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The Network Observer Vol 02 No 07
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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 7 JULY 1995
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"You have to organize, organize, organize, and build and
build, and train and train, so that there is a permanent,
vibrant structure of which people can be part."
-- Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition
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This month: Community and democracy
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Welcome to TNO 2(7).
This issue of TNO consists mostly of an unusually long article
that draws together many of the themes that previous issues have
been developing. I hesitate to call it a "theory of democracy"
because that seems too grand and because I'm not entirely certain
of its originality. It is partly a reaction to my reading of
Friedrich Hayek, partly an interpretation of the literatures on
the associational basis of society, and partly a routine account
of public relations. Along the way I offer some first thoughts
about the place of computer networking in the basic democratic
machinery of society. I have not tried to follow this theme all
the way through, though. Perhaps others will wish to do this.
In order to keep this issue (just) under 50K bytes, I have kept
the recommendations this month to a single book that relates to
the theme of the article. I know for a fact that we'll have many
more excellent things in next month's issue.
Ralph Reed's profound quote, already cited in TNO 2(5), has
returned as TNO's permanent motto. I hope that you will read
it afresh every month and ponder its meaning. The political
movement that Reed represents is winning fair and square, and
Reed's quote explains as succinctly as possible why this is.
Do you agree with him? Are acting as though you agree with him?
The whole purpose of TNO is to be useful to people who agree with
what Reed is saying and who believe that technology can be part
of the much larger project of reviving the values of democracy.
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Community and democracy.
For some reason not wholly clear to me, I have a powerful need to
understand how the professional world works and then to explain
it to anyone who cares to listen. On one level this project is
political: what elites inherit through their upbringing, almost
more importantly than money and contacts, is a system of advanced
social skills whose nature is systematically hidden from everyone
else. These skills may be largely tacit in nature; I cannot
tell for sure. Making them explicit for myself, bit by bit and
year by year, has made the world look completely different to me.
Perhaps above all, I am continually impressed by the extent to
which everything in the world is a collaborative construction of
far-flung networks of people. Sometimes this is obvious: a car
is built by hundreds or thousands of people organized by markets
and hierarchies. But sometimes it is not obvious at all: words,
sentences, conversations, speeches, memos, papers, and meetings
are likewise "built" by enormous networks of people. Mikhail
Bakhtin described some of these phenomena as they manifest
themselves in literary texts; this article offers some informal
first thoughts on the machinery through which collective voices
arise in real life. (For a slightly more formal version of
one part of this story, see my paper entitled "Institutional
circuitry", to appear in _Information Technology and Libraries_.)
Let's define a "community" to be a set of people who occupy
analogous locations in social or institutional structures. This
is not the ordinary use of the term "community", and it will take
a moment to explicate it fully. First some examples. The people
who are in charge of the parking lots on American university
campuses are a community. The Republicans who ran for elected
offices in the 1994 elections were also a community. The repair
technicians at a photocopier company form a community. The
business people who are implementing or planning to implement
"reengineering" programs in their companies form a community.
And so do the children in a particular grade school classroom.
The fire fighters who drive a given model of fire truck form a
community. The folks who live in a given political jurisdiction
form a community, of course. The "locations" in these examples
vary widely. They are notable for their relationships: virtually
every parking lot manager has a community of parkers and a police
department to contend with; virtually every Republican candidate
has a Democratic opponent to contend with; virtually every copier
repair technician has customers to contend with; and so forth.
Everyone might belong to a variety of different communities,
and these communities can be defined in broader or narrower
terms (the community of San Diego residents versus the community
of California residents; drivers of Mack fire trucks versus all
fire fighters; etc). The locations might correspond to formal
institutional titles or they might not; but in every case
they correspond to a relatively stable universe of structural
relationships, and this is what makes them "locations".
We can readily observe some patterns among these communities.
The community members have certain interests in common. The
institutions are also structured to effectively place them in
competition with one another in certain ways. These shared and
conflicting interests are "objective" in the sense that they are
imposed by the institutions; this is a distinct from the question
of how the people themselves understand their interests.
Another pattern is that the members of a community are frequently
in ongoing communication with one another. This is clear enough
when the members are routinely brought together into a shared
physical space. But it is also true when the members' physical
locations are distant. One purpose of clubs, unions, Friday
evening drinking groups, and professional societies is to bring
the members of a community together periodically. It is by
no means inevitable, however, that the members of a community
will interact. Nor is it inevitable *how* they will interact.
