Woolwine’s argument for the ALA needing a different type of ethical argumentation is set in the context of the USA Patriot Act, passed in the wake of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. Of particular note in the USA Patriot Act were provisions that limited the privacy and restriction of access to library records. The ALA saw itself as a “strong institution” standing “between the government and citizens” and thus released resolutions calling for preservation of intellectual freedom and civil liberty and condemning the parts of the USA Patriot Act that threatened those rights.

While the USA Patriot Act was passed over a decade ago, one recent group of legislation that brought privacy concerns was the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). The ALA spoke out against both of these acts. While SOPA had very visible public opposition, on the grounds that it would lead to Internet censorship and stifling of creativity, the opposition to CISPA has not been as strong. In a CNET article from April 23rd, 2012, it is pointed out that, unlike what happened with SOPA, support for CISPA continues to grow in the United States Congress. However, CISPA seems to be more representative of the kind of attack on intellectual freedom that the ALA rallies against. CISPA would allow Internet companies to hand over customer records to the National Security Agency (NSA). This is the exact kind of intrusion that the ALA argued against in the USA Patriot Act. However, the ALA hasn’t spoken out against it as strongly as it did against the USA Patriot Act.

Before we tackle why that is, Bowker’s article can give us some insight. In his article we also saw how the process of creating intellectual arguments and structures (in his example a disease classification information structure) can affect and be affected by institutional culture and society. One point that Bowker makes is that the uniformity of the classification system must be matched by the uniformity of the bureaucratic system (53). We can similarly see that the arguments posited by the ALA are a direct result of the structure of the organization. While each individual organizational entity within the ALA has some degree of autonomy, it also has a culture, which fits into the larger culture, and thusly it produces ideas and work that fit in with the larger whole. Finally, Bowker’s assertion that “information infrastructures force us to pay close attention to the unit of historical analysis” (59) helps us understand that the ALA’s views on intellectual freedom are deeply rooted in the history of the organization.

So why hasn’t the ALA fought as strongly against CISPA? Well for one, this isn’t a bill that has passed yet. The only statement from the ALA has been in the form of a press release on April 24th, 2012 , quoting ALA President Molly Raphael urging supporters to contact their elected representatives and urge them to oppose CISPA. For the ALA to issue as strong a statement as those against the USA Patriot Act will require at least a few months of meetings and voting by its various committees and councils. The ALA is a behemoth organization consisting of nine distinct organizational entities, each with their own sets of leadership and rules. Each entity has councils and committees that create rules, resolutions, and proclamations. And any action at a lower level has to be routed through a myriad of groups before it reaches the genera ALA. The ALA’s relatively weak public argument against CISPA is a prime example of how the size and complexity of the ALA (which, in all fairness, is not unique to the ALA) can get in the way of it making bold statements against legislation that negatively affect libraries and their patrons. To me this signifies an opportunity for the ALA to change the way it operates to allow for quicker issuing of official proclamations in cases like these.

References:

• Libraries and the Balance of Liberty and Security, David E. Woolwine. Library Philosophy and Practice 2007 (September).
• http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57419540-281/opposition-grows-to-cispa-big-brother-cybersecurity-bill/
• The History of Information Infrastructures: The Case of the International Classification of Diseases, Information Processing & Management, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 49-61, 1996.
• http://www.ala.org/news/pr?id=10246
• ALA Handbook of Organization, http://www.ala.org/aboutala/governance/handbook, accessed 19 April 2012

Google and Oracle are currently in the throes of a titanic copyright struggle, as the Economist points out.  The crux of the case: is the Java programming language itself copyrighted, or is Google free to use Java APIs (Advanced Programming Interfaces) in its Android mobile operating system.  Oracle, which recently purchased Java’s progenitor Sun Microsystems, has argued that Google’s use of Java sans-licensing fees is akin to digital piracy.  Google, wanting to keep Oracle from getting a piece of the Android pie, has eloquently argued that Java is akin to a poem–the words themselves cannot be copyrighted, but the product of those words (in Google’s case, Android) can be.  It’s definitely a new spin on the programmer phrase “code poetry.”

