communication

Clay Shirky on flaming & how to combat it

history, social software, tech in changing society / /

From Clay Shirky’s “Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software” (Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet: 5 November 2004):

Learning From Flame Wars

Mailing lists were the first widely available piece of social software. … Mailing lists were also the first widely analyzed virtual communities. …

Flame wars are not surprising; they are one of the most reliable features of mailing list practice. If you assume a piece of software is for what it does, rather than what its designer’s stated goals were, then mailing list software is, among other things, a tool for creating and sustaining heated argument. …

… although the environment in which a mailing list runs is computers, the environment in which a flame war runs is people. …

The user’s mental model of a word processor is of limited importance — if a word processor supports multiple columns, users can create multiple columns; if not, then not. The users’ mental model of social software, on the other hand, matters enormously. For example, ‘personal home pages’ and weblogs are very similar technically — both involve local editing and global hosting. The difference between them was mainly in the user’s conception of the activity. …

… The cumulative effect is to make maximizing individual flexibility a priority, even when that may produce conflict with the group goals.

Netiquette and Kill Files

The first general response to flaming was netiquette. Netiquette was a proposed set of behaviors that assumed that flaming was caused by (who else?) individual users. If you could explain to each user what was wrong with flaming, all users would stop.

This mostly didn’t work. The problem was simple — the people who didn’t know netiquette needed it most. They were also the people least likely to care about the opinion of others …

… Addressing the flamer directly works not because he realizes the error of his ways, but because it deprives him of an audience. Flaming is not just personal expression, it is a kind of performance, brought on in a social context.

… People behave differently in groups, and while momentarily engaging them one-on-one can have a calming effect, that is a change in social context, rather than some kind of personal conversion. …

Another standard answer to flaming has been the kill file, sometimes called a bozo filter, which is a list of posters whose comments you want filtered by the software before you see them. …

… And although people have continually observed (for thirty years now) that “if everyone just ignores user X, he will go away,” the logic of collective action makes that outcome almost impossible to orchestrate — it only takes a couple of people rising to bait to trigger a flame war, and the larger the group, the more difficult it is to enforce the discipline required of all members.

The Tragedy of the Conversational Commons

Briefly stated, the tragedy of the commons occurs when a group holds a resource, but each of the individual members has an incentive to overuse it. …

In the case of mailing lists (and, again, other shared conversational spaces), the commonly held resource is communal attention. The group as a whole has an incentive to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high and the conversation informative, even when contentious. Individual users, though, have an incentive to maximize expression of their point of view, as well as maximizing the amount of communal attention they receive. It is a deep curiosity of the human condition that people often find negative attention more satisfying than inattention, and the larger the group, the likelier someone is to act out to get that sort of attention.

However, proposed responses to flaming have consistently steered away from group-oriented solutions and towards personal ones. …

Weblog and Wiki Responses

… Weblogs are relatively flame-free because they provide little communal space. In economic parlance, weblogs solve the tragedy of the commons through enclosure, the subdividing and privatizing of common space. …

Like weblogs, wikis also avoid the tragedy of the commons, but they do so by going to the other extreme. Instead of everything being owned, nothing is. Whereas a mailing list has individual and inviolable posts but communal conversational space, in wikis, even the writing is communal. … it is actually easier to restore damage than cause it. …

Weblogs and wikis are proof that you can have broadly open discourse without suffering from hijacking by flamers, by creating a social structure that encourages or deflects certain behaviors.

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1% create, 10% comment, 89% just use

business, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Charles Arthur’s “What is the 1% rule?” (Guardian Unlimited: 20 July 2006):

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

It’s a meme that emerges strongly in statistics from YouTube, which in just 18 months has gone from zero to 60% of all online video viewing.

The numbers are revealing: each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads – which as Antony Mayfield (at http://open.typepad.com/open) points out, is 1,538 downloads per upload – and 20m unique users per month.

That puts the “creator to consumer” ratio at just 0.5%, but it’s early days yet …

50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users, according to the Church of the Customer blog (http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/).

Earlier metrics garnered from community sites suggested that about 80% of content was produced by 20% of the users, but the growing number of data points is creating a clearer picture of how Web 2.0 groups need to think. For instance, a site that demands too much interaction and content generation from users will see nine out of 10 people just pass by.

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo points out that much the same applies at Yahoo: in Yahoo Groups, the discussion lists, “1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content, whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress; 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups,” he noted on his blog (www.elatable.com/blog/?p=5) in February.