I will call these things the community's "forms of association".
Note that a community can have elaborate forms of association
without any two of its members ever being in the same place --
they can associate over the phone, through talk radio, through
magazines, through the Internet, through the efforts of a
small number of outsiders who carry news of one another from
place to place, or whatever. In practice numerous modalities
of association may be combined in customary ways. Forms of
association are contingent -- they could be different than they
are -- and they are historical -- they arise through concrete
processes that leave their marks. And, of course, they are
relational -- they depend in crucial ways on the ensemble of
relationships that constitute a given location.
This is very abstract, so let's make it concrete through a day in
the life of your average manager. Managers the world over have
highly developed forms of association. These vary by country,
sector, organizational level, and so forth, but they bear family
resemblances due to the basic workings of bureaucracy. Managers
live dangerous lives -- in some sense anyway. Credit and blame
are constantly being assigned for large, complicated processes
over which nobody has full control. Decisions must be made
that depend on more information than any single individual could
ever master, and they must be articulated and defended in terms
that orient to a constantly shifting set of political alliances.
It is not surprising, then, that managers exhibit a powerful
orientation to the experience and thinking of others in their
community. The university campus parking lot managers, for
example, will be well aware of the practices on other campuses.
They will maintain an elaborate topography of these campuses;
they will know which ones are considered to be on the cutting
edge of parking lot management. If one campus decides to try
setting parking prices according to a market-based allocation
mechanism, for example, then all of the others will be watching.
This "watching" will be subserved by a variety of mechanisms,
many of them well-institutionalized: consultants, newsletters,
rumor mills, and so on.
In many ways this is a good system since it permits people to put
their heads together. It is what Ed Hutchins calls "distributed
cognition": thinking that is distributed across a whole network
of people rather than just being located in one person's head.
If you ask how the University of Walla Walla made its decision
about how to charge for parking spaces, you cannot formulate a
serious answer without appealing to some collective construct
such as the community of university campus parking lot managers.
It is worth noting that this picture forces us to revise, or at
least amend, the picture of the economics of knowledge in the
newly influential work of Friedrich Hayek. Hayek depicted the
economy as a sprawling network of people who know their own local
conditions extremely well, all dealing with one another through
the arm's-length mediation of the price system. But the reality
isn't much like this. Of course, people are arranged in some
kind of social network -- that's almost a tautology. But they
also put their collective heads together in ways that have a lot
more regularity than Hayek's extreme localism can admit. These
collective minds do have their economics, and money certainly
changes hands in the conferences and newsletter subscriptions
that subserve the process, but this whole architecture is not
just a sprawling mass, and it is not just a "spontaneous order"
of localized market arrangements.
The analysis to this point also makes clear what the majority of
Internet discussion groups are really for. Even those of us who
use the Internet intensively have been too heavily influenced
by reporters' representations of it, which (as I remarked in the
introduction to TNO 2(6)) have focused on those areas of the net
that reporters can easily peek into -- especially the murky mess
of Usenet. The whole bogus issue of "rudeness on the Internet"
derives from that bias. What it ignores is the thousands upon
thousands of discussion groups for professions and subprofessions
and subsubprofessions of all sorts. Here, for example, are some
excerpts of a *big* directory of discussion lists for librarians,
all arbitrarily taken from the Bitnet section of the directory:
ARCLIB-L@IRLEARN.UCD.IE Irish and UK Architectural
Librarians
CALIBK12@SJSUVM1.SJSU.EDU California K-12 Librarians
CALL-L@UNB.CA Canadian Academic Law
Libraries
CIRCPLUS@IDBSU.IDBSU.EDU Circulation and Access
Services
CIRLNET@RUTVM1.RUTGERS.EDU Community of Industrial
Relations Librarians
EXLIBRIS@RUTVM1.RUTGERS.EDU Rare Books and Special
Collections
LABMGR@UKCC.UKY.EDU Academic Microcomputer Lab
Management
LIBIDAHO@IDBSU.IDBSU.EDU Idaho Libraries and Librarians
SHARP-L@IUBVM.UCS.INDIANA.EDU History of the Printed Word
TQMLIB@CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU Total Quality Management for
Librarians
(See gopher://info.lib.uh.edu:70/00/tools/netinfo/library for
much more.) These forums may not be promising places to troll
for a colorful story, but they are where the real action is
sociologically. Imagine what the world would be like if every
community -- in the sense of the term I'm using here: the
people who share a certain institutional location -- had its
own Internet discussion group. Of course, various factors will
influence whether the people in a given community would actually
benefit from an Internet discussion group:
* how numerous they are
* how often they have questions that pertain to that particular
location
* how fast the world around them is changing
* the forms of association that they have in common (or don't)
* how much conflict is currently going on in the institutional
relationships that define the location
* how much conflict is going on among the community members
themselves
* whether they share a common language
* what kind of access to the technology they have
* whether they have access to sufficiently compatible systems
* and so on
So far I have made it sound as though everyone in a community
plays an equivalent role in the community's collective thinking.
