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The Network Observer Vol 01 No 12
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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 12 DECEMBER 1994
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This month: The Progress and Freedom Foundation
How communities take hold of computer networking
Qualitative market research
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Welcome to TNO 1(12).
This month's issue is mostly taken up by a couple of articles
from the editor. The first of these discusses two new high-tech
political organizations, the Progress and Freedom Foundation and
the Wireless Opportunities Coalition. Each organization provides
us with a chance to think through the complicated interactions
between communications technologies and styles of political
organizing.
Also in this month's issue is the text of a speech from the
British Columbia Information Policy Conference in Vancouver
earlier this month. This is a fascinating group of librarians,
academics, community activists, and others, all trying to put
information policy into practice in their part of the world
by building free community networks. I took this occasion to
gather some thoughts on the broad question of how a community
takes hold of computer networking. We probably can't make firm
generalizations about this, at least yet, but we can at least
list some questions to ask and set some basic orientations. It
helps to view computing as a community activity -- as something
that people do together as groups or networks, within patterns of
relationship that probably serve other purposes as well. In any
event, some of my thoughts here will be familiar to long-time
readers of TNO, but other may not.
This month's company offers qualitative market research services,
and this month's follow-up offers the usual batch of pointers to
interesting net phenomena.
Starting with volume 2, TNO will start publishing irregularly
rather than monthly. TNO 2(1) will probably appear in January
1995, but after that it'll just be a matter of when I have the
energy and material to put a new issue together.
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The future of network politics.
In the December 1994 issue of Wired (page 121) there appears
an ad for something called The Progress and Freedom Foundation.
Under the headline "Cyberspace: It's Nobody's Highway", this
advertisement announces the availability of a "Magna Carta for
the Knowledge Age". Small type at the bottom informs us that
this document ...
... emerged from an August 23-24 conference in Atlanta,
Georgia. Participants included Jerry Berman, Esther Dyson,
John Gage, George Gilder, Jay Keyworth, Lewis Perelman,
Michael Rothschild and Alvin Toffler. Major support for the
conference was provided by BELLSouth and the Competitive Long
Distance Coalition. Additional support was provided by Agorics
Enterprises, Inc., AT&T, Cox Enterprises, J.L. Dearlove and
Affiliates, Forbes, Scientific Atlanta, Video Tape Associates
and Wired. Creative Consulting and Ad Production by J.L.
Dearlove & Affiliates, Chicago, IL.
Regarding the Magna Carta itself, it provides the e-mail address
PFF@aol.com and some phone numbers,
or, if you must, cross your fingers and send POM to 1250 H St.
NW, Suite 550 Washington, DC 20005.
Listen to the language. If you must? It's as though they're
trying to talk jive to ingratiate themselves with the kids on the
street. They don't even have a home page.
So who are these folks? The ad says that:
The Progress & Freedom Foundation believes cyberspace is a
frontier, not a government project.
We can learn a little more by turning to journalistic accounts.
For example, in the 12/12/94 Wall Street Journal's article on
Republican plans for the Food and Drug Administration (page A16),
we read the following:
In September, Rep. [Newt] Gingrich [incoming Speaker of the
House] told a biotechnology trade group that he was launching
a project to design a replacement for the FDA. Leading the
effort is the Progress and Freedom Foundation, whose head,
Jeffrey Eisenach, formerly ran Gopac, Mr. Gingrich's political
action committee. Without apology, Mr. Eisenach acknowledges
that drug companies are financial contributors to the
foundation, and notes that drug companies will be involved in
the project. And he dismisses suggestions that drug-company
involvement could taint the results. "So I should go to Ralph
Nader and do it?" he says. "That's silly".
So the Progress and Freedom Foundation is active on more than
just telecommunications issues. But it is not just an industry
lobbying organization. In particular, the connection to Gopac is
not at all coincidental. The purpose of Gopac has been to train
conservative Republican candidates in the particularly aggressive
style of politicking that Mr. Gingrich pioneered during his early
days in Congress, and the Progress and Freedom Foundation may
contribute to a generalization of this model.
[By 1994] "Newt World" was now far-flung, from GOPAC to the
National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee; the
Friends of Newt Gingrich campaign committee; a weekly TV show
on the conservative cable TV network, National Empowerment
Television, and a think tank called the Progress and Freedom
Foundation.