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The origin of broadcast journalism

history, technology / /

From Nicholas Lemann’s “The Murrow Doctrine” (The New Yorker: 23 & 30 January 2006: 38-43):

There is a memorable entry in William Shirer’s Berlin Diary in which he describes – as, in effect, something that happened at work one day – the birth of broadcast journalism. It was Sunday, March 13, 1938, the day after Nazi troops entered Austria. Shirer, in London, got a call from CBS headquarters, in New York, asking him to put together a broadcast in which radio correspondents in the major capitals of Europe, led by Shirer’s boss, Edward R. Murrow, who was on the scene in Vienna, would offer a series of live reports on Hitler’s move and the reaction to it.

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‘Thomas Crown Affair! Thomas Crown Affair!’

commonplace book, security, tech in changing society / /

From Improv Everywhere’s “Missions: Best Buy” (23 April 2006):

Agent Slavinsky wrote in to suggest I get either a large group of people in blue polo shirts and khakis to enter a Best Buy or a group in red polo shirts and khakis to enter a Target. Wearing clothing almost identical to the store’s uniform, the agents would not claim to work at the store but would be friendly and helpful if anyone had a question. There aren’t any Targets in Manhattan, so I decided to go with the two-story Best Buy on 23rd Street. …

We met at Union Square North at 3:30 PM. Around 80 agents showed up, most them looking like wonderful Best Buy employees. …

The reaction from the employees was pretty typical as far as our missions go. The lower level employees laughed and got a kick out of it while the managers and security guards freaked out. …

Security guards and managers started talking to each other frantically on their walkie-talkies and headsets. “Thomas Crown Affair! Thomas Crown Affair!,” one employee shouted. They were worried that were using our fake uniforms to stage some type of elaborate heist. “I want every available employee out on the floor RIGHT NOW!”

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Al Qaeda hijacks web server to distribute video

business, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Matt Tanase’s Don’t let this happen to you:

Smaller companies often assume they have nothing of interest to hackers. Often times that is the case, but they are still after resources, as in this case. Unfortunately, the hackers in this case are tied to Al Qaeda. They placed the recent hostage video on a California companies server. Imagine all of the lovely publicity this brought in.

From New24’s US firm spread hostage video (17 June 2004):

Video images of a US engineer taken hostage in Saudi Arabia, possibly by the al-Qaeda network, could have been put on the internet via a US firm based in California, Der Spiegel magazine reported on Thursday.

The video was released on Tuesday and shows relatively high-quality film of hostage Paul Johnson, who kidnappers from a group called “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” have threatened to kill by Friday.

The origin of the video was traced to Silicon Valley Land Surveying Incorporated, a California land surveying and mapping company, said Spiegel online, the internet service for the respected German weekly.

The magazine said that according to its research the move was the first time al-Qaeda had “hijacked” a website to broadcast its propaganda.

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Notes on The Strength of Weak Ties revisited

social software, tech in changing society / /

From Mark Granovetter’s “The Strength Of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited” [Sociological Theory, Volume 1 (1983), 201-233.]:

The argument asserts that our acquaintances (weak ties) are less likely to be socially involved with one another than are our close friends (strong ties).Thus the set of people made up of any individual and his or her acquaintances comprises a low-density network (one in which many of the possible relational lines are absent) whereas the set consisting of the same individual and his or her close friends will be densely knit (many of the possible lines are present). …

The weak tie between Ego and his acquaintance, therefore, becomes not merely a trivial acquaintance tie but rather a crucial bridge between the two densely knit clumps of close friends. To the extent that the assertion of the previous paragraph is correct, these clumps would not, in fact, be connected to one another at all were it not for the existence of weak ties (SWT, p. 1363).

It follows, then, that individuals with few weak ties will be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system and will be confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends. This deprivation will not only insulate them from the latest ideas and fashions but may put them in a disadvantaged position in the labor market, where advancement can depend, as I have documented elsewhere (1974), on knowing about appropriate job openings at just the right time. …

The macroscopic side of this communications argument is that social systems lacking in weak ties will be fragmented and incoherent. New ideas will spread slowly, scientific endeavors will be handicapped, and subgroups separated by race, ethnicity, geography, or other characteristics will have difficulty reaching a modus vivendi. …

In the evolution of social systems, perhaps the most important source of weak ties is the division of labor, since increasing specialization and interdependence result in a wide variety of specialized role relationships in which one knows only a small segment of the other’s personality. … the exposure to a wide variety of different viewpoints and activities is the essential prerequisite for the social construction of individualism. …

She relates this difference to Basil Bernstein’s dis- tinction between restricted and elaborated codes of communication. Restricted codes are simpler-more meanings are implicit and taken for granted as the speakers are so familiar with one another. Elaborated codes are complex and universal – more reflection is needed in organizing one’s communication “when there is more difference between those to whom the speech is addressed” (p. 256). …

