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The Network Observer Vol 02 No 03
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 2, NUMBER 3 MARCH 1995
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This month: Public relations on the Internet
Running an on-line newsletter
Social networks and democracy
What does "free" mean?
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Welcome to TNO 2(3).
This issue includes a series of short articles by the editor.
The first is addressed to public relations people who wish to
practice their craft on the Internet. The bottom line is that
the Internet provides the public relations profession with a
marvelous opportunity: learning to communicate in a rigorously
honest fashion in a democratic environment where manipulative
practices do not work.
The next article summarizes some lessons I've learned from
running this newsletter for the last year or so, followed by
two brief comments, one on a famous article about the threat to
democracy posed by the decline of bowling leagues in the United
States and the other on some recent attempts by ideologically
minded folks to remove all meaning from the simple, unambiguous
word "free".
This issue also commences a new TNO department, the wish list.
Back in TNO 1(7) I remarked upon the phenomenon of technological
fantasizing, the activity of inventing new cyber technologies in
one's head as part of daily life. I am certain that I am not the
only person who engages in this type of routine fantasizing, but
I do like to think that I am more ambivalent about it than just
about anybody else you're likely to meet. (A reporter in the San
Diego Union-Tribune (P.J. Hufstetter, 1/10/95) astutely referred
to Wired magazine as the Playboy of the 1990's, both because of
its male demographics and because of the vaguely erotic nature of
numerous men's attachments to computing machinery. The analogy
is worth extending.) The purpose of the wish list, then, is to
spell out some of each month's half-developed fantasies for new
kinds of useful computing and networking systems, to dwell on the
issues that those systems raise, and to think reflexively about
the nature of technological fantasizing itself. Lots of people
have gotten rich on their technological fantasies, and the line
between science fiction and business management is frequently
unclear these days. But that's even more reason to think about
the fantasies *as* fantasies -- given that the stuff of some
people's dreams is now rapidly transformed into the material
conditions of other people's lives.
A footnote. An article in the 1/30/95 issue of Forbes magazine
points out that people are not exactly flocking to buy stuff from
all those heavily hyped Internet shopping services. Flowers,
pizzas, magazines, you name it -- people would rather buy them
the old-fashioned way. Of course, so far as Forbes is concerned
this means that the Internet is basically a batch of hype. But
another possible conclusion is that people actually want to use
the Internet for what it's best at -- getting connected to other
people in mailing lists, interest groups, political movements,
interactive games, and so forth. We've got plenty of shopping
malls. We need more street corners, more pubs, more union halls,
more seminar rooms, more barn raisings, and more quilting bees.
The Internet can keep on being all those places if we take good
care of it.
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Public relations on the Internet.
This quarter I have been teaching both a seminar on public
relations and a class on computer networking as communication.
This juxtaposition has provided me with an occasion to think
about an important topic: the practice of public relations on the
Internet. Few people outside the profession of public relations
have much idea what public relations work actually consists of;
likewise, it's hard to explain the Internet to anybody who hasn't
used it awhile. The intersection of these two topics, then,
can be obscure. But this obscurity is going to dissipate as PR
people discover the Internet. It will be important for the net
community to be prepared for PR, and vice versa. This particular
article is addressed to PR people, based on a couple of informal
presentations I've made to groups of PR people in the last month.
Lots of books have been appearing over the last couple of years
that purport to explain "how to use the Internet". If you read
them, though, you discover that they are all (or all the halfways
legitimate ones, so far as I am aware) basically technical books:
how to log on, how to read your e-mail, how to telnet someplace,
how to set up a web page, how to get on a mailing list, what's
available where, and so forth. But this is only a small part of
the information that belongs under the heading of "how to use the
Internet". It is, so to speak, the bottom layer, the technical
foundation. But a foundation isn't much use in itself without
the considerable superstructure that connects the day-to-day
mechanics of net use with the larger goals of the organization.
What's needed, and still basically absent, is this next layer of
knowledge: how to use the Internet strategically as an integrated
part of the rest of what an organization is doing. Paper isn't
going away; television isn't going away; meetings aren't going
away; the telephone isn't going away. Clearly, whatever you
do with the net, it will be one element in a larger ecology of
forms of communication. Using the net requires its own technical
knowledge, but more broadly it requires its own *practical*
knowledge -- how to use the net in practice, as part of a larger
strategy, to get the stuff done that the organization is supposed
to be about.
With that in mind, then, let us imagine a world, one otherwise
similar to the existing world of professional communications
work, in which anybody who doesn't like your direct mail can
easily and cheaply turn right around and tell you so. Now
imagine a world in which anybody who doesn't like your direct
mail can easily and cheaply turn right around and tell your whole
mailing list just what they think about you. That, my friends,
is the Internet. The Internet holds some real dangers for people
who are in charge of managing the image that an organization
projects to the outside world. Anybody can use the Internet
to circulate poor opinions or unfavorable information about you,
and as the recent Pentium case shows, interesting news, good or
bad, can travel the length and breadth of the Internet in hours.
It's next to impossible for anybody to control what happens
on the net. Nobody formally governs the net and no particular
set of written-down rules adequately describes its functioning.
Instead, the denizens of the net run things according to their
own continually negotiated sense of what's right. The net,
in short, is the world's closest large-scale approximation to
democracy.
Looked at in a positive light, then, the net holds tremendous
promise for allowing PR people to actually put in practice the
ideals described in PR textbooks: open, symmetrical, two-way
communications between an organization and the publics that
have a stake in its operation. It has long been difficult
to conduct this kind of two-way communication, for the simple
reason that the mass media don't work that way. If you are
getting your message out to the public by persuading reporters
to write or broadcast stories about you, then that's one-way
communication. And it's sneaky one-way communication as
well, inasmuch as the organization is rarely identified as
the instigator of the article, and the people who see or hear
the story have little opportunity to discuss among themselves
what they think about it, much less make their voices heard in
response.
The Internet changes this. If you want to communicate with a
certain public then get your "Whole Internet Catalog" down off
the shelf, look for the relevant mailing list, sit down at your
computer, and send a message. Simple, right? Actually, of
course, it isn't that simple at all. The difficulty has shifted
from the laborious hustling of reporters to something else. But
what exactly?
Put yourself in the shoes of the people on a given mailing list.
These people all have other things to do, of course, but a few
times a day or week they sit down at their computer and read
their e-mail. Some of it will be from the people on that mailing
list, probably as part of an ongoing dialogue that has its own
history, its own vocabulary, and its own background of shared
references, memories, precedents, values, and assumptions. If
you just send out your own message, with no sense of this whole
background, then you're likely to seem like an odd, presumptious
stranger. And if your audience gets any sense that your agenda
is basically more about taking than about giving then they are
likely to get downright mad at you. This is what happened to
that so-called Internet expert who decided that he would promote
his book by sending form-letter messages to a hundred-odd news
groups, each customized with a bit of relevant text from the
book. These messages were widely reviled on the net (and justly
so), whereupon a German anarchist decided that they constituted
spam (which they did) and that therefore he was justified in
running a "cancelbot" to automatically erase them (which he
wasn't). When things like this happen, people in the PR world
sometimes start going off into manipulation and control, under
the bogus guise of calling for "consensus" about what behavior
(revenge-taking behavior, that is, not PR behavior) is
acceptable on the net. Out here in reality, though, no such
consensus-building process is necessary, for the simple reason
that control-oriented PR people are just about the only folks
who are not already in alignment with the perfectly functional
uncodified rule that you can't play on the net unless your basic
operating mode is one of giving rather than taking.
Most PR people, I like to think, would prefer the difficult but
more satisfying route of losing their one-way habits and learning
to participate in the net on a symmetrical, two-way basis. How
might this be done? Well, nobody knows for sure. All I can do
here is offer a few observations based on stories I've heard and
things I've been involved in myself.
The Internet is full of computer people, and as you might imagine
they use the net pretty heavily to talk about computers. Usenet
has numerous news groups devoted to particular computers and
software packages. These are the cyberspace equivalent of the
user groups found by the score in most larger communities. These
discussion groups are clearly a gold mine for companies that need
to know what their customers are thinking, and it is common for
PR and marketing people to monitor these lists. Of course, these
companies have other ways of finding out what their customers are
thinking, and they have to decide whether they get enough extra
information from paying someone to monitor these mailing lists,
but often they do. My sense is that the companies do not care
to spend a lot of time actively intervening in the lists, except
occasionally when technical people have technical information to
communicate. This might seem counterintuitive, given that people
on the lists must occasionally say bad or wrong things about
the company and its products. But generally, if somebody says
something unfair or mistaken then somebody else will correct them
without the company having to throw a fit. But to my knowledge
no real studies have been done, and I doubt if any reliable
generalizations can be made right now.
Some other companies have made information about themselves
available on the World Wide Web and other, similar facilities.
Creating web pages is easy and exciting, since you can produce
something flashy in a few hours of work -- or easily pay someone
else to do it. It is still entirely unclear, though, what role
these web pages can play as part of a serious communication
strategy. Web pages have the advantage, compared to posting on
mailing lists, that you can be as commercial and self-interested
as you want and nobody will get mad at you. Whether this is the
best course of action depends on who you are trying to reach. If
your goal is simply to communicate with your existing customers,
for example by providing customer-support information and product
updates, then a simple, low-overhead approach is probably best.
If you are providing an on-line equivalent to your paper brochure
then similar production values are relevant, although you should
keep in mind that large color bitmaps take most real users a long
time to download. Silicon Graphics is now advertising a service
for people who want to produce very fancy bitmaps for their web
pages, but I doubt if this is a good idea unless your intended
audience is all in the top one percent in terms of the power of
their hardware and the bandwidth of their net connections.
If your aim is to reach a broad audience with your web pages,
then as a general matter you need to advertise them. One
common way to do this is by placing ads in print media. Another
approach is to build and maintain web pages that are actually
going to be useful to the net community, and then include
information about your organization as one of the links that web
users can follow if they care to. If you are a law firm then you
could create a well-organized archive of on-line legal documents
in the area of your specialty. If you are a publisher then you
could create an on-line index of your books that can be searched
by authors, book titles, subject headings, publication dates, and
so forth. Use your imagination -- what information or software
can I put on the web that my target audience of net users will
genuinely find useful? That's the test: whether you are making
a genuine contribution to the net community. If so then you are
free to post simple, low-hype messages to newsgroups and mailing
lists announcing the availability of your new on-line service.
Everybody will know that you're doing this out of self-interest
in the end, but nobody will mind.
Another approach is to create a mailing list. This can be the
much cheaper electronic equivalent of your paper mailing list
for distributing advertising materials and the like. Definitely
never, ever add anybody to an electronic mailing list without
their permission. The best policy is to let people take their
own initiative to add themselves; the net's cultural convention
is definitely "opt-in" rather than "opt-out". Nobody knows for
sure whether the materials you send to the electronic mailing
list should simply be copies of the materials you send to a paper
list. Since the electronic list is free, of course, you can
afford to send more materials more often, provided you don't make
a nuisance of yourself. You can also offer pointers to web pages
that provide much more additional information than you could
possibly afford to print on shiny paper. But maybe it's worth
trying to rethink this conventional notion of a mailing list
altogether.
I've been running a mailing list for a while now, the Red Rock
Eater (see TNO 1(1)), which consists simply of whatever I find
interesting. People subscribe mostly after hearing about it
through word-of-mouth, or word-of-e-mail I suppose, from their
friends, for example when their friends forward RRE messages
to other people and other mailing lists with the RRE headers
still attached. Many of RRE's 2400 subscribers are big fans of
the list because I keep the signal/noise ratio high, as technical
people say, by only sending out items that I feel in my guts are
really interesting. If someone doesn't share my tastes then they
presumably move along after a while, which is fine. It's not a
difficult list to maintain, especially after I stopped looking
at the error messages generated by mailers that bounce RRE mail
back to me, since most of the material simply comes from other
mailing lists. Indeed, an increasing proportion of the material
is stuff that people send me because they think it would be good
for RRE, so that I don't even have to filter those other mailing
lists myself any more.
My point is that RRE has grown something of a loyal following.
Howard Rheingold says that the net has a "gift economy": people
contribute stuff without the expectation of return, but when
they do, other people are willing to help them out in time of
need. It's like the patterns of reciprocal assistance in any
region whose economy is based on subsistence agriculture: when
you pick your apples, you immediately take a bushel to every
neighbor within a few miles who doesn't have an orchard of their
own. That way, when you break your leg some day, your neighbors
will spontaneously start bringing stuff by until you get better.
