Engagement Ring

While I was in Washington D.C. for Gov 2.0 Expo, I enjoyed meeting open source and public engagement advocate Molly Moran of the State Department. At the Expo, some complained that I was too critical of State Department efforts in e-government, even though I only devoted one slide to the subject and limited my criticism to only one aspect of what I thought was a largely successful adoption of Twitter by the group, so I hope that I am setting the record straight when it comes to a branch of government that tends to attract the best and the brightest of federal employees.

As this State Department posting on Applying the Tools of 21st Century Statecraft to Public Engagement explains, the new media discussion group included Andrew Cedar, Katie Dowd, Luke Forgerson, Suzanne Hall, Darren Krape, Duncan MacInnes, Bill May, Cash McCracken, Molly Moran, Lawrence Randolph, Victor Riche, Aaron Tarver, Erica Thibault, Scott Weinhold, and Norma Williamson. I had presented on a panel about diplomacy in virtual worlds at the State of Play conference with May last year and had followed the work of many others in the group.

The blog entry summarizes the wide range of subjects addressed by the project:

Under Secretary Judith McHale recently convened a series of discussions and asked State Department colleagues to move public diplomacy forward in innovative ways. These discussions focused on several activities, including everything from student exchanges to English-language teaching programs . . . Engaging the public -- going beyond government to government communication -- has long held a place in American diplomacy, from the Marshall Plan following World War II to sports exchanges during the Cold War. Today, new tools and technologies enable us to reach more people, more quickly, more directly, than ever before, and activity in the online world is already having a tangible impact on foreign policy priorities . . . Given these examples, how would you use new media tools to engage the public on critical foreign policy topics and global issues? Let us know your ideas, and we look forward to sharing them with State Department colleagues and leadership.

My only gripe with the State Department's call for public feedback on the initiative was the illustration used as the banner image, a photo of a woman in a headscarf at a PC workstation. The image of women in headscarves interacting with technology has become a sort of stock image of Western liberalism that may be more subject to misinterpretation than Americans may imagine. It isn't always the universal signifier of female empowerment that those in public diplomacy consider it to be. As François Bar has cautioned in talks detailing his large-scale multi-year studies of public computing practices abroad, U.S. citizens should be wary of their own biases about both individual consumer technologies and the relationship between gender, space, and technology.

(For example, why does this woman have to have a man on the screen? Why isn't it more obvious that she is in a social computing setting with a numbered carrel, perhaps a cybercafe with sex-segregated hours? How would the image be different if she were shown on-the-go with her computing done on a mobile device? Why isn't she interacting with other women either as an "infomediary" or as one who benefits from their knowledge? Where is her family? Where is her community? Americans don't ask these questions, but other people in the world do.)

For more about experiments done in the State Department, you can see this Mashable article about the use of new media in diplomacy and other forms of transnational outreach by the government.

Talking to the Digital Natives

The words "digital natives" have been falling out of favor with Internet researchers. It is even a term that has even achieved disrepute at the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, where the phrase was once regularly sprinkled in reports. To me, as I've explained, the words have sounded very much like nails on a chalkboard for a long time. I hate the way it calls up noble savages, natural competencies, and exotic others who feel content will maintaining a sharp generational divide in society. That's why the use of the phrase "digital natives" three times in the "Transparency Begins at Home" talk of the State Department's Richard Boly marred an otherwise good talk about in-house tools that diplomats are using to improve preparation and communication in a field with frequent dislocation and turnover by design.

In providing history of this federal department, he explained how in 1995 an e-mail could take two hours just to travel from one floor to another. Although "teaching diplomats how to type" proved to be a minor obstacle, the State Department had faced a number of other major obstacles in adopting new communications technologies, because of their dependence upon outdated Wang terminals at the dawn of the Microsoft Windows era.

As an example of one of the group's efforts to promote institutional memory, Boly pointed to Communities@State, which serves as the umbrella for a range of collaboratively oriented blogs from Afghan Strategic Communication to Japan Economic Scope. He also discussed Diplopedia and Deskipedia as part of their eDiplomacy initiatives, which focus on "knowledge management within the organization" rather than public diplomacy aimed abroad. As he explained, wikis often seemed particularly natural platforms for his agency's employees, because "there is a strong culture of editing in the State Department."

One of the most daring projects he discussed was "The Sounding Board," which serves as an "ideation tool" to encourage professional diplomats to make personal suggestions as individuals with first and last names who are assumed to be equal. The submissions come in unweighted without regard to job title, and then these suggestions can be voted either up or down by other participants. In this way Boly explained how an article on military training in Diplopedia emerged from a request for more formal training in military norms.

It is worth noting that Boly used the Prezi presentation tool. As a sign of his interest in software alternatives, it was a particularly significant choice, given that few at the conference chose any PowerPoint alternatives. For other examples of this particular form of digital rhetoric that I have observed on the conference circuit, see postings here and here.

He closed with a discussion on his department's efforts to "crowdsource" after the Haiti earthquake using SMS messaging and geolocation data with an Ushahidi program based in Tufts University.