Its messages were coordinated with talk-show hosts such as
Rush Limbaugh and with Christian Coalition groups. [...]
"The goal of this project is simple", Jeffrey A. Eisenach,
director of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, wrote in a
fund-raising letter. "To train, by April, 1996, 200,000-plus
citizens into a model for replacing the welfare state and
reforming our government." (LA Times 12/19/94, page A31)
What can we expect from this rising army? Gopac's record
provides some evidence. Much has been written about the tactics
that Gopac suggested to its candidates. An article about Gopac
leader Joe Gaylord (Wall Street Journal, 8 December 1994, page
A18), for example, says:
Mr. Gaylord is one of the brains behind Gopac ... . [He]
wrote its how-to textbook, which urges challengers to "go
negative" early and "never back off". They must sometimes
ignore voters' main concerns because "important issues
can be of limited value". The book suggests looking for a
"minor detail" to use against opponents, pointing to Willie
Horton as a good example. Though it says a positive proposal
also can be helpful, it counsels candidates to consider the
consequences: "Does it help, or at least not harm, efforts to
raise money?" Mr. Gingrich has called the book "absolutely
brilliant".
Even more has been written about the most famous Gopac document,
... a memo by Gingrich called "Language, a Key Mechanism of
Control", in which the then-House minority whip gave candidates
a glossary of words, tested in focus groups, to sprinkle
in their rhetoric and literature. For example, it advised
characterizing Democrats with such words as "decay, sick,
pathetic, stagnation, corrupt, waste, traitors". (LA Times,
12/19/94, pages A31)
In my view, though, the most significant feature of Newt World
is not its language, which is certainly fascinating, or its
association with industry, which is hardly surprising or novel,
but rather its use of technology. Mr. Gingrich is a pioneer in
the use of new technologies to build a political movement. I do
have to hand it to him -- he has worked hard and he has a genius
for political organizing. Having observed in the early 1980's
that candidates spend a lot of dead time on the road traveling
around during campaigns, he hit upon the idea of sending them
videos and other materials about campaigning. This is what
Gopac did. As time went on, they generalized this model to
include scheduled conference calls and video broadcasts in which
Mr. Gingrich and others would provide campaigners with advice
about messages and methods.
How does this model scale to 200,000-plus people? Well, at that
point it starts to sound a lot like the information superhighway
-- a technology for centralized broadcast of programs to a group
that isn't the "mass audience" of conventional TV broadcasting
but is distributed across the country. More tailored programming
could be distributed as well -- to particular geographical
regions, to activists on particular issues, and so forth. It's
not a decentralized model like the Internet, but then it's not
the political vision that normally goes with the Internet either.
It's closer to the asymmetrical distribution model found in the
plans of many cable and regional phone companies -- some of whom,
you might recall, sponsored the Progress and Freedom Foundation's
conference.
This is not to say that Newt Gingrich and company are engaged
in a conspiracy against the Internet. After all, Mr. Gingrich
has made some encouraging statements about making Congressional
materials available to citizens on the Internet, and this
is certainly a good and laudable thing. The situation and the
participants' views are often complicated. The point is that
technologies are not neutral. Technologies certainly do not
determine how they will be used, but neither are they simply
tools that can be used for any old purpose at all. Rather,
technologies and social forms evolve together, according to the
affordances of the machinery and the forces of the social system.
None of this coevolution goes simply or smoothly in practice, of
course, nor is any of it inevitable. As the Internet illustrates
extremely well, machines frequently have uses that nobody ever
thought of, and these can often be resources for people wishing
to engage in genuine, bottom-up democracy. The machines can't
restore the health of our democracy, though -- we have to do that
ourselves. And in doing so, we need to be aware of the complex
and ambiguous interactions between the workings of our machinery
and the forms of our political life.
In particular, we should not assume that the Internet's open
and decentralized architecture necessarily makes it a force
for democracy, or that it necessarily levels the field for
all players. The practice of politics on the Internet is
increasingly complicated, with new kinds of players and new
variations on the existing games.
