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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1 JANUARY 1994
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What is The Network Observer?
The Network Observer is a monthly electronic newsletter about
networks and democracy. As the editor of TNO, I will interpret
both terms, networks and democracy, as expansively as possible.
Networks include the Internet and other global computer networks,
but they also include social networks of all sorts, computerized
or not. Democracy, for its part, includes all the means by which
people get together to collectively run their own lives. Social
networks are vital for any kind of functioning democracy, and
computer networks are vital if democracy is to survive and grow
in the face of an increasingly global market economy. The market,
in my view, is like the police: of course you need it, but if
it becomes the central organizing principle of your culture then
you're in serious trouble.
Where do you get the time to write this stuff?
Writer's block. When I can't make myself write the things that
are supposed to get me tenure, I try to keep up the momentum with
smaller writing exercises about whatever's on my mind. Sometimes
the results are interesting, and those are the bits I'll include
in TNO. If you find them interesting too then you're most welcome
to subscribe. And I hope you'll pass TNO along to anyone else who
might be interested as well.
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Action alerts.
Computer networks are a new medium, and we still haven't figured
out what to do with them. One thing we can do is share success
stories; if someone does something really innovative with the net,
let's get the word out.
But some of the net's uses have been around for years without
anybody really paying much attention. One such use is what I'll
call (following many analogous practices on paper) the "action
alert". An action alert is a message that someone sends out to
the net asking for a specific action to be taken on a current
political issue. It's time to understand how action alerts work
and abstract some guidelines for people who might wish to use them
more consciously in the future.
The action alerts I can think of fall into two categories, single
messages and structured campaigns.
* Single-message alerts. One model for a single-message alert
might be the recent flood of messages urging us all to counter
an ongoing Christian right campaign by calling up Apple Computer
to congratulate it on its policies regarding gay and lesbian
families. Several other such messages have passed through the
Internet over the years. A single-message alert will typically
be sent out ad hoc a discussion group, or to a bunch of them, from
which interested individuals will pass it along to other groups.
* Structured campaigns. Perhaps the best model for a structured
campaign is Jim Warren's successful campaign to get California
legislative information made publicly available on the Internet.
Rather than send his messages out to discussion groups, Jim
created his own mailing list devoted solely to this campaign.
Another example is the mailing list that Amnesty International
maintained for a while -- I believe it's no longer operating.
Both types of action alerts are obviously modeled on things that
have been happening on paper, and lately via fax machines, for a
long time. What computer networks do is make them a lot cheaper.
In particular, a networked alert can travel extremely far from its
origin by being forwarded from friend to friend and list to list,
without any additional cost being imposed on the original sender.
This phenomenon of chain-forwarding is important, and it behooves
the would-be author of an action alert, whether a single message
or a whole campaign, to think through its consequences:
(1) Establish authenticity. Bogus action alerts -- such as the
notorious "modem tax" alert -- travel just as fast as real ones.
Don't give alerts a bad name -- include clear information about
the sponsoring organization and provide the reader with some way
of tracing back to you.
(2) Put a date on it. Action alerts can travel through the net
forever. They may, for example, sleep in someone's mailbox for
weeks, months, or years and then suddenly get a new life as the
mailbox's owner forwards it to a new set of lists. Do not count
on the message header to convey the date (or anything else);
people who forward net messages frequently strip off the header.
And if your recommended action has a time-out date (e.g., do it
by Thursday, February 17th or don't do it) then clearly say so.
(3) Put clear beginning and ending markers on it. You can't
prevent people from modifying your alert as they pass it along.
Fortunately, at least in my experience, this only happens
accidentally, as extra commentary accumulates at the top and
bottom of the message as it gets forwarded. So put a bold row
of dashes or something like that at the top and bottom so extra
stuff will look extra.
(4) Think about whether you want the alert to propagate at all.
The Amnesty alert network actively discouraged this kind of
forwarding. Because of the extremely sensitive nature of the
materials they were sending out, they wanted to know precisely
who was getting their notices, and how, and in what context.