The World's Most Expensive Newspaper

In 2006 technology writer Clive Thompson wrote an article about "Open Source Spying" for The New York Times. At the Gov 2.0 Expo panel with the same title and some of the same informants, many lamented that little had improved when it came to the use of collaborative technologies to speed and streamline information gathering.

For example, Lewis Shepherd talking frankly about the "glacial pace" of change in the intelligence community despite the enormous amount of taxpayer dollars invested. In generating threat reports or what has been called "the world's most expensive newspaper," the many writers and analysts working in the intelligence community are failing much like actual journalists are to adapt to technological change. When a questioner in the audience complained of being presented with a panel of white men to represent change, Lewis quipped that "we express our frustration, Caucasian or not." (Later several noted that many of the senior leadership positions in the intelligence community were occupied by women, a fact that my own interactions with these government agencies has confirmed.)

Chris Rasmussen described the efforts of those who worked on Intellipedia and Intellipublia, but complained of resistance from a "finished intel 3-ring binder culture" in the federal government. He also complained of the "it's always Nigeria" problem in which technical tools are never tested with high-risk, high-value intelligence operations, because of anxieties about "stopping the mail" and disrupting existing systems with established workflows that never have a down season like that experienced by the IRS. The "product-centered" approach invariably supported what invariably became for Rasmussen a "theological argument" in which invoking the soldier for patriotic purposes and his close engagement in the field obfuscated the advantages of aggregation at a distance by drawing on multiple sources.

Matthew Burton joined the chorus to express his frustration with censorship of the dissemination of new organizational ideas by public affairs people who don't want to see policy debated in the pages of Federal Computer Week. He also noted that analysts with ideas about collaborative technologies were often reduced to finding "microwave towers all day long" rather than using systems like Intelink to make change.

During the Q and A for the session there were questions about the other meaning that "open source spying" could have in a world in which much intelligence could be gathered from the open web in a world with sixty million Twitter users. I didn't take Rasmussen's advice to "put 'Facebook' and 'OPSEC'" in the title of a blog posting in order to garner a million hits.

"We Were Really Bad about Telling the World about It"

When the United States boasted about being the world leader in data transparency and gifting its expertise to Great Britain, I expressed my skepticism here. The session at the Gov 2.0 Expo on "Four Perspectives on data.gov.uk" seemed designed to confirm my suspicions definitely, as speakers reminded audience members that they were often first in what they called a kind of "arms race" for which nation would have the greatest government transparency. As Dominic Campbell of wearefuturegov.com pointed out, despite leading the way in the competition to launch Gov 2.0 initiatives, "we were really bad about telling the world about it for a while." He also argued that the transparency efforts of Data.gov.uk were civil service driven rather than politically driven, as such efforts were in the U.S.

Several speakers on this panel organized by Tim Berners-Lee noted the oddity of the particular political moment in great Britain now that the "new marriage" of the Conservative and the Liberal Democratic parties had begun after years of Labor party rule. They noted that the Conservative Party had actually issued a Technology Manifesto, although "her majesty's shrinking budget" was also changing the technology scene.

Chris Thorpe of The Guardian noted that in March 9, 2006, Charles Arthur called upon the government to "free our data" long before the Obama administration took office. He also pointed to the success of the initiative Rewired State, which appeared three years later. Also worthy of note were data visualizations like the Voter Power Index and GIS projects like a map of cycling blackspots, although Thorpe explained that he had personal interest in developing a simple API for schools.

Morning in America

In the Virtualpolitik book I praise the NASA website for successfully engaging informal learners from amateur astronomy and rocketry communities with and for using online video in ways that captivated its audience members as they watched live feeds from the Mars rovers.

At the Government 2.0 Expo this morning, NASA Chief Information Officer Linda Cureton devoted much of her pitch to the benefits of cloud computing. She also made what would become a familiar rhetorical gesture for the day: pointing to a data innovation of the past to make an argument about data innovation in the present. In her case she pointed to moralizing from naysayers about the destabilizing effects of a communication device known as the telephone, a not unfamiliar analogy in the digital culture community. Later in this session of short keynotes, David Eaves argued that a previous transparency movement for making baseball statistics available had transformed America's pastime.



The panel that followed Cureton's presentation with the City of Los Angeles's Randi Levin and Google executive Dave Girouard caused some of those on Twitter in the audience to ask if they were watching "an ad for Google," as city managers praised the tech company. Although Google critics were dismissed as those who saw Google and cloud computing more generally as "the devil incarnate," more complex arguments about what Siva Vaidhyanathan has called "The Googlization of Government" in his larger argument in the forthcoming book The Googlization of Everything weren't really addressed in the session. Of course, host Tim O'Reilly opened the discussion by asking, "How different is government from a big corporation?" Although the pair presented an interesting argument about the need for automatic translation tools in multi-ethnic cities, they may have lost some credibility among academics who study Government 2.0 by devoting a considerable among of their limited time to criticizing the press, specifically a relatively rare example of due diligence by the normally idiotic Los Angeles Times in covering issues about platforms and proprietary software for once. At one point the group onstage agreed, "If you took the politics out we could probably be done by now." (More complete coverage of the controversy for further reading is here.)

