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The Network Observer Vol 03 No 04
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 3, NUMBER 4 APRIL 1996
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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: From librarians to communitarians
Methods for spontaneous noticing
Toward a universal event calendar
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Welcome to TNO 3(4).
This month I begin a two-part series on the future of libraries.
Right now is a good time to be thinking about this, as experience
accumulates from "digital library" research projects. A great
deal is at stake: we can just digitize everything as fast as
possible, or we can back up and rethink how people think together
and how technology could possibly help. The consequences for
librarians are particularly serious: on the first scenario their
jobs get smaller as the ideal of public access to information
gets narrowed into a technical question; on the second scenario
their jobs get bigger as we use technology in new ways to support
the diverse needs of different communities.
I've also included a peculiar article about an experiment that
my friends and I conducted many years ago at MIT. We felt,
and I still feel, that technical work -- at least as it has
been organized historically -- incorporates a distinctive way
of thinking that can separate us from our experience of our own
lives. We wanted to reverse this effect, both for our own good
and to help us develop better technical ideas. Here I describe
what we did, and what happened. I think that our experiences
suggest the outlines of a teachable skill that can actually make
people smarter.
A footnote. The Internet is heavily burdened with myths, many
of which I have already discused in TNO. But none of these myths
astounds me more than the idea that the Internet owes its success
to free enterprise. At practically every public debate about it
Internet, it seems, someone gets up during the question period
(if not on the panel itself) and launches into a rant about
how entrepreneurial foresight and freedom built up the Internet
and now the government is coming in to regulate it. This
word "regulate" is often spoken with a constricted throat and
slow-motion hand gestures that look like the speaker is grabbing
at or throttling something. The problem, of course, is that
the Internet was a government program from the beginning, and
was almost exclusively government-supported for most of its
life. The vision for the Internet came from some guys within
the military who were influenced not by the methods of industry
vendors, with their closed proprietary standards, but by the
methods of the scientific community, with its desire for openly
shared information. As the Arpanet grew and became the Internet,
they saw correctly that a network based on strong principles of
interoperability would powerfully support both an open society
and a strong economy. The mythology to the contrary is nowhere
more confusing than in the case of the Communications Decency
Act, which is willy-nilly ascribed to a nebulous bogey called
"the government" -- or just "government" -- without any serious
analysis of who the various players are both inside and outside
the workings of the state. This most recently came home to me in
one of the reports from Declan McCullagh on the ACLU v Reno trial
in Philadelphia. With the trial under way, the point is to guess
the judges' views from their questions and comments. Describing
one of the judges, Stewart Dalzell, and his interaction with one
of the ACLU's expert witnesses, Scott Bradner, he says:
Dalzell has a keen sense of humor and seems sympathetic to
our arguments. In fact, I'd guess he's been doing some out-
of-court web-surfing himself. In an _astounding_ question
at the end of the day, he asked Bradner: "Isn't it true that
the exponential and incredible growth of the Internet came
about because the government kept their hands off of it?"
Bradner gladly agreed. (What else would he say?)
For one thing, he could have told the truth. Declan has done
plenty of good things for the cause of free speech, but in this
particular case he is repeating some of the most thoughtless cant
of the Internet advocacy movement. Let's get real. "Government"
is neither good nor bad as an abstraction. Government is a field
over which different forces conflict, in which different sets of
values become entrenched and then dislodged, and in which psycho-
pathic ambition jostles cheek-by-jowl with people who work long
hours in crummy conditions for low pay because they believe
in the principle of public service. This is called democracy,
and it's pretty good. It works when the people make it work,
and when they understand it rather than generalizing wildly about
it. "Government" didn't cause the CDA; the CDA was caused by
the fund-raising imperatives of an authoritarian social movement
that loses nothing by proposing hare-brained solutions to social
problems because it can so readily tar anybody who speaks out
against it with the broad brush of a nebulous enemy of its own.
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The end of information and the future of libraries.
My work is thinking about basic ideas of technology in ways that
let us see them as products of social processes, and as part of
social processes. For example, computing has very particular
ideas about how to represent human activities. These ideas have
histories. They could be different, and they have significant
consequences for privacy.
Let us consider another basic idea of computing, information.
We all think we know what information is. Computer people and
librarians both define their work in relation to something they
call information. But I want to suggest that information might
be an obsolete concept, and that emerging technologies are
yelling in our ears to move along to other, different ideas.