But this is rarely the case. The actual division of labor in a
given community will depend on many aspects of its relationships
and its history, and these will have to be studied concretely
in each case to get a full understanding. But some patterns
do recur. The patterns I have in mind are driven by change and
pertain to the role of innovators and leaders. Innovation in
professions is often (but not always) surrounded by an ideology
according to which brilliant individuals come up with "new ideas"
through hard work, innate genius, sparks of creativity, and so
forth, so that one might regard it as mysterious that someone
else didn't come up with the same "new ideas" years or decades or
centuries earlier. My experience has been that it rarely works
this way. Instead, innovators are people who (as common idioms
put it) "see which way things are going" and "get ahead of the
curve". As the world changes, everyone in a given community
is going to face a common problem. And in practice, particular
individuals position themselves as the thought leaders in
relation to those changes. The thought leader's role is to get
on top of an issue: see it coming, gather positions and arguments
about it, network with people who are relevant to it in various
ways, and articulate it in terms that supply useful raw materials
for individual community members' own thinking in their own
situations. This, of course, is not an easy task, and the social
capital that these folks accumulate is usually well earned. The
conditions that permit individuals to play this thought-leader
role vary, and different people bring different strengths and
strategies to the job. Networking like mad helps a lot; if you
notice the same issue coming up repeatedly in conversations with
community members, and if the community members do not realize
how common the issue is, then that's an opportunity to do a
service for both oneself and the community. Although original
thinking on the matter is an advantage, all that is needed to be
helpful is to assemble everyone else's thinking in some useful
form.
Thought leaders accumulate capital in a variety of ways. Some
of these are straightforwardly financial, as when they earn money
for books and magazine articles, as consulting fees, or through
grants. But the capital can take other forms. Most especially,
community members' willingness to commit resources to expose
themselves to a synthesis of thinking on an emerging issue gives
the thought leaders an opportunity to expand their professional
networks in the course of organizing conference panels and the
like. This social capital is then convertible into other forms of
capital in a wide varieties of -- usually unforseen but usually
unsurprising -- ways. Professional communities in particular
have routinized much of this process: whole genres of writing and
interaction are devoted to it and whole publications are often
devoted to uncompensated articles written by people trying to
establish themselves as thought leaders. It is rare for anybody
to be taught the "moves" through which one accumulates capital
in these worlds, or the "moves" through which various kinds of
capital are converted into one another in the course of a career.
People go through whole careers without quite understanding the
process, while other people have a highly cultivated instinct
for it. Why is this? Part of the reason, as I mentioned above,
pertains to social class: if you watched your parents live their
lives through the associational forms of distributed cognition
through which thought leaders acquire capital, then you will
probably grow up with a tacit awareness of the phenomena and a
powerful head start in learning the skills. But it's not all a
matter of social class. Some people who did not grow up around
successful professionals have good professional-skills mentors
in college -- this is one of the purposes of public higher
education, and it's a purpose that public universities should
much be much more explicit about serving. A few others manage
to get themselves into productive apprenticeship relationships
to masters of the craft in their jobs. Other people manage to
get the idea in one world by working through rough analogies
to processes of distributed cognition and capital accumulation
through thought leadership in worlds with different class
structures -- local politics, labor unions, social competition
through parties and the like, street gangs and organized crime,
support groups, lodges, social movement organizing, and so on.
My point, though, is that not enough people ever get these things
explained to them, and that this is a powerful and remediable
force for social inequality.