There were also several good arguments made about ease of access and consumer friendliness. Open API was also a key theme during this morning session about e-government, such as the presentation by Joshua Robin of Massachusetts public transit, who showed the proliferation of successful applications for telephone, mobile computing, and display areas in public spaces that were launched at no cost to the government, simply because they had released the data to potential developers.

However, open APIs and cloud computing were often discussed in the same breath in ways that didn't always clearly differentiate between them or articulate the positions of government technologists in relation to specific technologies and vendors in more complete and convincing forms. For example, the possible threat to consumer protection posed by current US computer law that effectively prohibits the testing of potential security flaws by third parties, such as academic experts, was never mentioned, despite the libertarian leanings of many audience members and the supposed argument for technologies that weren't locked down.

Furthermore, relatively little was said about open source technologies in a venue largely funded by corporate sponsors that specialize in proprietary software, even though the advantages of open source approaches would prove to be an important theme in many of the smaller sessions at the conference.



If those in the audience like Ren Reynolds were amused by the promotion of Google at the start of the session, the appearance of Australian Senator Kate Lundy and her discussion of the "three pillars" of democracy and Internet prompted the following Twitter outburst: "keep in mind when listening to this that Australia are attempting to filter the entire net, kinda like china." Indeed, as this blog has pointed out here, despite flagship events like GovHack, Australia's digital rights' record has some significantly ugly features that weren't addressed anywhere in Lundy's optimistic presentation.



Tim Burners-Lee, who is often called the inventor of the World Wide Web, also spoke on the morning's bill about his own interest in transparency issues. He discussed how government entities could see their web outreach efforts as a system of "earning stars" for data access and reusability. Just putting up data in any form merits one star, putting it up in a spreadsheet format that enables mash-ups earns another, and making that data available in an open format would earn a third star in his system. Then he specified how having individual URLs and enabling notation systems and data linking could lead to the highest levels of star-earning. His other simple analogy involved a bag of chips in which he discussed how data should be both machine readable and aimed toward having a social impact. To develop this analogy he contrasted the nutritional information labeling on a typical bag of chips with its UPC code.



At the conference, several people who came up to chat with me compared me to the next morning speaker on the program, danah boyd. This comparison wasn't made based on the fact that we are both blondes or that we are both bloggers for Digital Media and Learning Central. It was based on the fact that we were both perceived as critical voices in our respective keynote line-ups with talks that pointed out potential pitfalls to Gov 2.0 utopianism. Ironically, the parallels were even closer, since in the original version of my talk I had a slide about Megan's Law to illustrate the risks of total transparency undertaken without serious reflection, because vigilantes could use the addresses of sex offenders to enact street justice that is just as likely to harass their family members as it is to target supposed criminals on parole.

I'm glad that I took out that slide the editing process, because I thought boyd did a much better job that I would have in developing a sustained critique of mainstream ideologies about sexual predators. She opened by establishing her ethos with the audience by explaining that a family member had been raped and murdered by a neighbor and that she had always been an advocate for preventing violence against women and girls. But she also pointed out that there were 700,000 people on the sex offenders list and that those offenders included teenagers who had oral sex with other teenagers. Furthermore, she challenged how the oft-cited statistic that one in seven minors had been sexually solicited online had been received without considering how those minors were generally solicited by other minors. Now that 15% of teens had been involved in "sexting" or the sharing of explicit photos, boyd was concerned that a large number of young people could even been charged with child pornography offenses.

She noted that people love to buy books like Blink or Freakanomics about "how we are terrible at interpreting data," but even this widespread consciousness-raising had had little impact on policy. She described her own feelings about being dismissed by justice system officials and law enforcement after the appearance of Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies, a report from Harvard's Berkman Center. (I had also heard this from John Palfrey.) She asserted that "information is power" and "information is not neutral" and argued for more information literacy efforts, particularly those guided by the research of Eszter Hargittai.



After boyd's appearance things quickly went from the sublime to the ridiculous, with an argument for "passion" and people "kicking ass" and "killer" technologies and "cool" strategies with Kathy Sierra. Although her examples about how a water quality report could be made interesting were interesting, it eventually degenerated into a facile argument that lolcats and comic books were the solution for open government.

A Moment's Pause

Yesterday the Teaching, Learning & Technology Center at UC Irvine presented a session devoted to "Online Learning: Myths & Realities." In the age of severely limited budgets, online learning in higher education looks very attractive to campus administrators and educational researchers have long said that the traditional lecture format is poorly suited for many types of learners who need to be better engaged with subject matter. The discussion took off with the first mention of the May 2009 Department of Education report on "Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies." Several faculty members contested the conclusion that "classes with online learning…on average produce stronger student learning outcomes than do classes with solely face-to-face instruction," since they actually argued that the data showed equivalent rather than better pedagogical works. However, many present were pleased with the report's praise for blended or hybrid learning as preferable to online alone instruction.