What is information? We can define it in a narrow technical
way. Shannon defined one notion of information in his theory
of the capacity of a communications channel; information for
him is measured in bits, and each bit is a distinction that
is meaningful to the parties on each end of the channel.
Bateson said something similar when he defined information
as differences that make a difference. Computer people
often speak of information in terms of the states of digital
circuits that represent binary states of affairs in the world.
In each case, information is an idea that builds a bridge
between the states of artifacts and meanings in people's lives.
We often hear that this is an information age, or an information
revolution, or that information rather than capital is now
driving the global economy. It is not at all clear what any of
this means. I think that in practice we tell three stories to
ourselves about information. Each story profoundly affects our
thinking by encoding particular views us about the relationship
between designers, information users, and information itself. I
will refer to these stories as information processing, masculine
transcendentalism, and information professionalism.
(1) Information processing
Computers originate in automation; "computer" was originally
a job title, not a machine. Early computing methodologies
were modeled on industrial automation methods -- a flowchart
is really an industrial process chart. When you hear the phrase
information processing, therefore, I want you also to hear
phrases like food processing and sand and gravel processing.
Information, according to this story, is an industrial material
like corn or oil or metal.
The information processing story assigns particular roles to
designers, users, and information:
designers - industrial engineers
users - factory machines
information - processed material
(2) masculine transcendentalism
I take this marvelous phrase, masculine transcendentalism, from
the historian of technology David Noble. We can see masculine
transcendentalism at work in Wired magazine, or in all of the
hype around artificial intelligence or virtual reality. The
story is this: someday soon, the physical world is going to
wither away. Everything is going to become digital. All of our
minds will be downloaded onto machines. All of our books and
paintings will move into digital media. We will no longer have
bodies, and most amazingly of all, we will work in the paperless
office. Noble's brilliant insight is that this is a religious
worldview, and his historical research demonstrates compellingly
that it developed *out of* a religious worldview without any
particular discontinuity along the way. It is a millenarian
worldview in that it posits a perfect future in which everything
will be transformed. It is a transcendental worldview in that
it calls for the whole world to be raised up and dissolved into
incorporeal realm that leaves the body and all the messy stuff
in the social world behind. It sounds funny and hyperbolic when
you frame it this way, but it is an enormously influential way
of speaking in industry and elsewhere.
Here, then, are the basic relationships posited by masculine
transcendentalism:
designers - prophets
users - caught up in an inevitable rapture
information - the fabric of heaven
(3) information professionalism
Information professionalism is a story that both computer people
and librarians tell, but I want to focus on the librarians'
version here. This story goes: we are professionals; there is
this stuff called information; and our professional expertise
consists of managing large bodies of information and connecting
people with information. These professionals are generalists,
or specialized at most to very broad areas, and libraries treat
very disparate kinds of stuff in the same way. This view is
understandable when you have a dozen librarians in a library
building, and they are buying, cataloguing, and managing
information that a hundred different kinds of people are using.
The librarians need to routinize their work, and they need highly
rationalized, detailed procedures so that the product of their
work -- a catalog, for example -- is uniform and so that this
product can be produced efficiently. Libraries have themselves
been factories in many ways -- thousands of books just have
to get catalogued. None of this is a criticism of librarians,
who have been working within the constraints of particular
technologies and institutions.
Here, then, are the relationships that the information
professionalism story posits:
designers - professionals
users - individuals with information needs
information - homogenous stuff to be stored and retrieved
I do believe that information technology is contributing to a
major change in the world, but I think that this is precisely
a change that makes each of these stories obsolete. The old-
fashioned factory story is already under heavy attack -- we've
automated an awful lot of tasks already, and the resulting
machinery requires a lot of skill and expertise to use. But it
is striking that we haven't often questioned this view in the
context of information.
Masculine transcendentalism, for its part, is really one of those
yesterday's tomorrows, like the Jetsons. If we look at what is
really happening in the world, we see information technology as
a nervous system for the physical world, not as a replacement for
it. (See, for example, TNO 1(5).)
But it's information professionalism that I really want to
focus on. The problem with information professionalism is
really a problem that the others share underneath: it treats
information as a homogenous substance. A good way to think
about information is that it's the professional object of
librarianship. Every profession has its object: for law
everything is a case, for medicine everything is a disease,
and for librarianship everything is information. In each case,
someone walks in the door with a problem, and the professional's
job is to find their object in that problem, and to talk about
the problem in a way that makes it sound like a case, a disease,
or information that can be compared with other cases, other
diseases, or other information.