In sketching the physiology of communities' collective thought
processes, I have tacitly opposed two extreme models: one where
all community members play the same role, communicating amongst
themselves equally and symmetrically, and one where a thought
leader is the sole go-between among all the community members.
The reality, of course, is more complicated, and it's important
to be aware of that complexity. In particular, it's important
to be aware of the associational forms through which community
members circulate bits and pieces of thinking among themselves.
In Julian Orr's studies of photocopier repair people, these
associational forms involved telling "war stories" about ugly
copier repair problems, an activity best conducted with the
aid of alcoholic beverages. Business people engaged in public
controversies circulate stories as well, but they do so within
a different practice based on public relations; the stories are
all crafted to provide support for an agenda of "messages" that
the community (having done the necessary political solidarity
work within itself) wishes to get across to particular publics.
(A "public", in PR jargon, is precisely a community that stands
in a specific structural relation to one's own community: for
example, a company's publics might include customers, regulators,
neighbors, activists, journalists, and union officials.) I have
referred to this circulation of structured interactional "stuff"
as an "institutional circuitry". This circuitry is often partly
professionalized, for example when an industry association sends
its members a "manual" of facts and stories and quotes that they
can use when articulating an industry perspective in one site of
public debate or another. Institutional circuitry is defined by
the genres of the "stuff" that circulates in them; stories that
photocopier repair people tell among themselves sound different
from stories that managers tell among themselves because they
serve different purposes -- that is, they are located differently
in the larger system of institutional relationships.
This discussion of stories should remind us that, in speaking of
community "thinking" and "cognition", I have simplified things
by losing sight again of the relational nature of the structural
locations that define communities. Everyone lives their life in
a set of institutional locations, and every situation that arises
in life (or, at least, every situation of any significance) is
defined (to some significant degree) in relation to these other
locations. This is particularly clear in the case of an industry
political voice (the example in my _Information Technology and
Libraries_ paper concerns the cattle industry). But it's also
clearly the case for bureaucrats, whose professional lives are
spent fashioning language for a stable universe of structurally
related others. The photocopier repair people, likewise, spend
much time discussing how to "fix the customer" as well as how to
fix the machine, and this "fixing" is conducted through language
-- language that nobody could fashion very well on their own,
by pure improvisation. People are often not aware of the extent
to which the associational forms of their communities serve the
purpose of fashioning a collective voice. They may not even
be aware of the crucial role of these associational forms in
gathering words for their own individual use back "home" in their
interactions with their familiar environment of structurally
related others. The associational forms, after all, probably
serve other purposes as well, including plain old relaxation, the
chance to "talk through" the feelings brought on by troublesome
events, the exchange of mutually interesting facts (for example
through "gossip"), and so forth. The fact is, though, that we
are all members of communities that possess complex mechanisms
for the collective construction of a voice. Our voices are not
simply our own. That is not to say that we are all puppets who
say what we are told -- such a system wouldn't work anyway. Nor
is it to say that we are conformists who hide behind the average
because it's safe -- though some of this is often prudent. Nor
is it to say that we are conspiratists consciously plotting the
most expedient utterances to use in manipulating others -- though
clearly some of this goes on from time to time. To get started,
the mechanisms I am describing require nothing more than simple,
basic, disorganized self-interest: people trying to deal with
their own local situations, discovering that others can provide
resources that help with this, associating with them for simple
mutual benefit, and then easing into the genres of interaction
and the institutional mechanisms that formalize the process
and help it scale up. In practice, of course, we inherit these
associational forms and institutions from others -- which is to
say, we enter a given community's world by being socialized into
them. We may permit ourselves to be socialized into these things
because we see the cognitive advantages of it, or we might have
other reasons for joining in. The bottom line, though, is that
the community's institutional circuitry can grow quite complex
without anybody ever understanding it, much less designing it.
It is important to discuss these things for many reasons. I have
already mentioned one of them: that mastery of many communities'
associational forms is unequally distributed, and this inequality
helps reproduce other kinds of inequality. But I think that
another reason is even more important, and this pertains to the
conjunction of topics that defines TNO: networks and democracy.
