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The Network Observer Vol 03 No 06
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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 6 JUNE 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: Ralph Reed's new book
Running a filter list on the Internet
Software for professional networks
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Welcome to TNO 3(6).
This issue begins with a review of Ralph Reed's new book, "Active
Faith". Sorting through all of the debate about the Christian
Coalition, my conclusion as always is that they are doing good
basic social organizing and that everyone should study and learn
from them. I have mentioned the Christian Coalition frequently
in TNO because they provide so many lessons in the practical
mechanics of politics. These mechanics include technology, but
the technology only makes a difference if it's an integral part
of a coherent strategy and organizational form.
I've also summarized the lessons I have learned in three years
of running the Red Rock Eater News Service, the mailing list to
which I send whatever I find interesting. The general category
that includes RRE is called, I gather, a "filter list". Filter
lists are a low-cost, low-effort way to get useful information
out to large numbers of people -- large, anyway, by Internet
standards. RRE's membership, for example, is approaching 4,000
(perhaps 75% of them in the United States). On the other hand,
these excellent people only amount to one Internet user in
10,000, one English-speaking human being in 200,000, or a few
percent of the circulation of an American political magazine.
This month's wish list sketches a family of programs and data
conventions for building and maintaining professional networks.
I have no idea if such a scheme would actually work. The
interest of the exercise lies in the patterns of congruence and
tension between the workings of the technology and the workings
of the social system -- in this case, the social system of the
research world.
A footnote. Let us once again praise "Dilbert". When I came
across a book of Dilbert comics that had been translated into
Norwegian (subtitle: "Nerdenes Konge"), I decided that I had to
understand the deeper significance of, as the French would say,
the Dilbert Phenomenon. Fortunately for me, this imperative
coincided with the publicity for Scott Adams' hardcover Dilbert
book. I conducted my research by scrutinizing the relevant
primary sources while sitting on the floor in the humor section
of the bookstore waiting for a friend. I realized something
that Adams himself had more or less said in interviews, that
his early strips were unfocused and often unfunny, and that he
only hit its stride once he decided to focus on workplaces and
base his comics in large part on reports he gets on the Internet
from his readers. This is clearly as an important discovery.
Everybody knows that employees in large companies want to do
a good job, and indeed that their human dignity is tied up
with the integrity of their work, but that they often *can't*
do good work because of the four layers of managers above them,
all of whom pursue their individual career strategies and speak
their endlessly changing languages without much knowledge of
the reality of the work. But we've always known all of this
in an abstract, piecemeal fashion. By channeling these folks'
war stories in syndicated cartoon form, Adams has turned himself
into a regular voice of the people. Yeah, okay, so it's totally
goofy to discuss Dilbert in academic terms; I won't carry on
analyzing Scott Adams as an organic intellectual, lest I become
the inspiration for a cartoon myself. But I do think we should
figure out how to generalize the model that he represents. Note
that Dilbert's success is not just about the Internet -- it's
about a synergy between two media, the Internet and the newspaper
-- and that it is not just about the voices of the employees or
the voice of Scott Adams -- it's about the closed loop between
the two voices, with each playing its own distinct role in
shaping the other. Tell you what: let's declare a three-month
moratorium on discussions that treat this thing, "the Internet",
as the monolithic prime mover of history. Instead, let's get
practice naming the synergies and tensions between the Internet
and other media, and let's remind ourselves that media have
value for a civilized society when, and only when, they provide
the means for new voices to emerge and to say things that matter.
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Assessing the Christian Coalition.
Given my boundless respect for the political skills of Christian
Coalition executive director Ralph Reed, I snapped up his new
book, "Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of
American Politics" (Free Press, 1996), the moment it came out.
It is a fascinating and sophisticated text that repays close
reading. The first thing that struck me is that it provides a
powerful argument for the religious left. That's very much the
way the book is constructed: it portrays religiously motivated
political action as the norm rather than the exception over
the last hundred years of American life, with special attention
to the temperance movement, the civil rights movement, and a
series of social justice movements based in the working class.
Reed places some emphasis on the scope and sophistication of the
temperance movement, articulating lessons for his own movement
from the tactical reasons for its successes and ultimate demise.
But he is not eager to identify the Christian Coalition with
the temperance movement, whose agenda he regards as discredited.
Nor, much less, does he wish to identify with the historical
religious right, which he treats, with persuasive eloquence, as
a swamp of racism. He offers little historical detail on racist
uses of religion, though, and among other Christian conservative
political movements he gives passing mention only to a 1950's
anti-communist group.
