Netizens-Digest       Monday, February 24 2003       Volume 01 : Number 419

Netizens Association Discussion List Digest

In this issue:

       Re: [netz] Local Netizenship
       [netz] Fwd: FC: How anti-Iraq war protesters employed technology, from NYT
       Re: [netz] Local Netizenship
       [netz] Followup on Politech article
       Re: [netz] Local Netizenship
       Re: [netz] Local Netizenship
       Re: [netz] Re: Control Systems Theory and Netizen Sociology

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Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 13:57:34 -0500 (EST)
From: lindeman@bard.edu
Subject: Re: [netz] Local Netizenship

Howard,

> But the response of 4-6 households was to remove themselves from the
> list, one couple saying they "felt invaded."  To me, that's massive
> oversensitivity, but it may be consistent with the feelings of
> nontechnical users of a presumably focused resource.[...]
>
> [...]What, frankly, surprised
> me is the intensity of negative reaction.  I will note,
> incidentally, that my community has an extremely high amount of
> Internet connectivity and a generally high education level.

Which hints that "nontechnical" perhaps isn't quite getting at the right issue. 
Maybe the issue is that these folks are coming to the list with the assumption 
that they _are_ supposed to "listen" to each other -- not to filter the posts 
either technologically or by just not reading (or not reading closely). Surely 
this has something to do with technical experience, but even the savviest of us 
bring different norms and expectations to different social settings, in Net 
life as in the rest of life. If a community list is something like a public 
meeting or a town commons, then we won't feel happy about someone jabbering 
loudly and demanding our attention, even if we're told, "It's OK, you don't 
have to listen to him."  It's rude, it's uncommunal, it's... invasive.

Very interesting.  Thread away! ;)

Mark

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 22:52:57 -0500
From: "Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb@gettcomm.com>
Subject: [netz] Fwd: FC: How anti-Iraq war protesters employed technology, from NYT