As a case study in these issues, let's consider an organization
called the Wireless Opportunities Coalition. The WOC has
circulated an alert on the net seeking support for a certain
position in a fairly arcane regulatory fight within the FCC
over the rules in certain frequency bands for digital wireless
communications. The WOC's materials are also available on WWW:
http://wireless.policy.net/wireless/wireless.html
The basic idea of the WOC's arguments is that companies with very
sensitive communications devices shouldn't be able to displace
other users of certain frequencies, including low-power digital
wireless communications used for educational purposes, for
example in local community networking in areas that do not have
high rates of telephone service. This certainly sounds like a
good cause, and it probably even *is* a good cause.
But note that the Wireless Opportunities Coalition's Web site
is a creation of a public relations firm called Issue Dynamics
Inc, whose largest clients include Bell Atlantic and a lobbying
alliance of the US regional phone companies. (To be fair, they
also include the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.) I
couldn't find this information by searching through the WOC web
pages, but you can verify it easily enough by aiming your web
client at the underlying index:
http://wireless.policy.net/
As recently as December 9th this page was entitled "IDI Index";
it is now, as of December 20th, called "Policy.Net". Click on
"Issue Dynamics", read down to the bottom, and click on the IDI
logo, which will take you to:
http://idi.net/clients.html
Why is it "idi.net" and not "idi.com"? Never mind. My point
is not that these folks are evil or that they have no right to
speak. My point is that they are practicing public relations
on the Internet. In the future, I expect that ordinary citizens
using the Internet will want to inform themselves about who's
behind all of those slick web pages.
Public relations and its place in society is a fascinating and
important topic, and I encourage everyone to learn more about it.
If you're interested, here is a brief reading list:
Edward L. Bernays, The Engineering of Consent, Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1955.
Bill Cantor, ed, Experts in Action: Inside Public Relations,
New York: Longman, 1984.
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Beyond Agenda Setting: Information
Subsidies and Public Policy, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982.
Jack A. Gottschalk, Crisis Response: Inside Stories on Managing
Image Under Siege, Detroit: Visible Ink, 1993.
James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt, Managing Public Relations, New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
Elizabeth L. Toth and Robert L. Heath, eds, Rhetorical and
Critical Approaches to Public Relations, Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, 1992.
Finally, let me close with a pertinent quote. I should note that
it pertains to situations slightly more extreme than the Wireless
Opportunities Coalition, which at least mentions its industry
membership. Nonetheless, I do think that the author is correct
in criticizing misleading representations by advocacy groups.
"One practice which I believe should be eliminated is that of
the so-called "paper front". A client is advised to finance
an "organization" to promote or fight for its cause under the
guise of an independent and spontaneous movement. This is
a plain public deceit and fraud and of course is a technique
developed with consummate skill and in great profusion by the
Communists. In a free country any interest with a cause has
a right to present its case to the public, to inform and, if
possible, to persuade to its heart's content. But that right
of free speech also carries the obligation that the source of
it will be in the open for all to see. Attempts to fool the
public by making it believe an "organization" existing only
on paper is really a vociferous group favoring this or that
cause have helped to cast a shadow upon the business of public
relations counseling. No counsel who wants to preserve his own
reputation will ever be a party to the issuance of any public
statement by a client unless the source is clearly set forth.
Obviously, when a client is involved in a public relations
controversy, supporting statements are welcomed from every
responsible source. But such statements should be issued by
real-live people or organizations and not phoneys."
This quote is from the autobiography of John W. Hill ("The Making
of a Public Relations Man", recently republished by NTC Business
Books, pages 139-140), who founded one of the largest public
relations firms, Hill and Knowlton.
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Building community networks.
[This is an edited transcript of a speech I contributed to the
British Columbia Information Policy Conference.]
My assigned topic this morning is "Building Community Networks",
and I want to start out with a bit of an apology, in that I have
not myself built a community network, so that it feels futile for
me to tell this audience, of all people, how to do that. Instead
I would like to offer something closer to my own expertise by
placing the process of building community networks in some kind
of social perspective. Let me begin by distinguishing between
two valid perspectives on community networking, the aerial view
and the ground view. When taking the ground view, as we usually
do in practice, our question is, how can I best go about building
my community network? It is a normative question, oriented to
action in concrete circumstances.