And they wisely said so.
(5) Make it self-contained. Don't presuppose that your readers
will have any context beyond what they'll get on the news. Your
alert will probably be read by people who have never heard of you
or your cause. So define your terms, avoid references to previous
messages on your mailing list, and provide lots of background, or
at least some simple instructions for getting useful background
materials. Avoid the temptation to explain the issue in the
shorthand you use when preaching to the converted. This can take
practice.
(6) Give everyone something to do. If your campaign only applies
to a certain political area, such as Warren's California campaign,
explain some alternative way that people from outside that area
can help out. Or, conversely, if your campaign is global, say so.
Apple Computer, for example, is a global firm and deserves global
reinforcement for its good deeds.
(7) Put a good, clear headline on it. And all the rest of the
usual advice. State the facts and double-check them. Check your
spelling too. Use short sentences and narrow margins. Write in
language that will be understood worldwide, not just in your own
country or culture.
(8) Don't overdo it. Action alerts might become as unwelcome
as direct-mail advertising. Postpone that day by picking your
fights and including some useful, thought-provoking information
in your alert message. If you're running a sustained campaign,
set up your own list, like Jim Warren did. Then send out a single
message that calls for some action and include an advertisement
for your new list.
(9) Do a post-mortem. When the campaign is over, try to derive
some lessons for others to use. Even if you're burned out, take
a minute right away while the experience is still fresh in mind.
What problems did you have? What mistakes did you make? What
unexpected connections did you make? Who did you reach and why?
Good guesses are useful too.
(10) Don't mistake e-mail for organizing. An action alert is
not an organization; it's just an alert. If you want to build a
lasting political movement, at some point you'll have to gather
people together, and it's really not clear whether the net is a
good medium for doing this. More on this topic in future TNO's.
With regard to campaigns run through mailing lists, the important
thing is to realize that such a campaign gets its power from two
linked elements: (a) a reporter on the scene (for example, in the
California Legislature) who can provide accurate, sophisticated,
comprehensible, up-to-the minute accounts of the current state
of play; and (b) a networked constituency who will read these
accounts and is willing to act on them.
In the particular case of legislative campaigns, this is a pattern
that's developing throughout the world of lobbying. The lobbyist
who spins arguments in members' chambers is quickly giving way
to the mass-mail and mass-telephone specialist who, armed with
absurdly detailed demographics on the member's constituents, whips
up letters and calls based on the issue of the moment. And many
organizations, such as the National Association of Manufacturers,
have reportedly been using computer networks for this purpose
routinely for years. This is definitely not a healthy development
overall. But the practices that have emerged on the Internet have
an important virtue when compared to the inflaming targeted phone
call: the alert messages go out in "public", or at least in open
network forums, and are subject to criticism from people who find
them misleading.
I'll have more to say about computer networks and lobbying in
future issues of TNO. The lesson to take home right now is that
the Internet is providing some kind of vague approximation of a
"public sphere" for political action, and we can all do democracy
and ourselves a big favor by paying close attention to its logic
and its ethics.
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New things to do with the net.
Over the last several months I've been exploring two new things
that I can do on the net without devoting more than an hour a
week to them. The Red Rock Eater News Service is a mailing list
I've been running on weber.ucsd.edu with the assistance of Mike
Corrigan. It's not a discussion list. I simply send out on RRE
whatever falls into my e-mailbox that strikes me as interesting
-- about five messages a week. People who share my interests
are welcome to subscribe to RRE, and people who don't share
my interests are encouraged to start their own list. RRE is
currently pushing 500 subscribers.
I've been trying to think of a generic name for this kind
of mailing list. Maybe it's a "reader", as in the Utne Reader,
which samples various vaguely "alternative" magazines. Or maybe
it's a "filtering service", since in practice it mostly consists
of messages from a fixed set of mailing lists: CPSR and EFF
newsletters, the Bryn Mawr Classical and Medieval Reviews, the
sci-tech-studies list at UCSD, and another, much higher bandwidth
filtering service called net-happenings, organized by Gleason
Sackman <
[email protected]>.
To subscribe to RRE, send a message that looks like:
To:
[email protected]
Subject: subscribe yourfirstname yourlastname
To subscribe to net-happenings, send a message like so:
To:
[email protected]
Subject: anything
subscribe net-happenings yourfirstname yourlastname
Whatever it's called, I wish that more people would run this kind
of mailing list. That way I could learn about a bunch of topics,
like the issues on the com-priv (Privatization of the Internet)
mailing list, without wading through tons of messages daily.
In any event, my other network experiment is a paper called
"Networking on the Network". It's been distributed or advertised
on several e-mail lists. (To fetch a copy, send a message to
[email protected] with the subject line "archive send
network".) I wrote the first draft of it over the summer and sent
it to a few hundred people, requesting comments. By now about
twenty people have sent back anything from a single suggestion
to detailed criticisms. That may not sound like much, but it has
made a big difference.
As a result, the paper has grown to at least twice its original
since, not to mention twice its original clarity, half its
original attitude level, and improved sensitivity to the situation
of people who aren't employed in elite institutions. This is good
for me, since it keeps me thinking about the ideas and I never
have to declare it "finished" with all its faults. And it's good
for the people who might profit from its improvements. But --
and this just kills me -- I don't get any official credit for
it. Because it's just a file available on the Internet, it has
never been "published", unless you count its appearance in the
Risks Digest. I've sent it to a couple of magazines and a book
publisher, but somehow it's just not the kind of thing that
anybody is set up to publish.
But forget about that. It's not for the sake of my resume anyway.
It's a kind of community memory, gathering up suggestions and
experience into a form that everyone can use. My model in this
regard is a paper David Chapman when he and I were both graduate
students, "How to Do Research at the MIT AI Lab". (In case you're
wondering, I don't think it's in print any more. And I've lost
my copy.) What he did was simple: he send e-mail to a few dozen
wise (or at least experienced) people, asking "what's the one bit
of advice you want to pass along to new graduate students in the
lab?" He had to do a reasonable amount of editing, and he wrote a
lot of it himself anyway, but the resulting document was extremely
useful and was widely and enthusiastically propagated.
Every community can do this, and the Internet provides a perfect
medium for doing so. In particular, you can do it. Send notes
(the same note sent to each one individually) to the three dozen
people in your field who you regard as wise. Tell them you're
trying to gather wisdom and advice for beginners (and specify "new
graduate students", or "new employees", or "beginning activists",
or whatever), and say that even one paragraph would be helpful.
Tell them it doesn't have to be formal, and indeed it should feel
much more like writing a personal letter (like they say in the
instructions for authors in Whole Earth Review) than a formal
article. Then collect the answers, edit them together with headings
and an introduction, make the resulting document available on the
net (through gopher or WWW or an e-mail archive or whatever), and
publicize it in the relevant listservs and newsgroups. The document
should include a date ("Version of 8 January 1994"), instructions
for how to fetch the current version, and an invitation to send
along further suggestions.
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This month's recommendations.
Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka, eds, Participatory Design:
Principles and Practices, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1993. A set of
papers on the practice of designing computers with the involvement
of their prospective users. Most of the papers are grounded in
the actual complexities of experience. See also the special issue
on participatory design of Communications of the ACM, June 1993,
and a couple more relevant papers in the December 1993 and January
1994 issues of the same journal.
Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, eds, Understanding Practice:
Perspectives on Activity and Context, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993. A bracing collection of theoretically
sophisticated empirical studies of routine activities -- each
study finds large things through sustained engagement with small
things, from sailors navigating a boat into port to AI people
designing something on a whiteboard to school examinations.
Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the
American Environmental Movement, Washington, DC: Island Press,
1993. An innovative history of the environmental movement
in the United States. Gottlieb paints a much broader picture
than most. In particular, he focuses away from the large
national organizations and towards the diverse traditions of
local, grass-roots work in communities across the country. The
environmental movement has its roots not simply in middle-class
nature appreciation but also in industrial hygeine and simple
community self-defense.
Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery, New York: Basic Books,
1992. A feminist psychiatrist looks at the psychological effects
of severe trauma. Her gaze is both clinical and political.
She emphasizes that the experiences of trauma victims are never
legitimized without a political movement to lend support to their
voices. Once brought out into the open, though, the experiences
of trauma are pretty much universal. One chapter, for example, is
literally written in alternating paragraphs about rape survivors
and soldiers, and another alternates between battered wives and
political prisoners. Her book is all the more important right
now, given the backlash against victims of sexual abuse that has
made the national magazines.
Open a window into the exploding world of right-wing theory and
networking with a free subscription to Imprimis, a small monthly
newsletter published by Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan
49242, USA. Their US phone number in is 1-800-437-2268. I don't
know if they'll accept subscribers outside the US, but they say
"Circulation 490,000 worldwide", so it's certainly worth a try.
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Company of the month.
It's no secret that the initiative in computer research has
shifted from academia to the private sector. And private
companies, especially the smaller ones where the real innovation
is happening right now, are normally more motivated to publish
their ideas through PR and sales brochures than through the
open literature. That's why it's important to keep up with what
new companies are doing by getting ahold of the documents that
companies put out about themselves. All such documents should
be read with a big critical grain of salt, but they should be
read nonetheless. So each month (when I can manage it), this
department will recommend that you contact a certain company and
ask for some basic brochure about the company and its products.
I do not necessarily endorse these companies' work, but I am
absolutely NOT recommending that you harass them. Don't request
the materials unless you are genuinely interested in reading them.
This month's company is
Enterprise Integration Technologies (EIT)
459 Hamilton Avenue
Palo Alto, California 94301
USA
phone +1-415-617-8000
fax -8019
E-mail:
[email protected]
WWW:
http://www.eit.com/
EIT are currently most famous for the money they just got to help
build the Smart Valley CommerceNet, "an electronic marketplace for
Silicon Valley's electronics industry". This is important because
it's the cutting edge of integration of computer systems *between*
companies and not just inside them. We can expect this to really
change the structures of numerous markets, and not just in the
computer industry.
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Abstract of the month.
Nikzad Toomarian, Multi-target tracking in dense threat
environments, Computers and Electrical Engineering 19(6), 1993,
pages 469-479.
"A new approach to multi-target tracking is presented for the
mid-course stage of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). This
approach is based upon a continuum representation of a cluster of
flying objects. The velocities of the flying objects are assumed
to be embedded into a smooth velocity field. This assumption
is based upon the impossibility of encounters in a high-density
cluster between the flying objects. Therefore, the problem is
reduced to that of identifying a moving continuum based upon
consecutive time frame observations. In contradistinction to the
previous approaches, here each target is considered as a center
of a small continuous neighborhood subjected to a local-affine
transformation, and therefore, the target trajectories do not mix.
Obviously, their mixture in plane of sensor view is apparent. The
approach is illustrated by an example."
This abstract comes from the "Mags" database of the University of
California Libraries' clunky but nonetheless indispensible Melvyl
system, which is a product of Information Access Company (IAC).
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Phil Agre, editor
[email protected]
Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego +1 (619) 534-6328
La Jolla, California 92093-0503 FAX 534-7315
USA
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The Network Observer is distributed through the Red Rock Eater
News Service. To subscribe to RRE, send a message to the RRE
server,
[email protected], whose subject line reads
"subscribe firstname lastname", for example "Subject: subscribe
Jane Doe". For more information about the Red Rock Eater, send
a message to that same address with a subject line of "help".
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Copyright 1994 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The
Network Observer electronically to anyone for any non-commercial
purpose. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
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