>
>Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 22:16:34 -0500
>To: politech@politechbot.com
>From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
>
>
>Some photos from last month's protests:
>http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/anti-iraq-war-march-jan03.html
>
>---
>
>Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 18:58:29 -0800 (PST)
>From: "Jennifer 8. Lee" <[spamproofed]@nytimes.com>
>To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/weekinreview/23JLEE.html
>
>CRITICAL MASS
>How Protesters Mobilized So Many and So Nimbly
>By JENNIFER 8. LEE
>
>
>WASHINGTON — Before the global protests against war in Iraq last weekend,
>organizers were already making conference calls and passing out fliers for
>their next set of demonstrations, including one scheduled for next Saturday,
>outside the White House.
>
>But then, the worldwide protests drew millions of people onto the streets,
>from San Francisco to London, and the Bush administration hit some diplomatic
>roadblocks. Sensing delay in White House momentum, the organizers themselves
>paused and decided to make a strategic move, delaying the demonstrations from
>March 1 until March 15. They spread the news the old-fashioned way, through
>alternative radio stations and word of mouth, and the instantaneous way,
>through Web sites and e-mail messages.
>
>Organizing a protest is fundamentally about logistics: where do people meet,
>how do they get on a bus, who will order portable toilets. Obviously, the
>Internet, like fax machines and copiers, has made the tasks easier. Before
>last weekend's protests, for example, people registered online for buses to
>New York. And a mass e-mail notice was sent out to New York protesters,
>informing them about public bathrooms in Midtown Manhattan and giving them a
>number to call in case of arrest.
>
>But the Internet has become more than a mere organizing tool; it has changed
>protests in a more fundamental way, by allowing mobilization to emerge from
>free-wheeling amorphous groups, rather than top-down hierarchical ones.
>
>In the 60's, the anti-Vietnam War movement grew gradually. "It took four and
>a half years to multiply the size of the Vietnam protests twentyfold," said
>Todd Gitlin, a sociology professor at Columbia University and longtime
>liberal activist.
>
>The first nationwide antiwar march in 1965 attracted about 25,000 people. By
>1969, the protests had grown to half a million. But increasing the numbers
>required weeks and months of planning, using snail mail, phone calls and
>fliers.
>
>"This time the same thing has happened in six months," Mr. Gitlin said. Even
>though momentum behind the demonstrations didn't grow until a month ago,
>after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United
>Nations, more than 800,000 people turned out in 150 rallies in the United
>States last weekend, from 100 in Davenport, Iowa, to an estimated 350,000 in
>New York City. In Europe, more than 1.5 million protested.
>
>The protests had no single identified leader and no central headquarters.
>Social theorists have a name for these types of decentralized networks:
>heterarchies. In contrast to hierarchies, with top-down structures,
>heterarchies are made up of previously isolated groups that can connect to
>one another and coordinate.
>
>Because no central decision-making authority exists, protests can be
>localized and can appeal to new groups and individuals who don't live in
>areas where social protest information would typically reach. For example,
>Mothers Acting Up was started two years ago by four women around a kitchen
>table in Boulder, Colo., a liberal college town. But with their Internet
>site, www.mothersactingup.org, they have been able to reach 600 like-minded
>members across the country, many of whom participated in marches last week.
>
>Technology also spreads word of rallies to countries where free expression is
>limited. In Singapore, where the government does not allow demonstrations at
>the American Embassy, cellphone text messages went out, exhorting recipients
>to gather at the embassy anyway. The text messages, which work like mass
>e-mail messaging to mobile devices, attracted at least a half-dozen
>placard-carrying demonstrators at the gates at the appointed time. The police
>rounded them up for questioning.
>
>"Whenever a new communications technology lowers the threshold for groups to
>act collectively, new kinds of institutions emerge," said Howard Rheingold,
>the author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution," which documents
>self-organizing and leaderless movements. "We are seeing the combination of
>network communications and social networks."
>
>His book tells the story of how cellphone text messaging helped bring down
>Joseph Estrada, the Philippine president who was ousted after protests in
>2001 over corruption. Text messaging advertised instant rallies, encouraged
>people to protest by wearing black and provided updates on the impeachment
>trial.
>
>(In the same way, cellphone messaging is potentially alarming for the Chinese
>government. Officials do not have centralized control over the network and
>therefore cannot censor it, the way they do the Internet.)
>
>E-mail lists have allowed individuals to create groups that defy geography
>and time. Thousands of people have joined hundreds of antiwar lists, and
>diverse streams of messages fly back and forth quickly, vastly different from
>the information flow in hierarchies. Since the beginning of the year, 300
>messages have been posted on a popular antiwar list in Sydney, Australia,
>that has almost 900 members. The notes range from solicitations for donations
>to United Nations updates to appeals for local volunteers.
>
>This is mass mobilization, but also nimble mobilization. Protesting a war
>that hasn't begun requires a constant eye on the calendar of government
>action. And the movement's flexibility maximizes its impact, organizers say.
>A protest date can easily be moved, timed to affect the latest diplomatic
>maneuver.
>
>"We are trying to stay a step ahead of the administration by our planning,"
>said Damu Smith, chairman of Black Voices for Peace, one of hundreds of
>groups involved in last week's demonstrations. And staying ahead of the game
>"is absolutely strategically central in our ability to be effective in what
>we are doing."
>
>Military theorists are fond of saying that future warfare will revolve around
>social and communication networks. Antiwar groups have found that this is
>true for their work as well.
>
>
>
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list
>You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice.
>To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html
>This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
>Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 23:06:59 -0500
From: "Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb@gettcomm.com>
Subject: Re: [netz] Local Netizenship

>Mark Lindeman shaped assorted electrons, photons, and worked magic 
>to repond to my post:
>
>>  But the response of 4-6 households was to remove themselves from the
>>  list, one couple saying they "felt invaded."  To me, that's massive
>>  oversensitivity, but it may be consistent with the feelings of
>>  nontechnical users of a presumably focused resource.[...]
>>
>>  [...]What, frankly, surprised
>>  me is the intensity of negative reaction.  I will note,
>>  incidentally, that my community has an extremely high amount of
>>  Internet connectivity and a generally high education level.
>
>Which hints that "nontechnical" perhaps isn't quite getting at the 
>right issue.

You're right.  While it's likely the average person in my 
neighborhood is user-literate with computers, but not necessarily 
with things like mailing list technology, this is much more about 
attitudes.

There's been much work, of course, on "virtual communities" by 
Rheingold and others.  Here, we see the more-or-less congruence of a 
real and a virtual community, and it's probably quite worth figuring 
out the social patterns.