When we are taking the aerial view, by contrast, our question is,
how do communities take hold of computing and networking? It is
an empirical question, oriented to developing concepts and making
certain kinds of social maps, and it posits "the community" as an
active agent of a collective sort. It is a problematic question,
of course, because we have to figure out what a community is,
what it means to speak of a community taking hold of something,
how to maintain a consciousness simultaneously of the unitary
action of a community and its often deeply divided daily reality,
and so forth. Nonetheless, I would like to devote the bulk of
my remarks today to a very much provisional consideration of
the aerial view on community networking. I am well aware that
communities differ and that my own understanding of the issues
has evolved in the context of urban settings in my own country.
The point of this type of inquiry is not to make generalizations,
although it is hard to avoid making generalizations, but rather
to offer some potentially useful concepts -- what I think of as
a handy reference card or checklist that one might take into an
analysis of any particular setting. I invite you, as we go along
here, to consider what I might be talking about within your own
community.
Before we begin, I would like to offer a brief anatomy of
what we might call the democratic technology movement, which
we might define as an increasingly global, politically diverse,
loosely organized, heavily networked movement of grassroots
activists who wish simultaneously to employ computer networking
to support a range of democratic projects *and* to contest the
future architectural and institutional development of the global
information infrastructure precisely to ensure that opportunities
for this kind of technologically mediated democratic organizing
are preserved and expanded in the future. At the risk of leaving
many people out in my hurry to move along to more concrete
issues, I would suggest analyzing this movement on three levels.
On the first level is the concept, widespread both in the
media and in the thinking of a remarkably broad range of
social activists outside the computer-and-information world, of
"equity of access to the information superhighway". Though the
widespread consciousness of this idea is a fine and remarkable
thing, I think it's important for us to recognize how limited the
notion of "access" is. "Access" presupposes that the technology
and its architecture are givens, that "access" to that commodity
is scarce, and that the issue is one of an equitable distribution
of that commodity. This actually *was* the case for a long time
with Plain Old Telephone Service, but it is not true any more.
Things are more complicated now. Many urgent issues concern the
future shape of network architectures, and the notion of "access"
does not do justice to the possibility and necessity of acting on
these issues. Bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper, but a poor
architecture or the erosion of common carrier principles might
lock large segments of the population out of true participation
in society.
On the second level of analysis we find specific movements
like the largely libertarian on-line community that is concerned
with cryptography and other privacy issues, and the largely
progressive and communitarian local and regional movements for
community networking, educational networking, preservation and
expansion of the social role of libraries, and so forth. I find
these movements wholly commendable, and I hope here to make my
own small ideological contribution to their efforts to reach out
and expand their social base.
At the same time, I think it is worth distinguishing a
third level of the democratic technology movement, namely the
participatory design movement that began with a collaboration
of labor unions and academics in Scandinavia, and that has
spread to North America through the efforts of some people in
industrial laboratories, notably Lucy Suchman at Xerox, and
activists, notably Doug Schuler of Computer Professionals for
Social Responsibility. Participatory design asks us to expand
our vision, focusing not just on choices about a computer or
network architecture but also on the process through which
such an architecture arises. This focus on process is something
that comes naturally to the community networking movement, given
the considerable reflection and creativity involved in reaching
out to various stakeholders and getting them on board, and
participatory design would encourage us to deepen and systematize
this reflection on process.
As we move through these three levels of the democratic
technology movement, we are challenged increasingly to understand
how we might conceptualize computing as a collective activity --
as something that communities and groups and networks of people
do, not just individuals. In doing so we should be aware of
the many ideological constructions of computing as an individual
activity. These begin with the stereotype of the asocial
computer nerd, but they extend much further. As Sonia Jarvis
points out, they are found in certain visions of the information
superhighway, in which we can shop at home, work at home, vote
at home, and just generally do everything at home. This kind
of technologically enabled agoraphobia is the antithesis of
community and democracy, particularly when the architecture
being envisioned is a top-down system in which "interactivity"
is conceived wholly as button-pushing to purchase commodities,
gamble, or participate in plebiscites.
Individualistic conceptions of computing are found in even
subtler places as well. Although training and good user
interfaces are certainly important, in my experience many
arguments for these things are really, underneath, arguments for
a one-person-one-computer view of computing. As an alternative,
I would argue that computing is almost always, as a matter of
necessity, something that people do as part of extended social
networks. If all we see when we imagine computing is a person
sitting alone in front of a terminal then we need to expand
our vision and take an aerial view, asking the much larger and
harder question of how communities take hold of computing and
networking.