There's a deep trade-off: each profession achieves generality by
reducing everything to a common denominator, leveling everything
to common terms. Each profession can help everyone, but they
cannot help them very well. Library materials are indexed in a
very sophisticated way -- certainly much more sophisticated than
the keyword searches that prevail on the Internet -- but it is
one uniform indexing scheme, despite the many different places
that different patrons might be coming from in their lives.
We can think about solving this problem by using information
technology to support several different coding schemes, and I
think this is a good thing to do. But I want to back up and
suggest a more radical approach. Let's get beyond the stories
we have told ourselves about information and tell different
stories about different sorts of objects.
I want to suggest that the defining feature of our new world
is that people talk to each other, a lot, routinely, across
distances, by several media. It makes no sense any more to
ask how individuals use information. Instead, let us ask how
communities conduct their collective cognition. Let's define
a community, as per TNO 2(7), as a set of people who occupy
analogous structural locations in society. The residents
of Palo Alto are a community, but so are cancer patients,
corporate librarians, and people who are in the market to buy
any particular sort of product. Emerging technologies allow
communities to think together. The fact that cancer patients
can think together is already turning medicine inside-out. The
fact that customers in computer-related markets talk intensively
to one another on the Internet is increasing the amount and
variety of information in the marketplace. The future, in my
view, belongs not to information but to this active process of
collective cognition in communities.
It might be objected that we will always have libraries
and bookstores, and they will still be full of information.
But that's not the best way to look at it. The first thing
that library cataloguing schemes lose is the dialogic nature
of articles and books: they are all turns in a conversation,
responding to a particular literature or cultural background
and addressed to a particular audience. Every community conducts
its collective cognition through diverse mechanisms, from rumors
to conferences to newsletters to wandering bards to Internet
mailing lists to articles and books. The library is one window
on this whole dynamic interplay, but it is not a window that
lets us see that dynamic interplay very clearly. Perhaps it is
an artificial window, a means to serve a subset of "information
needs" that is largely an accident of past technologies and
institutions. Many different kinds of energy pass through
the library, but the library reduces them all to information
retrieval, a homogenous category that it can work with.
The solution, I think, is not to pave the cowpaths by automating
the institutions we have now. Instead, I think we should explore
the full range of means by which we can support the collective
cognition of communities. Every community has its own mix of
communications mechanisms, its own history and institutions, its
own symbols and vocabularies, its own typified activities, its
own constellation of relationships, and perhaps most importantly,
as TNO 2(11) suggests, its own genres of communicative materials.
If we want a focal concept to replace information, we might
want to choose genres. Genres are stable, expectable forms of
communication that are well-fitted to certain roles in the life
of some particular communities. Business memos, opinion columns,
action-adventure movies, Interstate Highway signs, business
cards, and talking-head TV political shows all have stable forms
that evolve to serve needs in the midst of particular activities.
I don't think we should be automating information professionals
out of business. Quite the contrary, I think we should be
giving them a bigger job: reaching out to support the collective
cognition of particular communities. This might include systems
to support the creation, circulation, and transformation of
particular genres of materials. It might include setting up and
configuring mailing lists or other, more sophisticated tools for
shared thinking. It might include both face-to-face and remote
assistance. Distributed alliances of librarians might support
specific distributed communities, while comparing notes with one
another and sharing tools.
This view has many consequences. It follows, for example,
that a digital library isn't one big system but a federation of
potentially quite different systems, each embracing a range of
functionalities and fitting into people's lives in potentially
quite different ways.
It also follows that each community will have, to some extent,
its own infrastructure with its own evolution. Standards are
crucial. Tools for shared thinking work best when everyone is
using them, and so supporting a community's transition to new
tools will require consensus-building, well-timed coordination,
training, and a shifting division of labor between professional
librarians -- or, as we might start calling them, communitarians
-- and mutual aid and self-help among a community's members. No
more factories, no more millenarian fantasies, no more isolated
information warehouses. Instead, perhaps, we might be able
to build, and help other people to build, the interconnected
pluralistic society that we so badly need.
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A story about noticing.