At a more mundane level, I argued (SWT, pp. 1369-1373; 1974, pp. 51-62) that weak ties have a special role in a person’s opportunity for mobility-that there is a “structural tendency for those to whom one is only weakly tied to have better access to job information one does not already have. Acquaintances, as compared to close friends, are more prone to move in different circles than oneself. Those to whom one is closest are likely to have the greatest overlap in contact with those one already knows, so that the information to which they are privy is likely to be much the same as that which one already has” (1974, pp. 52-53). …

Administrative or managerial employees had a pattern very much like the one I reported: 35.5 percent using weak ties, 15.8 percent strong ones, and 48.7 percent intermediate. Professionals and office workers also were heavy users of weak ties (30.8 percent and 25.8 percent but, unlike managers, used strong ties even more frequently (51.0 and 44.4 percent). Semiprofessionals found only 13.1 percent of jobs through weak ties and blue-collar workers 19.1 percent; the former found 44.9 percent of jobs through strong ties, the latter only 19.1 percent. …

One set of results is of special interest, however. Ericksen and Yancey found that less-well-educated respondents were those most likely to use strong ties for jobs …

The argument of SWT implies that only bridging weak ties are of special value to individuals; the significance of weak ties is that they are far more likely to be bridges than are strong ties. It should follow, then, that the occupational groups making the greatest use of weak ties are those whose weak ties do connect to social circles different from one’s own. …

Consistent with this interpretation is the finding of Lin and col- leagues (1981) that weak ties have positive effects on occupational status only when they connect one to high-status individuals. For those of lower status, weak ties to those of similar low status were not especially useful, whereas those to high-status contacts were. In the latter case the status difference alone strongly suggests that the ties bridged substan- tial social distance. …

Weak ties provide people with access to information and resources beyond those available in their own social circle; but strong ties have greater motivation to be of assistance and are typically more easily available. …

Pool argues, for example, that the number of weak ties is increased by the development of the communications system, by bureaucratization, population density, and the spread of market mechanisms. Further, he suggests that average family size affects the number of weak ties, since where “primary families are large, more of the total contacts of an individual are likely to be absorbed in them” (p. 5). …

In my study of job finding, for example, I found that those whose job was found through strong ties were far more likely to have had a period of unemployment between jobs than those using weak ties (1974, p. 54). …

A number of studies indicate that poor people rely more on strong ties than do others. Ericksen and Yancey, in a study of Philadel- phia, conclude that the “structure of modern society is such that some people typically find it advantageous to maintain strong networks and we have shown that these people are more likely to be young, less well educated, and black” (1977, p. 23). …

Stack (1974) studied a black, urban American, midwestern ghetto … Stack: “Black families living in the Flats need a steady source of cooperative support to survive. They share with one another because of the urgency of their needs. . . . They trade food stamps, rent money, a TV, hats, dice, a car, a nickel here, a cigarette there, food, milk, grits, and children. . . . Kin and close friends who fall into similar economic crises know that they may share the food, dwelling, and even the few scarce luxuries of those individuals in their kin network. . . . Non-kin who live up to one another’s expectations express elaborate vows of friendship and conduct their social relations within the idiom of kinship” (1974, pp. 32-33, 40). …

At the same time, I would suggest that the heavy concentration of social energy in strong ties has the impact of fragmenting communities of the poor into encapsulated networks with poor connections between these units; individuals so encapsulated may then lose some of the advantages associated with the outreach of weak ties. This may be one more reason why poverty is self-perpetuating. Certainly programs meant to provide social services to the poor have frequently had trouble in their outreach efforts. From the network arguments advanced here, one can see that the trouble is to be expected. …

Furthermore, many cultural items never transmitted by the media are known throughout an extensive network: “Youth cultures offer excellent examples of subcultures which provide a set of communication channels external to the media. Much material which is common knowledge among young people – dirty jokes, sexual lore, aggressive humor . . . is not communicated by the adult-controlled media” (p. 9). …

What makes cultural diffusion possible, then, is the fact that small cohesive groups who are liable to share a culture are not so cohesive that they are entirely closed; rather, ideas may penetrate from other such groups via the connecting medium of weak ties. It is a seeming paradox that the effect of weak ties, in this case, is homogenization, since my emphasis has been the ability of weak ties to reach out to groups with ideas and information different from one’s own. The paradox dissolves, however, when the process is understood to occur over a period of time. The ideas that initially flow from another setting are, given regional and other variations, probably new. Homogeneous subcultures do not happen instantly but are the endpoint of diffusion processes. … Fine and Kleinman note that “culture usage consists of chosen behaviors. . . . Culture can be employed strategically and should not be conceptualized as a conditioned response. Usage of culture requires motivation and, in particular, identification with those who use the cultural items. Thus, values, norms, behaviors, and artifacts constitute a subculture only insofar as individuals see themselves as part of a collectivity whose members attribute particular meanings to these ‘objects'” (1979, pp. 12-13). …