To begin with, any given community will most likely have several
nuclei of interest in computer networking. These nuclei might
be computer professionals, librarians, retired people keeping
in touch with their families -- anybody who has been exposed to
the benefits of networking and wishes to take some initiative to
secure these benefits for themselves or their group. These folks
will probably have a diversity of understandings of themselves,
their communities, their goals, and the technology itself, and
they will not automatically encounter one another or necessarily
see themselves as having anything in common with one another.
Computers, however, do their best to disrupt this picture of
scattered participation. Computers, after all, are complex
and delicate machines. While some people assert that mass
participation in computing requires that computers be stripped
down and idiot-proofed, another perspective is that the
complexity of computers, or that complexity which is necessary
and not just bad design, is a positive force for bringing people
together into user groups, a form of collective action that has
been little written about despite the dozens or hundreds of such
groups to be found in most cities in North America and in many
other places as well. Many Macintosh user groups, for example,
have hundreds or thousands of members. These groups bring people
together through a complex pattern of interests, including users
seeking information and software for their own use, consultants
maintaining their referral networks, other computer professionals
keeping their knowledge up-to-date, vendors selling their wares,
volunteer sysops trying to build communities on their bulletin
boards, and so forth. Underneath, though, the fuel that drives
these groups is the immense rate of change in the technology.
People must band together to keep up with the changes and to
anticipate where things are going in the future, and the result
is a complex sociology of knowledge that warrants our attention
on several grounds.
The aerial view of computing encourages us to take this analysis
further by considering the distribution of computer knowledge
through a community. Let us consider an analogy between
knowledge about computers and knowledge about cars. Knowledge
about cars really is community property. Various degrees of
automotive expertise are widely distributed in most communities,
and it's a good thing, since expert knowledge is by its nature
hard to evaluate and best obtained within a web of relationships
of family or neighborhood or reputation. This expert knowledge,
of course, is not distributed equally. As a cultural matter
automotive knowledge, like computer knowledge, is heavily marked
as a masculine domain, and the group settings within which this
knowledge circulates -- auto clubs or computer clubs -- tend
strongly to be homosocial in nature.
Access to reliable auto knowledge is also conditioned by
the structure of your social network, so that, as a rough
generalization, working people whose social networks are
structured by family and geography will tend to have better
access to automotive knowledge than middle-class people whose
social networks are structured more vocationally.
The point here is that the growth of computer networking, like
any other social movement, is going to be shaped by the existing
structures of social networks in a community. The civil rights
movement in the US grew largely out of churches, as has the
conservative evangelical movement more recently. The Sierra
Club's environmental activism grew out of that organization's
nature hikes for families and singles and so forth. And groups
like Amnesty International operate heavily through paper mail,
with many small local chapters, since their base is not otherwise
organized by community or vocational ties.
But computer networks also afford the creation of new forms of
social connection among people, and I think we should view a wide
variety of network-based activities in terms of their immersion
in these networks of interrelationship. Access to government
information, for example, is usually of limited utility to
isolated individuals unless those individuals are strongly
motivated by a specific goal. Computer networks extend and
transform existing social networks, becoming integral parts
of them rather than replacing them. When the participants in
a computer bulletin board decide to get their families together
for a picnic, the result is a restoration of the normal order
of things, namely computer networks as merely one among the many
media through which people conduct their relationships.
Computer networks have a tremendous capacity, then, to bring
people together by extending the already diverse and complex ties
that people have among themselves. But the broad and diverse
applicability of computer technology simultaneously makes it hard
to help people incorporate the new technology into their lives.
The functionality of computers is defined in very broad, abstract
terms -- "communication", "information", and so forth. But most
people do not routinely think of themselves as communicating or
using information. Rather they think of themselves as putting
together social events, looking for work, persuading the city
council to pass an ordinance, settling the kids' fights, getting
dinner on the table, and so forth -- activities bound up in a
dense fabric of relationships and practical dilemmas, all of them
defined more concretely than "communication" and "information".