>Maybe the issue is that these folks are coming to the list with the assumption
>that they _are_ supposed to "listen" to each other -- not to filter the posts
>either technologically or by just not reading (or not reading closely). Surely
>this has something to do with technical experience, but even the 
>savviest of us
>bring different norms and expectations to different social settings, in Net
>life as in the rest of life. If a community list is something like a public
>meeting or a town commons, then we won't feel happy about someone jabbering
>loudly and demanding our attention, even if we're told, "It's OK, you don't
>have to listen to him."  It's rude, it's uncommunal, it's... invasive.

Yet some lists insist on anarchy.  Commercial chat rooms are 
reluctant to exclude disruptive people because of potential effects 
on membership.

I moderate a private list that has transformed from an originally 
virtual list to one in which the great majority of participants have 
met socially, in some cases involving Europe and North America. It 
has had its problems of assumptions. Without getting too much into 
private specifics of others, the list deals with alternate sexuality 
issues, and, specifically, some of the evolution from a cyber 
community (indeed, involving cybersex*) to one in which the 
participants have become an online family in terms of emotional 
content, and, indeed, there have been at least 5 (out of 30-40 
peoples) couples form either as long-term living together or as 
marriages.

On this list, there is a good deal of frankness, but we have had to 
deal with assumptions.  One involved describing some experiences that 
some other members found personally traumatic.  At one end of the 
discussion, a couple of members objected even to having warning notes 
in the subject headers, where others resigned because I would not 
permit personal attacks.

Chat, whether sexual or not, has an important difference from real 
social events.  At a physical party, it's usually possible to move 
away from some loud and obnoxious person.  In a chatroom, unless 
there is "ignore" software, everyone is sharing the same channel, and 
there is no way to move away.  If the chat software doesn't have 
private messaging, or the parties choose to have a private discussion 
in public, there's no way to avoid it.

So what other assumptions are there about this sort of discourse? 
Does the concept of civil disobedience apply to interfering with 
interaction, especially if the demonstrator is not considered part of 
the virtual community?

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 23:14:10 -0500
From: "Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb@gettcomm.com>
Subject: [netz] Followup on Politech article

I forwarded the NY Times article on protesters' use of the Internet. 
I think this very much on topic for netizens, dealing with the 
interaction of the net and politics, as distinct from any particular 
political position.

Howard

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 19:52:06 -0500 (EST)
From: lindeman@bard.edu
Subject: Re: [netz] Local Netizenship

> Here, we see the more-or-less congruence of a
> real and a virtual community, and it's probably quite worth figuring
> out the social patterns.

Yes, the real/virtual parallel makes it extra interesting.

> Yet some lists insist on anarchy.  Commercial chat rooms are
> reluctant to exclude disruptive people because of potential effects
> on membership.

I don't have much sense of this, in part because I personally have never been 
interested in chat.  If I understand rightly (ah, a source -- 
http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/Cyborgasms.html) AOL offers both moderated and 
unmoderated chat rooms, so in effect it caters to different communities, or 
markets.  More generally, clearly there is a lot of variety among virtual lists 
etc.; what we might call small-town norms aren't normative.

[I don't have much to add to your ruminations on the list you moderate.  I've 
had similar experiences of lists wrestling with assumptions about norms and, 
sometimes, "who belongs."]

> So what other assumptions are there about this sort of discourse?
> Does the concept of civil disobedience apply to interfering with
> interaction, especially if the demonstrator is not considered part of
> the virtual community?

(I'm not sure which sort of discourse you have in mind -- chat? or any 
electronic discourse?)

Do you think that this person who was posting to various community lists 
intended his actions as civil disobedience?  I would have doubted it, but I may 
have read my own assumptions into your narrative.  Clearly some kinds of civil 
disobedience are intended to challenge community norms, and these tend to be 
attributed to "outside agitators."

I quit an "ecological economics" list in annoyance because several members felt 
it was appropriate to launch ad hominem attacks at another member whom they 
regarded as not really accepting the premises of the list (and thus not really 
belonging).  The concept of CD doesn't really seem to fit there, but there's 
something about who really "belongs" and who doesn't.