The roots of democracy lie in associational forms: people learn
solidarity or division through their associational involvements;
communities that can manage to think, speak, and act collectively
can defend their interests much better than the ones that cannot;
people who define their communities of shared interests in narrow
ways will fare differently from people who define their interests
in broad ways; communities that can form working alliances with
other communities based on shared interests will fare better than
those that cannot; and so forth. Too often we think of democracy
in formal terms, as something that happens every couple of years
at the ballot box. But democracy is something that happens all
the time in society; it is the everyday process through which
people negotiate their relationships with one another. Such
negotiations may appear to our untrained eyes -- and the eyes
of the law and the economists -- as historyless improvisations
between isolated individuals, but they're not. Even if it were
possible for isolated individuals to negotiate with one another,
considerable advantages will accrue to whichever individual then
decides to go off and get involved in a community of people who
occupy analogous structural locations in society. The reason
for this is obvious: by participating in such a community, an
individual gets access to the thinking of many other people --
people who have probably faced similar negotiations already. As
a general rule, I've found, any community that preaches against
this broadly democratic conception of society will in fact be
discovered to practice it with terrific vigor. And, of course,
anybody who can convince you to abandon your associational
forms without also abandoning their own will have an enormous
negotiating advantage over you forever afterward.
Now that the stakes here are becoming clear, it is possible to
investigate a further question: which associational forms are
best? Is it always good to share stories? What kind of stories?
Is it always good for a community to have thought leaders who
accumulate social capital by gathering the community's thinking
on an issue of widespread concern among its membership? What
roles should various media play? What are the best genres to
employ for various purposes in these media? Part of my great
fascination with public relations is that it is precisely a
profession that asks these questions in a reasonably general way.
I have already remarked on a number of the basic concepts of PR
-- publics, messages, facts -- that fit alarmingly well with the
theory of democracy that I am presenting. This is, of course,
not accidental. PR originated around the turn of the century
as part of a broader movement to rationalize society through the
establishment of professions -- an openly antidemocratic rule of
experts. The job of PR experts was to mediate between the large
corporations (which were a brand-new phenomenon in those days)
and the public, maintaining their own kind of social harmony by
"engineering consent" for the goals of their employers. Since
democracy would not go away, the point was to intervene in the
tissue of society in a systematic way. The basic logic of PR
-- measure the current perceptions of certain strategic publics,
formulate messages to address to those publics, collect facts
that support those messages, circulate both the messages and
facts through a variety of channels, measure the perceptions
again, and restart the cycle -- has changed little since those
days. Those underlying concepts have been applied to different
venues, and more complex strategies have been built on top of
the basic cycle, but the cycle itself persists. What is more,
generations of business people have been socialized into the way
of thinking that PR developed. The circulation of messages and
facts in business is endless, and to the unaided eye it can seem
like second nature. Indeed, to the unaided eye it can seem like
nothing special at all: just the telling of interesting stories,
the exchanging of didja-know facts, the revealing of personal
opinions, and so forth. I find the temptation to emulate these
practices nearly overwhelming, and I teach a course on PR out of
my personal commitment to immerse myself in things that horrify
and fascinate me. We don't always think of PR as a political
practice: what's political about promoting a new movie, talking
to the reporters when a dead body is found in a hotel room,
calling up the stock analysts when your Asian operations have
just taken a hit from a currency devaluation, or chatting with
the neighbors while you're planning to expand your factory? But
in the properly broad sense of "democracy" that I've described
here, these are all professionalized democratic practices in a
way that is perfectly continuous with the polling of electorates,
fashioning of messages, collation of supporting facts, and
circulation of talking points by political parties. Reading the
conservative press, for example, I am convinced that the American
conservative movement is staffed by people with rigorous training
in PR methods -- and that the liberal movement generally is not.
The associational forms of the conservative movement -- parts of
which I described in TNO 2(1) -- are, in this sense, perfectly
continuous with the PR operations of businesses and industry
associations. The PR people promoting a new car probably don't
have much contact with the Republican Party central office, but
they are part of the same sprawling institutional circuitry.
The operating principles of this circuitry do not proceed from
any centrally directed conspiracy; rather, they proceed from the
associational forms fashioned by public relations and applied
to one part of society after another. From this perspective,
the great virtue of facts and messages is that they flow very
efficiently indeed through this circuitry -- little modules of
discourse that can be endlessly recombined for a wide variety of
purposes in different locations.