If an individual or group is going to incorporate new computing
technologies into their lives -- assuming of course that this
would actually be a beneficial thing for them to do -- then they
are going to have to travel a long cognitive path. Specifically,
they are going to have to reconceptualize their own activities in
terms that are commensurable with the concepts that underlie the
the technologies. They will have to see "looking for a job" as a
matter of communication and information, and not just abstractly,
but in terms of a real, practicable involvement in a system of
human relationships -- computer clubs, nextdoor computer gurus,
kids' school activities, professional networks, and so forth.
Once they *do* make this transition, they are in a position to
recognize some important commonalities with an enormous variety
of other people who have come to place a personal importance on
the future of computing and networking. But this isn't going to
happen automatically.
How, then, do people learn about computing and networking -- that
is to say, how do they become involved in the social organization
of computing and networking? What routes do they take? No doubt
many of them start with a general awareness of the discourses of
information superhighways and equity of access. They might also
hear stories about people using computers and networks through
their participation in various kinds of groups (computer-related
or not). They might hear the tales of computing and networking
that their kids bring home from school, assuming that their kids'
schools can afford such things, or their children's education
might provide the impetus for a more active investigation of the
issues. The fact is, we don't know very much about the stories
people hear about computing and networking -- the messages that
shape their understandings of the roles that these technologies
might play in their own lives. Do these messages provide models
for active and creative use of the technology, or do they point
toward exciting but essentially passive processes of consumption?
Do these messages portray computing as a collective activity or
a solitary one? As something associated with particular social
groups or social values? As settled and inevitable or as wide
open to shaping by movements of ordinary people? No doubt the
messages will not be univocal; nor will they all be received with
equal attention or simple credulity.
An increasingly significant source of messages about networking
is the advertising and public relations of commercial access
providers such as America Online. These access providers have
long cultivated the press, for example by providing free accounts
to journalists, and I suspect that a number of the television
and newspaper stories I've been quoted in as an expert originated
with story ideas from PR people for access providers. Part of
my suspicion originates in the close alignment between these
stories' contents and the providers' marketing message, which is
essentially that networking is now for ordinary people, and that
ordinary people are having a good time talking about immediately
accessible and interesting topics within the discussion groups
of these services right now. As media messages about technology
go, this type of message is an improvement on many other genres
of technology tales (mad scientists, gee-whiz counterintuitive
gizmos, apocalyptic disaster, the inevitable march of progress,
so complicated that only Einstein can figure it out, and so on).
But we should pay attention to the subtexts of these stories
nonetheless, and we should also tell some others of our own.
This is where I'd like to descend from my 30,000-foot aerial view
of community networking to the ground view of how we can help
people get involved. Central to the process, I want to suggest,
are stories. Talk to people in your community who are using
computer networking. Ask them how they got involved. Listen to
their stories. Ask permission to tell their stories to others.
Take their stories apart into pieces -- what messages about
networking did they receive where? What other messages might
they have received? Collect stories. Collect stories that fit
under particular headings -- stories about people who managed to
get help with their computer problems, stories about people who
reinvigorated their nonprofit organizations through the use of
a bulletin board system, stories about people who brought their
neighborhood closer together with networking, stories about
people who called out for help on a network and got it, people
who broke out of social isolation through networking, people who
got involved in politics through networking, people who joined
in a user group, people who served as networking evangelists in
their particular social world, and -- especially -- people who
made a difference in the technology itself through the force of
their vision about how technology could be usefully brought into
the lives of real people and real groups. It's important to
categorize the stories -- to name them in ways that help you to
recognize when they're relevant, how they compare and contrast
to other stories, what types of stories you haven't been hearing,
what messages about networking and people the stories really
convey, and what difference it makes to tell them. Almost any
categorization will do, so long as it makes you pay attention to
the forms and uses of stories about networking.
Telling the stories, of course, is the point. Tell the stories
to journalists and city council members. Volunteer to speak in
front of every organization and club in your community -- tell
them the stories and invite them to get involved in community
networking. Keep telling the stories to like-minded people, and
gather up their stories as well, since story-sharing is very much
a collective activity. Tell your stories on the net, and ask the
people on the net to tell their own stories. Ask the people on
the net if they have any stories of a specific type. ("We want
to convince the city council to allocate a little money to get
our bulletin board going, but they want to hear stories about
what this has to do with their priority, namely regional economic
development. Does anybody have any stories about this?")
Tell the stories in press releases. Create newsworthy events
that focus attention on information issues in your community.
Hold a panel discussion on the topic, ideally in a meeting room
at your local public library. Get on the phone and find out
who has ideas on the subject, and ideally who is doing something
about them. Include the major community groups and the Chamber
of Commerce. Send out a press release about the event to every
publication within two hundred miles, especially the smaller
newspapers. To learn how to do this, get yourself a copy of a
marvelously tacky book entitled "How to Make Yourself Famous" by
Gloria Michels. Being famous is a nuisance, of course, but it's
the price of getting your issues out in front of your community.
At one level this advice is common sense -- everybody knows
that telling stories is a powerful way to communicate a vision.
On another level, though, I'm afraid that I'm advising you to
engage in public relations. This kind of structured collecting
and retelling of stories is much of what PR is about, and
numerous people are paid all day long precisely to tell stories
whose purported lessons do not necessarily accord with your
values. PR has a poor reputation and sometimes this reputation
is deserved. But in my view, a revival of democracy is going to
require citizens to reappropriate the tools of public relations
-- of consciously structured story-telling -- for democratic
ends. The goal of these stories is to provide people with a
certain kind of opening -- an intelligible, attractive path into
the community activities of computer networking, thereby making
shared involvements with technology the basis for recognizing
shared interests of a deeper and wider sort.
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This month's recommendations.
Cultural Survival Quarterly. CSQ is produced by an international
human organization called Cultural Survival (46 Brattle Street,
Cambridge MA 02138, USA, +1 (617) 621-3818, fax 621-3814, net
cultsurv@igc.org) that works for the survival of tribal cultures
around the world. The articles in CSQ are mostly written by
anthropologists with long, deep, and sympathetic experience
with the people in question, and they usually provide much more
context than articles in the mainstream press. The Summer/Fall
1994 issue is a double issue on ethnic conflict, with articles on
Rwanda, South Africa, the Balkans, Indonesia, Mexico, and Quebec,
plus several articles on the former Soviet Union. Subscriptions
are not cheap, $45 a year, but I believe that much of that goes
to running the larger non-profit organization. CSQ is available
on many newsstands as well; the cover price on my copy of the
Summer/Fall issue is $5.
Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988. A merciless ethnography of
the moral lives of corporate managers. Having interviewed and
observed numerous managers, Jackall describes the thoroughgoing
orientation to expediency that these managers treated as
necessary to get ahead in the corporate world. Faced with
continually shifting politics and intractable ambiguity, managers
learn to manipulate symbols, commit little of consequence to
writing, claim credit while avoiding blame, and generally to
find a way of becoming "comfortable" with doing what's expedient.
Even if you don't agree with his bleak conclusions, his numerous
stories will help you develop serious antennae for the ethical
conflicts that routinely arise in organizational settings.
Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean: The Changing Landscape of
Corporate Power in the Age of Flexibility, New York: Basic
Books, 1994. A terrific guide to the meaning of "flexibility" in
the global economy. Computer networks and other means of global
coordination are not weakening the largest firms. Quite the
contrary, those firms which can best coordinate their activities
on a global scale can shift costs and risks to their suppliers
by making them compete with one another. This is great if you're
on the buying end, and not so great if you're on the selling
end. Harrison has a definite thesis and point of view, but he is
also admirably clear about the difficulties of deriving reliable
conclusions from the available data, and he discusses several
competing theories in generous detail.
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater
in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986. A book of breathtaking smartness and
moderately serious difficulty about the interplay of ideas on
the market and the theater in the revolutionary "long century".
The connection is one of artifice: as the market broadens
its reach into the web of relationships that make up society,
concern grows about the creation of appearances -- the "show"
or "act" that goes into selling things and especially into
(as they say in our own century) selling oneself. As people
struggled to understand this phenomenon, they eagerly read a
whole series of manuals that claimed to taxonomize personality
types and to reveal the methods by which the ambitious cultivated
personalities that would provide them with maximum advantage in
particular social settings. The theater provided a ready stock
of metaphors for this process, and these metaphors yoked together
the respective fates of the theater and the market in English
culture. Despite its title, the book is mostly about England,
with some notes about the American situation toward the end.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
E-Lab Incorporated
213 West Institute Place, Suite 509
Chicago, Illinois 60610
phone: (312) 640-4450
fax: (312) 640-4455
There's a whole world out there of qualitative market research:
small consulting firms whose speciality is interacting in some
structured way with a company's current or prospective customers
and producing a report about how the company should redesign its
products and services. Many if not most of these companies use
focus groups and the like, where people are brought in from their
ordinary lives into special settings where they are presented
with concepts and prototypes of new products or services and
asked to discuss them. For an amusing sociological study of this
world, you might wish to consult the second half of the following
book chapter:
Bernice Martin, Symbolic knowledge and market forces at the
frontiers of postmodernism: Qualitative market researchers,
in Hansfried Kellner and Frank W. Heuberger, Modernizing work:
New Frontiers in Business Consulting, in Hansfried Kellner
and Frank W. Heuberger, eds, Hidden Technocrats: The New Class
and the New Capitalism, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992.
Some companies are more creative than the others, going out in
various ways to where people live. E-Lab (officially spelled
with a bullet instead of a dash between the E and L) is one of
these. They conduct videotape-based studies of people in their
habitual settings using a wide variety of products and services,
from fast food to robots to advertising. Having collected a
batch of videotape in the field, they bring it back to the lab
and study it in great detail, analyzing and annotating it on
computer-based video processing systems. I'll bet that this
kind of analysis really can be useful to the company's clients.
This type of research obviously brings both promise and worry.
It sure would be nice if all kinds of things were designed with
a fuller understanding of the ways they're actually used: cars,
telephones, kitchen implements, laptop computers, newspapers,
and grocery stores come to mind. At the same time, it concerns
me to imagine our daily lives colonized in such fine detail
by the market's relentless logic of rationalization. The result
is an incredibly detailed symbiosis, with a whole elaborate
ecology of commodities fitting us all like gloves, their shapes
working together gently and subtly to guide us into average,
typical ways of doing things.
Anyway, you might wish to learn more about E-Labs. From what
I know of them they're nice people, so please don't harass them.
Only request their literature if you'd actually like to read it.
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Follow-up.
Response was overwhelmingly negative to my speculations about the
rise of a distinct Internet lingua franca, a version of English
with more net jargon and less local slang. Many argued that
removing local slang makes a language bland and unexpressive.
I think they're wrong; the expressiveness of language is not
built upon the colorfulness of individual words but rather
upon the way words are combined -- literally, upon composition.
Others were worried in a vague way about the language police.
I find these days that it's hard to express any sort of moral
preference (at least, any moral preference not shared by the
Right) without someone warning against a return to Stalinism.
Be that as it may, I continue to think that it's reasonable to
take a little care to avoid expressions that your readers may not
be able to understand. The best counterproposal was due to Arun
Mehta , who suggested the creation of a net
mailing list where people whose first language is not English
can get expressions defined for them. No doubt many linguists
and others who like the English language would be interested in
answering such queries.
Have a look at the interesting special issues being planned by
the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC). Their URL
is http://www.huji.ac.il/www_jcmc/announce.html
The Netherlands now has a very interesting organization working
for digital democracy and telecommunications freedom. They're
called Digitale Burgerbeweging Nederland and their home page
(which has much worthwhile material in Dutch and English) is:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~db.nl
Mitch Kapor's home page has a bunch of interesting links on it:
http://www.kei.com:80/homepages/mkapor/
A commercial Internet marketing company called "The Tenagra
Corporation" issued what it called the "5 Top Internet Marketing
Successes of 1994" on a WorldWide Web page whose URL is:
http://arganet.tenagra.com/Tenagra/awards94.html
The first prize went to Pizza Hut. I wish I could quote their
explanation of *why* Pizza Hut got the prize, but it really
should be savored in its entirety. So aim your own web client
at that URL and read the first two paragraphs. The executive
summary is that Pizza Hut didn't get the prize for providing a
useful or interesting service, or even a service that anyone was
likely to use, but simply for generating lots and lots of media
publicity for their use of the web, thus assisting with their
positioning of themselves as "with it" and "a 1990's company".
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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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