Unlike many such presentations, there was a serious attempt to offer more than boosterism. Organizers admitted that such courses may not save time, given expectations for frequent student feedback and updated materials, and that they might not always be cheaper either, since quality video and online design don't come cheap, even if the University of Phoenix boasts about its bottom line. Talk about higher attrition rates and a persistent digital divide, even among supposedly "tech-savvy" students also dampened enthusiasm. As a writing person, I would have liked to see more discussion of the limitations of so-called "self-grading exercises" to teach written composition, such as the Calibrated Peer Review system, which I have criticized in print.

Three faculty members from UCI taught these courses over the summer and shared their experiences with the group. Cell biology professor Diane O'Dowd argued that her teaching demonstrations were unlikely to be easily appropriated by other pedagogues and that good online courses were by definition non-generic, and that adopting the online courses of others was as ludicrous as being handed a syllabus and all the slides from a course with the expectation of an exact pedagogical replica. Her prior experiences in her large enrollment course Bio 93: DNA to Organisms were applied to the online version of the course, which was offered through the campus Distance Learning Center. She produced twenty-nine lessons, with professionally shot video of her talking behind a blue-screen backdrop, as well as an elaborate series of intros, wrap-ups, and other ways to develop activities, such as having students report their own experiences with long distance running before beginning a unit on hypernatremia. Although learning outcomes seemed to be good, she complained that students developed few peer relationships in the class and expressed her reservation that she was "not sure we are keeping them in the biology major."

In contrast, Michael Dennin has made his Physics 21: Science from Superheroes to Global Warming, which he had never taught before, available under a Creative Commons license that encouraged sharing. He also chose low tech webcam shooting for his video portions and creative forum moderation, where students grappled with issues like analyzing the California state budget, to develop their numerical literacy and to create lively in-class interaction.

Outside UCI classicist Maria Pantelia is probably best known for her work with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, but on campus she teaches the popular course Classics 45A: Classical Mythology: The Gods, which she described as a frequently "x-rated course" in the antics of the Greco-Roman deities. Her original lecture slides were masterfully converted to richly illustrated Flash pages about the classical world, while she provided audio voice-over.

Note that all three faculty members worried about cheating and relied on on-site midterms and finals for much of the course grading.

Real News about Government 2.0

Who cares if you friend Obama on Facebook? What does it matter if you follow the State Department on Twitter? How does watching the Secretary of Health on YouTube actually change your relationship with the government? How does adding another customer for a social network site do anything but build up corporate databases of user preferences? These are often the questions that I cynically ask about Web 2.0 technologies used by government agencies.

Instead, we could perhaps ask different kinds of questions about political participation and the regulation of commonly held files and networks. What form would Government 2.0 have to take to really change the relationship between direct and representational democracy? What resources for the public good do computational media create and challenge?

There are two stories from the week that point to ways that technology may actually be relevant to the political process. One case might be taken to be a cautionary tale, since distrust of electronic voting machines runs high, even though computational media may ultimately make citizen participation possible in the deliberative process of government.

This week there has been another leak of source-code from a the operating systems of voting machines from the Sequoia corporation. Those who are raising questions about this particular proprietary technology have created a wiki about the issues. Obviously suspicion of this particular technology runs deep enough that the video below suggests that electronic voting machines might just put one of their own into office.



The other big e-government news this week has to do with a much less controversial story: the allocation of computer IP addresses. After listening to a talk about IPv4 scarcity, this story about the implementation of the IPv6 system is actually something about which I can now hold a political opinion. The question is how to make this kind of an issue about the distribution of and access to critical technological resources as urgent -- although hopefully not as open to panic, satire, and conspiracy thinking -- as something actually covered in the mass media like electronic voting.

Wonkfest 2009

I often forget that I am as much of a nerd about fine print as I am. After all, I am the woman who once read the Iran-Contra Report on the beach as a teenager, and who has actually bothered to read the instructions on toothpaste and diapers. But somehow I felt right at home on the "Policy and Economy" panel at AoIR in the company of my fellow fine-print readers and at least two other MIT Press authors.

Mark Balnaves opened the session by presenting research that he had done with Matthew Allen about the differences between "e-government" and "e-governance." Like my own work in the Virtualpolitik book, the focus of Balnaves' talk was on the ways that governments often use technologies to preserve the status quo. He argues -- following David Coursey and Donald F. Norris, that e-goverment has had remarkably little engagement with the public. For Balnaves, e-government has failed to deliver on the promise of its "progressive and transformative" potential and primarily serves for 1) records management, 2) enhancement and manipulation of existing data, and 3) perception management. Of course, he notes that there are legal limitations on what the President can do on Facebook, just as there are even greater barricades to having citizens participate in deliberations in Congress. In practical terms, the news from the latest Report to Congress on the E-Government Act of 2002 doesn't indicate that much substantive progress has been made. In contrast, he claims that media-driven e-governance is capable of very rapid changes in public perception as private networks and social media mobilize citizens. Here he credited the influence of B.J. Fogg's ideas about MIP or Mass Impersonal Persuasion on his thinking. However, he observes that this can also foster radical media and once totally defunct movements such as Marxist-Leninism.