The importance of this notion is clear. If “the innovativeness of central units is shackled by vested intellectual interests (or perspectives) then new ideas must emanate from the margins of the network” (p. 460). Furthermore, as I suggested in SWT for the case of high-risk innovations (p. 1367), Chubin points out that marginals, in science, can better afford to innovate; the innovations, if useful, are seized on by the center. …

Weimann finds also, however, that strong ties are not irrelevant in information flow-the speed of flow, credibility, and especially influence are all greater through strong ties and, in fact, “most of the influence is carried through strong ties” (1980, p. 12). He suggests a division of labor between weak and strong ties: Weak ties provide the bridges over which innovations cross the boundaries of social groups; the decision making, however, is influenced mainly by the strong-ties network in each group (p. 21). …

In the bureaucratic solution, the ties are hierarchical; in the democratic clinics, many of which have reacted against the formal model, “tena- cious ties provide a matrix of close primary group relations unifying the entire structure. These strong ties strikingly resemble patterns observed in small communities, summer camps, and Jesuit monastic orders” (p. 20). …

In their analysis Breiger and Pattison studied three types of ties in the two communities-social, community affairs, and business- professional-and found that social ties function as strong ties, that business-professional ties are weak, and that community-affairs ties are strong in relation to business ties but weak in relation to social ones (1978, pp. 222-224). …

I have not argued that all weak ties serve the functions described in SWT-only those acting as bridges between network segments. Weak ties are asserted to be important because their likelihood of being bridges is greater than (and that of strong ties less than) would be expected from their numbers alone. This does not preclude the possibility that most weak ties have no such function.

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The value of Group-Forming Networks

commonplace book, social software, technology / /

From David P. Reed’s “That Sneaky Exponential – Beyond Metcalfe’s Law to the Power of Community Building“:

Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet, is known for pointing out that the total value of a communications network grows with the square of the number of devices or people it connects. This scaling law, along with Moore’s Law, is widely credited as the stimulus that has driven the stunning growth of Internet connectivity. Because Metcalfe’s law implies value grows faster than does the (linear) number of a network’s access points, merely interconnecting two independent networks creates value that substantially exceeds the original value of the unconnected networks. …

But many kinds of value are created within networks. While many kinds of value grow proportionally to network size and some grow proportionally to the square of network size, I’ve discovered that some network structures create total value that can scale even faster than that. Networks that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size, i.e. much more rapidly than Metcalfe’s square law. I will call such networks Group-Forming Networks, or GFNs. …

What kind of value are we talking about, when we say the value of a network scales as some function of size? The answer is the value of potential connectivity for transactions. That is, for any particular access point (user), what is the number of different access points (users) that can be connected or reached for a transaction when the need arises. …

The value of potential connectivity is the value of the set of optional transactions that are afforded by the system or network. …

Metcalfe’s law, simply derived, says that if you build a network so that any customer can choose to transact with any other customer, the number of potential connections each of the N customers can make is (N-1), giving a total number of potential connections as N(N-1) or N2-N. Assuming each potential connection is worth as much as any other, the value to each user depends on the total size of the network, and the total value of potential connectivity scales much faster than the size of the network, proportional to N2. …

In networks like the Internet, Group Forming Networks (GFNs) are an important additional kind of network capability. A GFN has functionality that directly enables and supports affiliations (such as interest groups, clubs, meetings, communities) among subsets of its customers. Group tools and technologies (also called community tools) such as user-defined mailing lists, chat rooms, discussion groups, buddy lists, team rooms, trading rooms, user groups, market makers, and auction hosts, all have a common theme—they allow small or large groups of network users to coalesce and to organize their communications around a common interest, issue, or goal. Sadly, the traditional telephone and broadcast/cable network frameworks provide no support for groups. …

What we see, then, is that there are really at least three categories of value that networks can provide: the linear value of services that are aimed at individual users, the “square” value from facilitating transactions, and exponential value from facilitating group affiliations. What’s important is that the dominant value in a typical network tends to shift from one category to another as the scale of the network increases. Whether the growth is by incremental customer additions, or by transparent interconnection, scale growth tends to support new categories of killer apps, and thus new competitive games. …