Having dissociated himself from the history of conservative
political uses of religion, then, Reed invests considerable
effort in portraying the Christian Coalition as the inheritor
of the American religious left. He starts by going out of his
way to emphasize the continuity of religious motivations on the
left through the 1970's. This requires him to argue, not at all
convincingly, that Franklin Roosevelt was inspired by Christian
faith to promulgate the New Deal. It also requires him to assert
that the religious left basically disappeared in the 1970's,
and that the liberal movement became essentially secular at
that time as opposed to a badly managed coalition of tendencies.
He makes no mention of the religious left's role in the 1980s'
peace movement, or of its role in supporting resistance to
the savage oligarchies in Central America that some Reagan-era
conservative Christian organizations heavily supported.
His idea in editing history in this way is that Pat Robertson's
1988 presidential campaign and the Christian Coalition have
picked up the baton of religious work in politics that the left
had dropped. He explicitly argues that the old religious left and
the new religious right (a phrase that Reed curiously excoriates
as an expression of bigotry without explaining why) are equally
concerned with social justice; he uses the leftist phrase "social
justice" repeatedly, although he does not provide any detailed
accounting of what exactly the left and right have meant by
this phrase -- not to mention the Catholic Church, whose members
the Christian Coalition has begun recruiting through a newly
formed organization called the Catholic Alliance. He does an
interesting and very complicated dance with the legacy of the
civil rights movement, often drawing parallels between it and
modern-day conservative evangelicals and then quickly backing off
from any suggestion that this white social movement's experiences
and grievances can be compared with the racist oppression that
motivated the likes of Martin Luther King.
(Although Reed is particularly cautious about it, this effort
to dress conservative evangelical issue campaigns, specifically
the anti-abortion movement, in the clothing of the civil rights
movement is not at all unique to him. Listen to a song called
"Breakdown" by the Christian musician Michael W. Smith, from his
new album "I'll Lead You Home", in which a speech by Martin Luther
King about the repression of civil rights marchers is interleaved
with electric guitars and a social-decay message. Smith isn't in
the same league as Steven Curtis Chapman, who I recommended in TNO
3(3), but he exemplifies an important principle that the classic
labor movement and the American Communists at their height knew
well, but that the modern left is forgetting: a successful social
movement must provide symbolic forms into which people can pour
a wide range of feelings and experiences, not just alienation.)
Reed's book is a monument to modern publishing technology. It
discusses events that occurred as recently as March and April,
covering the South Carolina primary and the wave of fires at
black churches. Some glitches testify to the speed with which
it was sent to press -- superscripts are missing for the first
several endnotes, the name of the Promise Keepers organization
is repeatedly mangled, and the text includes at least one garbled
sentence -- but it is definitely a quality production, very well
thought out as an intervention in the political summer before the
1996 elections. Just about every criticism ever made against the
Christian Coalition is addressed, and it is here that the book's
most disturbing feature lies. Although he quotes every last
hard word ("hate", "stealth", etc), Reed virtually never recounts
the concrete evidence upon which these charges have been based.
He does allude to the occasional passage from a fund-raising
letter than gets endlessly recycled in the fund-raising letters
from the other side, but we do not learn which passages he has
in mind or whether he still stands by them.
(This is a standard public relations tactic: reduce the issue to
a vague formula and adduce three facts that seem to spin things
in a different direction while distracting attention from valid
criticisms by picking invalid criticisms to stand for the whole
bunch. As such, it is further evidence that American politics,
as a professionalized practice, has been completely absorbed by
PR. Reed is himself very much a professional, completely under
control; the contrast with Pat Robertson could not be greater.)
Lacking evidence, then, the charges against his organization and
movement start to seem mysterious, and he proposes to resolve the
mystery by repeatedly suggesting that the real motivation behind
the charges is antireligious bigotry. It is certainly true that
some stereotypes of Christian conservatives have been motivated
by antireligious bigotry, and that certain charges against the
Christian Coalition have been unfair, for example some people's
lazy habit of equating them with the Klan. Reed's professed
antiracism may be good politics, but I have seen no evidence
that it is a lie. At the same time, it's grating to hear Reed
complain that religious conservatives have been "demonized" when
Pat Robertson routinely uses his television program to insinuate
that his opponents are literally agents of Satan. And I found
it really remarkable that Reed could go on so indignantly about
charges of stealth political tactics against his organization
without discussing the evidence that has been brought forward to
support them. This evidence, as is well known, includes his own
famous description of himself as a guerilla operating at night,
the explicit description of the stealth strategy at Christian
Coalition meetings several years ago, the testimony of people
in communities where the strategy has allegedly been practiced,
and academic analysis documenting severe distortion of opposing
politicians' records in Christian Coalition voters' guides --
which, by the terms of the Coalition's tax status, are supposed
to be nonpartisan. He does mention in a different context that
war metaphors have proven inexpedient, but he does not recant the
substance of what he has used those metaphors to say.
