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The Network Observer Vol 01 No 11
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 11 NOVEMBER 1994
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This month: The Internet lingua franca
Users' groups as collective action
A bunch of new network resources
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Welcome to TNO 1(11).
This month's issue is mostly taken up by a longish article by
the editor about computer users' groups as a form of collective
action. It is widely held that knowledge about computers will
increasingly influence both economic success and political
participation, so we had better understand the social dynamics of
technical knowledge. I can't offer any finished conclusions, but
I can suggest some good questions to ask. What kinds of social
networks does computer knowledge circulate in? How are these
networks going to evolve as computers become more pervasive? How
will they be structured in gender and class terms? Perhaps most
importantly, will they provide the basis for democratic action
in relation to the larger social implications of computing? I
briefly consider two types of such networks: users' groups and
organizations that are considering getting networked.
A brief article describes a useful message I got from someone
on the net who had trouble following some uncommon vocabulary
in a how-to I wrote for the net community. Will we evolve an
Internet dialect of English, shorn of local slang and extended
with network jargon? Should we want to?
The "follow-up" section discusses the extensive correspondence
provoked by my article about the gendered metaphors of network
use in TNO 1(10). It also provides instructions for fetching the
text of Karen Coyle's talk at the 1994 CPSR Annual Meeting (which
I had mentioned in my article) and describes several new sources
of information on the net, most of them on the World Wide Web.
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Writing in English for a global audience.
Long-time TNO readers will be aware of a twenty-page guide to
professional networking that I wrote, entitled "Networking on the
Network". (See TNO 1(1).)
This is the most ambitious of several continuously revised essays
I've written about professional skills. My strategy is to write
out my own ideas, send them out far and wide on the net, invite
everyone's comments, keep revising my copy, and make sure that
every copy I send out includes both a date and instructions for
fetching the current version. When I get good comments, I save
them up and then make a batch of revisions. Sometimes people
(on or off the net) will suggest extra topics and I'll go back
and add more paragraphs here and there. Over time the essay has
gotten pretty comprehensive, although it is still weak on the
larger concepts involved in organizing things.
I've gotten several comments from people outside the United
States, for example telling me about cultural differences.
Most recently I received a very helpful message from a student
in Germany listing English words and expressions that he had
difficulty understanding. I thought these lists might be of
interest because so many people on the net are now writing for
a global audience, including many people who are still learning
English or who speak different dialects of English:
"Here is the list of all the words which are either slang or
were not shown in my (rather large) dictionary): cuteness, to
track down, space cadet, jerk, to pass the salt, politicking,
prune back, to sweat it, and hype. I add a list with words I
was very unfamiliar with. Other foreigners might have the same
problem: illicit, mundane, to fawn, reciprocate, supplication,
insidious, revile, injunction, inadvertently, admonish, ledger,
relentless, and millennial."
So what do you think? I can easily imagine someone in Germany
having difficulty with these expressions. Should I rewrite
my essay to remove all of them? It wouldn't be that difficult.
I'm inclined to change about half of the words (especially space
cadet and jerk) and leave the others. Some are difficult cases
because I don't know how culturally specific they are (cuteness,
sweat it, hype, to fawn). Others are easily enough replaced
with simpler synonyms (to track down, illicit, reciprocate,
supplication, inadvertently, etc) and still others seem difficult
to replace since their meaning is fairly specific (insidious,
relentless, and millennial).
I wonder if we can negotiate an Internet lingua franca that
is based on English but that does not include a lot of slang,
local cultural references, and difficult words. Do we even want
to do this? Certainly we want to be aware of whether people can
understand us. At the same time, we don't want to be constrained
to an inexpressive subset of the language, much less submit to
any sort of centralized language authority. That's not how the
net works. But I do think that the request for simpler language
and less local slang is a reasonable one.
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New roles for user groups.
A few weeks ago I got a call from someone who runs a human rights
group for her county. In practice they are a network of human
rights activists around their county, and they would like to
get themselves on the net. Some of their reasons for this are
organizational: it's easier to stay coordinated if you have
efficient communications. But one of their reasons is more
specific: one of their jobs is to respond quickly to hate crimes.