The profession of public relations demonstrates the extraordinary
power of putting names on things. If you were to read a textbook
of public relations the way you read a textbook of mathematics or
social theory -- trying to appreciate the complexity and subtlety
of its inner conceptual logic -- then you would be disappointed
and probably perplexed as well. Nothing in a PR textbook is
at all conceptually difficult, and this contributes to the poor
reputation that the profession suffers within academia and the
world of scientific and technical research. But PR was never
intended as a theory that can be appreciated in isolation from
reality. Like much business-oriented theorizing, the purpose of
PR is to provide structures of perception, analysis, and action
that are useful in actual situations, in the full complexity of
their details and their background. It is incredibly powerful
to ask, "who are this organization's most significant publics?",
and to actually make a list of them, and then to ask, "which
of these publics can do us the most help or harm?", and then to
figure that out based on everyone's knowledge of the industry and
the personalities and the precedents, and then to ask "do we know
what perceptions each of these most consequential publics has
about us?", and then to find out what these perceptions are and
write them down, and then to ask "what messages would we like to
get across to those people", and then to collect a batch of facts
that supports each of those messages, and so forth. No rocket
science is required at any of these steps, just the substantive
knowledge that answers the questions and the professionalized
savvy -- accumulated through the professional institutions that
PR people have created amongst themselves using precisely the
mechanisms that I have already described here -- that keeps the
whole process on track.
Putting names on things, then, permits PR people (and the people
who have partially internalized the PR way of doing things by
being exposed to it over time) to do several useful things: it
lets them orient to the world in a way that helps articulate
valuable information; it helps them to marshal substantive,
location-specific knowledge within an orderly structure; and
it permits comparisons and contrasts to be drawn to partially
analogous "cases" that have arisen in PR practice in other
places and times. But more fundamentally, putting names on
things permits these people to see, and to openly and rationally
discuss, their contingent nature. One community, which does
not possess the conceptual tools of PR, might have a certain
repertoire of messages for which it circulates supporting
facts by means of its various associational forms. But another
community, which *does* possess those tools, will be able to ask
itself, are these the messages that we really want to be getting
across now? Has the world changed in such a way that we want
to get different messages across? Of course, communities often
do adapt to significant changes by formulating and propagating
new messages without having an explicit concept of "message".
The point is that, other things being equal, having the concept
makes the process vastly more efficient.
Is the inevitable conclusion, then, that every community in the
world should hire PR people and instil in itself the associational
forms of business and conservative political activism? I'm not
sure that would be such a bad idea, but I'm also not sure it's
the right lesson. The broader lesson is about consciousness --
which simply means, the concrete, day-to-day awareness of how the
world works. Putting names on things confers a certain degree
of consciousness of them, for the simple reason that it makes
their contingent nature apparent. When we locate the essence of
democracy in cultural forms, we run up against a clash of values:
if they are to successfully negotiate their way in a democratic
world, communities must possess and routinely use the skills of
association, and (it turns out) these skills include the skills
of adapting one's messages strategically in a changing world.
But we do not normally speak of cultures as carrying this
kind of self-consciousness and adaptive flexibility. Instead,
when we stand to praise cultures, we tend to speak of them as
sources of memory, meaning, strength, resiliency, and continuity.
We do not think of PR as a kind of culture, or as a producer of
anything that deserves to be referred to as culture, and for many
reasons: PR is shallow, culture is deep; PR has methods, culture
has contents; PR produces whatever meaning is expedient, culture
gathers things together within a common fabric of meaning;
PR's practitioners don't really believe what they are saying,
culture's participants can hardly help but believe what they
have been socialized into; PR requires a community to coordinate
its messages through hierarchical control, culture coordinates
messages in a decentralized way by grounding them all within a
shared system of meanings; PR is a tool of power, culture is a
tool of resistance. Such, anyway, is the popular stereotype of
PR (which I have to say I largely share) and the anthropological
stereotype of culture (which I regard as dangerously half-true).
The concept of associational forms, then, has a hard job to do.
Successful associational forms must not simply circulate a given
repertoire of ideas; they must also facilitate the collective
rethinking of the world. The problem is not that associational
forms actively *prevent* people from rethinking the world;
people are pretty darn smart, and they have an extensive capacity
to comprehend new propositions. But, to the extent that their
participants do not appreciate their contingent nature, cultures
do have their inertia. Metaphors, for example, readily generate
whole elaborate worldviews that can be extraordinarily persuasive
and extraordinarily difficult to see beyond -- so long as one
does not appreciate that other generative metaphors are possible.