Having said this, it should also be said that some portion of
the "stealth" problem is the fault of liberals who remain almost
completely unaware of the whole parallel universe in which Steven
Curtis Chapman and Michael W. Smith are big stars and in which
Ralph Reed is a pragmatic moderate. If you want to know what
the religious right is up to, my friends, you can go right ahead
and attend a conservative evangelical church. And this, I think,
is by far the most important point to be made about Reed's book:
even after all of the rhetorical tricks and tactical dodges have
been laid out and weighed up, the bottom line, as Sara Diamond
constantly and correctly emphasizes, is that the social movement
that Reed represents is winning fair and square. The reason
for this is very simple, and it can be found in the quotation
from Reed that is found at the top of every issue of TNO: the
Christian Coalition invests a large proportion of its resources
organizing its institutions, training its people, and building
its movement. They use technology, they build infrastructure,
they learn from their mistakes, they repress self-indulgence,
they keep refashioning their rhetoric and agenda to present their
opponents a smaller target, they extend their coalition, they
minimize the ad hominem, they reach out to make personal contact
with the people they want on their side, and they pick fights
they can win. And they do all of this on their own resources.
Given my interest in such matters, I was disappointed at first
that Reed's book did not present more detail on the mechanics
of the Christian Coalition's organization. But of course he
had no reason to write about this: his people know all about it
already. He writes largely from his own perspective as the head
of the organization, and it is certainly instructive to hear his
political analyses of various situations and to read his accounts
of particular conversations, for example the meeting at which
(he claims) he got the House to put the Communications Decency
Act up for a vote despite having to rush off across town in
a waiting car to appear on the Coalition's television program
in five minutes. Although nobody in human history has ever
had the political acumen that Reed presents himself as having,
I don't fault him for making things seem easier than they could
possibly have been. My point is that opponents of the Christian
Coalition who might read this book looking for hints and clues
in reconstructing a darker backroom story are largely misguided.
If you're looking for shadows, you can certainly find them:
Reed protects his organization's tax status by glossing over
the moments where the Coalition explicitly sets out to support
a specific candidate in an election.
Several passages make more sense once you're aware of the
internal factional politics of the anti-abortion movement.
The reader gets little realistic sense of the coordination
and negotiation that goes on among different organizations
and factions in the conservative coalition.
Reed offers no answers to the atheist group who observed that
the Christian Coalition's claimed membership is several times
larger than the officially stated circulation of its membership
magazine.
In response to charges that the Christian Coalition implies
that people who disagree with its political positions are not
good Christians, he replies with the non sequitur that the
Coalition regards its positions as justified on non-religious
grounds as well.
The title "Active Faith" suggests that something is passive or
otherwise deficient about religious faith that is not expressed
through political action.
He stretches reason to argue that Paul's instruction in Romans
to render "taxes to whom is due taxes, honor to whom is due
honor, respect to whom is due respect" constitutes a "biblical
injunction" to "register to vote, become informed on the
issues, and go to the polls".
Anybody who has actually read Pat Robertson's "New World Order"
will laugh at the bland account of it in Reed's book.
Finally, he finds himself in the unenviable position, given the
wide backing that Pat Buchanan received among the anti-abortion
rank-and-file despite Reed's pragmatic preference to align
with Bob Dole, of having to defend Buchanan against charges of
anti-Semitism and pass over in silence Buchanan's abundantly
documented racism.
These are, of course, all matters that people should know about.
But in my opinion the essential truth about Ralph Reed and the
Christian Coalition is out in the open for anyone to see. Reed
is grasping a historical moment to do something that's just about
as straightforward as it could be: organizing, building, and
training a social movement and political coalition based on a
coherent, consciously elaborated ideology that speaks to genuine
concerns and grievances that a large portion of the electorate
share and that other contemporary movements are not adequately
addressing. So long as Reed's opponents remain in denial about
these facts, preferring to fight the shadows of their enemies
from olden days, they will continue to lose.