What’s important in a network changes as the network scale shifts. In a network dominated by linear connectivity value growth, “content is king.” That is, in such networks, there is a small number of sources (publishers or makers) of content that every user selects from. The sources compete for users based on the value of their content (published stories, published images, standardized consumer goods). Where Metcalfe’s Law dominates, transactions become central. The stuff that is traded in transactions (be it email or voice mail, money, securities, contracted services, or whatnot) are king. And where the GFN law dominates, the central role is filled by jointly constructed value (such as specialized newsgroups, joint responses to RFPs, gossip, etc.). …

I’d like to close with a speculative thought. As Francis Fukuyama argues in his book Trust, there is a strong correlation between the prosperity of national economies and social capital, which he defines culturally as the ease with which people in a particular culture can form new associations. There is a clear synergy between the sociability that Fukuyama discusses and the technology and tools that support GFNs-both are structural supports for association. As the scale of interaction grows more global via the Internet, isn’t it possible that a combination of social capital and GFN capital will drive prosperity to those who recognize the value of network structures that support free and responsible association for common purposes?

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Our reasons for giving reasons

business, commonplace book, science / /

From Malcolm Gladwell’s “Here’s Why: A sociologist offers an anatomy of explanations“:

In “Why?”, the Columbia University scholar Charles Tilly sets out to make sense of our reasons for giving reasons. …

In Tilly’s view, we rely on four general categories of reasons. The first is what he calls conventions—conventionally accepted explanations. Tilly would call “Don’t be a tattletale” a convention. The second is stories, and what distinguishes a story (“I was playing with my truck, and then Geoffrey came in . . .”) is a very specific account of cause and effect. Tilly cites the sociologist Francesca Polletta’s interviews with people who were active in the civil-rights sit-ins of the nineteen-sixties. Polletta repeatedly heard stories that stressed the spontaneity of the protests, leaving out the role of civil-rights organizations, teachers, and churches. That’s what stories do. As Tilly writes, they circumscribe time and space, limit the number of actors and actions, situate all causes “in the consciousness of the actors,” and elevate the personal over the institutional.

Then there are codes, which are high-level conventions, formulas that invoke sometimes recondite procedural rules and categories. If a loan officer turns you down for a mortgage, the reason he gives has to do with your inability to conform to a prescribed standard of creditworthiness. Finally, there are technical accounts: stories informed by specialized knowledge and authority. An academic history of civil-rights sit-ins wouldn’t leave out the role of institutions, and it probably wouldn’t focus on a few actors and actions; it would aim at giving patient and expert attention to every sort of nuance and detail.

Tilly argues that we make two common errors when it comes to understanding reasons. The first is to assume that some kinds of reasons are always better than others—that there is a hierarchy of reasons, with conventions (the least sophisticated) at the bottom and technical accounts at the top. That’s wrong, Tilly says: each type of reason has its own role.

Tilly’s second point flows from the first, and it’s that the reasons people give aren’t a function of their character—that is, there aren’t people who always favor technical accounts and people who always favor stories. Rather, reasons arise out of situations and roles. …

Reason-giving, Tilly says, reflects, establishes, repairs, and negotiates relationships. The husband who uses a story to explain his unhappiness to his wife—“Ever since I got my new job, I feel like I’ve just been so busy that I haven’t had time for us”—is attempting to salvage the relationship. But when he wants out of the marriage, he’ll say, “It’s not you—it’s me.” He switches to a convention. As his wife realizes, it’s not the content of what he has said that matters. It’s his shift from the kind of reason-giving that signals commitment to the kind that signals disengagement. Marriages thrive on stories. They die on conventions. …

The fact that Timothy’s mother accepts tattling from his father but rejects it from Timothy is not evidence of capriciousness; it just means that a husband’s relationship to his wife gives him access to a reasongiving category that a son’s role does not. …

When we say that two parties in a conflict are “talking past each other,” this is what we mean: that both sides have a legitimate attachment to mutually exclusive reasons. Proponents of abortion often rely on a convention (choice) and a technical account (concerning the viability of a fetus in the first trimester). Opponents of abortion turn the fate of each individual fetus into a story: a life created and then abruptly terminated. Is it any surprise that the issue has proved to be so intractable? If you believe that stories are the most appropriate form of reason-giving, then those who use conventions and technical accounts will seem morally indifferent—regardless of whether you agree with them. And, if you believe that a problem is best adjudicated through conventions or technical accounts, it is hard not to look upon storytellers as sensationalistic and intellectually unserious. …

Tilly argues that these conflicts are endemic to the legal system. Laws are established in opposition to stories. In a criminal trial, we take a complicated narrative of cause and effect and match it to a simple, impersonal code: first-degree murder, or second-degree murder, or manslaughter. The impersonality of codes is what makes the law fair. But it is also what can make the legal system so painful for victims, who find no room for their voices and their anger and their experiences. Codes punish, but they cannot heal.