If someone gets beaten up in a particular locality, they need
to get the word out quickly to the people who can contribute
something helpful: background information about that particular
category of hate crime, liaison to the press, pointers to support
services for survivors, connections to attorneys who can assist
the survivor through the legal process, and so on.
I get a lot of calls like this. The calls fall roughly into two
categories, according to the caller's principal perceived need:
either technical support or political advice. I usually cannot
provide either of these things in sufficient quantities, but I've
got enough of a Rolodex by now to pass the people along to others
who might be able to help. I've done zero follow-up, though,
so I have no idea whether my pointers have actually been helpful.
In any event, these calls have set me to thinking about several
important things, all of which pertain to the very complex and
increasingly consequential sociology of knowledge about computer
networking.
Many people think of computer use as a solitary activity, in
part because of the stereotype of the asocial technical nerd.
But computer use has always been a highly social matter, and
in recent years it has gotten much more so. Most computer
users aren't computer people, yet they need continuing access
to computer expertise to keep their computers working. In
organizational settings this access is organized through highly
ritualized relationships between a user community and a technical
staff, often with software to help manage the steady stream
of requests for assistance.
Workplaces also have a variety of other social mechanisms for
circulating computer knowledge. One important roles is played
by the advanced users who make a point of keeping their technical
knowledge current; these people often provide a much-needed
communication channel between ordinary users and experts, as
well as providing informal mentorship to the apprentice users
around them. (See the wonderful paper by Bonnie Nardi and Jim
Miller, Twinkling lights and nested loops: Distributed problem
solving and spreadsheet development, in Saul Greenberg, ed,
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware, London:
Academic Press, 1991.)
But as computer use spreads into other settings, like people's
homes, small organizations, and poor nonprofits, new social
organizations of computer knowledge start to arise. Part of
the democratization of the computer is the democratization of
computer knowledge, which increasingly becomes community property
in the same way that automobile knowledge is community property.
Some people know a lot more about either computers or automobiles
than others, and people go to great lengths to enter into stable
relationships of trust with others who possess this knowledge.
Going to an unfamiliar computer/automobile repair shop selected
from the yellow pages is a notoriously dangerous matter, so it's
important to have a neighborhood mechanic who needs to tend to
his reputation, a brother-in-law who fixes cars on the weekends,
a quick night-school repair course to learn the basics, books
that explain how to avoid getting ripped off, and so forth.
This distribution of computer/automobile knowledge through the
community is obviously not entirely equitable. Both kinds of
knowledge are, of course, distinctly identified as belonging to
men, and the circulation of this knowledge occurs principally
in strongly homosocial settings. People who have weak social
networks are more apt to suffer -- one consequence of this is
that middle-class people whose social networks are structured
vocationally tend (as a rough generalization) to have less access
to automobile knowledge than do working people whose social
networks are structured through family and local geography. It
will be interesting to see whether computer knowledge develops
similar class-based dynamics as well.
Perhaps the most important site for the circulation of computer
knowledge in communities is the local users' group. Most cities
have dozens or even hundreds of users' groups, mostly defined in
relation to particular languages, operating systems, applications
packages, and so forth. Many Macintosh users' groups have
hundreds or thousands of members. These groups might organize
a monthly meeting where people can go to get free software, ask
technical questions, advertise their services, hear presentations
by vendors, or do some personal and professional networking.
Users' groups are fueled by a fascinating confluence of different
interests, among which the most fundamental is computer users'
need for technical information. Some people, like professional
computer consultants, have a powerful interest in keeping their
knowledge up-to-date, a task made incredibly difficult by the
extreme speed with which the computer market evolves. Other
people, like individual computer hobbyists, may not care very
deeply about computers as such, being drawn to such organizations
by particular contingencies that arise in the course of doing
something else -- "whenever I do such-and-such, the computer
bombs out with such-and-such a message; what's going on and how
do I fix it?".
Users' groups are an interesting example of collective action,
and it is important to understand their properties as such.
It is widely held that access to technical information will be
a crucial determinant of both economic survival and democratic
political participation in the future; if so, the dynamics of
users' groups will strongly condition the future development of
society. Not having conducted formal research on these matters,
I don't want to speculate about them. I would, however, like to
suggest some of the ways that users' groups might (or might not)
become increasingly important in the future.