In graduate school I worked in artificial intelligence. I had
chosen to study AI from adolescent sorts of motives: it seemed
cool at the time. Along the way, though, I started to grow up.
This is never easy, but my lack of a broad liberal education
made it much harder. In studying AI, I became socialized into
a distinctive way of thinking and using language that made it
hard to think anything else. I gradually emerged from the AI
worldview by a peculiar route. AI people have frequently used
informal introspection to guide their model-building. Together
with some friends, I tried something similar but (as it turned
out) importantly different, and the results were remarkable if
difficult to communicate. I think the story is worth telling,
both because of the intrinsic value of the research methods we
developed and because of the larger lessons we might learn about
technical thinking and technical work.
Many linguists and others have noticed an interesting phenomenon:
if you spend a good part of your workday studying a certain
formal aspect of human life -- say, a certain grammatical form
-- then you will start spontaneously noticing examples of it
in your life outside of your research. Many linguists collect
the examples they notice this way, making themselves nuisances
at dinner parties when they suddenly point out the unusual
phrase construction of someone's previous utterance. But we
had never heard of anybody actually making this phenomenon into
a deliberate strategy of research. That's what we tried to do.
Our basic motivation was our belief that AI's ways of talking
about people's lives were wildly at odds with the reality of
those lives. But this was a hard argument to make, since AI
regularly proceeds by making up little stories that sound like
plausible things that could happen in real life while also
corresponding conveniently to the capacities of particular
technical schemes. How could we show that these types of stories
misrepresented everyday life (i.e., real, genuine, authentic
everyday life and not the fictional constructions of it in AI
papers)? Could we show that such things *never* happened? That
they were atypical of everyday life in some statistical sense?
The only way to begin, we thought, was to start collecting real
stories of everyday life. But how to select these stories? We
shot several videotapes of people as they made dinner, but then
we decided that we weren't about to invent a coding scheme to
categorize an hour of complicated videotape. This, then, was
the attraction of the spontaneously noticed stories: they were
relevant to the theoretical issues that interested us, and we
didn't have to undertake any special effort to gather them beyond
remembering to write them down. It will no doubt be objected
that we couldn't remember the stories accurately. But keep in
mind that our baseline was the (most commonly) totally fictional
stories of AI papers; if anything the biases of reconstructive
memory would bring the real stories back into line with that
sort of artificial neatness. And we were only after heuristic
stimulation, not hard data in any traditional sense.
Through much trial and error we developed a methodology. The
first step is choosing a broad category of real-life situations
that you're interested in, let us say "mistakes". Now, it turns
out that "mistakes" is far too abstract and general to provoke
much noticing. But let's say that we notice a particular mistake
and take the trouble to write it out. For example, last night
I was using an automatic teller machine and twice hit too many
zeroes when entering amounts with the keyboard. To provoke the
noticing of further such events, it turns out to be crucial to
(1) write out the story from memory in extreme detail, as much
detail as you can remember, and then (2) invent a category
that includes this story but is half as abstract -- let us say,
mistakes caused by trying to do something repetitive too fast,
or even mistakes caused by trying to do something repetitive too
fast and doing one too many -- and then write out an explanation
of that category into one's notebook. We referred to this second
step as "intermediation", since it involved the invention of
a category that is intermediate in its abstraction between the
existing abstract category and the specific concrete example
at hand. It doesn't matter whether you formulate this category
"correctly" -- different people would no doubt formulate it
in different ways. What matters is the act of formulating it,
explaining to yourself in writing how it subsumes the example,
and explaining to yourself in writing how the more abstract
category subsumes it in turn.
Intermediation is a sure-fire way to provoke noticing. The
effect is amazing. What's really amazing is what happens if you
make a habit of it. We spent an hour or two every day writing
out episodes that we had noticed and intermediating from them.
The more we did this, the more episodes we would notice. After a
while we learned that we could deliberately "steer" our noticing
in one direction or another, depending on what theoretical
questions we were interested in -- just choose the aspect of the
new episode that interests you most and define an intermediate
category appropriately. With this method we can investigate a
given category of phenomena in much more detail and complexity
than we could by just collecting anecdotes (already a common
method in psychology). After a while you'll accumulate what
mathematicians call a "lattice" -- a structure defined by a
partial order, in this case the order "is a more general category
than". It helps if you can draw the lattice on a sheet of paper.