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Jefferson Davis, the Hill Cats, & the Butcher Cats

history, language & literature / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (396):

Nor was [Jefferson Davis] highly skilled as an arbitrator; he had too much admiration and sympathy for those who would not yield, whatever their cause, to be effective at reconciling opponents. In fact, this applied to a situation practically in his own back yard. The [Confederate] White House stood on a tall hill, surrounded by other mansions. On the plain below were the houses of the poor, whose sons had formed a gang called the Butcher Cats, sworn to eternal hatred of the Hill Cats, the children of the gentry on the hill. The two gangs had rock fights and occasional gouging matches. After one particularly severe battle, in which his oldest son was involved, Davis walked down the hill to try his hand at arbitration. He made them a speech, referring to the Butcher Cats as future leaders of the nation. One of them replied, “President, we like you. We don’t want to hurt any of your boys. But we ain’t never going to be friends with them Hill Cats.”

Davis came back up the hill.

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10 early choices that helped make the Internet successful

business, history, science, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Dan Gillmor’s “10 choices that were critical to the Net’s success“:

1) Make it all work on top of existing networks.

2) Use packets, not circuits.

3) Create a ‘routing’ function.

4) Split the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) …

5) The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds the University of California-Berkeley, to put TCP/IP into the Unix operating system originally developed by AT&T.

6) CSNET, an early network used by universities, connects with the ARPANET … The connection was for e-mail only, but it led to much more university research on networks and a more general understanding among students, faculty and staff of the value of internetworking.

7) The NSF requires users of the NSFNET to use TCP/IP, not competing protocols.

8) International telecommunications standards bodies reject TCP/IP, then create a separate standard called OSI.

9) The NSF creates an “Acceptable Use Policy” restricting NSFNET use to noncommercial activities.

10) Once things start to build, government stays mostly out of the way.

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Douglas Adams on information overload

commonplace book, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Douglas Adam’s “Is there an Artificial God?“:

Let me back up for a minute and talk about the way we communicate. Traditionally, we have a bunch of different ways in which we communicate with each other. One way is one-to-one; we talk to each other, have a conversation. Another is one-to-many, which I’m doing at the moment, or someone could stand up and sing a song, or announce we’ve got to go to war. Then we have many-to-one communication; we have a pretty patchy, clunky, not-really-working version we call democracy, but in a more primitive state I would stand up and say, ‘OK, we’re going to go to war’ and some may shout back ‘No we’re not!’ – and then we have many-to-many communication in the argument that breaks out afterwards!

In this century (and the previous century) we modelled one-to-one communications in the telephone, which I assume we are all familiar with. We have one-to-many communication—boy do we have an awful lot of that; broadcasting, publishing, journalism, etc.—we get information poured at us from all over the place and it’s completely indiscriminate as to where it might land. It’s curious, but we don’t have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that happened, any news, whether it was about something that’s actually happened to us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our horizon, it happened in our world and if we reacted to it the world reacted back. It was all relevant to us, so for example, if somebody had a terrible accident we could crowd round and really help. Nowadays, because of the plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we may get terribly anxious about it but our anxiety doesn’t have any impact. We’re not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that’s happened to somebody a world away and something that’s happened to someone round the corner. We can’t really distinguish between them any more, which is why we get terribly upset by something that has happened to somebody in a soap opera that comes out of Hollywood and maybe less concerned when it’s happened to our sister. We’ve all become twisted and disconnected and it’s not surprising that we feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us but we don’t impact the world. Then there’s many-to-one; we have that, but not very well yet and there’s not much of it about. Essentially, our democratic systems are a model of that and though they’re not very good, they will improve dramatically.

But the fourth, the many-to-many, we didn’t have at all before the coming of the Internet, which, of course, runs on fibre-optics. It’s communication between us …

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The history of tabs (card, folder, & UI)

business, commonplace book, history / /

From Technology Review‘s “Keeping Tabs“:

Starting in the late 14th century, scribes began to leave pieces of leather at the edges of manuscripts for ready reference. But with the introduction of page numbering in the Renaissance, they went out of fashion.

The modern tab was an improvement on a momentous 19th-century innovation, the index card. Libraries had previously listed their books in bound ledgers. During the French Revolution, authorities divided the nationalized collections of monasteries and aristocrats among public institutions, using the backs of playing cards to record data about each volume. …

It took decades to add tabs to cards. In 1876, Melvil Dewey, inventor of decimal classification, helped organize a company called the Library Bureau, which sold both cards and wooden cases. An aca­demic entrepreneur, Dewey was a perfectionist supplier. His cards were made to last, made from linen recycled from the shirt factories of Troy, NY. His card cabi­nets were so sturdy that I have found at least one set still in use, in excellent order. Dewey also standardized the dimension of the catalogue card, at three inches by five inches, or rather 75 millimeters by 125 millimeters. (He was a tireless advocate of the metric system.) …

The tab was the idea of a young man named James Newton Gunn (1867–1927), who started using file cards to achieve savings in cost accounting while working for a manufacturer of portable forges. After further experience as a railroad cashier, Gunn developed a new way to access the contents of a set of index cards, separating them with other cards distinguished by projections marked with letters of the alphabet, dates, or other information.

Gunn’s background in bookkeeping filled what Ronald S. Burt, the University of Chicago sociologist, has called a structural hole, a need best met by insights from unconnected disciplines. In 1896 he applied for a U.S. patent, which was granted as number 583,227 on May 25, 1897. By then, Gunn was working for the Library Bureau, to which he had sold the patent. …

The Library Bureau also produced some of the first modern filing cabinets, proudly exhibiting them at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Files had once been stored horizontally on shelves. Now they could be organized with file folders for better visibility and quicker access. …

But the tab is [Gunn’s] lasting legacy. And it is ubiquitous: in the dialogue boxes of Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, at the bottom of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, at the side of Adobe Acrobat documents, across the top of the Opera and Firefox Web browsers, and—even now—on manila file folders. We’ve kept tabs.

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Terrorist social networks

social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Terror’s Server“:

For example, research suggests that people with nefarious intent tend to exhibit distinct patterns in their use of e-mails or online forums like chat rooms. Whereas most people establish a wide variety of contacts over time, those engaged in plotting a crime tend to keep in touch only with a very tight circle of people, says William Wallace, an operations researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

This phenomenon is quite predictable. “Very few groups of people communicate repeatedly only among themselves,” says Wallace. “It’s very rare; they don’t trust people outside the group to communicate. When 80 percent of communications is within a regular group, this is where we think we will find the groups who are planning activities that are malicious.” Of course, not all such groups will prove to be malicious; the odd high-school reunion will crop up. But Wallace’s group is developing an algorithm that will narrow down the field of so-called social networks to those that warrant the scrutiny of intelligence officials. The algorithm is scheduled for completion and delivery to intelligence agencies this summer. …

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How terrorists use the Web

politics, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Terror’s Server“:

According to [Gabriel] Weimann [professor of communications at University of Haifa], the number of [terror-related] websites has leapt from only 12 in 1997 to around 4,300 today. …

These sites serve as a means to recruit members, solicit funds, and promote and spread ideology. …

The September 11 hijackers used conventional tools like chat rooms and e-mail to communicate and used the Web to gather basic information on targets, says Philip Zelikow, a historian at the University of Virginia and the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission. …

Finally, terrorists are learning that they can distribute images of atrocities with the help of the Web. … “The Internet allows a small group to publicize such horrific and gruesome acts in seconds, for very little or no cost, worldwide, to huge audiences, in the most powerful way,” says Weimann. …

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Cameraphones are different cameras & different phones

commonplace book, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From David Pescovitz’s “The Big Picture“:

Mobile researcher John Poisson, CEO of the Fours Initiative, focuses on how cameraphones could revolutionize photography and communication — if people would only start using them more.

As the leader of Sony Corporation’s mobile media research and design groups in Tokyo, John Poisson spent two years focused on how people use cameraphones, and why they don’t use them more often.

TheFeature: What have you learned over the course of your research?

Poisson: People think of the cameraphone as a more convenient tool for digital photography, an extension of the digital camera. That’s missing the mark. The mobile phone is a communications device. The minute you attach a camera to that, and give people the ability to share the content that they’re creating in real time, the dynamic changes significantly.

TheFeature: Aren’t providers already developing applications to take advantage of that shift?

Poisson: Well, we have things like the ability to moblog, to publish pictures to a blog, which is not necessarily the most relevant model to consumers. Those tools are developed by people who understand blogging and apply it in their daily lives. But it ignores the trend that we and Mimi Ito and others are seeing as part of the evolution of photography. If you look at the way people have (historically) used cameras, it started off with portraiture and photographs of record — formalized photographs with a capital “P.” Then as the technology evolved, we had this notion of something called a snapshot, which is much more informal. People could take a higher number of pictures with not so much concern over composition. It was more about capturing an experience than photographing something. The limit of that path was the Polaroid. It was about taking the picture and sharing it instantly. What we have today is the ability to create today is a kind of distributed digital manifestation of that process.