I bring up this case of Google v. Oracle for two reasons.  One, it’s incredibly rare to see two tech giants go after each other in such a public manner over copyright (Apple v. Samsung is the other tech battle du jour).  Second, and more germane to our discussion last week on the benefits and drawbacks of open access to digital materials, is this idea that digital works are somehow different.  Basically, the notions of copyright and open access as we traditionally know them are on the precipice.

Eliza Dresang, in her article “Intellectual Freedom and Libraries: Complexity and Change in the 21st Century Digital Environment,” re-iterates the idea that libraries are designed to be open.  Despite some restrictions on content (mainly via the Children’s Internet Protection Act causing libraries to install Internet filters), Dresang makes the case that libraries are still a safe place for the open spread of ideas.  She claims that “access is one of the profession’s core values and an important ally of intellectual freedom” (p. 179).

However, Alistair Black and Anthony Bryant, in their article “Knowledge Management and Diplomacy: Reflections on the Demise of the Valedictory Despatch in the Context of an Informational History of the British Diplomatic Service,” show that there is a downside to the notion of open access.  They detail the case of several British diplomats who’s final dispatches from the field caused a political uproar.  This caused the long-standing tradition of the valedictory dispatch to end–showing that sometimes, open access can lead to a chilling effect on speech.  It seems rather counter-intuitive, but if the speech is considered socially immoral, complete and unfettered access to said speech can cause the speaker to silence themselves.

Taking these two cautionary tales together, I posited that the next big battle between electronic communication and open access would take place around items that are protected via Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems.  If a Kindle book is DRM-protected, is that a way of limiting my speech?  Since I’m not speaking per se, it’s not limiting my speech, but it is limiting my access to other people’s speech.

In a way, it comes full circle.  Since Java was published openly, Google used it.  If Oracle loses this court case, which most programmers hope will be the case, why wouldn’t they try to re-work the license agreement?  Or worse, add digital protection to the SDK?  While the language itself might be free, the tools and support frameworks don’t have to be—and nothing prevents future versions to be either.  In sum, digital rights management is a danger to the very notion of open access, even if it ostensibly protects rights holders.

References:

• Alistair Black and Antony Bryant, Knowledge Management and Diplomacy. First Monday, vol. 16, no. 1-3, January 2011.
• Dresang, E. T. Intellectual Freedom and Libraries: Complexity and Change in the Twenty-First-Century Digital Environment. The Library Quarterly v. 76 no. 2 (April 2006) p. 169-92.
• Rumble in the Java jungle. The Economist. 21 April 2012. <http://www.economist.com/node/21553047>

In the article, “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” Bruno Latour explored a sociological reading of technology that ascribed morality and action to machines. Latour’s argument, and the articles title, stemmed from a comparison of the missing masses in physics and sociology. While in physics this refers to unobservable matter, Latour’s argument sought the missing masses of morality and law that control human behavior. For Latour, the missing mass of sociology was located in technology, and the interactions between human actors and technological “nonhuman actors.” Specifically, he argued that sociology needs to include technology in its study, or at least consider a sociological reading of technology. In my reading presentation I also highlighted another argument that Latour made, that it is not possible to separate society from technology because there are interconnected and interdependent.

Latour’s article emphasized the interaction between humans and technology by understanding technology in the context of what it would require a human to do to achieve the same outcome. The automatic door closer, or groom, was a recurring example throughout his argument. He argued that the groom effectively replaced a human doorman, which would otherwise be the only way of ensuring that a door remained closed. Specifically, he called this interaction delegation, displacement, translation, or shifting. He believed sociologists should investigate this process when human effort is displaced or delegated onto a nonhuman actor, or technology. Latour was also interested in the process by which machines delegate action back to humans. In the case of the groom, the door closer required a relatively strong and non-disabled person to open the door. Latour termed this process of technology delegating action to humans prescription.

For Latour, prescription was also the dimension by which machines gained a semblance of morality. In terms of prescription, Latour argued that machines were relentlessly moral. They actively controlled or at least implied how humans should interact both with machines and with the world. To better understand this, Latour suggested that the action of machines be translated into imperative sentences like “do this, do that, go there, don’t go there.” An example of this in action is a stoplight, which controls when and how humans progress on a street.  This process of machine mediated morality explained the missing mass in sociology that Latour was interested in.

Class discussion was also particularly interested in this argument. There were arguments that ascribing morality to machines was preposterous, as how could an inert piece of technology really control anything, or determine how it should be used? One rebuttal to this argument focused on the designers of the technology, emphasizing how the morality inherent in machines was in fact the displaced morality of the machines designers. The second argument focused on the fact that morality is not absolute, and just because a piece of technology indicates how it should be used, or how humans should interact with it, does not prevent humans from interacting with it in a completely different way. All of these arguments were also present to an extent within the Latour article, so there was fertile ground for debate.

In the article “It’s Not All About You: What Privacy Advocates Don’t Get About Data Tracking on the Web,” Alexander Furnas explores the application of these concepts to the world of online data tracking. Specifically, Furnas ponders the implications of advertising and websites that attempt to prescribe human behavior. To do so, they make use of vast quantities of aggregated user data, which allow advertiser to not just target specific user bases but to generate and prescribe demand within populations. Where Latour explored the possibility of human and nonhuman actors to recursively generate more behavior in each other, Furnas considers the implications of this process in the aggregate. Given an immense sum of data about diverse individuals, designers can generate artifacts that prescribe aggregated programs of action. Furnas’s article even directly recognizes and references Latour’s sociology of technology arguments. Specifically, Furnas seeks to apply this morality of technology directly to designers, arguing that they must consider the ethical implications of technology design. The article also goes on to lament the fact that the data collected by websites and advertisers is proprietary and limited, obscuring its potential to influence technological design and understanding outside of business contexts.

The other article for this week was Catherine C. Marshall’s “Digital Copies and Distributed Notion of Reference in Personal Archives.” The article focused on the problems that result from the frequent copying of digital files by individuals. Specifically, the article approached the problem of multiple files from the perspective of personal archives. A lot of the problem results from the combined factors of the ease with which copies can be made and kept, and the tedious difficulty of maintaining a single version. When in doubt, most individuals follow the process of benign neglect and simply keep every single copy of a file.

The problem Marshall is interested in is that eventually many users want consistency across some or all copies of a given file.  One option in this situation is to maintain a master copy of a file. In many situations, this is done on a server automatically, thus allowing changes made to copies to propagate back to a master server side copy and maintain consistency. However, there are many problems with this solution. For example, many times users do not want complete consistency. The individual metadata and evolving social metadata of a given file is useful in its specific context, but may not be useful in the sense of a master copy. Users also do not necessarily trust the process of automatic synchronization. This was in line with Latour’s arguments about the process by which humans interact with and delegate actions both to and from machines.

The crux of Marshall’s point was that copies often take on a life of their own, and maintain useful independent instances of data. This presents archivists with a particularly challenging problem of what exactly should be archived. To solve this problem, Marshall argues that archivists need to consider both benign neglect and a new distributed model of storage and retrieval. This model would acknowledge the specific social metadata of copies, without producing a single definitive instance of a file. To put this in Latour’s terms, this program of action would be created from the interplay between the creator of the files (the designer), the files themselves (the artifacts), and the users. Essentially, you cannot separate the files (technology) from the designer and the users (society) without losing valuable context and data.

Resources:

Latour, Bruno. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” Shaping Technology. By Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992. Print.

Marshall, Catherine C. “Digital Copies and a Distributed Notion of Reference in Personal Archives.” Microsoft Research.

Furnas, Alexander. “It’s Not All About You: What Privacy Advocates Don’t Get About Data Tracking on the Web.” The Atlantic. Web. 15 Apr. 2012. <http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/its-not-all-about-you-what-privacy-advocates-dont-get-about-data-tracking-on-the-web/254533/>.

In 2011 The New York Times ran five different stories about how the internet has had a positive effect on democratic efforts across the world.  Highlighting countries from China to India and Vietnam, the Times coverage tells basically the same story each time, linking technology with a rapidly expanding democratic values. But one must question such a blanket positive assumption—asking is this always the case?  Does free access to information on the internet always coincide with acceptance and promotion of democratic values?

The Best and Wade article conducted a quantitative analysis of data over a ten year period and suggested that there was a little evidence to point toward a positive correlation between internet usage and democracy.   The Best and Wade article also went so far as to say that there was little evidence of a positive correlation between literacy and democracy.  These findings are surprising given that the Maack article focused on the cultural diplomacy connection with libraries and access to information.  Maack’s research indicates that the history of cultural diplomacy really hinged on this viewpoint—that given the opportunity to read and understand the dominate country’s cultural perspective and governing philosophy—subordinate countries would embrace these values.  Both Maack and Best and Wade have demonstrated in their writing that these assumptions are not well founded.

While it may be difficult for democratic countries and countrymen to appreciate how anyone could endorse an anti-democratic perspective, both the Maack and the Best/Wade articles reminded readers of the sometimes irregular path to political power—that sometimes the intention of the purpose of the tools does not always equal the anticipated outcome.

I nevertheless felt that both articles pointed to this recurring theme about the role of the internet (or information access) and its effects on the political lives of global citizens.  More broadly, I found that at the core of this argument was the binary debate between technological determinism and social constructivism.  The abundance of media coverage, as evidenced by the New York Times, indicates that mainstream media has embraced the point of view that the technological tools link the internet will have a positive impact on the growth of democracy in the world.

Conversely, there are a quieter, but equally compelling, cohort of critics to this view point—who caution against this unsophisticated blanket enthusiasm for technology.  This technological argument has manifested itself as the techno-utopian versus techno-pessimist debate.  And part of what I was interested in, when considering the value of these readings for my presentation, was the manner in which this disagreement plays out.  Each side has their opinions supported by thoughtful evidence or at least a good narrative.

On the one side—the techno optimist—would argue that social revolts like those we’ve seen in Egypt, Tunisia, and across the Arab world would not have been possible without the vast increase in expressive technology.  Techno pessimists or cybercritcs would lob back that such views are naïve – that the internet is a technology made by man and thus a tool that can be controlled to further entrench dictators as easily as it could be used to unseat them.  To that the utopians would respond that such predictions are shortsighted and that the path forward to democracy is a long one.  They argue that the longer the internet and social media have to take hold on a population, the less willing they will be to live in a society that bans or censors their efforts at communication.  That every nations leaders will have to accept that their choice is rather black and white, either accept that the internet cannot be controlled or close it for good.  The techno optimists therefore believing that no modern country would close its communication borders only to be relegated to a hermit existence.

The argument goes around and around, but the articles we focused on for the week of April 9^th pretty staunchly upheld the techno pessimist standpoint, that access to information in general may not always result in the advancement of the “freedom agenda” as those who originally created it may have intended or thought.  In stead, both of our writers suggest that despite the political agendas set forth by those in power, what we really have in play here is a system that is a tool—made for the people by the people.

My favorite techno-pessimist:  Evgeny Morozov

TED TALK:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hFk6FDrZBc

NET effect BLOG:  http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/blog/5386

RSA video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk8x3V-sUgU

Techno-optimists:

The New York Times

Alarmed by Independent Candidates, Chinese Authorities Crack Down. Sharon Lafraniere. The New York Times. (Dec. 5, 2011) News: pA4(L). Word Count: 1118.

Free Speech and the Internet. The New York Times. (July 4, 2011) Opinion and Editorial: pA18(L). Word Count: 355.

China: censorship suit filed against Web company. J. David Goodman. The New York Times. (May 20, 2011) News: pA8(L). Word Count: 85.

Vietnam: Democracy Advocate Jailed. Seth Mydans. The New York Times. (Apr. 5, 2011) News: pA6(L). Word Count: 770.

Despite Intimidation, Calls for a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China Persist. Ian Johnson. The New York Times. (Feb. 24, 2011) News: pA14(L). Word Count: 420.

Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution. Sheryl Gay Stolberg. The New York Times. (Feb. 17, 2011) News: pA1(L). Word Count: 1453.

4 part BBC episode “How Facebook Changed the World” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnPR90dJ3Gk

The map of the London Underground is an iconic symbol. In “Mind the Gap,” Janet Vertesi explores the idea that to many people the map is London. Instead of acting as a mere description of one type of transportation system, it becomes the representation for the entire city. Vertesi explains, “The map is not only an interface to the subway system, but is also metonymically used as an interface to the city as a whole, establishing a virtual space in which the analog urban environment can be explored, constructed, narrated, and understood”

London Tube Map

London is huge, “immensely complicated and defies description. Indeed, London’s defining characteristic is an absence of overall form” (Encyclopedia Britannica). In this absence of form, the London Tube map becomes the form of the city. As Vertesi learned through personal interviews, people use the underground to understand the city. When she asked Londoners to draw the city, nearly all of them used Tube stops as reference points, even while pointing out that they knew the map didn’t accurately represent the true geography of London.

One of the reasons the Tube Map is so recognizable and so memorable is its simplicity. Although the map contains a lot of information, it is laid out in straight lines, regular angles, tight corners, and bold colors. Maxwell Roberts, a professor and psychologist writes “For any network, the very best maps do not just make journey planning easier. Their apparent simplicity will imply that travel will be effortless, and an attractive design will engage people, encouraging them to make full use of it.”

However, for all its simplicity and recognizability, the Tube map does have some flaws. In order to be simple, it must be distorted, and it obviously cannot include every geological and topographical aspect of the city. These spots, along with suffering from the lack of Underground access, also become invisible to those who use the map to understand the city. Vertesi reported that in her interviews “several of my respondents noted that this makes these neighborhoods [without tube stops] even more disadvantaged, as being ‘off the map’ divorces them from civic culture and political discourse.”

In the same way that the Tube map becomes a representation of London, with its stations acting as geographical hitching posts and creating invisible neighborhoods, social memory acts as a representation of history, with major events and historical figures becoming the “Tube stops” on society’s map of its past.

Eviatar Zeruabavel writes about the social aspects of memory in “Social Memories,” emphasizing that memory is not individual: “In fact, many of our earliest ‘memories’ are actually recollections of stories we heard from [parents, grandparents, and older siblings] about our childhood. In an odd way, they remember them for us!”

These social memories become a representation of our collective past, just as the Tube map becomes a representation of the city of London. But instead of Tube stops, we have People Who Are Important, Events That Changed History, and Cultures That Matter. These events that we learn about in school and from our families and communities form the map that we all know and recognize. Because of the simplicity, we can remember it and make sense of it. And just as the London Tube Map creates invisible neighborhoods, our “social map” of History creates invisible events, people, and cultures that are only seen by those who set out to explore the unknown.

A good example of this “social map” is the recent decision of the London Transportation Authority to temporarily rename its 361 Tube Stops in honor of Olympic Athletes for the 2012 games. Of the thousands of Olympians to have competed over the past century, 361 were chosen to represent the Olympians as a whole. This, quite literally, shows the parallel of a taught history and a tube map. For those unfamiliar with the history of the Olympics, this newly renamed Tube system will let them know which athletes matter and are worth remembering, as chosen by the map’s creators. Those athletes will become the base around which people’s knowledge of the Olympics is formed.

Underground Olympic Legends Map

In a Bloomberg Businessweek article, the creators of the map mention the “heated debate” that went into deciding on the station names, and their willingness to “defend [their] choices.” It’s interesting to note that even the temporary renaming of stations in honor of a historical event creates disagreement and dissension. Deciding who and what goes into our social memory is not an easy task.

Obviously history must be taught in some form, and with younger children especially, some simplification is necessary. But it’s important to note that just as the London Tube Map becomes London, those history lessons become history; they become the collective memory of a society, and we need to ensure certain events and people are not left out simply because they complicate the map.

Sources:

London. (2012). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://library.eb.com/eb/article-235576

Vertisi, J. (2008). “Mind the Gap: The London Underground Map and Users’ Representations of Urban Space,” Social Studies of Science, 38: 7-33.

Zerubavel, E. (1996). “Social Memories: Steps to a Sociology of the Past,” Qualitative Sociology, 19(3), 283-299.

Roberts, Maxwell J. (2007) Henry Beck Rules, Not Okay? Breaking the Rules of Diagrammatic Map Design. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Psychology, University of Essex.

Lehourites, C. (2012, March 28). London Underground map gets Facelift for Olympics. Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-03/D9TPJ3RO0.htm.