It's that way on the net as well. For example, when the students
in my Internet class (mentioned at the outset) were having trouble
getting people on the net to sit still for interviews about the
place of computer networking in their lives, I hesitated a while
and then I broadcast a call for help on RRE, whereupon about
two hundred offers of assistance poured in to the class mailing
list over the next forty-eight hours. Many people said that they
were helping out as repayment for the benefits they got from RRE.
Questions arise: Can you create similar good will by operating
a simple, useful service like RRE? How far can this model be
extended, and what can it accomplish? I don't know for sure, but
I do firmly believe that if you approach it without the spirit of
being genuinely helpful then it won't work.
A small number of organizations have engaged in issue campaigns
on the Internet. These can take the simple form of monitoring
certain mailing lists and posting company press releases as
they seem relevant. Posting them in the form of press releases,
as opposed to spontaneous-looking messages, makes it clear that
you're not really pretending to engage in dialogue, which is okay
on many lists as long as you're open about it.
Some issue campaigns on the net are more ambitious. I discussed
one of these campaigns in a critical light in TNO 1(12). The
problem there was not that a coalition of companies was rallying
the net community's support in a case it was arguing in front of
the FCC, but that its on-line materials did not make adequately
clear the nature of the organization that was conducting the
campaign. Although I was a little unjust in my criticism of
it (see the follow-up clarification in TNO 2(2)), I think it is
fair to say that the standards for such things are much higher
on the Internet than they are in the trenches of Washington.
In the world of mass media and and one-way communications,
you can get away with blandly saying "we are a coalition of
public interest groups, concerned citizens, nice old ladies
and companies" when in fact all the money is coming from the
companies. But on the Internet this won't work, even if you're
doing it from habit without consciously intending to mislead
anybody. If you do not thoroughly and clearly disclose who you
are, who you represent, where the money is coming from, and what
the real agenda is underneath, then you can expect that someone
else will make their own construction of these things widely
available to the net community. On the other hand, if you *do*
disclose all these things then nobody is going to bother you,
or if they do then nobody else will listen to them. The net is
basically a fair place in that regard, and the net culture has a
tremendous respect for free speech.
The larger point here is that the Internet provides the public
relations profession with the opportunity for a rigorous
self-examination. Straightforward practices based on full
disclosure, genuine participation, honest listening, and real
contributions to the net community will earn the community's
trust and permit a high level of useful two-way communication.
Anything else will provide the net community with an opportunity
to trash some manipulative PR people, which it will happily do.
The choice is up to you.
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How to run an on-line newsletter.
I've been running TNO since January 1994, and since then several
people have asked me for guidance in starting on-line newsletters
of their own. I cannot say that I encountered any very helpful
reference works as I was developing TNO, nor would I want to call
myself an expert on the subject. And I would strongly oppose any
sort of "rules" about on-line publication. But if the Internet
is going to live up to its promise of providing freedom of the
press to people who don't own one then we should at least *try*
to write down some guidelines about running on-line newsletters.
So here are my own guidelines, and I would encourage others to
publish complementary (or even conflicting) guidelines based on
their own experiences.
* Lay it out in a simple, consistent, visually distinctive
format. Neatness counts. Include a table of contents and a
summary at the beginning, as well as a publication date, since
you can't rely on people to keep your original mail header as
they forward your newsletter around the net.
* Be able to explain what the newsletter is about in a few
words. TNO, for example, is about networks and democracy.
Make sure that most everything in the newsletter connects to
that simple definition in some way. At the same time, don't
try to cram your entire agenda into every article you write.
Instead, let each article convey a piece of your larger message
while remaining a useful, self-contained whole.
* Be provocative but keep the rhetorical temperature down. That
is, try not to flame. It's difficult, I know, but it makes a big
difference in the long run. One problem with flaming is that you
tend to assume that your audience shares all of your assumptions,
rather than thinking carefully about what beliefs and values you
actually want to assume that readers share with you.
* Say something new. Most everything on the net consists of
people saying things they've heard elsewhere. People really
appreciate it if you say something original.
* Find a low-overhead way to work the newsletter into your life
so that it provides an outlet for some of those great ideas that
would otherwise go to waste. I find that the best way to keep
TNO's content fresh is to make simple notes during each month
about possible TNO article ideas. Then in the shower, or while
driving, I look for simple language to explain the issue. (The
language you want is more like an after-dinner speech than like
a scholarly paper or newspaper article.) Then when the time
comes to actually type in the articles, they flow pretty quickly.
* Where do you come up with things to write about? Don't set
out with a grand plan. Just read broadly and talk to a wide
range of people, and as you do so, take note of your personal
responses -- emotional reactions, intellectual free-associations,
patterns, things that ought to be named and discussed, and so
on. Write these reactions in a notebook, or explain them in
plain language to other people, and trust that some of them will
develop into newsletter articles without you having to fake or
force anything.
* Write for people who are reading on computer screens. Keep
it brief and get to the point. Paragraphs should be shorter
than those in books but longer than those in newspapers. Try to
use plain language; minimize technical and political jargon. In
ASCII versions, keep the lines of text narrower than 72 columns.
Keep the total length of each issue below 49,000 bytes, since
some mailers reject anything longer than 50,000 bytes including
headers. You probably cannot rely on anybody to consistently
read that much anyway.
* Include a department in every issue that provides pointers to
web pages and other net resources that you find interesting. A
large proportion of your readers will find this the most valuable
part of your newsletter. "How to" features (like this one) are
also popular. Lots of people want something that's immediately
useful and will ignore anything else.
* Before sending out your first issue, write "DRAFT -- DO NOT
CIRCULATE" all over it and send it to a dozen friends and a dozen
people who already run Internet newsletters with a low-pressure
request for criticism and comment. Several people maintain web
pages with pointers to existing newsletters; the standard search
tools ought to locate them quickly enough.
* Publish it both on the Web and in ASCII form. The ASCII
version is the more important of the two because people will
forward the ASCII version around to one another by electronic
mail. If you do have a web version, make sure the ASCII version
includes the URL for it, and that the Web version includes
instructions for subscribing to the ASCII version and fetching
back issues.
* Include a clear copyright notice that tells people what they
can and cannot do with the newsletter. Think about whether you
want the copyright notice at the top or the bottom of each issue.
Also think about whether you want people clipping out particular
articles to pass around. I personally do not, and will make
a special ASCII version of a single article when people want
to pass just that article around, but I decided it wasn't worth
the trouble of explaining my policy about this in the copyright
notice. You might decide differently, for example by saying
that your newsletter can only be passed along in its entirety.
* Speaking of copyright, do not include any copyrighted
information in your newsletter without obtaining permission.
In the United States anyway, everything original that is written
is copyrighted by default, even if it doesn't have a copyright
notice on it.
* Think twice before charging subscribers money. It's a lot
harder than making it free. If you do plan to charge money for
it, provide a shorter ASCII version of each issue for free and
include instructions for how to subscribe to the paid version.
That way you'll get a lot of advertising from people who pass the
free version around on the net. Provided that the free version
includes a generous amount of useful content and isn't overly
crass in its advertising, nobody will mind. A set of teasers
for the paid version, as opposed to a useful, self-contained
shorter version of the newsletter, is just advertising and will
justifiably annoy people.
* Consciously design particular articles to appeal to particular
constituencies: librarians, net newcomers, Europeans, graduate
students, reporters, etc. That way they'll pass it along to
one another, thus increasing your publication's visibility and
circulation. This assumes, of course, that you actually have
something interesting and useful to say to the constituency in
question. In general, you can be sure that whatever you write
will get forwarded to people who fit whatever topic you write
about. For example, if you make any off-handed nasty comments
about economists, you can be certain that a batch of economists
will end up reading them.
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Bowling for democracy.
Much of the American establishment is worrying late at night
about the conclusions in a paper by Robert Putnam in the January
1995 issue of the generally conservative Journal of Democracy
entitled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital".
Perhaps you've seen an op-ed piece about it. Putnam observes
that American membership in associations is steadily declining.
By associations he means everything from the Masons to labor
unions to sports leagues to the PTA -- groups organized outside
of the government and the market.
This trend, he says, is particularly striking given Tocqueville's
eighteenth-century observations about Americans' great affinity
for associations. The trend is also disturbing, he argues, both
on economic grounds, since a dense network of relationships of
trust facilitates the growth and evolution of the economy in a
given region, and on political grounds, since this same network
of relationships allows issues to be discussed more rationally
than is possible when politics is conducted largely through
enormous, impersonal intermediaries like national membership
organizations and the mass media.
While his argument is interesting, I have a number of problems
with it. First, he makes few distinctions between types of
organizations, particularly with regard to their inclusiveness
and exclusiveness. If old-fashioned associations served largely
to enhance solidarity among homogenous groups of people then
perhaps they reinforced social stratification, and if so then
we are better off without them. Associations that mostly keep
people in line should surely be differentiated from associations
that mostly help people pursue their own ends. And associations
that organize people against those above them in the social
hierarchy should surely be differentiated from associations that
organize people against those below them. Of course, everyone
is free to create any associations they want, short of criminal
conspiracies. My point is that some associations contribute an
awful lot more to democracy than others.
Second, he assumes that social networks are implemented solely
through formally defined associations. Granted, it is easier
to get statistics on associations that are listed in reference
works at the library. But communications and transportation
technologies are allowing people to pursue their own networks
in ways that are not so dependent on organizations and their
formal meeting places. Whether this effect compensates for
the decline of organizations, though, is a significant question,
particularly for political purposes.
Third, in discussing national membership organizations, he does
not adequately address the importance of a working system of
local chapters, as opposed to sole reliance on direct-mail and
fax-tree types of one-to-many relationships. The accountability
of a national office to the chapters is a crucial indicator of
whether the organization is truly likely to represent its members
and avoid cooptation and corruption. This is a matter of degree,
and a more qualitative analysis would have to assess historically
the health of the chapter structures of organizations such as
the Sierra Club. This is an urgent issue in the environmental
movement right now.
Fourth, I am unclear on why it makes sense to refer to the stock
of social network relationships as "social capital". The idea
is roughly that social capital is an economic asset built up over
time through people's activities together. Alright, but capital
is something more specific than that. Capital is the result of
paid labor that someone owns. "Social capital", by contrast, is
"owned", if at all, by a community, region, or nation. Calling
it "social capital", though, mixes metaphors in just the right
way to encourage government measures to build the stuff up -- as
a kind of industrial policy. Think of it -- the decline of the
Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks as an issue of national
competitiveness! There's some logic to it, I agree. But it's a
funny logic.
Fifth, he is dismissive of the capacity of computer networks
to contribute to a renaissance of associations. His argument
is roughly that people can't really get that intimate with one
another on-line. But computer networks are used largely by
people who also see one another face-to-face, whether at staff
meetings, conferences, or family reunions. They also facilitate
the creation of new connections among people that are conducted
through other media, not just on-line.
And this brings me to my conclusion. Despite all of my hedges
and qualifications, I definitely agree that democracy has its
genuine roots in the bonds of association in a community. Let's
use technology to do something about it -- not by encouraging
the creation of associations at random, but by encouraging the
creation of associations that bring diverse people together to
pursue ends of their own choosing and assert some control over
their own lives and the lives of their communities. Everyone
belongs to a lot of cross-cutting communities these days,
and therein lies a test for the net: the net is developing in
a truly democratic way if it permits us all to participate in
associations that cut across all possible boundaries, affirming
and empowering us in our diversity and our commonality alike.
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Free means free.
In TNO 2(1) I remarked on attempts by conservative pundits to
appropriate words, that is, to give old words new meanings that
make non-conservative ideas more difficult to think and express.
One such word is the word "free". I've been noticing this lately
in the context of discussion of Free-Nets -- that is, computer
networks (or, more precisely in most cases, computer bulletin
boards) that members of the public can use without charge. When
the need for free access to information is argued, it is common
for conservatives to query the word "free". In my experience
(which has so far been confined to private e-mail or spoken
debate at conferences and the like), they take either of two
approaches. The first approach is simply to act puzzled and
wonder what "free" means. The second approach is to "clarify,
in case anybody might have been misled, that somebody somewhere
has to pay for it". The conversation usually does not go very
far from here, since at this point most people just get confused.
In both cases, of course, the purpose of this type of rhetorical
intervention is to set up a standard argument for markets: if the
provision of certain services requires the allocation of scarce
resources, why shouldn't the cost of those resources be borne by
the people who consume the services? This is certainly a valid
question, and one that should be openly and rationally discussed;
Peter Harter's article in TNO 2(2), for example, is a serious
contribution to such a discussion. What is so exasperating is
the means by which this argument is introduced, namely through
the conceit that something is unclear about the meaning of the
word "free".
Everybody knows what "free" means: something is free if the
marginal cost of consuming it is effectively zero. Everyone
pays for their own share of the public library through their
taxes, but then they can check out books for free. Of course the
concept requires some slight care in definition (thus the words
"marginal" and "effectively"), but not too much. Everybody knows
that the library costs money to maintain, but nobody is confused
when we speak of checking out library books as "free". Claims
to the contrary are disingenuous, unfair, and corrosive of
rational debate, since their aim is not to refute an argument
(the argument for free public information services) but to render
that argument unthinkable and inexpressible by confounding the
meaning of one of its central terms, namely "free". My point,
then, is not that it is immoral to argue against Free-Nets, but
that it is immoral to do violence to the English language in
order to make the whole concept of a Free-Net unintelligible.
What strikes me is that I suddenly started hearing claims that
something is confusing about the word "free" about two months
ago, all at once, in a wide variety of geographic locations and
institutional contexts. One possibility is that believers in
the free market all suddenly came up with this idea independently
and simultaneously, driven purely by their native intelligence
and the plain obviousness of their philosophy. Without meaning
to impugn either their intelligence or the valid arguments that
they do have to make, though, I would lean toward an alternative
explanation, which is that these folks all subscribe to similar
channels for the distribution of arguments among the partisans
of a particular political tendency, in this case free-market
conservatism. In TNO 2(2) I spoke of this phenomenon in terms
of the industrial organization of public debate, and I pointed
out that it is neither restricted to any one political tendency,
nor is it something that is usefully regarded as a conspiracy.
I should think that free-market conservatives in particular would
embrace such an analysis of their own intellectual lives, given
their high regard for market analyses of such equally significant
topics as family life, the labor market, and the depredations of
liberalism. We will have an opportunity to test this hypothesis
as my analysis of the economics of public debate develops over
the next few issues of TNO.
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Wish list.
I know someone who runs a book shop in a small town. She says
that people frequently enter her shop looking for a particular
book, but all they know about the book was that its author was
interviewed that morning on a certain television show. They
might be able to recall vaguely what the author's name sounded
like, and vaguely what it was about, but they usually cannot
recall the title or any of the other information that is required
to look the book up in the CD-ROM version of Books in Print.
These authors don't just appear on talk shows for the ego trip.
They're trying to sell their books. Clearly the publishers and
the booksellers need to get together here to send bookstores a
daily summary of which authors are going to be on which programs
promoting which books, together with a synopsis of what the books
are about and generally what the authors will be saying in their
media appearances. Faxes would be good for this, and even better
would electronic mail to a server running inside the bookstore's
local system.
This is unlikely to happen, though. The various publishers are
all competing against one another; they all run their publicity
slightly differently and are unlikely to get together to organize
such a scheme. The bookstores are also competing against one
another. Both publishing and bookselling are turning into
oligopolies, so perhaps such a publicity-tracking operation
could achieve sufficient economies of scale within a particular
publishing or (more likely) bookselling conglomerate. This would
be unfortunate, of course, since it would reinforce the drive
toward consolidation in an industry whose decentralization is
important to the health of our culture.
The solution, perhaps, is an independent organization that
works with both publishers' publicity people and with bookstores
to keep this information flowing. The hardest part would be
defining standards, both to make the operation efficient and to
ensure that lots of sources can feed into it. Small publishers
ought to be able to upload their own publicity schedules into
the system as easily as the big national publishers, and small
booksellers should be able to download publicity schedules
for the media in their area as easily as Barnes and Noble can
for their national operations. Since the relevant media are
evenly divided between national (NPR, Donahue, Liddy) and local
(affiliate news, local talk shows, public access cable) channels,
such a decentralized scheme would be necessary and advantageous
to everyone. The Internet, perhaps using WWW forms, would be an
ideal infrastructure for such a system, which once established
could operate with little human intervention.
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This month's recommendations.
Simon Broughton, Mark Ellingham, David Muddyman, Richard Trillo,
and Kim Burton, eds, World Music: The Rough Guide, London: Rough
Guides, 1994. This book is so cool. It's a 700-page guide to
the world's music styles in nearly a hundred articles in small
type with numerous sidebars. Each article has a recommended
discography at the end. I was pretty pleased to already own
the recommended records for about a dozen of the articles, but I
had to admit complete ignorance of Thai pop, Egyptian classical
singing, Indian folk music, Argentinian accordian, and the weird
modern history of popular music in Indonesia.
US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Electronic
Enterprises: Looking to the Future, OTA-TCT-600, Washington, DC:
US Government Printing Office, May 1994. This is an excellent
introduction to the issues around information infrastructure
for the businesses and markets of the future. I learned a lot
from the report's review of the literature on the crucial place
of technical standards in the emergence of market structures.
This is a topic of crucial interest for everyone, not just
business people, since the architecture of future communications
networks will play a powerful role in the ongoing restructuring
of the global market that directly or indirectly employs all of
us. I certainly don't agree with all of its conclusions, but
I do respect it. You can obtain a copy by sending $12 (or US$16
for international customers) to New Orders, Superintendent of
Documents, PO Box 371954, Pittsburgh PA 15250-7954. (Postage is
included. Make checks payable to Superintendent of Documents.)
Guillermo J. Grenier, Inhuman Relations: Quality Circles
and Anti-Unionism in American Industry, Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1988. A relentless and harrowing inside
story of psychological warfare by a company fighting a union
organizing campaign in a factory in New Mexico. Along with
Martin Jay Levitt's "Confessions of a Union Buster" (Crown,
1993) and Gideon Kunda's "Engineering Culture" (Temple, 1992),
it is indispensable reading for anybody who finds themselves
confused by the experience of "teamwork" and "empowerment". Kurt
Lewin is surely rolling in his grave at Grenier's account of the
highly developed practices of social control through small-group
psychology. After reading this book late at night with the new
Nine Inch Nails record ("The Downward Spiral") playing at high
volume, I went straight off to bed and had some very bad dreams.
I don't recommend this specific procedure, but I do recommend
reading the book. Read it in a brightly lit space, preferably
with somebody sane nearby to keep an eye on you.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
DataCenter
464 19th Street
Oakland, California 94612
phone: (510) 835-4692
fax: 835-3017
net: datactr@tmn.com
DataCenter puts out a publication called Culture Watch, which is
basically a clipping service for people wishing to keep track of
the religious right. Every month they briefly abstract a couple
hundred newspaper and magazine articles on the subject, and you
can buy them by mail order for a dollar apiece. They presumably
pass royalties along to the copyright holders, but they add value
to the articles by collecting, indexing, abstracting, copying,
and sending them out to customers. This kind of service is the
best argument I know for building a marketplace on the Internet.
That way these folks could make the articles much more rapidly
available and easily searchable.
Culture Watch is $35 for ten 1995 issues, or $50 for both the
1994 and 1995 issues.
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Follow-up.
Roger Clarke <roger.clarke@anu.edu.au> has just created some web
pages on dataveillance and privacy issues. His own home page
is http://commerce.anu.edu.au/comm/staff/RogerC/RogersHome and
the dataveillance page is http://commerce.anu.edu.au/comm/staff/
RogerC/Dataveillance/RogersDV.html -- note that I've broken the
URL across two lines.
The Clinton administration's controversial Green Paper on the
law of copyright in cyberspace is available on the web at URL:
http://www.uspto.gov/text/pto/nii/ipwg.html
Past postings of Jim Warren's GovAccess mailing list are
at ftp.cpsr.org: /cpsr/states/california/govaccess and by
WWW at http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/states/california/govaccess
To subscribe to the list, send Jim a note at jwarren@well.com
Those wild hackers at the MIT radio station WMBR have assembled
an extensive web page of radio stations with web pages. The URL
is http://www.mit.edu:8001/activities/wmbr/otherstations.html
Also at MIT, Ellen Spertus has a list of non-profit organizations
on the web at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ellens/non.html
And a decent collection of net resources for activists on human
rights is at http://www.idt.unit.no/~isfit/human.rights.html
You must check out the web archive of a mailing list about moving
assets offshore. It's a whole subculture and quite continuous
with the general tone of libertarianism on much of the net and in
many manifestos of the hacker movement. The URL for the archive
is: http://www.euro.net/innovation/Offshore.html I'm told that
the way to subscribe to the mailing list is by sending a message
whose body is "sub" to offshore@dnai.com.
I was charmed to discover the web page for the Indonesian menu
at Bachri's Indonesian and Middle-Eastern Restaurant in Castle
Shannon, Pennsylvania. I wonder if they've gotten any business
out of it -- http://www.ibp.com/pitt/bachris/indonesian.html
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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 1995 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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