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Architecture & the quality without a name

commonplace book, on writing / /

From Brian Hayes’ “The Post-OOP Paradigm“:

Christopher Alexander [a bricks-and-steel architect] is known for the enigmatic thesis that well-designed buildings and towns must have “the quality without a name.” He explains: “The fact that this quality cannot be named does not mean that it is vague or imprecise. It is impossible to name because it is unerringly precise.”

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Some thoughts on strong & weak social ties

commonplace book, social software, tech in changing society / /

From Ross Mayfield’s “The Weakening of Strong Ties“:

Mark Granovetter’s seminal paper, The Strength of Weak Ties (summary), revealed the difference between friends and acquaintances and how useful acquaintances can be for certain tasks like finding a job. The difference between a strong tie and weak tie can generally be revealed by time commitment underpinning the relationship. Strong ties are better for action, weak ties for new information.

But time has changed with new tools and social networking models at our disposal. For the first time many social networks are being made explicit, often without the knowledge of participants, at an accelerating pace and dramatically lowered search costs. This newfound transparency may very well make strong ties weaker. …

Top-down models, or weak tie systems, are particularly good at the breadth of sample and search. …

That said, weak tie systems provide real insight we didn’t have before. They have vast potential for revealing structural holes and other methods of enhancing social capital. So long as participation is voluntary, information flows monitored is public and constraints keep in check how people act upon intelligence these systems will become a critical competitive advantage for any company.

By contrast, bottom-up systems are built for people instead of companies. Within Friendster, Ryze, Tribe.net and LinkedIn connections are made through individual decisions upon of invitations, requests and confirmations. The network grows organically, decision by voluntary decision.

Some thoughts on strong & weak social ties Read More »

Don’t fly where we won’t tell you not to fly

security, true stories / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “The Silliness of Secrecy“, quoting The Wall Street Journal:

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government has advised airplane pilots against flying near 100 nuclear power plants around the country or they will be forced down by fighter jets. But pilots say there’s a hitch in the instructions: aviation security officials refuse to disclose the precise location of the plants because they consider that “SSI” — Sensitive Security Information.

“The message is; ‘please don’t fly there, but we can’t tell you where there is,'” says Melissa Rudinger of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, a trade group representing 60% of American pilots.

Determined to find a way out of the Catch-22, the pilots’ group sat down with a commercial mapping company, and in a matter of days plotted the exact geographical locations of the plants from data found on the Internet and in libraries. It made the information available to its 400,000 members on its Web site — until officials from the Transportation Security Administration asked them to take the information down. “Their concern was that [terrorists] mining the Internet could use it,” Ms. Rudinger says.

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A living story, tattooed on flesh

commonplace book, cool stuff, fiction, language & literature, on writing, weird / /

From The New York Times Magazine‘s “Skin Literature“:

Most artists spend their careers trying to create something that will live forever. But the writer Shelley Jackson is creating a work of literature that is intentionally and indisputably mortal. Jackson is publishing her latest short story by recruiting 2,095 people, each of whom will have one word of the story tattooed on his or her body. The story, titled ‘Skin,’ will appear only on the collective limbs, torsos and backsides of its participants. And decades from now, when the last of Jackson’s ‘words’ dies, so, too, will her tale.

As of November, Jackson, the Brooklyn-based author of a short-story collection called ‘The Melancholy of Anatomy,’ had enrolled about 1,800 volunteers, some from such distant countries as Argentina, Jordan, Thailand and Finland. Participants, who contact Jackson through her Web site, cannot choose which word they receive. And their tattoos must be inked in the font that Jackson has specified. But they do have some freedom to bend and stretch the narrative. They can select the place on their bodies they want to become part of the Jackson opus. In return, Jackson asks her ‘words’ to sign a 12-page release absolving her of liability and promising not to share the story with others. (Participants are the only people who will get to see the full text of the story.) They must also send her two photographs — one of the word on their skin, the other a portrait of themselves without the word visible — which she may later publish or exhibit.

… Mothers and daughters are requesting consecutive words. So are couples, perhaps hoping to form the syntactic equivalent of a civil union. For others, the motives are social: Jackson is encouraging her far-flung words to get to know each other via e-mail, telephone, even in person. (Imagine the possibilities. A sentence getting together for dinner. A paragraph having a party.) …

… when a participant meets his or her demise, Jackson vows, she will try to attend that person’s funeral. But the 41-year-old author understands that some of her 2,095 collaborators, many of whom are in their 20’s, might outlive her. If she dies first, she says, she hopes several of them will come to her funeral and make her the first writer ever to be mourned by her words.

A living story, tattooed on flesh Read More »