Next up was Sandra Braman, author of Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power with a paper about her research analyzing the genre of the RFC or Request for Comments, which focuses on discussions about the technical constructs of computer networks rather than the management issues handled by ICANN. With over 5700 plus documents filed since 1969, she has a rich mine of material offers both a model of collective decision-making and an archive of quirky ephemera from a range of geek personalities that includes "jokes, memoirs, poems, and autobiographies" in the mix, along with policy-making and policy analysis. It's obviously an interesting source of metadiscourse that includes major guidelines on netiquette. In her NSF-funded study, she has found that 12% of RFCs actually address policy issues and that there were proactive suggestions for handling spam and viruses. However, the RFC contingent clearly had some blind spots beyond an obvious English-only bias. Certainly, the group favored talk about young people far more often than the elderly, and only a surprisingly paltry 2 RFCs were devoted to issues of disability. She also noted that vendors could try to manipulate deliberations by proposing protocols that favor particular kinds of proprietary software, and theat there might be other moves that assert intellectual property rights inappropriately.

Yale's Laura DiNardis admitted that her favorite RFC was probably 2324, which was authored on April 1st and was devoted to coffee pot protocols, but the subject matter of her talk actually focuses on IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and how the politics of Internet protocol might be tested by a scarcity of IPv4 addresses, as the 4.3 billion allocated are stretched by new devices and trends toward ubiquitous computing. She is the author of Protocol Politics, also from MIT Press, and her next book will be devoted to Technologies of Dissent and their architectures. As IPv4 addresses become depleted she cautioned against introducing markets and took a skeptical view of the property model. She argued that such systems would only privilege large players like established universities like MIT and corporations that have traditionally been part of the military-industrial complex and discriminate against those in emerging markets. She noted that Halliburton was just recently given a large Class A resource block of addresses. She also claimed that the switch to IPv6 was being slowed by the fact that big players have no incentive to change. The potential hazards that she listed included risks to business, risks to technical architecture, disincentives for innovation, legal and regulatory challenges, and the risk of unitended consequences. Introduce markets and you inevitably introduce regulation in a realm that has traditionally been navigated through "governance with a small 'g'" rather than with a large one. Members of the audience understood her somewhat arcane points and focused on suggesting ways to make this looming crisis better understood by the public. Someone posed an analogy with spectrum scarcity, and another person urged a comparison with dwindling phone numbers in a particular area code.

The last presenter was An-Shou Cheng who discussed his NSF-funded research project on the rhetoric in Congressional hearings about Network Neutrality. Cheng argued that in the 2006 hearings, pro-neutrality advocates emphasized equality while their opponents stressed "choosing own goals." By 2008 the pro group had switched to "freedom" as a theme, while the con group had switched to "wealth" and "social justice." However, some members of the audience were unhappy with how Cheng ignored the ways that these hearings had been manipulated with a politically motivated structure of "balance." Others wondered why he chose Schwartz's Value Inventory as his main tool, when this index spoke more to private psyches than public attitudes about the government.

Security Blanket

Earlier this week I wrote about the Government 2.0 conference and how its corporate hype and Web 2.0 enthusiasm ignored the need for legislative participation and systems of authentication that make political participation possible between trusted parties. Last month there was a conference, also in Washington D.C. for the Cyber Leap Year Summit, which was oriented toward much more substantive issues about how questions of provenance and trust could be negotiated. Of course, the conference reflects the Obama administration's continuing interest in developing a comprehensive "cybersecurity" policy, but it much more accurately reflects the concerns of policy makers and the anxieties of the public about infrastructure and privacy than the Gov 2.0 congratulatory get-together, even if the metaphor of "game changing" in these documents does seem somewhat trite.

The hosting agency, Federal Networking and IT research, which has its own .gov domain, deals with questions involving large scale networking, human-computer interaction, high confidence software and systems, and other issues that could make transformative e-government actually attainable and sustainable.

LinkedIn Makes the Cut

As the image above shows, there has been one obvious omission on the list of popular social networks that the White House cites when it comes to government content-creation: LinkedIn. This career-building site, which is oriented around job hunting and making professional connections, may have been seen as too formal in the past in its rhetorical conventions to further the feelings of participatory culture that have been so important for staffers in the Obama administration to maintain. After all, the site was founded on the principle explained in Mark Granovetter's "The Strength of Weak Ties," which argues that people generally find jobs through acquaintances rather than through friends, so it isn't structurally well-designed to foster deep political loyalties.

Now in "CEA Chair Romer’s Chat on Health Insurance Reform and Small Business," it appears that the Obama administration is interested in LinkedIn after all. The Council of Economic Advisors circulated a report about the possible impact of health insurance reform on small business and then over 1,500 users of LinkedIn submitted questions about the various medical coverage plans in play. There are two things that are particularly noteworthy about the blog posting: 1) the administration has still not learned to link primary sources to its content, since the report itself isn't hyperlinked, and 2) the CEA is using tag clouds to show the concerns expressed by the user-generated content on LinkedIn.