Practices and procedures, once codified and taught as repertoires
of ways-we-do-things, can likewise stop seeming contingent: one
can imagine changing this practice or that procedure, but it is
much harder to imagine changing the conceptual system underlying
the rule-book unless one knows that that conceptual system *is*
and can see it as even *capable* of being changed. The question
is, do a given community's associational forms facilitate the
reproduction of its understandings of the world or the conscious
reconceptualization of those understandings? This, it seems to
me, is the central challenge for democratic practice in our time.
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Wish list.
Can we do away with the concept of "deleting" something? Much of
the computer-using world lives in permanent fear of accidentally
"hitting the wrong button" and losing their work. This is not a
simple phenomenon, but one part of the problem is the concept of
"deleting" a file. You're probably familiar with this concept
-- indeed, you're probably so familiar with it that it might be
hard to imagine how else anything might work. But now that we
can plan on having serious processor speed and storage capacity
to work with, let's back up and rethink some basic metaphors.
The metaphor of a "file" has been around since the earliest days
of operating systems. The technical idea is that disk space is
an enormously long series of functionally identical words, some
of which are allocated to storing particular files while others
remain "free". Dynamic memory allocation works the same way,
though disk space is usually allocated in artificial blocks of
2^n bytes, where n might be 10 or 12, whereas memory is most
often allocated in blocks of a single word or byte. The basic
algorithms for all of this were codified in Donald Knuth's "The
Art of Computer Programming", and subsequent algorithms gained
efficiency by arranging things in fancy balanced trees.
The problem for the ordinary user is the binary paradigm: free
versus allocated. At any given time you have some definite set
of files, each of which occupies some disk space. If you want
a file to stay around, you leave it alone. If you want it to
go away, you delete it, whereupon the operating system tosses
the corresponding disk space back into the "free" pool. Trouble
arises, of course, when you delete something accidentally or
when you want something back that you've deleted. Getting back
deleted files is for many people almost the defining experience
of computer use, and untold thousands of people have desperately
hunted down the nearest computer guru in their social network
to recover lost files. This experience confirms all of the
worst and most disempowering expectations about the esoteric
and basically hostile nature of computers. Peter Norton, by
all accounts the loveliest computer nerd you'd ever want to meet,
made good money providing a software version of this salvation,
and his advertising traded heavily on the image of himself as
your computer-guru buddy whose rock-solid-reliable utilities
will save your butt in an emergency if it can be saved at all.
Maybe we can now rethink these things? Some half-measures
are already common, like "undelete" schemes and the Macintosh's
"trash can". But can we do better? I've long fantasized about
enormous offshore storage media warehouses where old files
migrate -- fully automated CD-ROM jukeboxes the size of aircraft
hangers, where all of my old files lie, fully encrypted, just
in case I want to poke back through them. Old files wouldn't be
deleted; they'd just fade into the background, and after awhile
it might take a minute to get them back. And the metaphors would
change to give this concept some intuitive force. I just can't
figure out what the right metaphor would be.
Maybe we can also rethink the concept of an application. The
traditional idea is: when you log in or power up, no applications
are running; but then you open some applications, use them for
a while, write out new files reflecting your new work, close
them all, and log out or power down. Generations of computer
users have lived in constant terror of this model, afraid that
a disk crash or wrong move will cause them to -- and you've heard
this phrase a hundred times -- "lose my work". As the technology
started maturing, more application programs started automatically
storing your work in the background. But they didn't change the
underlying model, which draws a qualitative distinction between
the file on the disk and the running application in memory. But
let's ask, what purpose does this distinction serve beyond the
convenience of systems programmers?
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This month's recommendations.
Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of
Democratic Change in America, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986. This is a brief, plain-language history of
democratic social movements in the United States. Its central
theme, indicated in its title, is that popular democratic
organizations have sometimes provided the "free spaces" that are
necessary for people to express themselves politically. These
spaces are partly physical -- coffee houses and the like -- and
they are partly institutional -- clubs and associations of all
kinds. The authors, long-time intellectuals of the progressive
populist movement, are equally critical of the right, which
has long attempted to define popular associations as divisive
bulwarks of the established order, and the left, which has been
influenced by Marx's disastrous theory that traditional forms
of association are inevitably swept away by a generalized form
of solidarity created by a common experience of wage labor.