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Starting a filter list.
For the past three years, I have been running a mailing list to
which I send whatever I find interesting. Called The Red Rock
Eater News Service (RRE), it currently has about 4000 subscribers
in 60 countries. It requires little work, and sometimes it
does some good. Such lists, I gather, are called filter lists.
Sometimes people ask me how to start such a list. I am afraid
I have little technical advice to offer, since Mike Corrigan
wrote all the code. (It's all homebrew, so I doubt if it would
port anywhere else.) But I can report some hard-earned lessons
from three years of running my own list. I've formulated them
as general rules, but obviously you should take what you need
and leave the rest, following your own evolving sense of things.
* Send a steady trickle of good stuff. Two issues are foremost
in potential subscribers' minds, based on bad experiences they've
had with other mailing lists clogging up their mailboxes. First
they want a high signal/noise ratio, so you must promise to send
only good stuff to the list. Second they want a limited number of
messages, so you must promise not to send too many -- ten messages
per week seems to be the limit. These two points are absolutely
crucial, and they are the main points to emphasize in describing
the list.
* Define the scope of the list both in terms of a particular
subject matter (e.g., "social and political aspects of networking
and computing") and in terms of your own subjective interests
(e.g., "whatever I find interesting in my guts"). That way
you can wander from your official topic occasionally. You will
also have an excuse when someone wants something forwarded to
your list that doesn't feel right to you. The subscribers are
subscribing to *you*, not to an abstraction, and they will stay
on the list if they happen to share your interests.
* Take time to build an audience. Don't expect that you can
blast out an e-mail announcement to the net and get an instant
humongous subscriber list. It will take time, and you shouldn't
start unless you're willing to sustain the effort. Social
networks are not very interconnected, even on the Internet, and
you can easily have high visibility in one community and zero
visibility in another.
* Never add anyone to a mailing list without their permission.
If you think someone would like your list, write them a personal
note inviting them to join. But don't push it; don't become
possessed by a desire to get this, that, or the other person on
your list. It will grow naturally if you let it take time.
* Take some initiative to find good stuff to send. Once my
list had about 2000 subscribers and two years of happy operation
behind it, I could rely on the subscribers for my primary source
of good stuff to send to the list. That probably won't work
for a new list, though. One approach is to subscribe to mailing
lists X, Y, and Z, and send your subscribers the good stuff
from those lists. Assuming that your subscribers share your
sense about what's good, maybe you can save them the trouble of
subscribing to those lists themselves. Decide whether you want
to promise to filter those particular lists for all eternity or
whether you want to leave it less defined. You can also, if you
have time for it, seek out worthwhile stuff by actively prowling
the net, or by noticing announcements of conferences etc in print
media and writing away for the electronic versions. This will
seem like a lot of work at first, but it gets easier as you build
an audience who can help you find good things to distribute.
* Make sure you can turn off mailer errors. This requires
that your messages include the appropriate field to direct
error messages to an address which is not your personal mailbox.
Perhaps that address is an alias that directs the messages into a
file in your directory. You will get an amazing number of mailer
errors, absolutely no matter what you do. Believe me: you will
drive yourself insane if you try to reduce your incoming flow of
mailer errors to zero. Many of these error messages, moreover,
will be badly formed, mailed to the wrong place, or otherwise
useless. If you can shunt them into a file then you can look
at them at your leisure. Even better, arrange it so that the
messages can also be directed into the bit bucket (on Unix this
is called /dev/null) for a few months. It's a good responsible
practice to weed bad e-mail addresses off your list occasionally,
but not every day. Every few months is plenty.
* Do not ever give out your mailing list to others. This
is probably obvious, but I'll say it anyway. If you are using
Listserv, turn off the feature that lets anyone retrieve the
mailing list by sending a command to the server. On the other
hand, you cannot make a blanket promise to protect the list.
Your system administrator probably needs to see it occasionally,
and someone might hack into your system and steal it. Just
promise to do your best.
* Do not send mail to individual subscribers unless you really
have to. People generally want to feel a degree of anonymity
when they subscribe to a mailing list, so you may invite bad
interactions if you send a subscriber a personal note saying,
"oh, hey, good to have you on the list" or whatever.