You may ask, what earthly use is this? We found it fabulously
useful as a way to establish contact between abstract theories
and empirical reality. It is similar in this regard to
ethnography or other kinds of qualitative description. It is
less appealing in that it doesn't seek a thick theorization of
its materials, but on the other hand it grounds the concepts
in one's own subjectivity as spontaneously noticed and not in
the systematically observed behavior of someone else. I find
it hard to explain except to say that I found it compelling and
kept doing it, as I say, for a few years.
Let me describe a particular observation we made using the
method. For a while we used it to explore a particular theory
invented by my friend David Chapman, called "semantic cliches".
Semantic cliches are simple formal structures that seem to
recur frequently in the world's ideas. Mostly they correspond
to simple mathematical structures. Take for example the notion
of a total order: a structure consisting of a set of entities
and a relation on them, such that every pair of entities which
are different from one another has a "greater" or a "lesser"
according to the relation. Examples are endless in the folk
theories of the world: temperature, loudness, smartness, hotness,
powerfulness, etc. The point isn't that the *reality* has that
structure but that the *ideas* have that structure, though of
course the relationship between the ideas and reality is probably
not arbitrary. In his paper on semantic cliches -- which, true
to the culture of the lab where we did our graduate work, was
only published as an internal lab report -- David identified
a few dozen of these cliches. Another one is propagation: you
have a mathematical graph, and one of the vertices has a certain
property at a certain time, and then this property spreads out
across the arcs of the graph to successively broader sets of
vertices. You can refine the cliches to make them more specific
(once again, in a lattice). So for example, one kind of total
order is a finite totally ordered set, which of course will have
a greatest and a least element.
We were studying semantic cliches, then, and this caused us to
notice things in the world that were examples of the particular
semantic cliches we were studying. So of course we set about
intermediating the various semantic cliches and the various
other concepts associated with the semantic cliches. Along
the way we discovered a great many examples of semantic cliches,
based on episodes we noticed in which one or another property
of them was at stake. And more interestingly, we started
noticing lots of analogies between different parts of life that
we did not formerly think of as analogous. More interestingly
still, we noticed our lives start changing rapidly -- not in
deep, meaningful ways, but in lots and lots of small, simple,
logistical sorts of ways. For a long time we thought that we
had discovered a previously undetected phenomenon: the continual
evolution of the most ordinary routines of daily life. And so
we set about intermediating on the category of routine evolution.
This was what my dissertation was originally going to be about,
until I got derailed by the immense difficulty of using AI's
technical concepts to build anything that has any genuine
relationship to people's everyday lives.
In any case, we eventually discovered that the routine evolution
we were noticing had various components -- that is, a variety of
qualitatively different mechanisms of change -- and that the most
productive of these components was being induced by our method
of investigation. That is, the cycle of noticing, writing down
stories, intermediating, and noticing again was causing our lives
to change. Why? Precisely because the various categories, and
most especially the semantic cliches, were mediating numerous
analogies in our heads. Now, if you've read the literature on
analogical reasoning (and particularly if you've read Jean Lave's
critique of it in "Cognition in Practice") then you're aware
that people only really make experience-distant formal analogies
when their attention is somehow brought to the analogy. Their
attention can be directed in several ways: experimenters can
point out the analogy, metaphors or other linguistic means can be
used to draw the analogous situations under a common description,
printed forms or other mediating artifacts can be used to
structure the situations within a common form of activity,
and so on. Some of these means might be consciously aimed at
causing people to notice analogies. Others might be fortuitous,
or might be part of a culture's more deeply meaningful set of
metaphors and categorizations, or whatever. In our case, our
attention was drawn to the analogies because we were deliberately
using a certain abstract vocabulary to describe the forms
of everyday events, and the common vocabulary we assigned to
otherwise dissimilar situations was causing us to spontaneously
notice analogies between them. These analogies, moreover, were
frequently causing us to notice slightly better ways to do things
that we already did in basically acceptable ways on a routine
basis everyday.
Let me give you an example. We had an acetyline torch in
our kitchen that was operated by a trigger that generated
a piezoelectric spark. I often used this torch in the dark.
Don't ask why. The problem was that the torch only worked when
a certain knob, which turned to one of perhaps four positions,
was turned to the second position. For a long time I would
have to squint at the knob in the darkness to see if it was
in the right position. Eventually, somehow, I came up with
the idea of turning the knob all the way to its counterclockwise
limit and then turning it one notch clockwise, after which I could
guarantee that it would be in the second position. Well, it so
happened that a few days later I was in a car with an automatic
transmission, shifting back and forth between drive and reverse
repeatedly to get out of a tight parking space while pedestrians
kept jumping between cars trying to get me to break their legs.
Whereupon *poof* I noticed the analogy with the torch and started
whacking the shifter into park and then one notch right into
reverse rather than looking at the shifter and clunking it two
notches to the left each time I shifted from drive into reverse.
I'm quite sure that the semantic cliche of a finite total
order mediated this analogy. Why am I sure of this? Because
I was quite conscious of it at the time. Why did I *notice*
and think to write down the fact that the analogy was mediated
by a semantic cliche? Yes, that's right, because I had been
intermediating on the phenomena of analogical transfer through
intermediated categories. By that time it had grown quite
common for noticings to trigger other noticings to three or four
deep: I would notice an instance of some intermediated category
in the midst of taking out the trash, whereupon I would notice
that that noticing was itself an instance of some completely
different intermediated category, whereupon I would notice that
*that* noticing was itself an instance of yet a third completely
different intermediating category. It would take quite a while
to write all of this down on paper. If I wrote it all down right
away, or within an hour or two, I could be confident of having
remembered it all pretty accurately, since the intermediated
categories provided a precise vocabulary for articulating what
had just happened. I also intermediated extensively on the
process of writing the stuff down. I'll never forget one day
when I was writing out a particularly complex chain of these
noticings, and found that something I had just thought while
writing had triggered a sequence of noticings that chained
so fast that I could not remember it all. It was a bizarre,
quasi-mystical experience. It persuaded me that it was time
to stop this absurd exercise and start writing my dissertation.
What did I gain from all this? It would be hard to tell
you, much less convince you. For my own purposes, though, I
am convinced that a couple of years of regular intermediation
literally made me much smarter. I think the part of it that
made me the most smarter was intermediating on the formation
of analogies. As I wrote out my thoughts on a variety of topics
in my notebook, I would often notice analogies between ideas that
I had never connected together before, and even if the analogies
seemed pointless I always wrote them out and followed through all
of the suggestions that each analogous thought would make for the
line of thinking represented by the other. Many of my best ideas
in graduate school arose this way, and it is commonly held that
many important discoveries (ones far more important than mine)
also arose through the noticing of analogies. By intermediating
on the process of noticing and working through analogies, I found
that I noticed lots more analogies than I had before, and that I
therefore had many more ideas than I had had before. They were
not always good ideas, but that's alright, since you only need
one really good idea to contribute something to the world before
you die.
Eventually I stopped intermediating and stopped noticing things
in that spontaneous way -- at least I stopped noticing things any
more than anybody else does. But I do believe that my experience
of intermediation left me thinking much more clearly than I did
after my rigorless schooling and the murky commercial culture
upon which I wasted so much of my childhood. I got some idea
of what concreteness means, and abstractness, and the difference
between an idea that sounds good as words and an idea that I can
see in my own experience. I learned to be open to spontaneous
noticing, and I learned to have respect for the immense
complexity and wisdom and order of my own everyday life beyond
my conscious awareness of it. And above all I learned to get
intellectual concepts -- those of AI, and by extension all others
-- in perspective. We don't really know that much, but we know a
few good things, and through discipline and humility we can open
ourselves to learning more from the simplest things around us.
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Wish list.
I wish for a universal event calendar. It would be easy to do.
Someone would set up a simple WWW form with all the entries you
might want: date, time, venue, title, speaker, price, parking,
etc. In the simplest mode, the server could generate web pages
with a nice layout. Or it could have several different forms
for different kinds of events: one-time, weekly, monthly, speaker
series, competitive sporting events, political rallies, church
services, weekend workshops, film showings, book signings, art
exhibitions, legislative hearings, and so on. In successively
more complex modes, with more complex form interfaces, event
promoters could design more complex ads. These ads might have,
for example, links to pages for venues that include directions
and a map to print out. City council hearing announcements could
include a link to the agenda. The whole thing would be linked
to a relational database, some search engines, a notification
service, and so on.
The universal event calendar could be a viable business. It
would be free for the event-seeker. It would also be free for
nonprofit advertisers using the simplest formats. Others would
pay, though it wouldn't take much to keep the computers running.
