you can reject
anything you don't want.
Once again he has found a way of side-stepping the issue of
whether a sales pitch is solicited: the pitch is a phenomenon of
nature that simply exists. The privacy violation is not caused
by these "communications" but by your telephone! In other words,
it's your job to secure the technology to sort through the piles
of unsolicited sales pitches that companies send you. The word
"smart" makes such a development sound natural and inevitable,
even though advertisers will have a great incentive to circumvent
such screening. At a minimum, advertisements would have to be
labeled and organized in standardized ways to allow these smart
terminals to parse them and inspect their contents. As a matter
of architecture, Gilder's proposal is not far different from
having a passive store of advertising material that individuals'
software "agents" can actively search through for desired
materials; the difference is that it is now the responsibility
of individuals to *prevent* the receipt of materials they do not
wish to receive, rather than actively *soliciting* the receipt of
materials they do wish to receive.
As computer and network technology changes, lots of words and
concepts will change their meanings. This is both inevitable and
reasonable. But it also means that we will have conflicts about
what words ought to mean. "Privacy" is one of those words, and
we should be vigilant in defining and defending an expansive
understanding of it.
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The wireless consumers' movement.
The computer industry is certain that we will all someday soon
carry around a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) such as the Apple
Newton. The problem is, what will we do with it? Let me propose
one answer. Let's found the wireless consumers' movement. We'll
need a bar-code scanner and cheap wireless packet communications
that we can plug into the PDA. Then when we're shopping, we need
only point the scanner at the UPC bar-code on a given product to
retrieve the information about it from Consumer Reports, the Wine
Spectator, the New York Review of Books, or whatever. Reviews
of the products would pop up on your screen, hypercard-style,
with buttons you can press with your pen to get further details,
comparisons with other products, and so forth. You'd subscribe
to these various services, paying per month or per screenful.
This idea can be extended considerably. Merchants can choose to
make their prices and other information available on servers for
these products, so that when you scan a certain bottle of wine at
one shop, another shop can automatically tell you that they have
it for a few dollars less. Obviously you wouldn't receive this
information unless you wanted it.
But it works best after you've already bought the product.
Press the "evaluation" button and scan the barcode on the bottle
of wine you just drank (book you just read, etc), and a page pops
up with various buttons on it. (And of course you can customize
this for each product class if you like.) Maybe you can tap
a number for how much you liked it. Maybe you can call back
up what the critics said, and press a button to make note of
whether you agreed or not. After a while each critic will have
a "scorecard", so you can develop a sense of which critics share
your tastes.
Another mechanism could automatically correlate the judgements
made by everybody using the service, and then statistically
predict which products you might like, given what others with a
history of similar tastes have liked.
Several people think that information like this might become
a commodity. Your judgements and preferences are valuable
information to producers. Your PDA could offer you certain
amounts of money to sell this information, with one price to
sell it without any demographic information about you attached,
another price to sell it anonymously but with your vital stats
included, yet another price (maybe much higher, depending on
the market) to sell it with your name and address, and so forth.
But this might not work: someone could just go down a grocery
store aisle, entering bogus preference information for every
product just to collect the cash. It's probably just as well.
Another consumer application of wireless computing would be ways
to reveal the costs of consumption. Markets put real work into
telling you the price of things, but they also put real work into
hiding the true costs of consuming them. A superstore might have
the best prices, but you probably have little idea how much extra
it costs to drive there. So maybe your car should have a running
meter on it, like an odometer only measured in money instead of
miles, telling you how much you've spent driving it lately. I'll
bet that the sight of this meter ticking away the dollars will be
enough to send lots of people back to their nearby neighborhood
shopping districts and away from the superstores, not to mention
back to living in the city and not in the suburbs. The same idea
could be applied to thermostats and electrical devices.
The problem is actually computing the costs. You could program
the thing with a rule of thumb, like $0.25 a mile to drive.
But it would be a lot more compelling if the computer behind
the meter could be kept up-to-date on the actual costs. This
should be relatively easy for thermostats and electric sockets,
since the utility company can easily broadcast its current rates
(if it's somehow motivated to do so). Cars are harder since so
many costs must be included. "Blue Book" used-car values could
be available on-line for calculating depreciation. Approximate
prevailing gasoline prices could be broadcast as well. Insurance
companies or home bookkeeping systems could tell your computer
how much you've paid in premiums. Maintenance costs could be
approximated as well. And so forth. All of this information
would reside in various databases -- some private, some public,
some that are free, some that you have to subscribe to. The
result, perhaps, could be substantial decreases in all of the
ills associated with driving: highway deaths, pollution, wasted
time, emotional stress, and so forth.
Now, all of these thought experiments carry an obvious dark side:
they all presuppose a tremendous amount of infrastructure which
they do not in themselves justify. So what else will all of
this infrastructure be doing at the same time? What's appealing
about these scenarios, of course, is that they are all voluntary;
they do not require you to identify yourself to anybody else's
computer. But if your car is keeping track of this information,
maybe your insurance company wants to be automatically told how
you use your car, lest you be classified a high risk.
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The net gives new life to journalism.
Marsha Woodbury
Director at Large, CPSR
Doctoral Student
College of Education
University Of Illinois
marsha-w@uiuc.edu
When people talk about the NII journalism, they think in
terms of our daily paper being delivered on a screen. But the
metamorphosis is deeper than that. We journalists are scrambling
to keep up with today's changes, as we can link to resources
that we used to dream about. We can reach out to each other and
our readership in wonderful ways. As a journalist trying to ride
this wave, I am constantly thrilled with what we can do now, yet
overwhelmed with keeping up.
The good news is that this growth in the boundaries of journalism
bodes well for freedom and democracy. And the transformation
goes far deeper than the outsider might realize.
First let's look at the transformation in roles and
responsibilities. For example, "print" and "broadcast" used
to be the two divisions in journalism schools. Soon the NII, or
Infobahn, will allow video clips to be part of the story, and all
journalists will need to be conversant with good writing and good
broadcasting. Multimedia delivery is here. The division of the
future will be between advertising and public relations on one
hand, and news reporting using multimedia on the other.
Computer-Assisted Reporting
For the past few years, journalists have been using databases and
spreadsheets to generate their work. The Investigative Reporters
and Editors (IRE) recently published a compilation of 101 stories
about exploring digitally stored information, often off 9-track
tape. Up until the Net began mushrooming, computer-aided
reporting (CAR) involved combining multiple databases to reveal
government or business misconduct.
A classic example is running a database of all school bus drivers
in a state against all drivers with drunk-driving citations.
Sure enough, some bus drivers have had multiple drinking
violations. Reporters used to pry many data bases out of the
government. However, more and more are available on-line, and
that should increase.
Control
Editors and photographers feel they are losing control over
their products. Computers have been used for the composition of
newspapers far more than for CAR. Programs like QuarkXPress (TM)
and Pagemaker (TM) are used to design pages, a process called
"pagination." As page make-up is done on computers, designers
have the added ability to be "creative" with headlines and
other text traditionally left to copy editors, which causes some
conflict.
Photographers are struggling with the implications of digital
photography, and the easy manipulation of pictures. Anyone in
the pagination process can alter a digital photo, for example,
removing an unsightly beer can--an alteration that once could
only be done in the darkroom. Frankly, photographers are
worried.
News Librarians
Another change involves news librarians, who used to be mainly
responsible for the paper's or TV station's archives. Today,
these information professionals are out in the newsroom, their
names in by-lines. They are working shoulder-to-shoulder
with staff writers, and they are recognized for their skilled
contribution. Computer-aided stories are now daily fare.
For example, a San Francisco journalist sought the membership
of the exclusive Bohemian Club. The club refused. A search
through the on-line version of Who's Who, picking out all entries
who listed their affiliation with the Bohemian Club, gave the
reporter an impressive partial list of members.
News librarians have been instrumental in stories about
everything from car theft to election fraud. Their expertise
in accessing digitally stored information is proving essential
in keeping up with business and government records now available
on-line. On-line databases proved helpful in these two stories.