* Try to get software that requires new subscribers to send a
second message confirming their intent to subscribe to the list.
This solves two remarkably common problems: forged subscriptions
intended to flood a victim's mailbox with unwanted mail and badly
formed subscription messages that create nonfunctioning entries
on the mailing list.
* Be careful about copyrights. If you send copyrighted material
to your list without permission, and you're located in a country
that enforces the laws, then you can get in trouble. Maybe
not *that* much trouble, yet. Still, you should assume that
everything is copyrighted unless there's a good reason to believe
that it is not. Articles from newswires are always copyrighted.
Treat messages that people have sent to other mailing lists as
copyrighted, and get permission before you forward them. (I just
send the author a quick note enclosing their message and asking
"May I forward this to my mailing list? For details on the list,
see ..." followed by the URL for the Web page that describes
the list. Then I say "forwarded with permission" at the top of
the message when I sent it out.) The lack of a copyright notice
absolutely does not imply that the material is not covered by
copyright. A message that feels like a professionally written
magazine article, for example, probably is; it may have been
typed or scanned in, violating copyright, by someone besides
its author. Some genres, such as conference announcements, are
obviously intended for wide distribution. But that's a kind of
implied license, not a lack of copyright.
* Be careful about political action alerts. If you send out a
badly designed or misinformed political action alert then you can
cause an awful lot of havoc. Consider refusing to send out any
action alert that does not conform to a set of guidelines that I
laid out in the very first issue of TNO. One particularly subtle
guideline is that every action alert should have a stop date
(e.g., "take this action until 15 October 1996 and then stop").
* Decide whether you endorse the material you send out. Unless
you clearly specify otherwise, people will assume that you intend
to endorse every word of every message you send to your list
-- even messages that are obviously silly. Consider including
a disclaimer in the boilerplate message that new subscribers
receive.
* Tell people how to unsubscribe. Many people will not save
your explanation of how to unsubscribe from the list. So you
need to provide them with several obvious ways to find out.
No matter what you do, a trickle of people will send you little
messages saying "please unsubscribe me". If you've given them a
real chance to find out how to unsubscribe, then you can ignore
these messages in good conscience. Alternatively, you can set up
a keyboard macro or some other quick means of replying to such a
message with an explanation of how to unsubscribe.
* Don't let yourself be baited. You will probably get messages
from people who wish to recruit you into mind-games of various
sorts, particularly if you send out messages with political
content. Refuse. If you are an angel then you can send out
polite responses to everybody. Otherwise you might have to
delete these messages. I found that I suddenly got many fewer
baiting messages after I wrote a long article about baiting in
TNO 2(11), though I cannot be sure that it was the article that
did it, and not a coincidental increase in Internet civility.
* Have an agenda. In sending a stream of messages to a filter
list, you effectively speak in a distinctive voice. Even if you
don't add many annotations of your own, your choice of materials
to send out makes a statement. While I do recommend being guided
by your gut feelings when choosing what to send to your list, I
also recommend having an intellectual life that gives your guts
something to work with. For example, after the appeals court
in Philadelphia struck down the Communications Decency Act, I
sent my mailing list the press release from a prime supporter of
the CDA, the Family Research Council. Why? In part because it
seemed too obvious to send out the court's decision, which was
already flooding the net by other means. But more importantly,
because I am trying to get the Internet enthusiast community to
listen to the language and arguments of their opponents -- who,
court decisions notwithstanding, are vastly better organized
in plain political terms. I didn't say this when I sent out
the press release (though it's a theme I've harped upon in TNO),
but it's what I had in mind. I cannot guarantee that everyone
will understand my reasons for sending out particular items, but
I do think that everyone gets a sense of my voice and judgement
and agenda if they care to remain on my list over the longer
haul. By continually trying to articulate to myself what I'm
trying to accomplish, I help the list maintain focus and express
a coherent personality. And by rationing my own commentary as
much as I can, I let people draw their own conclusions.
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Wish list.
The world of research, like all social worlds, has elaborate but
largely tacit rules. Many of these rules concern the workings
of professional relationships and networks. The social networks
of research worlds are tremendously important. Sociologists
commonly refer to them as "invisible colleges" (see Diana
Crane's book by that title), since they are rarely written
down and only become visible to outsiders through bibliometric
research and the like. They are not at all invisible to their
participants, though, who treat them as real and deadly serious.