For another interesting example of how the White House is using information graphics, check out their analysis of their web traffic statistics here.

Amateur Hour

There is an interesting possible confirmation of Henry Jankins' argument that the Internet fosters participatory cultures in which avid amateurs are active cultural creators. A new report from the National Endowment in the Arts, the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, depicts a depressing picture of graying audiences and dwindling attendance at galleries and concert halls. Yet, as NPR points out in "NEA: Art Creation Up, Attendance Down," a high tech folk culture of DIY community production means that people continue to take an active role. When the organizations that they monetize don't have revenue, government subsidies for professional artists are at risk and virtuoso content-creation could be compromised.

Looky Here

In "Agency Skeptical of Internet Privacy Policies," the New York Times reports that a recent press release, FTC Staff Proposes Online Behavioral Advertising Privacy Principles," makes clear that federal agencies are expressing skepticism about how forthcoming Internet companies that collect data are with the users of their social computing applications. The days of non-regulation and voluntary compliance may be coming to an end, according to the FTC's official report at Behavioral Advertising, Moving the Discussion Forward to Possible Self-Regulatory Principles. Certainly many who specialize in digital rights have argued that user agreements with endless verbiage that force consumers to agree to give up their privacy without any conditions in order to even use the products to which hours of unpaid labor are often contributed.

Update: Check out the snazzy new design of the FTC website above, and consider how this story about how "Facebook’s Users Ask Who Owns Information" may show that the FTC has good reason to be interested in privacy policies.

Love for Dot-Gov

For ten years I've written about the rhetoric of government websites, so it is exciting to see that this month many others are discussing what was once considered to be an arcane issue for e-government policy wonks and Internet cranks unworthy of critical reflection or public interest.

For example, writer Douglas McGray points out in an article on "iGov" in the Atlantic that government websites like USASpending.gov are supporting new technologies that allow software developers to create new applications that represent data from the public record that in the past would have merely been only aggregated into government reports in what he calls "unwieldy PDF format and binders" that relatively few citizens would access. He begins by discussing the iBart trip planner for mobile devices that was created by two young entrepeneurs.

What does any of this have to do with the federal budget? Well, USAspending.gov might look like any other government Web site, but its API—that’s Application Programming Interface—allows access to the site’s raw data in an open, standard file format, similar to a transit feed. (“Wow,” Moore said. “That’s really powerful.”) Enterprising programmers, researchers, bloggers, or watchdogs like the Sunlight Foundation or Govtrack can grab that data and slice it, dice it, chart it, graph it, map it, or mash it up with new feeds.

However, based on putting Bank of America into one of its search engines, the USASpending.gov system doesn't seem to account for current bailout dollars, although it does include loans from agencies like FEMA in its calculations of how this specific bank has gained from taxpayer largesse.

Conscience by Committee

When it comes to web design and compatibility with social media platforms, the website of the Senate Arms Services Committee is one of the most obviously retro among federal .gov websites, but its recently released "torture report" has been widely circulated on the Internet. Additional documents point to a number of relevant "web links" that show how revelations about torture perpetuated by the United States government in the name of gathering intelligence information through extreme interrogation methods has been justified throughout the whole chain of command.

Hack First, Ask Questions Later

In today's story in the Los Angeles Times, "Pentagon debates development of offensive cyberspace capabilities," computer hacking is presented as a possible legitimate weapon in the arsenal available to military planners.

What I find interesting to note about going to the websites related to the National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations, which the article references, is the ways that military strategists use the term "cyberspace." Although "cyberspace" is often a contested term among theorists of new media, who feel that it poorly represents the actual experiences of users or the ways that interfaces and software programs are designed, it is apparently the phrase of choice in the Pentagon. Furthermore, it's noteworthy that the Air Force uses the term in its promotional and recruiting materials and in its 2005 mission statement to suggest that cyberspace should be most obviously part of its purview rather than the concern of other branches of the military.

The article focuses on the conflict between the Pentagon and the NSA rather than which particular combat organization would be in charge.

"Let's not mistake intelligence collection with military operations," said Lani Kass, a senior Air Force official and former director of the service's Cyberspace Task Force. "The mission of the NSA is to collect signals intelligence, and it is very good at it. But the NSA is not a war-fighting organization." Ironically, given the record of the current administration when it comes to principles of international law, "military officials emphasized that all such efforts would be governed by the laws of war and international treaties."

Of course, as this transcript from a 2006 congressional hearing indicates in its discussion about disrupting the computer networks of hostile parties, this "debate" has been going on for a long time now. As usual, the LA Times has a strangely slow timeline for what it considers to be "news" about the Internet: this "new" initiative dates from 2006.

Update: Peter Krapp notes that Wired ran a story last month,"Air Force Suspends Controversial Cyber Command," which seems to indicate that the Air Force had been thwarted in its attempts to gain operational control over possible Internet offense and defense maneuvers.

