-------------------------------------------------------------------- T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1 JANUARY 1994 -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 . To subscribe to RRE, send a message that looks like: To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: subscribe yourfirstname yourlastname To subscribe to net-happenings, send a message like so: To: listserv@internic.net 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 rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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: info@eit.com 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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). -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. To subscribe to RRE, send a message to the RRE server, rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu, 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". -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- END-----------------cut here------------------