-------------------------------------------------------------------- T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R VOLUME 1, NUMBER 3 MARCH 1994 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to TNO 1(3). This issue includes an uplifting article by Jonathan Grudin on The Beginning Teachers Computer Network, a network set up to help new graduates of the Harvard School of Education teacher training program survive their first year of teaching. How can this fine system serve as a model for others? Which features of it are crucial? It's hard to say for sure, but it does involve people who have known one another in person but who have scattered geographically while still sharing stressful experiences in a new activity without necessarily having adequate support systems. What else is like this? New doctors from medical school? New parents from birthing classes? Newly sober alcoholics from AA meetings? People who have similar physical disabilities, newly released from hospitals or physical therapy programs? Circles of elderly friends newly dispersed to nursing homes? Perhaps all of these groups could use electronic alumni associations. Aside from Leslie Regan Shade's article on Canada, TNO 1(2) was far too polemical. TNO 1(3) returns to the path of constructive criticism with some reflections on the Internet at a commons. Most Internet institutions are still remarkably open, in the sense that anybody can join and anybody can send messages at any time. Will this last? Will hordes of unacculturated beginners overwhelm it? Will advertising overwhelm it? Will cumbersome billing software overwhelm it? Will people start building walls around their network communities? Maybe not -- if we understand and apply some principles for the maintenance of a commons. -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Internet as a commons. With the Internet growing exponentially, cultural emergencies are breaking out. TNO 1(2) described one of these, the unfortunate practice of teachers telling students to ask basic questions on Internet discussion lists. There's also the fairly widespread Internet traffic in digitized pornography, advertisements sent unsolicited to individuals or discussion lists, high-bandwidth video signals sent over long distances without full regard for the consequences for folks along the way, and so forth. Yet another is the following irritating dynamic: * Someone wishes to subscribe to a given discussion list, so they send a request directly to the list rather than to the list maintainer (probably because nobody ever told them how). * The request goes out to several hundred readers, a few of whom mistakenly reply to it, and these replies also go out to the whole list. * Whereupon several more readers send notes to the whole list complaining about the previous messages. * Whereupon several people wish to remove themselves from the discussion list, but they don't know how, so they send messages to the whole list. * Whereupon several more readers send out-and-out flames demanding that everyone else stop sending them meaningless messages. Many readers of TNO are no doubt aware of other such phenomena. What can we do about these problems? One common response is to promulgate rules or etiquette guidelines or "principles of user responsibility" and so forth. In each case, the image is one of restraining unfortunate behavior through written instructions, which does not work very well. But more effective responses exist. One of them, crucially different from the rules and guidelines, is to write instructions for the most effective ways of using the net to get things done, including clear explanations of *why* these methods work best. I've tried to write a couple of these things myself (see past issues of TNO for details), and I hope that others will too. (No doubt they have; if you know of any, please tell me.) In writing these things, I was influenced both by how-to-get-ahead books for business people and by books about the practice of democratic organizing for political people. The point is to appeal both to self-interest and to shared values, not to authority. Here's the wonderful thing. Given how the net works, it happens that the most effective ways of networking, getting help, finding information, gathering people together, making friends, and so forth are also the most socially responsible ways of doing these things. Why is this? It's because of the network's tremendous capacity for cultural self-regulation. The most obvious example of this phenomenon is the suppression of anti-social advertising methods. The net is full of people looking for business models these days, and several books and newsletters promise to explain how to advertise on the net. These people have caused much worry among net inhabitants who envision receiving floods of junk e-mail and the like. There are certainly things to worry about, but in my view this isn't one of them. Internet folks have already suppressed numerous outbreaks of anti-social advertising through the simple method of flooding the offenders with flaming complaints. While ill-tempered flaming has its own costs, the basic method is an important one. Imagine if it were just as easy to complain to the people who send you *paper* junk mail. What the Internet needs, then, is not rules and guidelines but a more fully functioning set of community standards. Although laws are certainly necessary for many sorts of things, community standards are better than laws because they are more flexible, more situational, cheaper, less dependent on supposedly objective authorities, and basically decentralized. Community standards are the best way to regulate a commons. And that's what the Internet is -- a commons. What does that mean? Well, we're not talking about common ownership, since the Internet is owned by all sorts of organizations. Rather, we're talking about a certain social system within the Internet, which includes, for example, the convention that discussion lists are open to all. This could change. The Internet could fragment into a bunch of separate spheres, each with its own gatekeeper. It won't happen right away, since most of the people who run Internet discussion lists and the like are still primarily interested in attracting people, not keeping them away. Notice that many of the people who run important Internet facilities, for example bibliographies and Listserv lists, are based at relatively marginal institutions -- the ones that we in the United States sometimes jokingly refer to as "Southwestern East Kansas State" and the like. Those jokes can be their own form of bigotry, but the phenomenon is real: the net is providing people at the periphery of the global research system with ways of building a community for themselves by providing a useful public service. Let's hope it stays that way. Garrett Hardin's classic paper "The Tragedy of the Commons" is often quoted to demonstrate the impossibility of a real commons. If everyone can graze their sheep on the commons, he points out, then everyone has an interest in maximum grazing, thus ensuring that the commons will be quickly worn out. Likewise with fishing in the world's oceans; many fish stocks are in grave danger of being fished out, and the fishing fleets of newly industrialized countries often fail to see the wisdom of collective management administered by institutions dominated by the very countries that fished the stocks down to dangerous levels in the first place. Is Internet bandwidth a commons, just like fish stocks? Market economic theories tend to assume that it is, simply because some people can profit by using more and more of it. But, as Hardin points out, a commons *can* work if it has a functioning system of community standards. In this context, of course, a "system" is not a piece of hardware, nor is it a set of written rules. Rather, it's a set of customs, together with a form of social organization that ensures that everyone has an interest in upholding those customs. When people's lives are heavily intertwined, as in a small town, and when the society is not too badly stratified, then reputation is an effective means of restraining anti-social uses of the commons. Another system is to place the commons under the management of respected elders, a system that obviously has a delicate set of preconditions. At bottom, maintenance of a commons always requires a holistic ethic of care, which can retain the benefits of managing the commons as a whole and avoid the disadvantages of chopping it up into separate domains. To learn more about the history and customs of the commons, read the following tremendous book, by the editors of the British environmentalist journal The Ecologist: The Ecologist, Whose Common Future?: Reclaiming the Commons, Philadelphia: New Society Press, 1993. NSP's phone number is +1 (215) 382 6543. You can order by phone, or by mail at 4527 Springfield Avenue Phil 19143. It's $14.95 plus $2.50 s&h. How should we maintain the commons of the Internet, so that everyone can keep on benefitting from its openness? I don't have all the answers, but here are some thoughts, in two groups: first things that are more "social", then technical things. * Complaints. When someone does something on the net that seems anti-social, send them a note. I don't think it serves any purpose to send people flaming hate-mail; after all, you might change your mind once you learn more facts, and non-hardened offenders are more likely to see reason if they're treated reasonably. Also, it's good not to give such complaints a bad name by being arbitrary or rude. If such complaints become a widespread practice (as they already are for many purposes) then they'll serve as an automatic referendum on marginal forms of network behavior. * Story-telling. Recount stories about net behavior. The recent article by Julian Dibbell in in The Village Voice ("A Rape in Cyberspace", 12/21/93) about some unsettling goings-on in the Xerox PARC LambdaMOO system is a good example. Stories are good ways to transmit values, to occasion debates about values, and to provide models for understanding and responding to future instances of questionable behavior. When disputes arise about proper net use, and when community standards have to be invoked to suppress unfortunate network behavior, it's important to tell stories about the events, and to keep on telling the stories for the benefit of others. * Curriculum materials. Nowadays anyone can choose from among a wide variety of texts about the technical aspects of using the Internet. What students learning about networks need now, in my view, is a textbook of the social aspects of network use. How do you get things done on the net? Again, the point is not to constrain users' activities with rules. Rather, the point is to provide the methods that work -- methods that are consistent with community standards, and that contribute to the atmosphere of helpfulness that now prevails on the net. * Network Watch. Let's imagine an organization called Network Watch whose purpose is to bring unfortunate network practices on the part of large organizations to the attention of the network community. This could include simple things, like advertising practices, but it could also include more sophisticated things, such as the diversion of personal information to purposes other than those for which it was collected. Obviously such a group would have to be cautious and encourage debate about what is and isn't legitimate network activity, and it should keep reminding itself that its most important weapon is publicity, but it should also call for e-mail campaigns, boycotts, and other forms of pressure against particularly grievous or chronic offenders. (See, for example, TNO 1(1)'s article on Internet action alerts.) It could also serve as a contact point for people who have been harmed by unfortunate network practices, or it could form an alliance with publications such as the Privacy Journal that already serve this purpose. The possibilities for such campaigns are unlimited. A great deal of inspiration can be gotten from labor unions' "corporate campaigns", which pressure organizations to conform to community standards in pay and working conditions by mapping out the full range of the organization's connections in the world (directors, customers, suppliers, bankers, etc) and applying pressure on the ones that seem vulnerable to public criticism. The great virtue of such campaigns is that, more or less, they don't work unless the community decides that the cause is just. (For more info on corporate campaigns, see issue #21 of Labor Research Review, which is available for $8 plus $1 s&h from the Midwest Center for Labor Research, 3411 West Diversey Avenue Suite 10, Chicago IL 60647, USA, phone +1 (312) 278-5418.) Technical things: * Interface. Many unfortunate social dynamics have their ultimate causes in bad interfaces that mislead users -- with the common result that the users make mistakes by trying to use new systems by analogy to systems they already know. We know a lot about designing good interfaces by now, so we should do it. In particular, it's quite important to watch some new users trying to use the system, and to encourage new users to write about their experiences, since the long-timers have usually forgotten what the hard parts are. * Concrete instructions. The worst set of net-user instructions I've ever seen are for an elaborate system of discussion groups and archives for people doing research in a field that shall remain nameless. The instructions are detailed, but they are basically useless to anybody except experts because they are full of abstractions like "issue a "send" command", where the meaning of "issue an xxx command" is explained somewhere else, in a way that itself presupposes that you know about ten other such abstractions. * FAQs. Many folks on the net maintain lists of frequently asked questions (FAQs). Unfortunately, in my experience you usually have to be a world-class neuromancer to actually *find* these things. New net users should be directed to relevant FAQs through as many mechanisms as possible, including absolutely detailed and concrete directions, if possible down to the precise keystrokes, for how to retrieve and read them. In particular, someone who subscribes to a discussion group should automatically receive such instructions, along with a clear explanation of what a FAQ is. (Most new users don't know what F.A.Q. stands for!) * Bounce-mail. Bounce-mail refers to the messages you get back when your e-mail doesn't get through. Since I run a mailing list, I get lots of bounce-mail and it's all terrible, full of extremely obscure and arbitrary codes, with the crumbs of useful information so badly formatted that it takes moderate experts like me several tries to find it. And, of course, every mailer has its own completely unique format. Imagine how intimidating such messages are to beginners. Can someone please write an RFP for bounce-mail formats? Can we please generate error messages that are written in whole sentences, formatted into whole paragraphs, with extra paragraphs explaining the basic idea in case the recipient is a beginner? One of these paragraphs should say: If you wish to report this problem to someone, please send along this whole bounce-mail message, because otherwise it will be impossible to figure out what really happened. * Collective memory. FAQ's are a kind of collective memory. We need tools to support the collection of many other kinds of collective memory as well. One possible tool would be a matcher that takes a user's question and compares it to *all* of the questions in *all* of the FAQ's on the net. Maybe this wouldn't work, given that each FAQ tends to presuppose a certain context (e.g., that you're using a certain program or speaking the language of a certain discipline, etc), but it's worth a try. * Better tools for maintainers. A lot of problems would be solved if it were easier for mailing list maintainers to screen the messages that are sent out to them. Such tools do exist, and some maintainers do use them, and claims of censorship do arise, for example when people insist on thinking out loud by sending large numbers of long messages to a list. But these issues are going to come up, and if we have flexible tools then we can try different solutions to them. The important thing is to share our experience, not keep it locked up in a particular person's head or a particular systems department. -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Beginning Teachers Computer Network. Jonathan Grudin University of California, Irvine Information and Computer Science Department grudin@ics.uci.edu "The network is one of the most wonderful things a school can give to its students." The students, in this case, were not really students, they were former students: graduates of the Harvard School of Education teacher training program. I spent an hour on the phone with a seventh grade teacher in Augusta Georgia, the result of a chance conversation with her mother. 50% to 60% of new teachers leave their profession within 5 years, she said. To find out why and to see what could be done about it, several years ago Harvard set up the BTCN or Teachers Network. For $25, a graduate can rent a computer and modem for a year. The system comes set up, with an 800 dial-in line and hotline help. The documentation is primarily education on "email etiquette" -- actions and feelings to expect on a network. The graduates have been through an intense twelve months of training. "We get very close in the program and are then hurled off into the cruel world. The first year of teaching is awful, it's very very hard. It was the worst year I've ever had, the hardest thing I've ever done. It's brutal. It's hard. You never sleep, you're grading all the time, you're planning all the time, you're crying all the time." She estimated that 60 of a class of around 100 took the offer and joined the network. Some "forums" are devoted to specific disciplines: Humanities, Math & Science, Foreign Languages. Others are topics: Classroom Management, Evaluation. In an Introduction forum new participants are guided in trying out the technology together. "Soapbox" is a general forum. Some Harvard faculty participate in the lightly facilitated forums, which are also studied for research purposes (a consent form is part of the rental agreement). "Private forums" (person-to-person email) are unmonitored. (Recently they upgraded the system and added a "Chat Line" for synchronous communication. She is unsure the new features warrant the increased complexity, though.) "It was really lifesaving for me, it kept me grounded when I needed it, helped me see what things are mountains, what are molehills. It's a time when you are feeling panicky about the world, worried about the future of society and children. Classmates really understand things so well. We could help each other in a wonderful way, not naive yet still excited." Questions were often specific. "'I'd like to stress writing, but the class is 35 kids, it seems too big... Should I teach Julius Caesar or Macbeth?'" Sometimes, though, "It was like reading an education journal" in a positive sense, "where theory and practice meet up." Some classmates who had not found teaching jobs got on the Teachers Network but inevitably stopped participating. To her surprise, arrogant classmates she "couldn't stand" in school were likable and helpful on the network, all struggling with similar problems. "It allowed me to see the longer range. With intense, miserable experiences every day there is a tendency to say 'forget it.'" Students encourage each other or just "vent." Discussing differences in the methods encountered in different schools enabled her to see that some problems she faced in her all-white private school were not universal. After a year she moved to an inner-city magnet school, where she says she is much happier. ("I wouldn't say Augusta has an inner city, but that's what they call it.") Her year of computer rental up, she bought a computer to stay on the network but finds herself participating less in the forums, which remain focused on first-year problems raised by the newly graduated class. (This year for the first time current students at Harvard can monitor and (rarely) participate.) She mostly uses private forums (email) to a few friends who also stayed on. It seemed a very special set of circumstances so I asked her uncertainly whether she sees any other uses for networks of this sort. She was ready. "Parents! Of kids in the same age group. I'm thinking of starting a newsletter for them. Parents of middle school kids see their kids turn into monsters and don't know what to do. It's a monstrous age, difficult to live through. Seventh grade is the height of monsterness." She laughed. "Parents need to be told "you were a monster when you were 13 and your children's children will be monsters when they're 13." She sees many opportunities. "Networks for parents of infants. For people starting new businesses..." -------------------------------------------------------------------- This month's recommendations. Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, eds, Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. A tremendously intelligent collection of articles about the phenomenon of "context" in language. The idea, roughly, is that "context" isn't just a sort of cloud that hangs around and determines or changes the meanings of words. Rather, context is something that people are *doing* through the ways they interact with one another. Philip Lesly, Overcoming Opposition: A Survival Manual for Executives, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984. A belligerently reactionary defense of established authority against campaigns of activists, including some rather sophisticated counter-tactics. He advocates propagating a steady stream of "facts" that make things seem complicated, since people will be quiescent if the picture isn't clear. He also suggests supporting groups that favor the organization's own goals. As one might expect, he grossly caricatures and oversimplifies the activists' positions (not that all anti-corporate activists think clearly, of course). It's not clear whether he really believes these things -- his big example throughout is infant formula in the Third World -- or whether it's just good strategy to position activists' views as oversimplified caricatures etc. The book is eminently quotable throughout and is clearly addressed to business executives who feel the need for an ego boost after all the attacks on their legitimacy. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Company of the month. This month's company is Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc 155 Montgomery St San Francisco CA 94104-4109 (800) 929 2929, +1 (415) 288 0260, fax +1 (415) 362 2512 A remarkable new movement has arisen within the American business community, which presents itself as a radically more ethical and democratic approach to business than we're accustomed to. The important ingredients include a rhetoric of "empowerment", an emphasis on personal change and development, attention to the emotional and spiritual dimensions of work, the leveling of hierarchies, and a rethinking of traditional relationships of authority. The most radical of the books in this movement are published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers of San Francisco, and I encourage you to call or write for their catalog. Are they for real? Are they just naive? Is this all just a cover-up for New Age forms of mind control? Have the traditional relationships of control within firms been entirely supplanted by the inherent discipline of the market? I don't have the answers. I do know that I regularly learn genuinely useful and genuinely ethical things from these people's books. In case you're curious, they tell me that they're not yet on the Internet but they're working on it, and that their point person for Internet-based activities is Pat Anderson (510) 339-7467. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Abstract of the month. Andrew Clement and Pater Van den Besselaar, A retrospective look at PD projects, Communications of the ACM 36(4), 1993, pages 29-37. Modern methods of information systems design involve the user in some way in the development process. However, often this is only deemed 'functional,' in that it is reasoned that involving users will lead to greater acceptance of the end system. Participatory design (PD) techniques attempt to get the user involved in order for them to have a say in their eventual working environment. PD has changed since its inception in the 1970s. However, many aspects remain similar. Detailed is an overview of the history of PD. Discussed are many of the PD projects documented since the 1970s that were reported at conferences sponsored by IPIF Working Group 9.1. Areas analyzed include a definition of PD, the method of constructing sample projects, a discussion of the actual projects, and general patterns and analysis. 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). -------------------------------------------------------------------- Follow-up. One impassioned reader of TNO 1(2) actually called me a Communist sympathizer. Given that the rhetoric of political repression is coming back at full strength, it would probably behoove me to point out that I am a life-long opponent of Communism. My core value, and the core value of TNO, is democracy. Conservatives in the US are increasingly open about their opposition to democracy. One manifestation of this is the increasingly frequent practice of coining metaphors that compare democratic liberalism with the Soviet Union, thus insinuating that liberals are basically Communists. For example, conservative Republican strategists have recently taken to referring to Bill Clinton's health-care proposal as "liberalism's Afghanistan", the over-reaching invasion that demonstrates the regime's underlying weaknesses and helps bring it crashing to the ground. Many of them also like to portray democracy as "two wolves and a sheep voting", when the more common picture, of course, involves one wolf and twenty sheep. Heaven knows that democracy in my own country is pretty messed up at the moment, but that's why I'm writing TNO. My view is that democracy is first and foremost a cultural phenomenon, a set of skills for actively getting together to run the collective life of the community while respecting individual dignity. These skills include getting help, communicating across cultural boundaries, networking, organizing things, and so forth. None of these skills is innate. All must be learned, and all are in danger of disappearing when people are manipulated into passivity in the name of some supposedly higher good. We can use networks to alleviate this danger -- and to help reverse the damage that has already been done -- by sharing our experiences, information, strength, and good will, and TNO is my own small contribution to this larger project. Those who are interested in the issues management now being practiced by various players in the Washington telecommunications regulation battle might be interested in a press release from a coalition of the seven regional Bell companies announcing their WWW server, which contains all kinds of lobbying materials. To retrieve a copy, send a message that looks like: To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send bells Don't let my rhetoric overly influence you -- read their views and make up your own mind. You might also wish to read the views of the Information Industry Association, who generally want information to be a commodity. In this issue they explain their opposition to a bill that would impose a presumption of privacy upon personal information kept by state Departments of Motor Vehicles, as well as their proposal to commercialize the circulation of government documents to libraries. To retrieve a copy, send a message that looks like: To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send iia Also, due to popular demand, the article on TNO 1(2) entitled "The art of getting help" is now available as a separate file. To retrieve a copy, send a message that looks like: To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send getting-help You would be most welcome to post it to your favorite discussion group, to beginners on the net, or to people who teach courses that involve Internet-based research. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucsd.edu Department of Communication University of California, San Diego +1 (619) 534-6328 La Jolla, California 92093-0503 FAX 534-7315 USA -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Network Observer is distributed through the Red Rock Eater News Service. 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