The Impotence of Virtue

The presidential address by Society of American Archivists head Mark Greene called upon archivists to pursue greater political engagement in a number of significant areas. Specifically he urged archivists to define and promote themselves by articulating a set of values like the "Core Values" spelled out by the American Library Association, which also has its own agenda for issues and advocacy. He argued that an archivist was more than "a cross between a librarian and a historian" because he or she could also serve as a "watchdog" or "whistle-blower." Greene claimed that too often archivists were hampered by what he called "the impotence of virtue" and divorced themselves from issues involving "money and power."

For Greene, archivists have a central role in guaranteeing "government accountability." He noted archivists' objections to Executive Order 13233, which limited scope of the post-Watergate Presidential Records Act by fiat. He also mentioned their professional stance against the destruction of e-mail by the Bush administration and the documents related to the detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Like those at the ALA, he also asserted that copyright holders had used legislation to extend their ownership of intellectual property to the point that it interferes with "use," which Greene argued should "trump preservation" every time.

The Electronic Mailbag from the Jungle

Today's NPR story, "Interpol Backs Colombia's Charge Against Venezuela," describes the role that electronic evidence is playing in a dispute between neighboring Latin American countries. Interpol has recently weighed in with their computer experts in "INTERPOL's forensic report on FARC computers and hardware seized by Colombia," which is available in four languages on the international law enforcement agency's official website. For those interested in the evidentiary aspects computer law, it is a fascinating document about the eight devices seized from rebel strongholds: three laptop computers, two external hard drives, and three USB thumb drives.
The report begins with a remarkable acknowledgments section, which includes this paragraph of thanks:

None of this would have been possible without INTERPOL’s two computer forensic experts from Australia and Singapore who dedicated themselves to producing such a large amount of high-quality work under great time pressure. Their willingness to take on this painstaking task – to fully immerse themselves in the examination of 609.6 gigabytes of data – and the professionalism with which they conducted their forensic examination gave INTERPOL the utmost confidence in their findings. INTERPOL also benefited greatly from the invaluable insights of the experts from academia, the private sector and police who were consulted.

It is also interesting that the report claims that these experts' lack of translation skills ensured their neutrality, since the experts "came from outside of the region and did not speak Spanish, which helped to eliminate the possibility that they might be influenced by the content of any data they were examining."

In the news coverage the fact that this is a policy document as well seems to be missed. Note how the "Executive Summary" ends.

Finally, INTERPOL’s CompFor IRT has identified a number of issues with regard to the conduct of international computer forensic examinations and with regard to the handling of electronic evidence by law enforcement officials, especially those who are the first to respond to a crime scene. These issues are not only directly relevant to Colombia but also for law enforcement officers in all of INTERPOL’s 186 member countries. Addressing them effectively requires INTERPOL and its member countries to develop a number of initiatives which are explained in detail in Part 6 (“Recommendations for INTERPOL and its member countries”) of this report.

Ambulance Chaser

The Director of the National Endowment for the Arts appears to be a necrophiliac. Indeed, Dana Gioia is a man in love with death. For those who don't know the name, Gioia played a central role in the "death of poetry" debates of the eighties and nineties and is now ringing the death knell for reading itself. Like the blood-sucker for whom he has recently written an operatic libretto, Nosferatu, Gioia's artistic vision is one of darkness and mortality.

In a 2004 report "Reading at Risk," Gioia places blame for the demise of reading squarely on "our society’s massive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information" and claims that "interactive electronic media, such as video games and the Internet, foster shorter attention spans and accelerated gratification." The agency's newer but equally grim report of November 2007, "To Read or Not to Read," names the same culprit for the decline of literacy: "Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media, they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading."

New media critic Siva Vaidhyanathan has drawn attention to several counterarguments to the assumptions buried in Gioia's mournful dirge. For example, one of my favorite writers on online reading, Nancy Kaplan, has looked at the way the chartjunk in the NEA report obscures alternative interpretations of the data. In "Reading Responsibly" on the website for the Institute for the Future of the Book, Kaplan points out that "a careful and responsible reading of the complete data provided by the NAEP and the NAAL undermine[s] the conclusions the NEA draws." Mathew Kirschenbaum also debates the contentions of the report in "How Reading is Being Reimagined" in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The authors of the report tend to homogenize "the computer" without acknowledging the diversity of activity — and the diversity of reading — that takes place on its screen. Our screens are spaces where new forms like blogs and e-mail and chats commingle with remediations of older forms, like newspapers and magazines — or even poems, stories, and novels . . . The report also fails to acknowledge the extent to which reading and writing have become commingled in electronic venues. The staccato rhythms of a real-time chat session are emblematic in this regard: Reading and writing all but collapse into a single unified activity. But there is a spectrum of writing online, just as there is a spectrum of reading, and more and more applications blur the line between the two.