Investigative reporter Duncan Campbell used Knowledge Index
to expose the fraudulent claims of an AIDS researcher, and the
Brisbane Weekend Independent used the PAPERS file to track down a
missing Australian businessman, according to Roland Standbridge,
a journalism educator.
Keeping Up With Change
How do I monitor the transformation of my field? It's not
easy. I use the Internet, where there are probably 30-40
good Listservs. I subscribe to several: JOURNET, spj-online,
the Nieman conference list, and newslib. I get the Visual
Communication (Viscom) Listserv as well. The novel element
in these groups is the intermixing of librarians, reporters,
editors, free-lancers, lay people, photographers, and educators.
"Newslib" started as a group for newspaper librarians, and now
there are untold journalists lurking there. We all share a
passionate interest in on-line sources. The other group that
intrigues me is INFOPRO, for professional information seekers,
like private eyes and investigative reporters. (I'll put a list
of the group names and their Listserv addresses at the end of
this article, with instructions for joining).
When I cruise the Net bulletin boards, I alight on
"alt.journalism" or "alt.journalism.criticism" groups.
There are many more which deal with gathering and presenting
information, not to mention international news provided through
the "soc.culture" groups such as "soc.culture.new-zealand." I
can read about a New Zealand earthquake minutes after the event,
whereas such minor news would never make the American papers.
A clever journalist can develop hundreds of stories without ever
leaving the terminal. On the other hand, who needs a journalist
when readers can receive the news directly from the people
involved? Questions like that one take up hours of Listserv
time!
Journalism Education is Changing
If you teach journalism, your curriculum is changing as are the
resources. We journalists must know how to use e-mail, how to
search with Gopher and Mosaic and Fetch, how to access libraries
and participate in Listservs. These skills are as important as
the AP Style Book. Our lab here at the University of Illinois
developed a web tutorial for using the Internet, which you can
reach at
http://gopher.ag.uiuc.edu:70/WWW/AIM/Discovery/Net/intro.html.
The resources for education are blooming, led by John Makulowich,
Internet Trainer. He's set up an "Awesome List" on the web, as
well as exercises for teachers to give their students, and most
recently the KID (Kids Internet Delight) List,
http://www.clark.net/pub/journalism/kid.html. I am is awe--our
students will be able to put their work up for the whole world to
see.
Newspapers have made their text available on-line, and many are
"up" with pictures, too. My favorite is the University Kansan
Daily Interactive http://kuhttp.cc.ukans.edu/cwis/UDK/UDKpg1.html
Old-time reporters still smell the ink and listen for the clank
of linotype and typewriters. Modern journalists are accustomed
to the quiet of computers, the changed workrooms, the blending
of graphics and print. It behooves the older generation to add
computer skills to their wealth of experience, in order to be
effective mentors to the new generation.
You, the Searcher
At the CPSR Annual Meeting, which will be held in San Diego on
October 8th and 9th of this year, I'll do a workshop on how you
can use the Net to gather information. (For more information
about this meeting, send a message to cpsr@cpsr.org).
In order to keep up with searching tips, I have to update my own
records DAILY.
To give you a brief example of where you might look for
information on the Internet--and this is only one small
tool--imagine being able to search for a particular word in the
thousands of bulletin boards in the Netnews, or Usenet It is
possible to keyword search the millions of Usenet messages among
the 6000 or more special interest news groups overnight while you
sleep. You basically provide a few keywords via an email message
and send it to a site. The results, about 20 lines from each
match, are forwarded to you by email.
Or how about using Gopher to bring up the a school newspaper, and
quickly looking through the archives for articles on hazardous
waste?
Every day more government documents are coming on-line, allowing
us to "possess" the documents in our offices. The US Embassy
Daily Bulletin, produced by the United States Information
Agency (USIA) is a huge full-text 40- to 80-page document which
is prepared for distribution in Europe. It covers politics,
business, economics, and science, and is the best source of
European news on the Internet.
Though many people are worried about power being concentrated in
the hands of those who own and control the methods of delivery,
there is a tremendous freedom for us all to explore the Net.
With the amazing proliferation of materials available to us all
on-line, we can become more active watchdogs of the government
*and* the press, and the chances will increase for us to
participate in areas where we once felt powerless.
Here's a case in point. Our local freenet in Champaign-Urbana,
Illinois, is PrairieNet, which has a bulletin board devoted
solely to the local paper. People can write in about each and
every issue, and corrections and additions are far easier for the
newspaper to glean.
Look out for e-mail interviewing, more journalism Listservs
and bulletin boards, more on-line papers and magazines, more
opportunities to e-mail to the press, and more information to
keep up with. It's all happening on the Net.
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JOURNET send your message to LISTSERV@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA
spj-online send your message to listserv@netcom.com
Nieman send your message to Nieman-request@nando.net
newslib send your message to listserv@gibbs.oit.unc.edu
Viscom send your message to listserv@templevm.bitnet
INFOPRO write jcook@netcom.com
For computer-aided reporting with A LOT of traffic:
carr-l send your message to listserv@ulkyvm.louisville.edu
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For first-timers: to join a Listserv group, you send your message
to the Listserv:
For example, to join JOURNET, I would send a message to
LISTSERV@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA
I would put nothing in the Subject line, and the message would
simply say:
Subscribe JOURNET Marsha Woodbury
as in: Subscribe (list name) (my first name) (my last name)
and I'd leave off my signature--the message would look like this:
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 94 16:08 EST
From: marsha-w@uiuc.edu
To: LISTSERV@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA
Subject:
---------------
Subscribe JOURNET Marsha Woodbury
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VWAR-L as a network community.
Kali Tal
Editor, Viet Nam Generation
18 Center Rd., Woodbridge, CT 06525
fax: 203/389-6104
kalital@minerva.cis.yale.edu
VWAR-L is a discussion list for those interested in the Vietnam
War. It attracts many veterans. I do not know what percentage
of list members are veterans, but well over 50% of the regular
posters define themselves as vets. I studied the VWAR-L for
over two years, and I will make the argument that the email
environment both fosters the creation of a "community" and shapes
the development of that community in very specific ways. (Though
I focus on the VWAR-L "community," I have a colleague who engages
a transsexual bitnet community in a similar way. She and I have
shared many discussions about our work and observations, and have
come to some similar conclusions.)
Communities of trauma survivors (in which category I would
include, for example, Viet Nam combat veterans and post-operative
transsexuals) are not homogenous, though they are formed around
a "common" traumatic experience. There is a great deal of
stratification in any community of trauma survivors, as evidenced
by the "hierarchy of authenticity" which, in groups of Holocaust
survivors privileges the Auschwitz survivor as somehow more
authentic ("real") than the person who spent the war hiding in
some peasant's potato cellar, or, in groups of Viet Nam veterans,
privileges the "boonierat" (bush combat vet) over the REMF
(Rear-Echelon Motherfucker who spent the war typing memos in the
Inspector General's office in Saigon). Furthermore, survivors
have different agendas--there is a battle in any survivor
"community" over *which* trauma narrative becomes "normative".
In order to "belong" to the group, there is a great deal of
pressure on the survivor to revise his or her story so that it
conforms to the normative formula. (This is most apparent in
the so-called 12-step programs, where "testimony" necessarily
takes a particular shape: "My name is Nancy Smith and I am an
alcoholic....")
Not all survivor communities depend on high-tech, of course.
But I believe that access to high-tech (email) affects the
development of particular survivor communities in important ways.
There are currently many Viet Nam vet support groups that meet in
person. We tended to get three types of vets on the VWAR-L list.
One type had never joined any veteran support group; one type
used to belong to a veterans organization (usually Vietnam Vets
Against the War) but did not join another veteran's group when
that group effectively dissolved (some 10-15 years ago); one type
currently is involved in one or more veterans' support groups but
finds additional support from VWAR-L. If one examines shifting
trends in the Viet Nam veterans movement, one finds a shift from
veteran's groups based on common political beliefs and shared
trauma (GI Forum, Viet Nam Veterans Against the War, Veterans
for Peace, etc.) in the late 1960s through the 1970s, to the
post-political "healing"-oriented VVA, Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Fund, Khe Sanh Veterans, etc. which blossomed (not at all
coincidentally) during a period coincident with the construction
and dedication of the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Wall in the
early 1980s. The shift in Viet vet group orientation--which
started in the late 1970s (marked by the effective demise of
Vietnam Veterans Against the War as a working organization)
and which was, for all intents and purposes, complete by
the mid-1980s--was accompanied by a flood of popular culture
productions emphasizing a "normative" Viet Nam vet combat
experience (from Cimino to Coppola to Stone, etc.). These
productions gave us the story of a "senseless" war which was
useful only in that it provided a personal growth experience for
the combatant protagonist. They also helped depoliticize and
then medicalize the image of the traumatized Viet Nam veteran.
The result of this trend was that left-wing Viet Nam veterans
began to feel as if they were not accorded room in the "veterans"
community, particularly since the "normative" vet was absorbed
in the "religion" of POW/MIA worship (culturally signalled by the
slew of Rambo and Chuck Norris films... Bruce Franklin says you
can get into a bar fight quicker by claiming there are no POWs
than by claiming that there is no God). These leftwing vets
were displaced survivors, far outnumbered by their apolitical or
decidedly right wing peers.
VWAR-L in its first years provided a meeting place for
disfranchised vets, a place where the myth of the normative Viet
Nam vet was not only regularly shattered, but where bonds of
community were forged between vets and nonvets. Membership in
the VWAR-L community is determined by who shows up--folks "vote
with their keyboards". The latter fact is quite important, and
it is due, I believe, to the difficulty of engaging in physically
threatening behavior over the net. I have witnessed first-hand
the physical intimidation tactics used by, for example, POW/MIA
supporters to silence opposition, and by rightwing vets to expel
left wing vets from gatherings. We who live our lives mostly
outside of the realm of physical threat tend to forget that a
threat-free environment can be quite liberating for folks who are
used to being afraid of having the shit kicked out of them. Such
strongarm tactics were apparently not possible on the VWAR-L.
Left wing vets were vocal, and might have outnumbered right wing
vets. They often came to the support of nonveterans who posted
favorable descriptions of the antiwar movement, and contradicted
right wing vets who attacked the antiwar movement as being
"anti-vet." A situation in which a civilian antiwar activist
could stand up to a group of right wing combat veterans while
being cheered on by a bunch of equally tough combat vets who
worked with Vietnam Vets Against the War is simply a situation
impossible to envision in a face-to-face community. Such an
interaction would either never have taken place, or certainly
ended in physical violence.
The definition of "community" is debatable. For the first
three years of its existence, VWAR-L members signed on and did
not leave. During that period VWAR-L lost between five and ten
major players--a very low attrition rate. (In fact, at least two
VWAR-L members departed the list in a huff, directly attributing
their decision to leave to my vocal presence on the list. These
two right-wing listmembers claimed that my criticisms of what I
considered to be racist and sexist language amounted to a sort of
censorship of their words. Since then I have noticed that there
is a strong tendency for people who find themselves addressed
critically because of their choice of language to claim that
their rights of "free speech" are being infringed upon, as if
"free speech" means that one's speech is entitled to be "free"
from the threat of criticism.) The volume of messages often
exceeded 100 a day. Out of 300 listmembers, over 50 were regular
posters (at least one post a week). Listmembers informed the
community when their children were born, when they were going
on vacation, when they got married, when they got divorced,
when they were ill, when they had fallen off the wagon, when
they needed medical, legal or personal assistance. Several
listmembers gave day-to-day progress reports of their attempts
to get sober. Others posted their nightmares. They met in small
groups (for example, there was a VWAR-L Northwest [God's Country
Division]) which met a couple of times a year. All meetings
between Vwarriors were described in posts to the list. GIFF
files of photographs of VWAR-L members, taken at parties and
gatherings, were available by ftp. Backchannel and public
communications wove in and out to create a fabric more dense than
any casual reader could understand. List-members have met each
other and married. They have left "real" relationships with
"real" people for equally real relationships with previously
"electronic" people. Folks up late at night signed on and
checked in to find out who else was awake. Scholarly papers
were traded around, librarians (we had at least ten on the
list) regularly answered questions and provided references. The
spontaneously developed metaphors of the bar and the village were
bandied about by Vwarriors a dozen times a day. If this is not
a virtual "community" I am not sure what is. One of our resident
anthropologists asked Vwarriors if they they thought VWAR-L
comprised a community. The unanimous answer was "yes." In my
book a community is constituted by its members. And the members
of this community were more diverse than would have been possible
in a face-to-face community because the low population density of
leftwing vets and the tactics of physical intimidation would have
precluded it. Email allows for an immediate and often intimate
form of contact which *reminds* people of "real-life" encounters.
There are all kinds of interesting questions raised by what I
call the "performative" aspect of email (in every post you write
yourself into existence for a particular audience) and lots of
questions about the nature of identity politics in a disembodied/
textual space, but I think they complicate, rather than
invalidate, the notion that virtual communities exist. When a
Viet Nam vet spills his guts on screen for the *first* time in 20
years, when a man with 100% psych disability from the VA uses the
list to keep himself from committing suicide, when people trust
each other with secrets and truths they wouldn't share except
among friends, when the *belief* that VWAR-L is a community is
strong enough to move folks to do exactly the sorts of things
that they would do within a community, doesn't that qualify?
The character of the VWAR-L has changed greatly in the last year.
Membership has fallen from over three hundred to less than 150.
This drastic exodus was caused in part by an acrimonious and
extended argument which developed between left and right-wing
listmembers, in which the listowner clearly sided with the
right wing. It was also brought about by the strenuous attempt
of right wing veterans to "police" the list and to attack (often
viciously) listmembers (particularly newcomers) who questioned
the normative conservative image of the "veteran". The argument,
which took place primarily on the VWAR-L, often transcended
the virtual arena, and had an effect on the "real" lives of
participants, destroying face-to-face friendships of many years,
and resulting in real damage to the lives of some participants--a
fact to which I can attest since my own life was damaged in this
way. In my tenure on the list I was subject to (in addition to
public verbal abuse) circulation of my private email, threats of
blackmail, harassing private and public email, and even physical
threats to my person which were blatant enough to move the
police to take action. I also made good friends and professional
acquaintances who supported me in "real life" when the virtual
world was causing me a great deal of stress and unhappiness.
In short, the "virtual community" was indistinguishable from the
"real world community" (and the latter did, in fact, exist in the
form of public, personal, and professional face-to-face networks
which had been--if not created by--at least shaped by the
"virtual community").
I am not trying to hype the virtual environment. VWAR-L is not
an ideal community by any means. It's no utopia. It's more like
(as one listmember wrote) a self-cleaning aquarium. Some people
say that network community is an illusion. But it is precisely
the shared illusions which create community, both in the real
and the virtual world. As Helen Keller once said, "Security is
mostly superstition".
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This month's recommendations.
Mike Parker, Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to QWL, Boston:
South End Press, 1985. A brilliant analysis of "quality"
programs in manufacturing, including both an inspired literary
analysis of some training materials for "quality circles" and
several detailed case studies of quality systems in practice at
various types of plants. A valuable corrective to the hype of
management consultants.
Daniel C. Hallin, We Keep America On Top of the World: Television
Journalism and the Public Sphere, London: Routledge, 1994. A
set of lucid and intellectually serious essays about TV news that
avoids several simplistic extremes while offering well-supported
criticisms and pointing out some worrying trends. Topics include
war coverage in Vietnam and Nicaragua, coverage of the President,
and sound bites.
Upside. Upside magazine is the source of the worrisome interview
with George Gilder that I cited above. It's also a fascinating
window onto the thinking of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who
have developed a distinctive culture of their own: aggressively
libertarian in their social values, disdainful of government
without being particularly Republican, and (of course) intensely
worshipful of individual enterprise. For a while last year
they were referring to themselves as "Somali warlords". Upside
is the main cheerleader for this culture. It has promoted the
electronics industry's recently intensified political organizing
in Washington. The magazine is consistently fascinating, with
detailed articles on the workings of markets, the thinking of
venture capitalists, the fates of particular companies, and so
forth. Monthly, $48/year. Upside, PO Box 469023, Escondido,
California 92046-9023, USA.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
PeerLogic
555 DeHaro Street
San Francisco, California 94107-2348
+1 (415) 626-4545, fax +1 (415) 626-4710
The future is here, and every day you use computer networks that
span the globe. So why is it so incredibly difficult to write
globally distributed software applications? One reasons is the
heterogeneity of operating systems and network protocols, each
obscure in itself and just about incommensurable with all the
others. In a reasonable world you'd have a layer of software
that sat on top of those incommensurable systems and provided
you with a simple, uniform set of abstractions. The software
would come in the form of a kernel that was always running in
the background on every machine in the known world, talking to
that machine's operating system and hardware, keeping on top
of all the weird interrupts and contingencies that come up, and
shielding you and your applications from all of that nonsense,
with the result that your application doesn't even have to know
what kind of machine or network it's running on. Right? Right.
Well, that world has arrived, and the software that brings about
this blessed state of affairs is called Pipes Platform from a
company called PeerLogic. Just think what the world will be like
once any programmer in the world can write a globally distributed
application and make it available on the net without any concern
for grungy system calls and incompatible standards. We'll have
all kinds of interesting games, communications schemes, bulletin
boards, databases, and whatever else happens to be widely enough
adopted to reach a critical mass of users.
The next step is for someone to write genuinely useable mailer
software on top of a system like Pipes Platform. Listserv is
okay, but it has an appalling interface and you have to be a
hacker to use it. In the future, anybody will be able to create
their own e-mail infrastructures, and we won't be stuck with the
small number of simple models of e-mail use that we have at the
moment.
The problem with this brave new world is that the new ease of
writing global applications will be available both to the people
I like and the people I don't like. So we can have both global
democracy and global surveillance, global community and global
hierarchy, global interaction and global accounting. Better get
going and spread around the kinds of applications you'd want the
world to made out of.
In short, I recommend that you write to PeerLogic and ask for
product information. I do not, however, recommend that you
harass them. Only get the literature if you're genuinely
interested in reading it. Thanks a lot.
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Follow-up.
Nobody had any complaints about TNO 1(5). I don't know if that's
a good thing or not, particularly given its robustly avant garde
criticism of some important ideas about technology.
Check out "A Grant Getter's Guide to the Internet", available at
the University of Idaho gopher: gopher.uidaho.edu. Pick the menu
entry "Science, Research, & Grant Information" and then "Grant
Information".
Also, check out the ACLU's gopher at aclu.org and the Digital
Freedom Network at gopher.iia.org.
The archives from Gleason Sackman's net-happenings list, which
I've mentioned a number of times in TNO, are available, along
with a variety of other things, from the Coalition for Networked
Information. Telnet to gopher.cni.org, log in as "brsuser", and
follow the directions. The interface is pretty terrible, but I
more or less figured it out after three tries.
The June issue of the Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine is
now out; see http://www.rpi.edu/~decemj/cmc/mag/1994/jun/toc.html.
It includes useful articles by Brock N. Meeks, Bruce Hahne, John
December, Rob Kling, and Gary Ritzenthaler.
Virginia Shea's new book "Netiquette" has some nice things to say
about TNO. It's a useful guide to Internet etiquette for those
just starting out. You can reach the publisher, Seth Ross at
Albion Books, at seth@albion.com. (I'm pleased to report that
they've trademarked the term "netiquette". Next I hope they
trademark "newbie", thus helping to take another regrettable
network neologism out of circulation.)
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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
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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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