Once people started consulting the calendar regularly, it would
profit event organizers to list their events, which would then
motivate more people to consult the calendar.
The calendar service could be interconnected with an awful lot of
other online services through a distributed object system with a
relational database for queries. Take concerts. You could have
an object for each artist and each venue, and calendar entries
could point to them. If the Firefly music-searching system
(which I mentioned in TNO 2(9) when it was still an MIT Media Lab
project called HOMR) used these objects then users could easily
ask about concerts by bands they have found through Firefly, and
they could also jump into Firefly to ask about records by bands
they have found out about through the calendar service. Firefly
could even be set to notify you whenever a band is coming to town
that you are likely to want to see, based on the correlations
between your tastes and those of other users.
The relational database would be good for travelers. Someone who
traveled a lot on business and always wanted to know where the
Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or Unitarian Universalist Church
services were could arrange for them to be listed in advance,
complete with schedules and maps for each city on a prospective
itinerary.
The calendar service would also be a good way for an organization
to remind its members of meetings. If the organization posts its
meetings and the members use a reminder service then they will
always have up-to-date information. If the system lists events
that are not public then it will need an authentication system,
which might be a nuisance. It will need an authentication
system anyway, though, to avoid bogus entries (e.g., an enemy of
Greenpeace announcing a Greenpeace meeting in a dark alley late
at night) or bogus changes to existing entries.
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This month's recommendations.
Irresistible Rhythms, Route 1 Box 1320, Buckingham VA 23921.
The Fall/Winter 1995-96 Irresistible Rhythms catalog is the best
world music catalog I've seen. You could order at random from it
and be guaranteed of getting terrific music. Its strengths are
in the most commercial areas -- African pop, Latin, Caribbean,
and Cajun/Zydeco; it makes little attempt to cover music from
Asia or the indigenous peoples of Australia or North America.
But that's okay; the stuff it does list is all great. If you
don't trust the hype or want more detailed information, refer to
the Rough Guide to World Music, which I recommended in TNO 2(3).
The Smithsonian Folkways catalog is cool, too, and some of it is
on the Web: http://www.si.edu/products/shopmall/records/start.htm
With Folkways, though, beginners should be sure to choose modern
recordings with good stereo imaging; the old ethnomusicological
recordings often sound more like laboratory data than music you
would want to party to.
Joan Greenbaum, Windows on the Workplace: Computers, Jobs, and
the Organization of Office Work in the Late Twentieth Century,
New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995. The more hype we hear
about impending total revolutions, the more we need historical
research that puts things in perspective. Joan Greenbaum's book
about the modern development of office work could therefore not
be more timely. In focusing on the point of view of the people
who actually work in the offices, it escapes the pitfalls of
technology-driven utopian and dystopian scenarios, as well as
the overly simple visions of managers and consultants who don't
really know what their employees do anyway. Applicable history.
Community Technology Center News and Notes. This is the semi-
annual newsletter of the Community Technology Centers' Network
(CTCNet), which is now part of the Education Development Center
in Newton, MA. It's a good place to read about all the excellent
things that people are doing with community access to technology
in the US. CTCNet was originally known as the Playing to Win
Network; it was founded by the most excellent Antonia Stone, who
was doing this stuff way before it was fashionable. Subscribing
for $20/year can keep you in touch, and if you have more money
they could really use it. EDC, 55 Chapel St, Newton MA 02158,
(617) 969-7100 x2727, ctcnet@edc.org, or http://www.ctcnet.org
William F. Hanks, Language and Communicative Practices, Boulder:
Westview Press, 1996. This textbook is the most accessible
introduction to an important intellectual tradition that seeks
to synthesize two equally strong but seemingly irreconcilable
approaches to the study of human language. Hanks defines the
first approach through its emphasis on the "irreducibility"
of language -- that is, the sense that language has its own
autonomous structure, particularly grammatical structure, that
we can study without much reference to the actual activities
in which language is used. And he defines the second approach
through its emphasis on the "relationality" of language -- that
is, the sense that we can only make full sense of language in
the context of particular, complicated, historically specific,
ongoing relationships between people. The first approach, taken
to extremes, produces the militant formalism of contemporary
structural linguistics downstream from Noam Chomsky. The
second approach, taken likewise to extremes, produces the
militant relativism of some postmodernist and poststructuralist
analyses of meaning. Going to extremes can be valuable for
a while, but somebody has to bring things back to a synthesis
before too many generations of students get schooled in the
rhetoric and tactics of intellectual intolerance. And that,
potentially, is the value of Hanks' book, which is intellectually
demanding in the good sense: it requires the reader to travel
deeply into the phenomena of language, postponing the leap to
classifications and allowing the phenomena to speak through
the refractions of various theorists. The resulting synthesis
will not please anybody, since so many tensions will remain,
but those tensions simply indicate that we have a long way to go
yet in our understanding of the actual phenomenon of language.
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Follow-up.
My wish for a life expectancy server in TNO 2(9) got reprinted in
Wired and provoked some replies. One person described the Health
Risk Appraisal (HRA) system that the Centers for Disease Control
built in the early 1980's "that would take inputs on about 20
variables and predict your life expectancy, highest risks for
death, and the changed life expectancy if you changed certain
behavior." It asked you questions; his favorite was "Do you
frequently argue with or criticize strangers?" He thinks it
loaded up on the homicide-risk factor.
In TNO 2(12) I noted the recent bifurcation in the English word
"victim". When pronounced with a normal stress it refers to
people who have been harmed by some people's bogeys, but when
pronounced with an extra-heavy stress on the first syllable
it refers to people who choose to portray themselves as having
been harmed by some other people's bogeys. People in the former
group have boundless moral authority; people in the latter group
make us sick with their whining and refusal to accept personal
responsibility. On public radio's "Marketplace" program the
other day, I heard a fascinating extension of this distinction.
In a report on downsizing, a representative of the National
Association of Manufacturers referred obliquely to those who
"would rather victimize" the laid-off employees than see their
situation as the natural order of things. In other words, the
verb "to victimize" can now be used to mean "to portray as a
victim". The amateur linguist in me was thrilled.
Web picks.
A thorough directory of Internet resources for job hunters can
be found at http://www.jobtrak.com/jobguide/
To sample the hype from the recruiters' end, check out the IBJ
interview at http://www.phoenix.ca/sie/publish/ibj/recruit.html
Of course it's a good thing to have efficient ways to find a job.
But assuming there's a danger too. If employers' costs of hiring
are greatly reduced then, by basic economics, other things being
equal, jobs will become less secure. Employers' needs evolve
continually, so there probably exists a person who is better
qualified for your job than you are. If it is expensive to find
and hire that person then it's in your employer's interest to
provide you with the training and other opportunities that you
need to get up to date. But if it's cheap to find and hire that
person then you're out the door tomorrow. What is more, as the
"human resources" person who was interviewed in IBJ remarked,
the net is especially good for finding people who already have
jobs but are browsing around to see what might be better. As the
costs of hunting for new jobs decreases, the number of people who
are eyeing your job increases, thus forcing you to spend a lot
of time eyeing other people's jobs as well. This can be terribly
inefficient, given how expensive it is to change jobs, but those
costs lie squarely on employees, not employers. So think twice
before you embrace this brave new world in which you're an
interchangeable part.
A company called Offshore Information Services Ltd., located on
the 88-square-mile Caribbean island of Anguilla, claims to make
it easy to create an "offshore online identity". Their publicity
asserts that "Anguilla has no restrictions on publications about
dead presidents of France, or information about birth control,
etc." Their URL is http://online.offshore.com.ai/
My local webmaster, Bruce Jones <bjones@ucsd.edu>, has pointed
out that two useful critiques of html programming style are: Art
and the Zen of Websites http://www.tlc-systems.com/webtips.shtml
and the HTML Bad Style Page http://www.earth.com/bad-style/
Also, a useful guide called "Creating well-designed Web pages
that are efficient to transmit and navigate (or: being kind to
people with slow modems and those in developing countries with
expensive Internet access)" by Philip Bogdonoff of the World Bank
Electronic Media Center is at http://www.worldbank.org/html/emc/
documents/zippywww.html#fewscreens
A good collection of Web resources on transportation can be found
at http://dragon.Princeton.EDU:80/~dhb/
A pretty good brief survey of the conflicting statistics about
net use can be found at http://webcom.com/~piper/9512/whois.html
Easily the coolest thing at CFP'96 was a moot court concerning
a hypothetical US law banning domestic cryptography. Most of
the resulting documents are on the Web in the CFP Web pages at
http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/~switz/cfp96/plenary-court.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 1996 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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