Mark

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 19:52:07 -0500 (EST)
From: lindeman@bard.edu
Subject: Re: [netz] Local Netizenship

> Here, we see the more-or-less congruence of a
> real and a virtual community, and it's probably quite worth figuring
> out the social patterns.

Yes, the real/virtual parallel makes it extra interesting.

> Yet some lists insist on anarchy.  Commercial chat rooms are
> reluctant to exclude disruptive people because of potential effects
> on membership.

I don't have much sense of this, in part because I personally have never been 
interested in chat.  If I understand rightly (ah, a source -- 
http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/Cyborgasms.html) AOL offers both moderated and 
unmoderated chat rooms, so in effect it caters to different communities, or 
markets.  More generally, clearly there is a lot of variety among virtual lists 
etc.; what we might call small-town norms aren't normative.

[I don't have much to add to your ruminations on the list you moderate.  I've 
had similar experiences of lists wrestling with assumptions about norms and, 
sometimes, "who belongs."]

> So what other assumptions are there about this sort of discourse?
> Does the concept of civil disobedience apply to interfering with
> interaction, especially if the demonstrator is not considered part of
> the virtual community?

(I'm not sure which sort of discourse you have in mind -- chat? or any 
electronic discourse?)

Do you think that this person who was posting to various community lists 
intended his actions as civil disobedience?  I would have doubted it, but I may 
have read my own assumptions into your narrative.  Clearly some kinds of civil 
disobedience are intended to challenge community norms, and these tend to be 
attributed to "outside agitators."

I quit an "ecological economics" list in annoyance because several members felt 
it was appropriate to launch ad hominem attacks at another member whom they 
regarded as not really accepting the premises of the list (and thus not really 
belonging).  The concept of CD doesn't really seem to fit there, but there's 
something about who really "belongs" and who doesn't.

Mark

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 08:15:52 -0500 (EST)
From: Ronda Hauben <ronda@panix.com>
Subject: Re: [netz] Re: Control Systems Theory and Netizen Sociology

Dear Larry and others on the netizens list

On Fri, 21 Feb 2003 AGENTKUENSTLER@aol.com wrote:

> Dear Howard and Ronda;
>
> Re: Control Systems Theory and Netizen Sociology.  Many questions.
>
> How do you design a workable abstract model for a real social system that is
> simple enough to analyze the input-output associative mappings and yet
> complex enough to be able to plausibly apply the results from this model to
> the real world?

This is a big question. I can't answer the question but I can say
that I have been spending some time trying to undertstand control
system theory and how it can apply to institutional or social phenomena
as well as to the creation and development of the Internet.

Also I think that there is reason to try to understand this in general,
and that netizens are a feedback factor that are important in the
development of the Internet. It would be good to understand this as well.

Karl Deutsch was a psychologist and political scientist and he spent time
with Norbert Wiener trying to learn control theory and cybernetics
and to apply it to political institutions. Wiener was a mathematician
and engineer and named cybernetics after he became interested in
feedback mechanisms in living (human etc) and machine systems.

Deutsch's book "Nerves of Government" is very interesting.

So is Wiener's writing, though some of it is quite difficult.

His book "God and Golem" and "Invention" are not as difficult.

I discuss some of this in a paper I have been working on for a while.

The paper is still in draft form and doesn't yet have footnotes but
it is online if anyone is interested.

The url is


http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/misc/lick101.doc

It is an effort to apply this theory to understand the Information
Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) which was the office in the US
government which gave leadership to create networking and Internet
developments.

 Does this social system use only the Internet as a means of
> communication?


I prefer a narrower question. What role does feedback play in the
Internet and its development, both technically and in terms of
management structures.

(...)
>
> Howard and Ronda, please explain how control systems theory can help us gain
> more than a whimsical insight into the behavior of the Netizen or citizen.
>

This is some of what interests me as well.

But my question is more having to do with how the netizen or citizen
affect the Internet or the society, etc.

That there is an important role for each that isn't understood.

I will try to respond more when I have the chance.

For now, anyone interested might want to look at a chapter of Netizens
that Michael wrote about the role of the citizen in the society,
which I think can apply to the netizen with regard to the Internet
as well.

This is chapter 18 of Netizens "The Computer as a Democratizer"

The online version of the book is at

http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/


with best wishes

Ronda

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End of Netizens-Digest V1 #419
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