In seeking to revalue organizations like the Farmers' Alliances
and the Knights of Labor, Evans and Boyte wish to paint a picture
of an endlessly self-renewing democratic tradition -- one that
provides models and symbols upon which contemporary movements
can draw in their own reinvention of democracy. Their effort
enjoys all of the strengths and suffers all of the complexities
of social history: it evokes a sense of the cultural traditions
that provided the necessary background of the successes of the
most visible organizers, yet it also continually risks idealizing
movements that contained their own inequities. Nonetheless, I
think that everyone who cares about the state of democracy should
study these traditions. Sure, none of those clunky old decades
enjoyed the benefits of new communications technologies. But
we can easily get too impressed with those technologies and
forget the basics -- starting with the fact that democracy is
a phenomenon of cultural forms and skills, not a phenomenon of
technology. It is this fact that shines through most clearly in
histories like this one.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
Amazon.com Books
http://www.amazon.com/
Amazon Books is the first on-line company that I've mentioned
in this slot because it's the first on-line company that I've
actually bought anything from. They're a mail-order book company
who have a million-book inventory catalogued and accessible
through a clunky but workable WWW interface. This interface,
which you can use without registering as a customer or providing
a password, is a useful resource even if you don't buy the books.
Will Amazon.com and companies like it further erode the position
of local independent booksellers? Not soon, I imagine, simply
because not enough people are on the Web and the local bookstore
is still good for hanging out and for browsing the actual words
in the books. But I do think that independent bookstores will
have to redouble their efforts to grow beyond being "just"
bookstores to become centers of intellectual and political
life for their communities. Can the net play any part in this
process? Maybe, if it helps mediate a broader and more complex
range of relationships between bookstores and their customers,
including ones not necessarily directed to selling books. Some
independent bookstores are on the web. (See the web pages of the
Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica for an index to these.
Their URL is http://www.cinenet.net:80/msbooks/ and if you know
of any independent bookstores with web pages that they haven't
linked to, do let them know.)
Usually I end this department with a friendly reminder that only
the serious should only write away for the (presumably paper, but
often now CD-ROM as well) literature of the month's company. But
amazon.com, of course, represents itself just fine on-line, and I
doubt if unserious visitors have any chance of clogging their web
server...
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Follow-up.
Regarding my "wish list" in TNO 2(6), several people wrote to
report that many voice-mail systems *do* permit callers to leave
voice messages regardless of whether the recipient is available
to answer the phone. I am told that this feature is commonly
called "stealth mail". As you might expect, though, every system
invokes the feature in a different way, and you often cannot know
which system your recipient is using. As a result, most of these
features might as well not exist. Hurrah for standards.
Several librarians also commented on my wish list for library
catalogues. I am told that indexing tables of contents is very
much on the minds of cataloguers, whereas indexing book reviews
to the books themselves is a lower priority than connecting
electronic catalogs to other kinds of on-line resources. This
is strange to the ears of someone trained in computer science,
since the first thing you learn in computer science is to put
names on *everything*. We refer to these names as data types
and object classes rather than indexes, but that's the principle.
Of course, this same principle causes all kinds of problems when
what's being named is human beings and their activities. That's
the sense, I've argued, in which invasion of privacy is inherent
in the traditional practices of computer science. Many of my
"wish list" wishes concern this problem -- either wanting to
extend the logic of universal naming to things that don't have
privacy interests, like book reviews, and to withdraw it from
people, who *do* have privacy interests.
Web picks:
The Global Democracy Network is at http://www.gdn.org/
Ellen Spertus' "Meta-Index for Non-Profit Organizations" is at
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ellens/non-meta.html
The Chile-Heads are at http://www.netimages.com/~chile/
Some militia supporters have taken to writing online reviews of
press coverage of the militia movement. This is an interesting
practice, pioneered in the aggressive style by the "Accuracy
in Media" Newsletter and in the genteel style by "Forbes Media
Critic". These dispassionate analysts almost invariably discover
that coverage supportive of their views is fair and balanced and
that coverage not supportive of their views is biased and shoddy.
http://www.eskimo.com/~hmcom/4/db/militia/main.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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