Recall the anecdote I told at the outset about the person who is
trying to get her (social) network of human rights activists on
some (technical) network to facilitate their work. One immediate
problem is critical mass: it's no use getting a few people on
the net unless the people they need to communicate with are also
on the net. The social geography of network-use is a complex
matter that warrants more investigation; the boundary between
the networked world and the unnetworked world, for example, runs
clean through the middle of my own department, and this makes for
tensions about the meanings of technology and information in my
professional life.
But for now let's look at the question in an idealized way,
starting with a community of people who are currently not
networked. Most likely the idea of becoming networked will not
occur to everyone simultaneously. Rather, particular individuals
will get enthusiastic about the net and will set about persuading
the others to join in. Their challenge will be to convince a
critical mass of people that getting on the net is worth it for
them. Maybe the necessary critical mass decides that the net
holds benefits for themselves individually, without regard to
the community's workings. Or maybe not, in which case everyone
will be waiting for everyone else to get on the net, and it will
be necessary to make some kind of collective decision to get
networked.
This is a nuisance, but it is also an opportunity. Let's say
that a certain nonprofit organization has made a decision to
get all of its staff and activists on the net, and that we're
talking about a couple hundred people. This organization is
now in a strong bargaining position with the various network
service providers. What might they want in exchange for their
collective business? A group discount? A special area set up
on the service for private discussions among people associated
with the organization? A customized interface (e.g., menu
entries) for those users? Storage of various files? Support
for a listserv-like distribution list for information from the
organization? Support for distinctive forms of interaction in
that group (e.g., instantly displaying notification of certain
kinds of alerts)? I don't know what negotiating agenda would
actually be most helpful, but various groups could use the net
to compare notes about what they've asked for, what they've
gotten, what they've been told is possible and impossible, and
so forth.
A larger question here pertains to the future evolution in the
market for network access provision. The conventional wisdom,
subscribed to by America Online and Microsoft for example,
holds that the future lies in providers that offer access to
the widest possible range of services within a common interface.
(See for example the very interesting article on "marketspaces"
in the current (I think it's Oct/Nov/Dec 1994) issue of Harvard
Business Review.) This tends to assume, though, that customers
will approach these services as individuals. Another possibility
is that users will frequently organize themselves into groups,
for example through the organizations they work for or belong
to. In this case, it will be important for service providers
to customize their offerings to the needs of particular groups.
In particular, it will be important for the service providers to
understand how computer networking is part of the larger lives of
these groups, and for the groups themselves to understand these
same things well enough to ask for whatever arrangements will
best benefit them.
I've been speaking just now of specific organizations rather
than users' groups more generally. But it would not surprise me
to see users' groups become more like users' unions, organizing to
exert pressure for better support services, more useful features,
new releases that actually fix bugs, greater customizability, and
other things. This sort of thing already happens in an implicit
way through the social networking of advanced users who develop
a consensus among themselves about the virtues and vices of new
products and system releases. Wise companies keep their ear to
the ground for this type of discussion, sometimes by monitoring
e-mail discussion lists about their products. As more and more
users join network discussion lists, this effect will intensify.
The next step is to move beyond sharing opinions to actually
organizing -- involving stakeholders, developing agendas, taking
action to back up their positions, and so forth. The necessary
infrastructure for these activities largely exists already; what
is needed is the cultural background of advanced social skills
that this kind of democratic action requires.
It may seem silly to imagine groups of Microsoft Windows users
acting like protest groups and presenting demands. This sense
of silliness derives partly from our cultural images of protest,
which at least in my own country derive largely from strikes and
anti-war protests. Most likely the organizing of users' groups
will employ different cultural forms. After all, who needs to
carry picket signs around when the relevant public is on e-mail?
The sense of silliness may also derive from our stereotype of
the details of computer functionality as socially and politically
unimportant. It's definitely infuriating to get thrown into DOS
with an inscrutable error message, but who has time to organize a
revolution about it?
But as computers become more pervasive in our daily lives,
their workings will have increasingly profound consequences.
Imagine what the world will be like once the so-called
Intelligent Transportation Systems (which were called Intelligent
Vehicle-Highway Systems until the folks in charge realized that
the latter phrase was bad public relations) become widespread.
These are systems that employ computer networking to collect road
tolls, distribute traffic information, enforce regulations on
commercial vehicles, and ultimately provide for fully automated
cars driving in convoys down the fast lane. The workings of
these systems will someday soon become a matter of urgent concern
to pretty much everyone. It is far from decided, for example,
how (and even whether) privacy will be protected in such systems.
Maybe they will maintain digital records of everywhere you've
driven in the last year, and maybe these records will be
susceptible to secondary use by marketers or to subpoena by the
authorities. The users' groups for such systems will have an
serious interest in influencing their operation. Some of this
influence can be exercised by individuals simply refusing to
participate. But this will probably be about as easy as refusing
to carry a credit card. Stronger measures will be needed, and
well-organized ITS users' groups might provide the only practical
recourse.
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This month's recommendations.
Vicki Smith, Managing in the Corporate Interest: Control
and Resistance in an American Bank, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990. A rare and fascinating study of the
internal politics of a large American bank that is undergoing
all kinds of morale-crushing restructuring. Many restructuring
programs such as "reengineering" are aimed at getting rid of
middle managers, and the advertisements for these programs
routinely portray middle managers as obstructionists who, it is
said, "resist change". Smith, though, portrays in some detail
the impossible situation that middle managers in this bank were
being put in, as well as their heroic attempts to maintain some
semblance of social cohesion and morale among their staffs as
the company pressed endlessly for quantitative measurements and
arbitrary speedups. Of particular interest is Smith's detailed
account of a training session for these managers in which the new
interpersonal order of the company was defined. These trainers,
in the best Human Potential Movement tradition, steadfastly
refused to acknowledge the structural and logical contradictions
in the company's program, employing a wide variety of rhetorical
and interactional devices to reframe any problems in terms of
individual psychological shortcomings.
Richard A. Posner, The Economics of Justice, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1981. Most Americans have little understanding
of the intellectual underpinnings of the harsh new order that has
arisen in Washington, DC. But it's time to start studying up.
Richard Posner is the foremost exponent of something called "Law
and Economics" whose leading assumption is that the purpose of
the law is to maximize economic efficiency (as opposed, say, to
ensuring justice). He writes a great deal (for example, check
out his most recent book, "Sex and Reason", Harvard University
Press, 1992). Those interested in the future of privacy policy
will definitely want to read the relevant chapters of "The
Economics of Justice". They consist of a rambling set of ex
cathedra statements about legal concepts of privacy. Although
certainly not dumb, he is generally dismissive of arguments for
the protection of privacy. For example, he rebuts the common
argument that lack of privacy would encourage an oppressive and
bland conformity to public norms, Posner finds no problem with
the notion that everyone would have to behave themselves. As
large private interests develop behind pervasive electronically
mediated invasions of privacy, we can expect such arguments to
become much more commonplace. As a result, it is important to be
ready for them.
Nathan Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. A set of really
smart papers about economic aspects of technology based on
detailed qualitative investigations of particular technological
industries. He points to numerous important and frequently
overlooked phenomena such as the large amount of interlocking,
overlapping, and cross-fertilization among these industries.
He is opposed to simplistic single-factor theories that derive
everything from the isolated properties of machines or markets
or societies. He is also a careful scholar and an interesting
writer.
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Follow-up.
Many people commented on the article in TNO 1(10) entitled "Is
the net a wilderness or a library?". My favorite comment was
the observation by Ilene Frank <ifrank@dudley.lib.usf.edu> that
"browsing" is actually quite similar to one female-gendered
activity, namely shopping. Perhaps that's an ominous sign for
the future development of the net, though I like to think that
no self-respecting serious shopper would be satisfied seeing
digital photos and video clips of goods -- the net, thankfully,
won't have textures or smells or dressing rooms any time soon.
A number of people took strong objection to that article. One
kind of objection accused the article of sexism. I'm afraid that
I have not been able to determine the precise grounds on which
this charge is made. One possibility is that I was taken to
approve of various stereotypes about men and women, for example
about exploration having historically been constructed as a
masculine activity, or to subscribe to those stereotypes myself.
But I don't wish to make any statements about what activities men
and women (or boys and girls) are inherently, naturally good or
bad at. I'm just interested in the gendered meanings that have
been attached to certain activities, and in the role of these
meanings in influencing who will have access to those activities
in the present day. It's very hard to measure the magnitude of
this influence, given its subtlety and the wide variety of other
factors that are also in play. It's a conjecture.
Other people seem to have interpreted my article as a call for
librarians to be installed as the Internet Information Police,
making sure that everyone organizes their information in the
approved way. I would certainly never approve of such a thing,
and I very much doubt that it could even happen. If people want
to make information available on the net in a disorganized or
specialized or eccentric way then that's their perfect right. My
point is simply that we shouldn't claim that the net makes vast
amounts of information accessible unless the hard librarian's
work has been done to order the stuff so that people can find it.
Several people told me about interesting projects that partly
answer my request for tools to let people help one another find
information in things like gopherspace and the web:
Raul Deluth Miller <rockwell@nova.umd.edu> mentioned a MOO (an
object-oriented MUD, a system for letting people chat with one
another in real time) that's connected to gopherspace. The URL
is gopher://boombox.micro.umn.edu:70+/11/gopher/GopherMoo
Margaret Riel <mriel@weber.ucsd.edu> mentioned AskEric, a project
of the Eric Clearinghouse for Information. It's a "national
collection of people who will find information for teachers on
whatever topic they are interested in". I'm afraid I haven't
got the necessary pointers handy, but you can look it up with any
net-searching tool.
Jean Armour Polly <jpolly@nysernet.org> mentioned the help desk
that she runs to serve affiliates of NYSERNet. A commercial firm
called SilverPlatter pointed me at their web pages, whose URL is
http://www.silverplatter.com
I've heard about other projects as well. It would be great if
someone (not me) collected them into a guide, if only to provide
inspiration for people making choices about network technology
right now. It would be especially great if someone could conduct
interviews with people who run on-line help services to see what
their experiences have been, and what else might be done.
Speaking of librarians, you really must check out the amazing set
of Internet guides available by aiming your gopher or WWW client
at una.hh.lib.umich.edu (i.e., gopher://una.hh.lib.umich.edu/ ),
then select "inetdirsstacks". For example, an amazing guide
to Internet resources for non-profit organizations available at
gopher://una.hh.lib.umich.edu/00/inetdirsstacks/pubservice%3atruxnes
Long-time RRE readers know about my interest in something
called "issues management", which is a profession that promises
to rationalize companies' attempts to influence public opinion
and policy-making by integrating aspects of research, lobbying,
public relations, and so forth. Well, the other day I got an
advertisement in the mail from "Issue Action Publications Inc"
(207 Loudoun Street SE, Leesburg VA 22075, USA) for something
called "The Critical Issues Audit" ($24.95 plus $3 p/h), which
promises to guide you through a process of assessing your own
company's exposure to potential harm through changes in public
opinion. The idea is to make a rational economic choice about
whether and how to invest in efforts to prevent public opinion
from adversely affecting your company, and in particular what
mixture of investments in research, lobbying, etc is optimal for
this purpose. If anybody feels like actually spending the money
and sending it a report (without, of course, violating anyone's
copyright), I'd be pleased to distribute it.
The Institute of Public Policy Studies at the University
of Michigan has assembled a Web page on telecommunications.
The URL is http://www.ipps.lsa.umich.edu/telecom-info.html
The American Communication Association has set up a good Web
guide to on-line resources for communication research. The URL
is http://cavern.uark.edu/comminfo/www/ACA.html
Some paleontologists are digging up a dinosaur in Canada and
documenting their work on the web. The URL is
http://herald.usask.ca/~scottp/scotty/scotty.html
I'm told that a Noam Chomsky web site has been established on the
net at http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/usr/tp0x/chomsky.html or
you can ftp to ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/user/cap/chomsky/
The US Environmental Protection Agency now has a pretty thorough
set of pages on the Web at http://www.epa.gov/
The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is organizing
a Special Issue on Communication and the Design of Virtual
Environments. See the JCMC announcement at URL
http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/annenberg/announce.html
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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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