In "Networking on the Network", I tried to help out graduate
students by writing down, as best I could, some the rules that
govern them. But it also seems to me that networked software
could support the development and maintenance of professional
relationships.
Here's how it might work. Let us imagine that every researcher
in the world has their own unique "web object". This is a common
enough idea, though it's not yet in the newspaper. A web object
resembles a home page, except that it has much more standardized
structure. And it resembles an entry in a distributed object
database, except that it has various visible manifestations,
one of which might look like a home page. A researcher's
web object would include contact information, interesting web
links, and other such home-page stuff. It would also be hooked
into a digital library, providing ready access to citations
(and, in many cases, full text) of that author's publications.
Some people might put a lot of work into maintaining their web
objects, whereas others might ignore them once they have been
created, except for major transitions like job changes. Some
organizations might simply pay someone to create a web object
for each member of their research staff. It's crucial that
everybody have an interest in creating a basic web object, even
if they don't plan to think about it again.
The web object would serve much the same purpose as a home
page and online vita. But it would also provide the starting
point for much more elaborate functions, and these functions
would provide a motivation for individual researchers would
be motivated to construct a web object for themselves. These
functions start with a program called a professional relationship
manager (PRM). The PRM would resemble, in broad outline, the
contact management software that sales people use -- although it
would probably not be wise to point out the resemblance. My PRM
would include an entry for each researcher with whom I have any
kind of relationship. These relationships might run the full
spectrum, from someone whose book I glanced at once to someone
with whom I have collaborated extensively. Each entry would
include a pointer to that person's web object, further personal
information such as home phone number and spouse's name, full
text of my correspondence and notes on other contacts with the
person, bookmarks and annotations on their writings, and so on.
It needn't be elaborate, and most of the entries might even be
rudimentary.
As such, the PRM simply consolidates several existing functions,
and one might worry that maintaining it will become a compulsive
substitute for doing real work. The real point of the system,
though, is the basis it provides for various novel (or newly
practical) functions. It would be most excellent, for example,
for each field to pool its members' online citations to provide
a ready source for authors who need a citation quickly without
going to the library. It would also be terrific if each graduate
student, as a requirement of advancement to candidacy, had to
write a critical survey of research in a field -- not just as a
text but as a hypertext with connections to all of the relevant
web objects.
Or imagine a PRM specifically to support the editor of a journal.
It could keep track of all past and present submitted articles,
help in selecting potential referees, and generally track the
workflow on the whole editorial process. This information would
also be selectively available, courtesy of familiar security
mechanisms, to various classes of people: guest editors, members
of the editorial board, the publisher, authors who have papers
under consideration, librarians, subscribers to the journal, and
so on.
Other PRM's might be built to support the staff of a professional
society, a publisher, a department chair, a research grant
administrator, a program manager for a funding agency, a library
bibliographer, a sociologist studying a particular field, a
public relations person for a university who brokers contacts
between journalists and researchers, or the occupants of any
other identifiable institutional role that relates to the
research world. Each specialized PRM could be organized with
hierarchically nested domains, so that each individual has
their own personal information and each group (e.g., members of
a research team, publishing house, etc) could have information
that is "inherited" by each member of the group. This sort of
structure is what object-oriented databases are all about.
Another potential function of a PRM is automatic notification.
The University of California library catalog, for example, is
willing to automatically notify me whenever a new publication
appears that satisfies a given predicate (e.g., it was written by
my department chair). This feature, though well-intentioned, is
completely useless. I have to type a separate command for each
author and each database I want to search in, and then I have to
update it by hand every six months. With a PRM, though, I could
say something more interesting like "please inform me weekly of
new publications in any format by anybody whose work I have cited
in my own publications, and daily of new publications by everyone
in my PRM who resides at my own university".
As individuals' web objects become integrated with other sources
of information, other notification functions become possible.
Publishers, for example, would have an incentive to produce their
announcements of new and forthcoming books in a database that
links to the authors' web objects, so that people who care about
those authors can be notified about the books before they appear.
Likewise, the universal event calendar that I wished for in TNO
3(4)could refer to the web object for whoever is speaking in
a given event, and people with relationships to that person in
that geographic area could be notified automatically of upcoming
speaking engagements.
Other functions could start from citation information, to the
extent that this information is available online. The world is
full of potentially useful techniques for bibliometric analysis
of research communities, for example, and programs that implement
those techniques could be running full-time. Likewise, to the
extent that full text is available online, existing systems
for automatic conceptual mapping could be used to notify me of
publications that might relevant to my research. Experience
with such systems suggests that it is crucial to provide me with
extensive control over how I get this information, and when I get
it, and how much of it I get.
Certain automatic functions could use individuals' private PRM
information in a way that does not violate their privacy. It
would be nice to told, for example, about individuals who are
very close to me in the professional network, but who are not
yet in my database. Researchers could also use the private
information in an anonymized fashion, much as epidemiologists
use medical records to perform statistical analyses without
having to identify the individuals whom the records are about.
Once these automatic functions are in place, individuals would
have easy ways to maintain up-to-date home pages. I gather that
literally hundreds of firms are building software to generate
web pages from underlying databases, and this would be a good
application. We're really just talking about a new-age report
generator, after all. People could build templates that generate
a decent-looking home page from the database entries that mention
them (for example: display my name and contact information in
these fonts with this indentation, then use our professional
society's citation format to display all of my publications
for the last two years that are listed in these databases,
then a bullet for each of the classes I am teaching this term
with pointers to syllabi, followed by this hand-written HTML
code for my favorite links and other random stuff). Then other
people could grab those existing templates, perhaps modifying
them slightly, as a basis for their own automatically generated
home page. The important point is that home pages would now be
largely virtual constructions that are built on the fly, either
daily or whenever someone fetched them, and not just a batch of
uninterpreted HTML code.
Automatic systems are fun to talk about, and they might even
be useful, but they should not distract attention from the
lived work of building social relationships. I would propose
that the real test of a PRM comes when I attend a conference.
The point of attending conferences is to talk to people, talking
to people takes preparation, and a PRM is useful if it supports
that preparation. A designer would want to ask: what do people
talk about at conferences, and what information would it be
useful for them to review beforehand? It would be nice to know
who is planning to attend a given conference, for starters: this
information is generally available through attendee lists, so it
would be reasonable to make it available in an object database
ahead of time. Before talking to someone, I want to know what
they have published lately -- especially books. I also want to
review our correspondence quickly, to help ensure that I connect
a person's disembodied e-mail persona with their face. If I am
organizing a book or conference in which that person is involved,
or might be involved, then I want to have the materials relevant
to that project organized in a handy form. If I will have a
computer handy at the conference then I can just prepare a file
that makes all of this material mouse-click handy. Or else I can
print out relevant stuff and have it bound to take on the plane.
The point of a PRM, then, would not be to automate research but
to support the often laborious and haphazard process of creating
and maintaining relationships in a research community. What
would happen in practice? Not all of the results might be happy.
University administrators these days are talking among themselves
about how to rationalize the administration of universities and
research laboratories, and standardized online systems could play
a role in personnel evaluations. How often have you been cited?
How many other researchers have you listed in their databases?
How many people have read your online publications? How many
articles have you refereed for journals? The PRM database might
also be used to select suitable authors of evaluation letters at
promotion time. As soon as the database is used in this fashion,
of course, everybody will start skewing their online personae in
whatever direction the administrators want to see. It is already
common in many fields -- computer science is an extreme case --
for researchers to publish their results in many small increments
to pump up their publication count. And mutual citation mafias
are common as well. A world of networked object databases could
accelerate these effects and create new ones.
The effects on individuals' careers could be even greater. It is
already routine for departments and research units to track the
careers of potential future "hires", for example the students who
are finishing their degrees in other programs. It is commonly
forgotten that much of the point of affirmative action, despite
all of the hype about quotas and standards, was to formalize
and generalize this process, so that hiring was based less on
informal networks, and so that institutions had incentives to
extend their informal networks to include potential sources of
hires from traditionally underrepresented groups. The use of
PRM's could make job candidates "visible" to the job market in
a strategic way, starting well before the formal hiring season
begins. A PhD advisor could use the web-object network to help
each PhD candidate build a professional network in preparation
for the job hunt, and departments and research units expecting
to hire in the future could engage in advance intelligence about
various candidates. The whole hiring process could thus shift
more toward active recruitment. Job candidates, likewise, could
prepare much better for their interviews than they can now, since
they would have ready access to publications and other relevant
information about the members of the departments where they are
applying and interviewing. And all of the same arguments apply
to graduate school recruitment and admissions as well.
It is worth noting the engine that makes all of these gears
turn: multiple relational databases that are interlinked and
thus searchable as if they formed a single database through the
use of a common object that represents the same person for many
different purposes. That's how we're accustomed to thinking
about information on computers. It's a good thing, if a bit
rigid sometimes, when it supports generally good applications
like the ones I am describing here. Applications tend to be
good when the data is under the control of its owners, or under
the collective control of the community that it's about. But
the same interlinking of databases can also be at the root of
serious privacy problems when data about individuals is collected
and used involuntarily, or without notification and rights of
correction and control of secondary uses.
These are familiar arguments, but distributed object databases
may give them a new urgency. Suppose that the world's major
maintainers of personal information got together to create a
system whereby every human being has precisely one object that
represents them. This object might be created at birth, if not
before, and it would exist forever. Any organization in the
world could proceed to link its database to the shared object,
provided that it supported the standard data object protocol.
Security systems would, of course, regulate which organizations
could conduct searches in other organizations' databases. But
each organization would have a great interest in licensing other
organizations access to its databases. Each organization would
thus effectively have available a gigantic distributed object
database, a sort of virtual database that effectively merges
all of the individual databases to which it has access. Then
it could conduct giant relational queries that would give new
meaning to the phrase "data mining". It is a worrisome scenario.
It is probably also too simple, but it is a good way to summarize
the problem. Perhaps the move toward a standardized object for
everyone will start with relatively good applications, since
those will cause less protest. But once established, the system
could creep with little effort toward relatively bad applications.
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This month's recommendations.
Andrew Feenberg, Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in
Philosophy and Social Theory, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995. This book brings together several studies by the
foremost scholar of the critical philosophy of technology. Among
the book's many strengths are its lucid exposition of difficult
philosophical ideas and its combination, rare among philosophers,
of scholarship and empirical research. The book is organized in
paired chapters, scholarship matched with case studies. A study
of Marcuse's critique of technology is applied to science fiction
movies. His chapter on the concept of technocracy in Adorno,
Foucault, and Habermas will save many people some painful late
nights of reading these obscure characters in the original, as
well as providing the background for a study of the ethics of
AIDS experimentation. A study of the postmodernist philosopher
Lyotard is applied to a case study of the Minitel system in
France. And a theoretical discussion the work of Kitaro Nishida,
which suggests that theories of modernity have not been the sole
province of European political philosophy, then provides the
background for a study of the game of Go in Japanese culture.
Martha Lampland, The Object of Labor: Commodification in
Socialist Hungary, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
This is a historical and ethnographic study of life in a
collectivized village in Hungary under Communist rule in the
1980's. Its question is, what are capitalism and communism,
not as abstract ideal types but as forms of activity and meaning
that people enact in their everyday lives? The villagers, having
lived under feudalism through perhaps the turn of the century,
something resembling capitalism between WWI and WWII, and a messy
approximation to communism after WWII, saw the world in a complex
amalgam of different ways. Individualist and collectivist values
were both very much present, having arisen historically at the
same time and through the same process. Everyone saw scientific
socialism as a corrupt farce and invested their main effort in
their private plots of land. Yet they generally approved of the
efficiencies of collectivized agriculture and the predictability
of the cooperative markets. In this complicated middle ground,
Lampland analyzes with great subtlety what a commodity is and
what it means for labor to be bought and sold. The results
should help everyone to feel uncomfortable with the easy answers
that come with their political beliefs, regardless of what those
beliefs are.
Seminary Co-op Bookstore. This is not the biggest academic
bookstore in North America, but I think it's the best, at least
for the social sciences and humanities. I can easily spend a day
here, and I make time for it whenever I'm in Chicago. 5757 South
University Avenue; Chicago, Illinois 60637; +1 (312) 752-4381,
1-800-777-1456, fax +1 (312) 752-8507; books@semcoop.wwa.com;
http://www.semcoop.com/
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Follow-up.
Several people have asked me where they can read more about
David Noble's concept of "masculine transcendentalism", which
I cited in TNO 3(4). I heard him use the phrase in a talk about
the place of religion in the history of technology. His book,
"The Religion of Technology", has not yet been published, but the
last chapter of "Progress Without People" (Toronto: Between The
Lines, 1995) is a preview. After hearing me describe the idea
in a talk, one person thought I meant that men are inherently
defective, or that all men are transcendentalists. But that's
not what Noble or I have in mind. The point, rather, is that
a historically specific and contingent cultural construction
of masculinity has reinforced, and been reinforced by, certain
institutions and practices of technology. I hope to write more
about this in future issues of TNO.
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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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