Years ago, when writing my dissertation, I took issue with Gioia's positions in Can Poetry Matter? that only stern remedies of technical discipline and financial independence from the university would save poetry from itself. I had received a Regent's Fellowship in creative writing as an MFA student, but because I had written a book of sonnets as my master's thesis, many mistook me for a cultural conservative like Gioia. Back then, here was my take on Gioia's death fixation about poetry, in which I point out that he's an incredibly sloppy close reader.

Dana Gioa’s essay, “Notes on the New Formalism” carefully distinguishes between formal verse and “pseudo-formal” verse. According to Gioia, the latter verse assumes the visual characteristics of poetic form, but achieves no aural formal identity. In other words, these “pseudo-formal” poems lack metrical consistency, the abstract stress-grid on which language plays in a properly formalist poem.

However, there are at least two significant problems with Gioia’s reading. First, one begins to doubt his ear when he insists that William Carlos Williams was writing “two rather undistinguished lines of blank verse” when he composed “The Red Wheelbarrow.” It is certainly possible to read the poem as rough iambic pentameter, but Gioia’s particular reading demands a semantic impossibility, that no stress be placed on the syllable “wheel.” Second, his argument leads to an extremely limited notion of poetic form which values metrical regularity over all other features of verse.

This kind of new dogmatism can be seen in the introduction to Richman’s The Direction of Poetry, which not only disallows “quantitative syllabic poetry,” but also rails against forms like the sestina and the pantoum as structures contaminated by the experimentation of John Ashbery and others. He claims that they adopt “the pretense of traditional form … without employing any of its technical attributes.” Of course, to be so literal-minded as to be unable to see patterned word repetition as a kind of rhyme is almost unimaginable, but Richman and those like him promulgate a radical orthodoxy in which young poets are to write exclusively in a limited repertoire of metered and rhymed forms and evince an unquestioned faith in the reality of traditional foot metrics.

Gioia had been an executive for General Foods, where he presided over cultural institutions like "Jello Jigglers," and believed that poetry should not be a state-supported profession. He argued that the great Modernist writers all had "real" professions as doctors, insurance executives, and editors and therefore were able to produce great verse because they essentially did it as a hobby. This particular ideology about government support and the arts is obviously part of the reason that Gioia was appointed to his current post by the Bush administration, where he has aggressively sought corporate sponsorship and frustrated arts organizations that had previously assumed that the NEA was a supporter not a competitor for funding of the arts.

Apparently I Am to Blame

That's right. We need more media consolidation, because people hate media consolidation, and now choose to get their news off blogs, podcasts, online video sharing sites, and other sources from distributed networks. Regular audience members are rejecting the offerings of the infotainment monopolies, so we should make sure that they have even less choice in their local media markets.

That's essentially the argument of boyish Bush-appointed FCC chairman Kevin Martin who has proposed a major Revision of Cross-Ownership Rules. He wants to see local newspapers able to own local television stations, although in practice the reverse will likely be the most common case, in order to save the newspaper industry from evil-doers like me.

If we don’t act to improve the health of the newspaper industry, we will see newspapers wither and die. Without newspapers, we would be less informed about our communities and have fewer outlets for the expression of independent thinking and a diversity of viewpoints. The challenge is to restore the viability of newspapers while preserving the core values of a diversity of voices and a commitment to localism in the media marketplace.

It's an utterly illogical argument, of course. When done well, online news sites from papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post have seen their circulations rise and their costs drop when bloggers cite their stories on the web. Of course, my once-beloved Los Angeles Times is a basket case, but they aren't taking my good advice, so it is really their own fault.

And it certainly won't make newspapers any better when their content is driven even more by the pitbull-bites-man-during-high-speed-chase news determined by the B-roll that currently dominates local television news. If the rules are revised, I think you'll see less investigative journalism, fewer muti-installment in-depth stories, and a general discouragement of some of the thoughtful blogging and vlogging that newspaper reporters are experimenting with in favor of jokey round-the-anchor-desk fatuousness.

What is interesting about Martin's push for a rules change is that he acknowledges that this will be an unpopular proposal, which is something that policy makers rarely do.

I confess that in my public role, I feel that the press is not on my side. But it is for this very reason that I believe this controversial step is worth taking. In their role as watchdog and informer of the citizenry, newspapers are crucial to our democracy.

Unfortunately, the lessons about the hard-won legal victories associated with The Prometheus Radio Project may soon be forgotten. Luckily, the formal Reply by Commissioners to Chairman on the FCC website indicates that Martin may not get his way too easily.

(Thanks to striking show-runner and former law student Chip Johannessen for his contributions to my thinking about this issue.)

Reading Between the Lines

Although its front page content maintains a position of studied and staid neutrality, there's a lot of insight about state rhetoric to be found at Governing.com. This website is the electronic publisher of sourcebooks for state and local government, and also provides management advice from the Kennedy School of Government. But there's also some surprisingly incisive analysis of the fine print of government reports, which includes hot-button topics like abortion. Thanks to Virtualpolitik reader Mark Stencel, who also works for one of my favorite sources of fine print, Congressional Quarterly, for making me aware of the site. Stencel also co-authored Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal.