The Sociology of Information

Prying Information Loose and Dealing with Loose Information

2012-01-22T17:34:00.000-08:00

A sociology of information triptych this morning. Disclosure laws that fail to fulfill their manifest/intended function, the secret work of parsing public information, and the pending capacity to record everything all bear on the question of the relationship between states and information.

In a 21 Jan 2012 NYT article, "I Disclose ... Nothing," Elisabeth Rosenthal (@nytrosenthal) suggests that despite increasing disclosure mandates we may not, in fact, be more informed. Among the obviating forces are information overload, dearth of interpretive expertise, tendency of organizations to hide behind "you were told...", formal rules provide organizations with blueprint for how to play around with technicalities (as, she notes, Republican PACs have done, using name changes and re-registration to "reset" their disclosure obligation clocks), routinization (as in the melodic litanies of side-effects in drug adverts), and the simple fact that people are not in a position to act on information even it is abundantly available and unambiguous. On the other side, the article notes that there is a whole "industry" out there -- journalists, regulators, reporters who can data mine the disclosure information even if individuals cannot take advantage.

Rachel Martin's (@rachelnpr) piece on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, CIA Tracks Public Information For The Private Eye describes almost the mirror image of this: how intelligence agencies are building their infrastructure for trying to find patterns in and making sense of the gadzillions of bits of public information that just sits their for all to see. It's another case that hints at an impossibility theorem about "connecting the dots" a priori.

And finally, in another NPR story, "Technological Innovations Help Dictators See All" Rachel Martin interviews John Villasenor about his paper, "Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments" on the idea that data storage has become so inexpensive that there is no reason for governments (they focus on authoritarian ones, but no reason to limit it) not to collect everything (even if, as the first two stories remind us, they may currently lack the capacity to do anything with it). I if surveillance uptake and data rot will prove to be competing tendencies.

The first piece suggests research questions: what are the variables that determine whether disclosure is "useful"? what features of disclosure rules generate cynical work-arounds? if "more is not always better," what is? can we better theorize the relationship between "knowing," open-ness, transparency, disclosure and democracy than we have so far?

The second piece really cries out for an essay capturing the irony of how the information pajamas get turned inside out with the spy agency trying to see what's in front of everyone (we are reminded in a perverse sort of way of Poe's "The Purloined Letter"). Perhaps we'll no longer associate going "under cover" with the CIA.

And the alarm suggested in the third piece is yet another entry under what I (and maybe others) have called the informational inversion -- when the generation, acquisition, and storage of information dominates by orders of magnitude our capacity to do anything with it.

Journalism and Research Again

2012-01-08T13:14:00.000-08:00

Lots of Twitter and blog activity in response to NYT article about Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff research paper on effects of teachers on students' lives.

No small amount of the commentary is about how when journalists pick "interesting" bits out of research reports to construct a "story" they often create big distortions in the social knowledge-base.

So what can reporters do when trying to explain the significance of new research, without getting trapped by a poorly-supported sound bite?

Sherman Dorn has an excellent post on the case, "When reporters use (s)extrapolation as sound bites," that ends with some advice:

"If a claim could be removed from the paper without affecting the other parts, it is more likely to be a poorly-justified (s)implification/(s)extrapolation than something that connects tightly with the rest of the paper."
"If a claim is several orders of magnitude larger than the data used for the paper (e.g., taking data on a few schools or a district to make claims about state policy or lifetime income), don’t just reprint it. Give readers a way to understand the likelihood of that claim being unjustified (s)extrapolation."
"More generally, if a claim sounds like something from Freakonomics, hunt for a researcher who has a critical view before putting it in a story."

New Book on Data Journalism

2011-12-30T18:16:00.000-08:00

Simon Rogers has a new book called Facts are Sacred: The power of data coming out as a part of the Guardian Shorts series with a Kindle Edition available now from Amazon.UK and in January from Amazon in the US.

I was turned on to this project when I stumbled across this excellent collaborative project visualizing the spread of rumor via Twitter during last summer's London riots.

For the last hour or so I've been having that "I should have written this book" feeling -- not a pleasant feeling, but a recommendation to be sure. A nice feature of the book is that it blends boosterism and manifesto with how to and reportage on best practices. That brings it in as a book that won't be perfect for anyone, but has something for each of it's several potential audiences.

Google Knol into the Dustbin of E-history

2011-12-13T22:24:00.000-08:00

After 15 weeks of non-stop work, a moment for thinking about something other than classes and budgets came available today. Recently, while googling about, I became re-acquainted with the idea of a "knol" -- a unit of knowledge -- and the associated web service that Google has run these last number of years. And the fact that it is going away. Or rather it is evolving: into something called Annotum which describes itself this way:

Develop a simple, robust, easy-to-use authoring system to create and edit scholarly articles
Deliver an editorial review and publishing system that can be used to submit, review, and publish scholarly articles

The google knol thing has been around since 2007. The initial beta announcement described the thithis way

Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.

I remember, now, encountering it back in the day -- I may even have written some knols -- but it didn't stay on the radar screen for long. It was portrayed at the time as an alternative to Wikipedia -- with it's distinguishing characteristic being "authorship" :

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good (googleblog, 2008).

The divergence between Wikipedia's modus operandi and that of Knol (now Annotum) provides a nice case study jumping off point for thinking aboutf how we are figuring out the relationship between crowd sourcing and authorship, peer production, open source, intellectual authority, and how platform as institution feeds into how we think about content legitimacy.

Wikipedia harvests (harnesses, makes possible the emergence or realization) of a potentiality that, in a sense, has always been there, but represents a completely new mode of knowledge aggregation and access. A project like Knol or Annotatum, on the other hand, is about removing the friction from existing processes in a way that makes more of what's already done happen more easily.

Both approaches thumb their nose at property-based organizational middle-men as the arbiter of intellectual legitimacy, but exploring the contrast between them is instructive.

I am, of course, not the first to think about this. One knol author suggested that the real point of contrast is "Wikipedia does not allow the visionary or individualistic type of knowledge to be developed, because Wikipedia does not allow original content." And if you google "knol vs. wikipedia" you'll find lots of others -- my initial, quick and dirty assessment is that most are boosters for one or the other approach but I'm guessing there will be some grist for the mill for the chapter in The Sociology of Information where I'll talk about the social organization of information aggregation.

Bottom line: I'm back on the job.

Gossip, CMC, and Tight Knit Communities

2011-09-20T10:57:00.000-07:00

U.S.

In Small Towns, Gossip Moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious

By A. G. SULZBERGER

Published: September 19, 2011

As more people share gossip over the Internet rather than over coffee and eggs, anonymous, and startlingly negative, posts have provoked fights, divorce and worse.

Good eye/mind catches logical fallacy in WSJ Analysis

2011-09-11T13:06:00.000-07:00

Jean Whit notes that the authors of this piece about Wall Street Journal number crunching about sovereign debt default and bond ratings, WSJ Analysis: Rating Firms Not Effective at Predicting Government Defaults, got their analysis backwards. A classic case of sampling on the dependent variable or percentaging in the wrong direction: how many of the defaults had a given rating rather than how many with a given rating end up defaulting. See Jean's comment at bottom of post.

GPS, Orwell, and the 4th Amendment

2011-09-11T12:55:00.000-07:00

The 9/11 anniversary reminds us, among all the other things, of the questions of government surveillance that have arisen in the last decade, some related to terrorism, some reflecting challenges raised by new technologies, and many at the intersection of these.

This fall, the US Supreme Court will consider whether law enforcement should be able to attach a GPS tracking device on a vehicle without a warrant. Adam Liptak reports on the issue in "Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS" in today's New York Times. Lower courts have ruled in different directions on the question.

One way to think about it is in terms of aggregating information and whether there's an emergent property that changes how we would classify obtaining, possessing, or using information.Consider, for example, one's daily round. Leave the house at 7:30, stop for coffee, pick up the dry-cleaning, get stuck in traffic, arrive at work, park in the lot over behind the pine trees, etc. All of these are done in public with no expectation of privacy. And then it all happens again tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow. Except the dry cleaning stop is only made on Mondays and every other Friday there's a stop at a bar on the edge of downtown. If there is a GPS attached to your car, the separate public facts of any given daily round -- the sequence and full set of which perhaps only you know -- are assembled as a unit of information. And, if the GPS is there for a month, both the overall, boring, day-in-day-out pattern and the regular exceptions and the truly unique exceptions are all a part of the information bundle available "out there."

Even if all of the component information is about mundane, innocent, non-embarrassing activities, indeed has all the properties that would exclude it from your understanding of "private" information, does your willingness to do these things in public view aggregate to willingness for information about them to be aggregated into a tracking record?

See also
UNITED STATES v. GARCIA No. 06-2741.
New York Times. Articles on Surveillance of Citizens by Government
New York Times. Articles on Global Positioning System

From Musical Consonance to Styles of Thought

2011-09-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

An article published in Physical Review Letters, reported on in Science News, describes a mathematical model of how neurons can distinguish consonant sounds (say, a C-major chord) from dissonant ones (say, D-E-F). A simple network of neurons, behaving like neurons behave, produces qualitatively different outputs depending on the quantitative differences in the sound frequencies it receives as inputs.

Very interesting as an example of an information processing system with emergent information processing capacities.

I suspect something, at least metaphorically, similar might go on in the processing/experience of consonant ideas. At first I'm tempted to say "least that part of consonant or resonant ideas that we want to ascribe to consonance in the external world" but I think you could take it further and imagine the development of structures along similar lines for the detection of "constructed" consonance. Eventually, one could arrive at mechanisms for implementing "styles of thought" that would not be limited to algorithmic systems that "crank through a set of data" in the same way every time. Rather, we could talk about styles of thought in terms of the kinds of thoughts, tropes, logics, metaphors that would appeal as consonant with "everything else I believe." Or, the flip side of this would be to move toward mechanisms for cognitive dissonance.

Just a highly speculative bit of musing, but clearly news of this research did strike a chord with some stuff I've been thinking about for a long time.

Sociology of Information in the New York Times

2011-09-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

BUSINESS DAY

The Beauty Contest That’s Shaking Wall St.

By ROBERT J. SHILLER

Published: September 3, 2011

Why all the sharp swings in the stock market? To Robert J. Shiller, it’s a case of investors trying to guess what other investors are thinking....

Seeking not what is the case, but what others probably think is, or even what others think that others think is...

U.S.

Perry’s Blunt Views in Books Get New Scrutiny as He Joins Race

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

Published: September 2, 2011

When Rick Perry, the governor of Texas and a presidential hopeful, debates his rivals, his assertions on climate change, Social Security and health care could put him to the test....

Once it's out there, it's out there...

U.S.

WikiLeaks Leaves Names of Diplomatic Sources in Cables

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: August 29, 2011

The antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks published nearly 134,000 diplomatic cables, including many that name confidential sources....

Developing story -- a leak, a revelation, or just a mistake? (See also previous posts on Wikileaks.)

Bloomberg Contra Notification Norms

2011-09-04T12:25:00.000-07:00

Consider a recent NYT article by Mosi Secret and Michael Barbaro about the controversy over New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's failure to inform the public about the actual reason -- an arrest in Washington, D.C. for domestic violence* -- deputy mayor Stephen Goldsmith resigned this summer.

According to the article, Bloomberg "rejected the notion that he had an obligation to tell the public of the arrest." He is quote saying, “I always assumed it would come out, but it’s not my responsibility.”

It's a first rate example of notification in the public sphere and of how overlapping relational circles can suggest contradictory notification rules.

It turns out that it's not just a notification issue, though. Initially the mayor said the resignation was to pursue other opportunities -- in other words, he was pretty explicitly misleading not just failing to reveal.

But back to notification.Bloomberg, apparently, takes the line is that his first obligation was instrumental, making sure "he no longer works for the city." And then his next obligation is to treat Goldsmith and his family with respect. His critics suggest that his first obligation is to the public, although the one quoted in the article, Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, sticks with the instrumental saying Bloomberg has responsibility to "protect the public, not to protect a staff member” according to the article.But nobody really seems to be saying that there was any instrumental damage done by the non-notification and it's a bit disingenuous to say that getting Goldsmith off the city payroll was facilitated by non-notification.

The issue, then, is how the various relational imperatives governing who ought to tell whom what when and how interact. New York City law, as it happens, has something to say: "the city’s Department of Investigation must be notified" if an official is arrested in the city (not clear by whom), but this did not come into play here since arrest was in DC. The article reports a debate within the mayor's team about the matter with the mayor saying that Goldsmith should get to decide how much to reveal. And after the fact Goldsmith, who took some heat for not indicating in his resignation announcement what the reason was, has "admitted" that HE had a responsibility to be more forthcoming at the time, though he added that he thought that immediacy of his resignation "mooted the need for further explanation."

So, does the mayor's official role and its informational obligations trump the social obligation to allow another "ownership" of his own announcement? Does the consequential outcome -- resignation -- obviate the obligation to notify (for the record, Goldsmith says he was wrong on that count). If there is public outrage based only/mainly on the relational expectation of "we should have been told," does it support sanctions? Does Bloomberg's citation of a norm that certain personal situations are one's own to disclose get him off the hook? Does affirmatively suggesting other reasons rather than simply failing to disclose the actual ones cross another line entirely?

Bottom line: in many locations within the social, institutional, moral orders, the import of information behaviors goes far beyond the instrumental, consequential, substantive realm.

* The case is not being pursued as Mr. Goldsmith's wife dropped the complaint.

Information Control and Politics: Not Just "Over There"

2011-08-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

Cell Reception Cut In San Francisco To Hinder Protest

by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

August 13, 2011

Transit officials blocked cellphone reception in San Francisco train stations for three hours to disrupt planned demonstrations over a police shooting.

Officials with the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, better known as BART, said Friday that they turned off electricity to cellular towers in four stations from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday. The move was made after BART learned that protesters planned to use mobile devices to coordinate a demonstration on train platforms. ... <MORE>

This is your Background Check on Steroids

2011-07-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

An article, "Social Media History Becomes a New Job Hurdle," by Jennifer Preston in yesterday's NYT is obvious fodder for the sociology of information. It's primarily about Social Intelligence, a web start up that puts together dossiers about potential employees for its clients by "scraping" the internet.

Issues that show up here:

the federal government (FTC) was looking into whether the company's practices might violate the fair credit reporting act (FCRA), but determined it was in compliance
"privacy advocates" said to be concerned that it might encourage employers to consider information not relevant to job performance (why not fair employment advocates? -- later in the article we do find mention of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission)
what do we make of the statement: "Things that you can’t ask in an interview are the same things you can’t research"?
since this is really just an extension of the idea of the "background check" -- can we think a little more systematically about that as a general idea prior to getting mired in details of internet presence searches?

Perhaps more alarming than the mere question of information surfacing was the suggestion by the company's founder, Max Drucker, about how a given bit of scraped information might be interpreted. To wit, he mentioned fact that a person had joined a particular Facebook group might "mean you don’t like people who don’t speak English." According the reporter he posed this question rhetorically: "Does that mean...?" This little bit of indirect marketing via fear mongering adds another layer to what we need to look at: what sort of information processing (including interpretation and assessment) are necessary in a world where larger and larger amounts of information are available (cf. CIA problem of turning acquired information into intelligence via analysis).

Drucker characterized the company's goal as "to conduct pre-employment screenings that would help companies meet their obligation to conduct fair and consistent hiring practices while protecting the privacy of job candidates." This raises another interesting question: if an agent has a mandated responsibility for some level of due diligence and information is, technically, available, will a company necessarily sprout up to collect and provide this information? Where would feasibility, cost, and the uncertainty of interpretation enter the equation? Can the employer, for example, err on the side of caution and exclude the individual who joined the Facebook group because that fact MIGHT mean something that the employer could be liable for not having discovered? Will another company emerge that helps to assess the likelihood of false positives or false negatives? What about if it is only a matter of what the company wants in terms of its corporate culture? Can we calculate the cost (perhaps in terms of loss of human capital, recruitment costs, etc.) of such technically assisted vigilance?

Anonymity and the Demise of the Ephemeral

2011-06-21T11:37:00.000-07:00

The New York Times email update had the right headline "Upending Anonymity, These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone" but made a common mistake in the blurb: "Pervasive social media services, cheap cellphone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts have made privacy all but a thing of the past."

It's going to be important in our policy conversations in coming months and years to get a handle on the difference between privacy and anonymity (and others such as confidentiality) and how we think about rights to, and expectations of, each.

There's a long continuum of social information generation/acquisition/transmission along which these various phenomena can be located:

artifactual "evidence" can suggest that someone did something (an outburst on a bus, a car broken into, a work of art created)
meta-evidence provides identity trace information about the person who did something (a fingerprint, a CCTV picture, DNA, an IP address, brush strokes)
trace evidence can be tied to an identity (fingerprints on file, for example)
data links can suggest other information about a person so identified

Technology is making each of these easier, faster, cheaper and more plentiful. From the point of view of the question, whodunnit?, we seem to be getting collectively more intelligent: we can zero in on the authorship of action more than ever before. But that really hasn't much to do with "privacy," per se.

As Dave Morgan suggests in OnlineSpin (his hook was Facebook's facial recognition technology that allows faces in new photos to be automatically tagged based on previously tagged photos a user has posted) the capacity to connect the dots is a bit like recognizing a famous person on the street, and this, he notes, has nothing to do with privacy.

What it does point to is that an informational characteristic of public space is shifting. One piece of this is the loss of ephemerality, a sharp increase in the half-life of tangible traces. Another is, for want of a better term on this very hot morning in Palo Alto, "linkability"; once one piece of information is linked to another, it can easily be linked again. And this compounds the loss of ephemerality that arises from physical recording alone.

From the point of view of the question asked above, the change can mean "no place to hide," but from the point of view of the answer, it might mean that the path to publicity is well-paved and short.

Some celebrate on both counts as a sort of modernist "the truth will out" or post-modernist Warholesque triumph. But as pleased as we might be at the capacity of the net to ferret out the real story (the recent unmasking of "Gay Girl in Damascus" yet another example), the same structure can have the opposite effect. The web also has immense capacity for the proliferation and petrification of falsehood (see, for example, Fine and Ellis 2010 or Sunstein 2009).

Thus, it may well be that the jury is still out on the net effect on the information order.

See also :"No Such Thing as Evanescent Data"

animal diminutives

2011-06-08T18:27:00.000-07:00

At the risk of straying too far off the sociology of information trail, may I report a conversation from this morning's ride down to CASBS and request your assistance?

My ride partner mentioned a conversation with a "cub reporter" the other day. Why, we wondered, is Ursus the right genus for journalists? And what animal diminutives do we use for other professions?

If baby sharks are called pups, should new law firm associates be called pups? And same with those just getting started out in the human smuggling business? How about beginner loan sharks? Or sleazy wheeler dealers at the start of their career: snakelets? Hatchlings?

If an editor has an eagle eye, is an editorial trainee a eaglet? Do others come to mind?

And back to the journalists: why are they bears? OED gives first occurrence as 1899 J. L. Williams in Scribner's Mag.25 277 "The cub reporter and the king of Spain." and lists two other "cubs": engineer and (river boat) pilot (both from M. Twain. And one of the definitions of "cub" is "An undeveloped, uncouth, unpolished youth" with the explanation that it comes from the idea that "the young of the bear was fabled to be born in a shapeless condition, and afterwards licked into shape by the mother" and the earliest usage is Shakespeare in "Twelfth Night" (1623).

So, let me put the question out there -- do you know of any other animal diminutives that we apply to beginners in various professions or trades?

Adding Sociology of Information Blogs to the Blog Roll

2011-05-10T11:45:00.000-07:00

Up to now our sidebar included the names of blogs that linked to The Sociology of Information. Now that the field has started to achieve something of a latent critical mass out there, I'm evolving the blog roll in the direction of "other blogs on the topic" which is really more useful.

First entry is Drew Conway's Zero Intelligent Agents blog. Drew is a PhD student in political science at New York University who studies terrorism and armed conflict using tools from mathematics and computer science. Much of the material on the blog is more on the techie side of things (it's an extremely useful resource in this regard) but interspersed with news about python routines and R utilities is much grist for the sociologist of information's mill.

Toward a Wikipedia of Sociology

2011-05-03T14:18:00.000-07:00

Every few years one gets a request from the editor of an encyclopedia of social theory or globalization or social research. Some publisher has succumbed to the idea that a new compendium is needed and some senior scholar has succumbed to the idea that "the time has come...." Or, some senior scholar has managed to cajole some junior scholar into doing most of the work on a project that will bear the senior scholar's name. OK, that last might be a little harsh. What's next is someone conjures up a list of usual suspects (or, more likely, a series of database searches produces such a list). Then someone sets up a content management system and an editor at the publisher solicits articles on behalf of the senior scholar editor -- usually with promise of a complimentary copy of the finished volume(s) as an honorarium

I wonder, though, if the days of this genre are numbered. Would it not make sense to create an encyclopedia of sociology for and by card-carrying sociologists? Mightn't crowd-sourcing disciplinary knowledge be superior to the limited intellectual resources represented by centrally selected article authors and the limited review of a small handful of editors? I mean, the typical encyclopedia article probably has fewer peer reviews than most articles get.

What if a professional association opened up a wiki with a single restriction: you have to be a member to edit and you have to edit under your own identity. Beyond that, no central control.

To be realistic, this is probably much more openness and flexibility than most professional associations could ever tolerate. There'd have to be a committee of members and probably a report to the executive committee or something like that that would turn the endeavor into as close a clone of the traditional encyclopedia as possible.

So, maybe what has to happen is that the project has to start with a small group of renegades. And so, just by way of testing the waters, that's what I am proposing.

You sociologists out there, are you game?

Reinventing Research? Information Practices in the Humanities

2011-04-26T17:44:00.000-07:00

[re-blogged from Resource Connection : April 26, 2011]

A project of the Research Information Network (RIN) focuses on the behaviours and needs of researchers working in the humanities.The goal of RIN study is to:

"develop an in-depth understanding of humanities researchers’ approaches to discovering, accessing, analysing, managing, creating, reﬁning and disseminating information resources;
"provide comparisons between the behaviours and needs of researchers in different subjects/disciplines, research teams or institutional contexts;
"identify barriers to more effective performance in using, creating, managing and exchanging information resources, and suggest how they might be overcome."

The report is based on interviews and focus groups with academics responsible for digital humanities projects such as Old Bailey Online, Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, and The Digital Republic of Letters, projects they've arrayed in a two dimensional attribute space defined by computational complexity and collaborative complexity:

The report is available to download from Information use: case studies in the humanities - Report

No Such Thing as Evanescent Data

2011-04-22T15:16:00.000-07:00

Pretty good coverage of the "iphone keeps track of where you've been" story in today's NYT "Inquiries Grow Over Apple’s Data Collection Practices" and in David Pogue's column yesterday ("Your iPhone Is Tracking You. So What?"). Not surprisingly, devices that have GPS capability (or even just cell tower triangulation capability) write the information down. Given how cheap and plentiful memory is, not surprising that they do so in ink.

This raises a generic issue: evanescent data (information that is detected, perhaps "acted" upon, and then discarded) will become increasingly rare. We should not be surprised that our machines rarely allow information to evaporate and it is important to note that this is not the same as saying that any particular big brother (or sister) is watching. Like their human counterparts, a machine that can "pay attention" is likely to remember -- if my iPhone always know where it is, why wouldn't it remember where it's been?

It's the opposite of provenience that matters -- not where the information came from but where it might go to. Behavior always leaves traces -- what varies is the degree to which the trace can be tied to its "author" and how easy or difficult it is to collect the traces and observe or extract patterns they may contain. These reports suggest that the data has always been there, but was relatively difficult to access. It's only recently that, ironically, due to the work of the computer scientists who "outed" Apple, that there is an easy way to get at the information.

Setting aside the issue of nefarious intentions, we are reminded of the time-space work of the human geographers such as Nigel Thrift and Tommy Carlstein who did small scale studies of the space-time movements of people in local communities in the 1980s and since. And, too, we are reminded of the 2008 controversy stirred up when some scientists studying social networks used anonymized cell phone data on 100,000 users in an unnamed country.

http://www.agocg.ac.uk/reports/visual/casestud/southall/visual.htm

Of course, the tracking of one's device is not the same as the tracking of oneself. We can imagine iPhones that travel the world like that garden gnome in Amelie and people being proud not just of their own travels but where there phone has been.

See also

Data Exhaust and Informational Efficiency

2011-04-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

Heard an interesting talk by Paul Kedrosky a few weeks ago at PARC titled Data Exhaust, Ladders, and Search.

The gist of the talk is that human behaviors of all kinds leave traces which constitute latent datasets about that activity. Social scientists have long had a name for gathering this type of data: unobtrusive observation. Perhaps the most famous example is looking at carpet wear in a museum as a way of figuring out which exhibits captured the most visitor attention or garbology and related "trace measures used by anthropologist W. Rathje in the 70s and 80s.

One of Kedrosky's nicer examples was comparing aerial view of Wimbledon center court at the end of a recent tournament with one from the 1970s. The total disappearance of the net game from professional tennis was clearly visible in the wear patterns on the grass court.

Infectious Greed Blog

In addition to a number of neat examples of using various techniques to capture "data exhaust" (indeed, he suggests, it's the entire principle behind google), he asks the question: What are the consequences of an instrumented planet? That is, a planet on which more and more data exhaust is captured and analyzed, permitting better decisions and more efficient choices.

In fact, one of the comments on Kedrosky's blog post about the talk (by one J Slack) suggests a continuing move toward "informational efficiency" -- with more and more instrumentation generating data and more and more connectivity, he suggests, "we'll be continuously approaching an asymptotic efficiency, though never quite getting there."

A standard definition of informational efficiency is "the speed and accuracy with which prices reflect new information" (TheFreeDictionary.com). But there is some circularity here -- in this context it's only information if it does affect the price, otherwise it's mere noise. And so we're still left with the challenge of sorting out the signal from the noise even after the data has been extracted from the exhaust. And the more of everything the more of a job it is.

Bottom line: I think "data exhaust" is a great concept, but I don't think perfecting is capture and analysis gets you to a fully efficient use of information about the world (even asymptotically). The second law of thermodynamics kicks in along the way for starters, but the boundedness of human cognition finishes the job.

Somebody is probably going to point out that evolution already does this. But it takes big numbers and lots of time to do it and the result, though beautiful, is messy.

More to think about here, to be sure.

radio + internet + letter to your senator = democracy in action

2011-03-06T23:04:00.000-08:00

This project, reported by WNYC and npr's On the Media is one of the best uses of web crowd sourcing I've heard about.

They ask listeners across the country to write their senator asking whether s/he placed a particular anonymous hold and then to submit the response. To date they collected 96 written denials and four "it's none of your business!". Step two is to reword the question and have residents of four states pose them in writing. Rather brilliant.

I also love the implicit claim to inequality in the "it is our privilege to keep secrets from our constituents" stance. This is what Gillian and I are writing about in our paper "Democracy and the Information Order."

Sociology of Information in the News

2011-02-21T15:33:00.000-08:00

A flurry of sociology of information items in today's New York Times:

"Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins"
"Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter"
"TV Industry Taps Social Media to Keep Viewers’ Attention"
"100 Years Later, the Roll of the Dead in a Factory Fire Is Complete"

Information and the Humanities

2011-02-21T09:45:00.000-08:00

New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen has been on the "ideas and intellectual life" beat for sometime and has recently produced some excellent pieces of potential interest to the sociologist of information:

A Digital Future for the Founding Fathers." January 30, 2011. The University of Virginia Press is in the process of putting the published papers of Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin on a free Web site.
"Scholars Recruit Public for Project." December 27, 2010. A project in London is using crowd-sourcing to transcribe 40,000 unpublished manuscripts of the Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
"In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture." December 16, 2010. A Google-backed project allows the frequency of specific words and phrases to be tracked in centuries of books.
"Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches." November 16, 2010. Digitally savvy scholars are exploring how technology can enhance understanding of the liberal arts.
"Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers." December 3, 2010. A computer-generated process gives scholars a view into Victorian thought.

Outflanking "the Human" with Information

2010-12-28T13:09:00.000-08:00

Two stories in NYT today about data crunching. One on mapping neuron connections in mice to understand how brains work. The other on using statistics to detect possible cheating on standardized tests.

The brain research takes thin slices of brain tissue and maps connections between neurons in a really BIG (petabyte per mm3) data mining operation. The research is in the infancy stage, but eventually one can imagine having a full circuit diagram of a brain. Interesting implications possibly grasped by either researchers or the articles author:

Neuroscientists say that a connectome could give them myriad insights about the brain’s function and prove particularly useful in the exploration of mental illness. For the first time, researchers and doctors might be able to determine how someone was wired — quite literally — and compare that picture with “regular” brains.

Experts quoted in the article debate whether the research is promising enough to spend millions on. But this comment about defining normal or regular brains is not one of the concerns they mention. What are the informational implications of having a data set that describes the connections of a "normal" person?

The second article, "Cheaters Find an Adversary in Technology," reads as a shameful bit of commercial promotion masquerading as journalism, but does usefully illuminate the worldview of the standardized test industry. The story is about a company that uses statistics to detect cheaters. Their algorithms are designed to detect things like similar patterns of wrong answers, changed answers, and big improvements in test scores. If a group of students all misunderstood something in the same way it would look like cheating. And a test taker who "saw the light" at one point and went back and changed several answers will look like a cheater. And the thing we do most in school, attempt to teach people stuff, if successful would lead to big improvements in test scores. But that too, according to the experts, would look like cheating.

There is an arrogance about testers (the gentleman profiled calls himself (unselfconsciously, notes the journalist) "an icon" -- (those who have never heard of him are poorly informed)) that consistently rankles. And their self-promotion as agents of fairness and meritocracy (recall The Big Test) is simple hypocrisy. More problematic, though, is the influence on teaching, learning, and scholarship of a regime that bases its authority and legitimacy on science and objectivity, but that shrouds itself in secrecy and lives OFF rather than FOR education.

Why these two articles together? They suggest a sort of pincer maneuver against "the human" based in information -- on one flank, structure, define the normal brain to a (particular) giant matrix of ones and zeros, while on the other, behavior, treat statistically unusual patterns of activity as morally suspect. "Super Crunching" may be a way of the future, but one might lament the likelihood that it is THE way of the future, crowding out or delegitimizing other forms of inquiry into the human condition. Together, these two articles suggest the imperative of an affirmative complement to our fascination with what we CAN do with information.

Source Mentions and Allusions

Ayres, Ian. 2008. Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart
Foucault, Michel. 1995 (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Gabriel, Trip. 2010. "Cheaters Find an Adversary in Technology." New York Times, December 27, 2010
Swedberg, Richard. 2000. Max Weber and the idea of economic sociology
Vance, Ashlee. 2010. "In Pursuit of a Mind Map, Slice by Slice." New York Times, December 27, 2010

Wikileaks Mirror Servers Geographic Visualization

2010-12-14T12:15:00.000-08:00

A fascinating Google Earth visualization of the wikileaks mirror sites worldwide.

An Interesting Web Book "App"

2010-12-13T16:28:00.000-08:00

What reminds you of what? When one reads -- or hears about -- a book, one almost unconsciously make connections -- this book is a little bit like that book. When you tell someone you are interested in some topic s/he will often say, "well, then you should have a look at ...."

I just stumbled across a web resource, http://www.librarything.com/, that implements this as a combination of a personal library catalog and a social network. It allows you, virtually, to surf your own library and connect from books you know to books that are related to it. Users "tag" books creating a interesting way to slice through the database. Try these, for example: sociology, history, philosophy, economics. And it keeps an eye on where a given book is available -- libraries, bookstores, online digital sources, used book networks (like abebooks.com).

When I played around with it looking for books on the sociology of information I got a bookshelf that nearly mirrored my the books in front of me on my study's shelves, but with a few titles I was unfamiliar with :

Wikileaks Conversation Continues

2010-12-08T11:50:00.000-08:00

Interesting piece in NYT blog "The Lede" about online activists' response to credit card companies and PayPal "blacklisting" Wikileaks.

The entry includes the YouTube "manifesto" of the group (or, rather, decentralized network) "Anonymous" that claims to be at the center of this backlash.

The Times Blog gives a list of related posts:

An Old Idea Wikileaks has Gotten Me Thinking About Again

2010-12-05T22:47:00.000-08:00

I have been sitting on a thought experiment for some years now. Well, not exactly sitting on it -- have written a bit about it and teach it in my "sociology of everyday life" class.

It starts from Simmel's observation (in "How is Society Possible?" -- a brilliant essay, BTW) that a starting point for understanding social interaction has to be the recognition that the human condition involves awareness that one can never completely know the mind of the other. No matter how intimate the relationship, there is material held back.

So, imagine this. One day, god gets a funny idea. S/he suddenly makes people's mental content available to those around them. All the fleeting thoughts, the quick little zigs and zags our minds make (making a cake with my mom, talking with her while I washed the dishes about her mother's death, stealing wet cement from that construction site where I smoked my first cigar, Denise my "girlfriend" in seventh grade though I liked Kim better, that pad Thai tonight was tasty if a bit heavy, I can't believe I mistakenly bought 2% milk the other day -- all that between these two sentences and this report highly censored) fully audible to anyone around us. Everyone her own Ulysses. How exactly it would work, I'm not sure -- but imagine that there's some way that the cacophony of it all would be sorted out and we'd be privy to the internal conversations of those around us (and they ours -- and both of us privy to our reactions to what we were hearing).

So, god does this for maybe 15 minutes and then shuts it down. This would I think, have a profound effect on us. God would be amused. But the s/he gets another idea: before heading off to other realms, s/he announces "that was so much fun, I think I'll do it again sometime."

That, I propose, could be the end of social life as we know it.

Wikileaks and Protecting Your Sources

2010-12-03T15:57:00.000-08:00

In the NYT, Alan Cowell wrote today about reactions among diplomats to the WikiLeaks leaks. In the middle of the story we read:

A Chinese intellectual, who spoke in return for customary anonymity, said the disclosures had left those like him who had contact with United States diplomats “nervous” about the possibility of exposure and persecution by authorities who have already blocked access in China to the WikiLeaks Web site.

I don't want to equate journalistic secrecy with government secrecy, but I'm surprised, as I suggested in a previous post, that there's been no commentary (or at least none I've seen -- anyone have a reference?) on the irony of the secrecy and confidentiality given sources (as above) by the media vs. the ones revealed in the leaks.

NOTE: it appears that in a lot of the material that's been put online by media organizations some redaction of source information has been carried out.

FTC Proposes "Do Not Track" Option for Consumer Privacy

2010-12-01T15:48:00.000-08:00

The Federal Trade Commission released a preliminary report, "Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change," for public comment today. Among other things, it did suggest the "do not track" option for web surfers. Here's the NYT article on the report.

A few weeks ago E. Wyatt and T. Vega wrote of the then forthcoming FTC report on net privacy in "Stage Set for Showdown on Online Privacy" (NYT November 9, 2010):

"Consumer advocates worry that the competing agendas of economic policy makers in the Obama administration, who want uniform international standards, and federal regulators, who are trying to balance consumer protection and commercial rights, will neglect the interests of people most affected by the privacy policies. “I hope they realize that what is good for consumers is ultimately good for business,” said Susan Grant, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America."

The report contains what look like some good, balanced, and practical guidelines for how consumers and information collecting entities interact on the web and elsewhere.

I'd like to propose, as a thought experiment, a more radical approach. What if we started from the premise that everyone owns her own information. You own you opinions, your attitudes, and the traces your behavior might create. If this information is valuable to another entity, they are free to bid on it. We don't need privacy protections, we just need an infrastructure that will allow for a market for private information to operate.

A website or a retailer can have an offer, right at the front door: if you want to browse here, I want to know your name and take note of what you look at. The consumer, in return, can say, you can watch me, for 5 dollars. Consumers can make money by moving around the net and generating value. The entities who host websites on which behavior turns into information turns into value would also be entitled to a share.

Now take the idea a step further. Suppose rather than selling my information I agree to license it. This time I say, you can watch me for $5 but down the road, if any value accrues to you by virtue of you aggregating my information with that of others, I want a cut. As my information goes upstream, up the aggregation pyramid, it becomes a component in something valuable: I deserve a share.

Of course, we'll be told this is completely impractical. Retailers and other entities would just build in the cost. And the transaction costs would be too high. Maybe. But we've got micro-credits worked out at the level of single click-throughs. I don't think the barriers would be technical.

From Information Superhighway to Information Metrosystem

2010-12-01T15:28:00.000-08:00

The new FTC report on consumer privacy has an interesting graphic in an appendix. It purports to be a model of the "Personal Data Ecosystem." It's interesting as an attempt to portray a four-mode network : individuals, data collectors, data brokers, and data users. The iconography here seems to be derived from classic designs of subway and underground maps.

From http://www.ftc.gov/os/2010/12/101201privacyreport.pdf.

The genre mixing in the diagram invites, on the one hand, a critical look at where the FTC is coming from in the report (which, in my limited experience of digesting FTC output looks relatively well done) and, on the other, points toward a need to better conceptualize the various components and categories.

Under "collectors," for example, we have public, internet, medical, financial and insurance, telecommunications and mobile, and retail. The next level (brokers) includes affiliates, information brokers, websites, media archives, credit bureaus, healthcare analytics, ad networks and analytics, catalog coops, and list brokers. Finally, on the info users front we have employers, banks, marketers, media, government, lawyers and private investigators, individuals, law enforcement, and product and service delivery.

It's a provocative diagram that helps to focus our attention on the conceptual complexity of "personal information" in an information economy/society. More on this to follow.

Leaking Irony

2010-11-30T08:32:00.000-08:00

While I work on more extended analysis of the WikiLeaks situation (among other things the obvious connection to my work on how geometries of information sharing are co-constitutive of social relationships and statuses), a small irony must be noted.

Apparently, several news organizations have had the material recently made public since August. Editors and reporters have been meeting in secret to develop protocols about what would be reported, when, and how. Fortunately for their work, it appears that these journalists managed to do all of this while maintaining the kind of secrecy necessary for them to be able to process the information and to consider its meaning and its implications out of public view. The public, media, and official reaction of the last few days make clear why this secrecy was necessary.

One thing that would be interesting to hear a story on would be what measures were taken to ensure the security of the process. What sorts of technological tools were employed? What sorts of social tools? Did participants have to sign confidentiality agreements? What prevented a rogue reporter from reporting on the reporters reporting?

Work Slowdown in Soc of Info

2010-11-12T13:45:00.000-08:00

Readers,

Have been swamped with teaching and administrative work of late, and trying to spend two days a week at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences has me on a slow blogging output these days.

Am working on pieces on forms (the kind you fill out) as rationalizing filters and "information interaction protocols," the assumptions behind pending online-privacy proposals (from Commerce and FTC), the soc of info implications of the story of the CIA official knew that a Jordanian contact was a problem (a la double agent -- he later blew himself up at a remote CIA location), and what it means when we make moral judgments about people's ignorance of some thing (as in, "she didn't even know what hip-hop was!").

Meanwhile, thanks for reading. Would love to read any comments you might have -- are there there?

Cheers,

Dan

Peer to Peer Education: Can Students Teach One Another?

2010-10-17T13:36:00.000-07:00

One of society's major "information institutions" is, of course, the university (and colleges, too). In these institutions information is generated, classified, evaluated, sanctioned, organized, and systematically disseminated.

There are lots of interesting experiments going on in and around the university connected with its various fundamental information functions (e.g., opentextbook.org, wikibooks, OpenCourseWare, and, of course, all manner of distance learning). Each of these experiments plays with changing how we think about one piece of the education equation.

I've just come across one that takes the university itself out of the picture: The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). P2PU is structured as an online community of open study groups whose members engage one another in short university-level courses. Their model is to connect open educational resources and small groups of motivated learners. P2PU supports the endeavor with a course infrastructure that facilitates course design by an "organizer," interaction among participants, access to materials, and methods for recognition of students' and tutors' work. Initially focused on more technical skills, the organization seems very committed to making sure that P2PU is an ongoing, distributed research project on the topic of new ways to organize learning.

The video below is a bit amateurish on the production side, but gives some idea of the why and the how behind P2PU. The project also maintains a wiki that gives you a sense of how they do what they do.

Peer 2 Peer University 2010 from P2P University on Vimeo.

Do Organizations that 'Fess Up Do Better?

2010-08-09T22:19:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey W. McCarthy, a retired chief medical officer for the V.A., wrote, in a letter to the NYT on 9 August in response to an article on radiation overdoses in medical tests about two approaches to how organizations manage information about organizational errors. He notes that the issue illustrates the contradictions between "risk management" and "patient (or passenger or client or consumer) safety."

He notes that the risk manager will say "don't disclose" and "don't apologize" because these could put the organization at legal or financial risk. A culture of safety and organizational improvement, though, would say "fully disclose," not because it will help the patient, but because it is a necessary component of organizational change. The organization has to admit the error if is going to avoid repeating it, he asserts.

This suggests a number of sociology of information connections, but we'll deal with just one here. This example points to an alternative to the conventional economic analysis of the value of information. The usual approach is to "price" the information in terms of who controls it and who could do what with it (akin to the risk manager's thinking above). But here we see a process value -- the organization itself might change if it discloses the information (independent, perhaps, of the conventional value of disclosure or non-disclosure). One could even imagine an alternative pricing scheme that says "sure, Mr. X might sue us, but by disclosing the information we are more likely to improve our systems in a manner that lets us avoid this mistake in the future (along with the risk it poses to us and the costs it might impose on society). Why pour resources into hiding the truth rather than into using the information to effect change?

One rebuttal to this says that an organization can do both, and maybe so. Another would say that this is just mathematically equivalent to what would happen in litigation (perhaps through punitive damages).

But I think that Mr. McCarthy is onto something in terms of "information behaviors." There are, I expect, a whole bunch of "internal externalities" associated with what we decide to do with information. In other places I've examined the relational implications of information behavior. This points to another family of effects: organizational. More to come on this.

Information and Educational Assessment I

2010-08-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

In a letter to the NYT about an article on radiation overdoses, George Lantos writes:

My stroke neurologists and I have decided that if treatment does not yet depend on the results, these tests should not be done outside the context of a clinical trial, no matter how beautiful and informative the images are. At our center, we have therefore not jumped on the bandwagon of routine CT perfusion tests in the setting of acute stroke, possibly sparing our patients the complications mentioned.

This raises an important, if nearly banal, point: if you don't have an action decision that depends on a piece of information, don't spend resources (or run risks) to obtain the information. The exception, as he suggests, is when you are doing basic science of some sort.

Now consider, for a moment, the practice of "assessment" in contemporary higher education. An industry has built up around the idea of measuring educational outcomes in which a phenomenal amount of energy (and grief) is invested to produce information that is (1) of dubious validity and (2) does not, in general, have a well articulated relationship to decisions.

Now the folks who work in the assessment industry are all about "evidence based change," but they naively expect that they can, a priori, figure out what information will be useful for this purpose.

They fetishize the idea of "closing the loop" -- bringing assessment information to bear on curriculum decisions and practices -- but they confuse the means and the ends. To show that we are really doing assessment we have to find a decision that can be based on the information that has been collected. Not quite the "garbage can model of decision-making," but close.

Perhaps a better approach (and one that would demonstrate an appreciation of basic critical thinking skills) to improving higher education would be to START by identifying opportunities for making decisions about how things are done and THEN figuring out what information would allow us to make the right decision and THEN how we would best collect said information. Such an approach would involve actually understanding both the educational process and the way educational organizations work. My impression is that it is precisely a lack of understanding and interest in these things on the part of the assessment crowd that leads them to get the whole thing backwards. Only time will tell whether these scientist-manqués manage to mediocritize higher education or not.

Open Science : A Sociology of Information Topic par excellence

2010-07-29T16:05:00.000-07:00

Conference at Berkeley this weekend on changing the way we think about scientific knowledge http://opensciencesummit.com.

From the conference website

Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science

July 29-31 International House Berkeley

Synthetic Biology, Gene Patents, Open Data, Open Access, Microfinance for Science, DIY science, DIY Biology, Alternative Funding for Science, Open Source Drugs, Patent Pools, Open Health/Medicine, Patient Advocacy for Innovation

"Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for a truly free and open 21st century knowledge economy? Join us at the first Open Science Summit, an attempt to gather all stakeholders who want to liberate our scientific and technological commons to enable an new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve humanity's greatest challenges."

A Few Limits on Copyright

2010-07-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

Until a few days ago, most of us did not know that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 empowers/requires the Librarian of Congress to "determine whether there are any classes of works that will be subject to exemptions from the statute’s prohibition against circumvention of technology that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work" (U.S. Copyright Office 2010). But it does.

And here's what's changed as a result of James H. Billington's tri-ennial interpretation.

(1) College professors (in general) and students (in film and media studies, at least) can circumvent DVD security measures to include snippets of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment for educational purposes. A similar exemption exists for documentary filmmaking and noncommercial videos.

(2) You can hack programs on your phone if the purpose is to get programs you have legally obtained to work together. This is interpreted to mean you can "jailbreak" an iPhone and load non-Apple apps.

(3) You can hack programs on your phone if the purpose is connect it to a telecommunications network you are authorized to connect to. In other words, you can hack your Iphone so it works on Verizon.

(4) You can hack a video game you own if it's just for testing or fixing security flaws as long as you don't use the information you get from the process to help folks violate copyright.

Dongle

(5) If you own software that's protected by a dongle and you can't use it because the dongle is broken and no replacement available then you can hack the software to get around the dongle.

(6) If you have an ebook and all existing ebook editions disable read-aloud, then you can hack it to make it read-aloud. In other words, if the copyright owner doesn't offer to sell a read-aloud enabled version then you can break the controls that prevent read-aloud on a copy you own. Note that it seems that the publisher could offer for sale a million dollar read-aloud-enabled version to get around this. Presumably, the exception won't unravel retroactively -- the question will be was the read-aloud-enabled version available on the day you hacked the control.

Sources

U.S. Copyright Office. 2010. "Statement of the Librarian of Congress Relating to Section 1201 Rulemaking."

Wortham, Jenna. 2010. "In Ruling on iPhones, Apple Loses a Bit of Its Grip," New York Times July 26.

Regulating the Supply of Law

2010-03-12T11:34:00.000-08:00

From the "Friends and Relatives of the Department" Files...

The ways that states regulate professions is a topic of sociological interest. The degree to which citizens have access to legal services to solve legal problems is a topic of sociological interest. As argued previously on this blog("Equality, Information and the Courts Redux," "Democracy and the Information Order," "Courts and the Information Order," "Suing for Information"), the way the courts work is a topic of sociology of information interest. In this op-ed, these issues come together in a sociologically interesting way. You may recognize the author of the piece as my sometime co-author (and wife).
-- Dan.

A case for legal aid at Wal-Mart

By Gillian Hadfield

Friday, March 12, 2010

The United States stands largely alone in advanced-market democracies in drastically restricting where and how people can get help with their legal problems. In all states, under rules created by bar associations and state supreme courts, only people with law degrees and who are admitted to the state bar can provide legal advice and services of any kind. [Read More]

Technologically Induced Social Alzheimers

2010-02-05T00:09:00.000-08:00

David Pogue has a nice little piece called "Why We Make Home Videos" on the NYT website. It's basically a personal tale in defense of home videos, but he starts out reminding readers of something he's written about a number of times, data rot.

Data rot is the tendency for technology to evolve so fast that we are all left with lots of information stored on media for which there no longer exist a device to play it. The implication of this is that society as a whole "has" lots of information that it might have no way of accessing. Hence the title of this post. Of course the ironic thing is that the social problem is hardware outstripping the memory while in the personal case its sort of the hardware failing the memory.

But it points to an interesting idea: perhaps the explosion of information -- and our general capacity to store, move, and process it -- comes with some self limiting counter tendencies. One is complexity -- too much information, no one has the synoptic view or cleverness to understand what it means. Another is the connect the dots problem I've written about here. Yet another is data rot -- backwards compatibility always has its limits. I wonder if anyone has sat down to map out what sorts of information are likely to move into the darkness of rot when. Are all the data on punch cards gone from the social memory yet? How about all those 24 inch fixed disk platters we used to get mounted on our System/370 machine? I know my college thesis on it's 8 inch IBM Series/1 diskette is basically lost to time. What else?

Related Posts
"The More Information the Better"?
What Society Knows

Three Kinds of Information Sensitivity

2010-01-31T10:35:00.000-08:00

OK, a naive meditation on three modes of paying attention to the world.

Pretend you are a politician, perhaps a senator or member of congress. What do you pay attention to?

Some would have us believe that poll numbers are the most important. You open your mouth, emit a sound bite, the media disseminates it, people react and respond to polls, and you adjust accordingly. Depending on your point of view, that's either democracy in action or appalling pandering. In either case, the opinions/reactions of "the people" are aggregated via some presumably reliable and accurate method.

Another theory would be that you are listening to powerful interests who have your ear and who donate to your campaign. Your comments are probably a little more proactive than reactive -- they've let you know what they want to hear and so you make sure you say it. But as above the whole thing is a cycle -- we get the initial attention by saying things and then it cycles from there. In this case, though, the method for aggregating the reactions (and pre-actions) of donors is harder to suss out. Tally up the dollars? Is there a pecking order? Or a "one topic each" rule?

A third approach would be that you apply accepted methods of policy analysis and make use of trustworthy data to decide what policies would best achieve desired aims. Here information is aggregated and decisions made using generally accepted (and open) methods. Of course, deciding on those aims is an information problem that can bring us right back into one of the first two approaches, but we'll set that aside for the moment.

My guess is that a system COULD run on any of these three approaches to information processing. What presents a challenge to govern-ability, though, is when one or more of these is the public face of what's going on while another one is what's going on behind the scenes. Or, worse, when the actors themselves don't really have a handle on when they are using one or another to try to ascertain how to govern.

And yes, this could be seen as an attempt to translate direct democracy, some variation on aristocratic pluralist democracy, and technocracy (help me on the terms, polisci friends) into information terms.

New Digital News Outlet from KALW

2010-01-19T14:13:00.001-08:00

This week KALW is launching its new local digital magazine to complement their broadcast work. The new site has a way for community leaders to plug in and help them do a better job of reporting on the arts and other community events and issues. Users can become "community correspondents". Check it out, help them tell others about it and together we can do a better job of becoming the media we want to create.

Here's the magazine: http://www.kalwnews.org/

This is the community page: http://www.kalwnews.org/community

And here's their FB group to stay in touch: http://www.facebook.com/pages/KALW-News/195280839624

Great Info Blog and Interesting Sounding Conference (NY Feb)

2010-01-08T21:39:00.000-08:00

Check out Graham Webster's excellent blog for some insightful essays on topics not unrelated to those I'm writing about here. It's called:infopolitics/

While reading through that blog, came across mention of an interesting conference to be held in February at the New School in NYC: Conference on Information Flow Restrictions at the New School. It actually had me looking at plane ticket prices and thinking "whom do I know that I could stay with...." If you know how little I like to travel during the semester, you get the idea that I was intrigued.

Those damn unconnected dots again (rough draft)

2010-01-06T00:00:00.000-08:00

An article in the Times, under the headline "Obama Says Plot Could Have Been Disrupted," reprises the metaphor of "connecting the dots" to describe different pieces of information having been in different heads, but never getting put together in one head that could make sense of them.

It is reassuring that Obama's speaking bluntly about organizational performance rather than riding roughshod over the constitution, but, as argued in an earlier piece ("Mind the Gap"), the idea that it's a simple problem of dot connecting is a basic misconception.

How do you hear "connect the dots"? One version is reminiscent of a detective show or Agatha Christie novel; the challenge is to assemble hints -- pieces of information that, alone, are not conclusive proof of anything -- in such a way that the "answer" emerges as a sort of logical necessity. The "logic" is in the mind of the beholder, but that's all.

A different version is reminiscent of the we draw lines between stars and come up with "constellations." Two things are important. One, the stars are not really next to one another -- the viewer is the one who sees them as points on a plane and interpolates and extrapolates the other vertices of the figure. Two, there's no there there -- the crab in cancer or the warrior in Orion has to be brought to the observation by us.

The first requires us to have all the pieces on the table and be open to what they "tell us" when seen together. The challenge for intelligence agencies is to put the information from various sources onto the same table.

The second requires us to decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore (left), how to connect and not connect (middle), and what to add that's not there (right).

If we increase the degree of information sharing we fill up our field of view with more and more points and the dots get harder and harder to connect.

On the other hand, if we ask the different agencies to filter the information then we are back in hot water because none of them know what they are looking for.

The president was furious about the failure of the system to see "the red flags" and intelligence agencies are reported to have said that the information they had was "vague but available." The problem is that flags are not, in general, a priori red. Presumably, some smart people are thinking about how systems see and things like that; hopefully, they don't just think of it as "connect the dots."

We observe with some irony that the actual policy response to the problem -- at least the response that's been announced -- is in fact to gather more information via increased screening.

Oh, and if we look up "connect the dots" in Wikipedia you get a short article about a children's game. It bears a Wiki-warning: "This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards."

Who Uses That?

2009-12-23T18:21:00.000-08:00

As the year wraps up I'm going over unpublished drafts of posts. Came across this one from September that hints at (or at least resonates with) the posts on "infermation."

In our bathroom stands a toothbrush stand and in that toothbrush stand stands a gum stimulator. It is/was mine, but I rarely use it. It's basically abandoned property -- to the point that I sometimes look at it and wonder whose it is.

I was looking at it today and had a "take the role of the other" moment. I wondered what other members of my household made of the gum stimulator. I felt pretty sure that they (OK, I'm talking about one person in particular, so "she") took it to be mine; she knows it as "Dan's gum stimulator." There is no way she can detect the change in the object's status -- the fact that it's become an abandoned artifact, that I look at it and don't know whose it is (but at some level I remember because I haven't yet thought it was hers) -- because if it is used, or rather when it was used, it was used in private. Her access to the object is the same as it ever was: "not mine, only one other person routinely uses this bathroom, must be his.").

This started me thinking about the general category of things that are in plain sight, but about which one has no direct, experience based knowledge of who uses them or what they are used for because they are used by whoever it is that uses them out of our purview.

Those keyboxes at various locations in office buildings. The number tags on utility poles. Spray painted numbers on streets.

This brings up a series of related socio-epistemological categories. Equipment that's used out of sight and generally kept out of sight, is closely related to the above. Perhaps we need a distinction between the mysterious (stuff that you just don't know who uses it how for what) about which one could become curious, but usually does not, and stuff that you presume is used by particular others for perhaps known purposes (though, in fact, like my gum stimulator it might be used for nothing by no one). Then there are the things that I know are yours but I have no idea what you do with them (tools, perhaps) and am just comfortably ignorant. Another category might be things that are superficially shared but that embody some of the secret side of the other. And so on.

The point, I think, is related to Simmel's observation that one can never know the other entirely. That's one of his a prioris of the human social condition. This extends to objects which we know (or suspect) to be objectifications of subjectivity (made by, used by, related to) without fully grasping the subjectivity they embody.

More...

Information about Infermation

2009-12-23T18:04:00.000-08:00

Alas, it turns out that I (and my Bangalore colleague) may not be able to claim coinage of the term "infermation" as introduced in a recent post. The term shows up in 2004 in LexiconWiki, a wiki for playing a variant of the Lexicon Game. The initial definition there is different from ours:

Infermation is what we can know about something from reports of that thing.

since our definition distinguished three categories: (1) information derived from experience, (2) information derived from the experience of others (and reported to us and taken as the case because of trust in the provenance), and finally, (3) that which can be inferred from either of these by the application of some sort of logic -- infermation.

But they add an interesting twist as their definition continues:

Infermation is most commonly available about long lost texts, and the pattern of human history means that many sources of Infermation are several generations removed from the thing under examination.

You may rightly be getting suspicious of this source as it is starting to sound odd (and it gets odder), but, let's do note that there are some things that would fit both definitions. Two examples that come to mind are proto-languages and "ur-texts." For historical linguists, known languages and the logic of linguistics allow us to infer the existence of proto-indoeuropean, even though no examples have ever been found. Similarly, we sometimes posit the existence of a never found "ur-text" that must have preceded some known text. So far so good, but their definition starts to head off into other directions after this, progressively verging on nonsense (in the conventional, not Wittgensteinian, sense):

Sources may, obviously, vary a great deal, ranging from direct assessments, both academic and popular, of the thing in question, to notes and references, index lists, bibliographies, catalogues and assorted general remarks. The acceptance of Infermation as valid and valuable has allowed academics to make many advances that would otherwise have been impossible. The Infermatic industry, which first flourished on Alphas, has grown throughout the academic community, promoting and assessing the use of Infermation and producing dedicated Infermatics for both academic and general consumption. [read more]

From there the 2004 source veers more and more off the road. After intense scrutiny, my confidence in our (re-)coinage has returned. Maybe I should have typed "infermation tm"

Stop! What's going on in your head right now??

2009-12-23T13:43:00.000-08:00

Noted with interest: "Taking Mental Snapshots to Plumb Our Inner Selves*." A UNLV psych professor, R. Hurlburt, tries to do some systematic phenomenology by having research subjects report on their "inner states" at randomly chosen moments.

His critics say you can't expect research subjects to be honest, that they "twist" responses to conform to their biases or what they think the researcher's expects, and that the problem is you can't capture these inner state "as they happen" but only in retrospect (even if relatively short amounts of retro). The most illuminating comment was "The experience sampling work is a reasonable first step, but only that; the claims need to be followed up and backed up by objective studies."

Objective studies these days usually means brain-imaging studies. Another expert interviewed for the article noted "[t]he brain imaging setting is very sterile."

What's in it for us as sociologists of information? Nice concrete example of the epistemological clash between objectivity and introspection and question of "know-ability." One scientist quoted in the story noted that there might be "no good way to study [the] question [of inner experience content]." Hurlburt himself notes that he may be up to what William James described as "turning up the gas to see what darkness looks like."

* New York Times

Scientist at Work: Russell T. Hurlburt

Taking Mental Snapshots to Plumb Our Inner Selves

By JASCHA HOFFMAN

Published: December 22, 2009

Infermation : A New Concept

2009-12-15T13:19:00.000-08:00

My tracking software tells me that a reader from Bangalore arrived here this morning from a google search for cricles and infermation. After a chuckle at the misspellings, I was intrigued by the fact that one of my posts was the second search result until I noticed that I'd engaged in a bit of SEOing by introducing the same typo into that post's title last February :"Notificational Webs in Cricles of Friends".

More importantly, though, this little bit of synergistic finger slippage has led me to (collaboratively, I'd have to say) formulate a new concept: infermation.

What is "infermation"? All that I know about the world that is neither from direct experience nor from reports from trusted sources, but is implied by all that stuff when operated on by whatever tools of logic and entailment I have at hand. These of course, will be context dependent (framing) and "mood" dependent (am I feeling hyper-rational just now?) and so on. Gives us a nice taxonomy of "my world": experience based information, received information, a set of inferential tools, and all of my "infermation."

Still lots to work out on this (and some hard thinking to do about what existing concepts it recapitulates) but it looks promising. So, thanks to that provocative mis-typer on the other side of the world.

Sexting: New Info about an Info Behavior

2009-12-15T12:53:00.000-08:00

Pew Internet and American Life Project came out with a new report on "sexting" today. The basic findings: prevalence of sexting "ever" among teens overall is in the 10-20% range. Sexting seems to be an evolving element in teen "courtship behavior."

I was disappointed, though, with the "just-this-side-of-moral-crusading" feel of the report. The tone is not explicitly alarmist, but it is a soft ball pitch to those who will turn it into media hoo-ha. Expect a number of misleading articles to appear in the media to be followed by researchers decrying media distortion. But whose fault: consider the flaws in just this one report in terms of what we give the media to work with.

A Hesitance to Criticize Previous Research
As background they describe previous surveys, done by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and others. One found ~20% of teen participants had sent and ~30% had recieved a sexually suggestive picture or video of themselves to someone via email, cell phone or by another mode. In another 9% had sent, 3% had forwarded one, and 17% had received. All of these surveys seemed to have some methodological problems that would put wide-error bars on these numbers but the report just hints at these.

Slightly Fuzzy Numbers
This report is based on a survey of 800 young people plus focus groups.In the new study, the acknowledged margin of error for the full sample of 800 is about +/- 4%. For subgroups, it will be higher -- for the 1/6 sample of each age year, for example, it's about +/- 8%.

And then the report says

4% of all cell-owning teens ages 12-17 report sending a sexually suggestive nude or nearly-nude photo or video of themselves.... [among t]he oldest teens in our sample – those aged 17 – ... 8% ... hav[e] sent one, compared to 4% of those age 12.....

But given the margin of error, all we can say is that somewhere between 0 and 8% of all teens and somewhere between 0 and 16% of 17 year olds have sent a suggestive picture of themselves. The authors do a great job of including background on the survey and footnoting margins of error and such but they leave it up to the savvy reader to make something of these. All these numbers are pretty small -- this reader, at least, thinks responsible researchers should do a little more to drive home this point than this report does.

A Missing "Network" Angle
The authors don't make much of the fact that the number of folks who have sent is consistently lower than the number who have received. This implies, and their qualitative data seems not to deny, that the practice is not informally controlled by a norm of "just between you and me babe" and that the ease of distribution and the difficulty of detection and potential for sheer high volume make the transaction costs of informal control prohibitive. Obvious, but important.

Percentaging in the Wrong Direction
The media pitch is furthered by doing percentages in arguably the wrong way. Consider this paragraph:

Teens who receive sexually suggestive images on their cell phones are more likely to say that they use the phone to entertain themselves when bored; 80% of sexting recipients say they use their phones to combat boredom, while 67% of teens who have not received suggestive images on their phone say the same. Teens who have received these images are also less likely to say that they turn off their phones when it is not otherwise required – 68% of receiving teens say they generally do not turn off their phones when they do not have to, and 46% of teens who have not received suggestive images by text report the same “always on” behavior (page 6).

As is, it risks being parody: those who receive naughty pictures are more likely to use their phones to combat boredom than those who do not! But presumably the point here is to compare types of cell phone users and so the percentages should be done the other way round: among boredom combatters, what percent get baudy pictures? A quick, back of the envelope recalculation* suggests it would look like this:


	Use vs. Boredom	Not vs. Bordedom
Received	~108 (20%)	~27 (11%)
No Received	~445 (80%)	~221 (89%)
	==== ~553	==== ~247

That's actually a little more compelling (and certainly easier to make sense of). The rate is twice as high among the "I use my phone to combat boredom" group. But both are relatively low.

A similar methods 101 error is made when reporting what interventions make sense:

One parental intervention that may relate to a lower likelihood of sending of sexually suggestive images was parental restriction of text messaging. Teens who sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images were less likely to have parents who reported limiting the number of texts or other messages the teen could send. Just 9% of teens who sent sexy images by text had parents who restricted the number of texts or other messages they could send; 28% of teens who didn’t send these texts had parents who limited their child’s texting (page 12).

It is unlikely that the authors are thinking that sexting causes parental restrictions -- the sense is just the opposite -- and so the percentaging should be within the categories of parental behavior and comparison across these. This should look like this (again, based on quick, back of the envelope, calculations*).


	Parental Restriction	No Parental Restriction
Ever Sent	~3 (1.4%)	~29 (5%)
Never Sent	~215 (98.6%)	~553 (95%)
	==== ~218	==== ~572

Again, this doesn't overturn the take-away -- it might even be argued that it strengthens it: lack of parental cell phone restriction associated with a 3 to 4 fold increase in the behavior -- but we researchers should put our best practices forward to as we dump our results and findings into the information environment around us.

* Calculations

Text says 

Just 9% of teens who sent sexy images by text had parents who restricted the number of texts or other messages they could send; 28% of teens who didn’t send these texts had parents who limited their child’s texting.

And

4% of all cell-owning teens ages 12-17 report sending a sexually suggestive nude or nearly-nude photo or video of themselves to someone else.

Thus: 0.4 x 800 = 32 sent and 768 did not

Of senders, 0.9 had restrictive parents: = 2.88 = ~3

Of non-senders, 0.28 had restrictive parents: = 215

Total restrictive parents = 218, total non-restrictive 572

Text says

80% of sexting recipients say they use their phones to combat boredom, while 67% of teens who have not received suggestive images on their phone say the same.

Total sexters is 4% or 32.  80% of these is ~27 sexters who combat boredom.

Non-sexters are 768 and 67% of these is ~515.

Total boredom combatters is ~553, non-boredom-combatters is ~247.

Mind the Gap

2009-11-11T09:45:00.000-08:00

Slatest passes along a story, "Military Wasn't Told of Fort Hood Shooter's E-Mails," that appeared in today's Wall Street Journal as "Agencies See Gaps in Sharing."

The Slatest post is a great example of saying "OHMYGOD...actually might not be much of a story here," the WSJ article is a little less so. Both make out the story to be "we spent millions after 9/11 to improve information sharing but here's a clear case where information wasn't shared just like in olden days" (with the implication (though the articles admit this is not a sure thing) that things might have turned out differently if information had been shared).

Some sociology of information fundamentals at work here. The WSJ article actually describes what sounds like a pretty thorough process of assessing whether or not to pass along information. For what sound like good reasons, the decision was not to. Now, maybe they need to revisit the structure of their decision process (and this is not necessarily true as no one appears to have shown that the information would have made a difference), but that's different from the story being that agencies are not sharing information.

A senate official is quoted saying "[a]ll signs are indicating that something wasn't put together." But this might be misleading. The article uses a favorite phrase from 2001, "connecting the dots," and speaks of "intelligence gaps." I think both of these are uttered too glibly and unanalytically. These sorts of events bring out massive displays of "hindsight bias" -- the tendency to see things after the fact as a lot more predictable than they really were.

There is probably also a problem with the geometric metaphor of intelligence gaps. We might be able to distinguish topological gaps (information in one place does not reach another place) from topographical gaps (the empty spots in information that any particular knower has access to). When an event like Fort Hood occurs, we start to fantasize about a world in which the gaps pointed to by hindsight would have been bridged over. But to guarantee that we probably need to posit a world in which there are no gaps, but that's a world in which everyone knows everything and without a division of informational labor, the whole thing grinds to a halt.

We need to zero in on how humans share relevant information with those for whom the information is relevant. Competent nodes in an information network have good working models of the relevance systems of the nodes they are connected with. We don't want to eliminate intelligence gaps, we want to make the gaps (read links) more intelligent. And that probably comes most from interaction. And that's something that organizations and agencies are not naturally prone to. What the analysts should look at is what we've spent the millions of dollars on in our quest to fix the intelligence gaps rather than just implying that the effort has been wasted.

Information Abhors a Vacuum?

2009-11-07T17:05:00.000-08:00

Great essay today by Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition. He called it "The Bombastic Fog Engulfs Fort Hood."

Long story short: very quickly after the events at Ft. Hood on Thursday afternoon there were items appearing in the media providing all manner of explanation of things that might or might not have anything to do with those events.

Simon's initial diagnosis is the structure of modern mass communication itself "...in these days where almost anyone can find some kind of audience." A certain kind of event, such as mass killings on the U.S. Army post, "encourages people to analyze and speculate in advance of a lot of actual facts."

He goes on to give a few other examples and then zeroes in on how journalists ran with the idea of pilot fatigue when some airline pilots missed their destination a few weeks back, making the jump from the speculation of experts in the absence of direct knowledge of the circumstances and details of an event to research on the science and politics of pilot fatigue. Any number of stories along this line were produced only to be proven irrelevant (in Simon's on-the-mark characterization) when, upon investigation, it turns out the pilots were playing with their laptop computers.

This reminds me of a few things. One is the propensity of some journalists (and some social scientists, too) to decide very early on "what the story is." That's what your editor wants to know as soon as you pitch an idea -- what's the story, what's the angle? We've all been contacted by a reporter looking for a quote that confirms a particular line they've decided to take in the story or a student who is looking for some research that supports a particular conclusion she wants to draw.

The second thing is that competition for eyeballs and ears forces people who talk and write for a living to talk and write whether or not they have anything to add to our collective knowledge. Dead air is bad.

Those are professional errors, malpractice, if you will, even if of a mundane sort.

There's probably something else going on too -- something more at the "information order" level than the professional practice level. It is fundamentally difficult for a community to learn of an "untethered" fact (unconnected, that is, to a story that grounds it in the web of our taken-for-granted worldview (Weltanschauung)) without someone stepping up to tell a story that does ground it in the known.

And so, the urge that insiders sometimes have to not announce something prematurely "because it will lead to speculation" is probably not nearly the pathology we often make it out to be.

After listening to the essay I began to think about thought experiments in how to balance the incentives. If, as Simon says (that phrase was going to come up in this essay sooner or later), it's because its so easy to "find some kind of an audience" (or at least a soapbox around which there could be an audience), then maybe we (members of the chattering classes -- both amateur and professional) should give some consideration to what we'd say if there were a word tax as well as a word rate. If what you have to say turns out to be irrelevant, not only do you not get your $2 per word, you actually have to pay the rest of us for the bit of our information universe you filled up with worthless drivel.

Notification on TV

2009-11-07T16:30:00.000-08:00

Once you start thinking about notification, you see it everywhere. Just in the last few days, it's figured centrally in episodes of PBS's "Masterpiece Mystery: Inspector Lewis" and AMC's "Madmen" (see also 9.20.2008 and 9.8.2008).

In episode 12, "The Grownups," Pete chats with Harry with the TV turned down. The audience can see Walter Cronkite talking about a news flash from Dallas but Pete and Harry are too engrossed in their conversation. We cringe knowing what they don't know but are about to find out. Other characters then crowd into Harry's office to watch the news. Don emerges from his boss's office to see the main work area basically empty but all the phones ringing. He's beside himself trying to figure out what's going on. Then he does. Later a few of the characters talk about the fact that they "just had to call" so and and so (this even though news of the assassination was one of the most quickly diffused messages in history up to that point.

And, of course, about half of the dramatic tension of the entire show is generated by all the secrets kept by characters from one another (with the audience tipped off and forced to watch painfully as characters they care about remain in the dark).

SPOILER ALERT. In the "Inspector Lewis" episode titled "The Quality of Mercy," Lewis' Sergeant discovers some information about Lewis' wife's death a few years earlier. He gets the info on a phone call while Lewis is sitting next to him but says "oh, nothing" when Lewis asks him what it was about. When he eventually tells Lewis later that day, Lewis is furious and takes it as a sign that their relationship is really quite flawed. Sergeant Hathaway explains that he withheld the information because of their relationship, but Lewis pretty much says "we don't even have one if you thought it was O.K. to wait to tell me."

Information Forms in Everyday Life

2009-10-31T11:58:00.000-07:00

News in recent years have featured a wide-array of "information problems" as background story. Setting a few of these side-by-side lets us get a sense of what I mean by "informational forms."

"Stove-piping" happens when "raw information" is inappropriately transmitted directly to higher-ups without being "vetted" which refers to systematic "sifting, disambiguating, analyzing" (Wikipedia).

In news organizations and financial organizations information can threaten conflicts of interest and so "firewalls" or "Chinese walls" are maintained : an information barrier that prevents members in one part of the organization from knowing what's going on in another part (news and advertising in journalism, analysis and investment in banking).

When this effect is generated inadvertently we have "information silos" -- situations in which entities have information that one, the other, or both could benefit from sharing that does not occur because of ignorance, lack of compatible systems, or organizational jealousies.

There are also cases where the problem is neither a deficit of information in a particular organizational location nor disregard for standard procedures but variations on information overload or "too much information" (see post from 20080915). In these situations we have real world phenomena generating so much information that it's nearly impossible to construct an apparatus that is up to the task of figuring out what it means. At one extreme we have issues of transparency and democracy -- is there a point at which more information does not help voters make informed decisions because they simply can't expend the energy necessary to make sense of the information? At the other is information -- and here the financial industry is the example -- that's simply too difficult for those who need to understand it to understand.

Next, I'll work on turning these preliminary examples into a typology of information forms -- identifying the underlying dimensions along which they are arrayed with hope of completing the typology with as yet unexamined forms.

The Social Organization of Collective Blindspots

2009-10-09T14:12:00.000-07:00

Floyd Norris has a piece in the NYT under the headline "When Law Obscures The Facts." In it he describes a -- fill in a word that is the opposite of a loophole -- in the 1995 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. The law was passed at the urging of corporations to limit what they saw as "frivolous" investor lawsuits. One of its provisions, according to Norris, is investor lawsuits that allege fraud must be highly specific and concrete about what the fraud was or be subject to summary dismissal.

This means the suit can be dismissed before the plaintiff gets to do any discovery. And so there's this Catch-22: you can't sue unless you can detail the fraud, but you can't detail the fraud unless you can force the defendant to disclose information.

The irony that drives Norris' article is that in the wake of the 2008 collapse of the auction-rate securities market a lot of corporate investors that had purchased these securities are being excluded from settlements in which Wall Street is reimbursing other investors.

There are various theories about what happened in this market. The guy who invented it, Ron Gallatin, thinks it was a matter of salespersons simply not understanding what they were selling. Others think it was more explicitly fraud that led to investors buying things that they didn't know what they were.

As Norris puts it:

If there ever is a wide-ranging trial, we might get to see which issues of auction-rate securities were owned by Wall Street firms in the summer and fall of 2007, and how much they sold before the collapse. We might learn if the firms understood risks they did not mention to customers.

But that will not happen if judges continue to prevent such cases from proceeding even to the discovery process. Corporations that cheered the 1995 law may discover it keeps them from having a chance to recover their own losses.

This episode goes into the file for my chapter on "the social organization of ignorance" -- another example of how institutions and structures can systematically reduce the amount of information available in the social world. It's related to "democracy and the information order," as Gillian Hadfield and I have written about (also the subject of several other posts in this blog: here and here), reminds us a bit of Robert Proctor's concept of "agnotology," and resonates at least a little with some points raised by Mark Danner in an NYRB article about torture last spring (where he argued that we need to know the answer to the question "did it work?" in order to have a responsible political discussion)

Works Mentioned

Danner, Mark. 2009. "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites: ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody by the International Committee of the Red Cross" New York Review of Books Volume 56, Number 6 · April 9, 2009
Hadfield, Gillian and Dan Ryan. 2008. "Democracy and the Information Order"
Proctor, Robert N. and Londa Schiebinger (eds.). 2008. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford University Press.

Surveilance Raised to the Second Power

2009-09-18T21:26:00.000-07:00

The following article appear about a week ago over the AP business wire. It turns out that parents who "spy" on their children may be unwittingly helping corporations to spy on them too. It's very valuable to folks in marketing to know what kids are talking about. If you believe the companies that make/sell the child surveillance software to parents, the information being collected is not associated with the kids' names but it is tagged with information about the kid (ironically, often entered by the parent when s/he sets the software up in the first place).

One easy take-away is the idea that norms about spying on kids are highly dependent on who is doing the spying and why. If you have legal custody of the kid and you are trying to protect her from predators, spy away. If you are a commercial entity who wants to listen in to the kids' chats, you're crossing the line.

Bunch of sociology of information questions emerge in what looks in the article to be real mishmosh of thinking about this phenomenon. We see talk of "targeting children" (by marketers), "putting the children's information at risk" (not really sure what that means), legal issues of collecting data from kids and having parents' permission implied if software is installed, and so on. What doesn't get thematized is that this is yet another example of trading a service for your information. In pure economic terms it can be written off as an exchange, that, if people do it, must be identifying an equivalence in value (as in, "it's worth it to me to play this game at the cost of the provider can observe what kind of music I like"). In fact, though, I suspect that these dimensions of value are more orthogonal than is being pretended. It works because of multiple slights of hand -- one isn't really sure what information one is giving up or what is happening to it or one doesn't get to evaluate those questions until after certain commitments have been made or it's just plain too complicated to find out.

Look for another post soon about FaceBook applications and quizzes and the kinds of information give-aways and grab-ups that they involve.

Web-monitoring software gathers data on kid chats

* By DEBORAH YAO, AP Business Writer - Fri Sep 4, 2009 5:16PM EDT

Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids' online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered.

Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.

"This scares me more than anything I have seen using monitoring technology," said Parry Aftab, a child-safety advocate. "You don't put children's personal information at risk." [Read More...]

The "Is More Information Always Better?" File

2009-09-02T14:58:00.000-07:00

Monica Davey's article "Case Shows Limits of Sex Offender Alert Programs" in the NYT (2 Sept 2009)raises a number of interesting sociology of information issues.

The basic story is that sex offender registration policies did not seem to do much good in the case of a California man found out last week to have kidnapped a young girl and held her for 19 years in his back yard. The alleged perpetrator was a registered sex offender, reported regularly to a parole officer, and wore a GPS tracking device, and law enforcement officials had visited and looked around his home.

It is, I think, a bit of a red herring to argue that this case shows a weakness of the registry system as it exists. But the conversation does point to some important issues about the mechanisms by which we expect "public information" to produce "public goods."

So what are the questions here? The most obvious one, expressed in general terms, is how much prevention does tracking actually provide? Another is whether or not the zealous inclusion of every minor sex-related offense (the article cites, as an example, a one-time flasher) over-taxes law enforcement and blinds society to "the real problems." A proponent of registries who was quoted in the article said

“Look, nobody ever suggested that registering sex offenders is going to remove sex offenders from the planet, but let’s at least make sure they’re not working in your elementary school or coaching the soccer team.”

I don't think the research is entirely clear as to whether the law accomplishes this or not, but it points to an interesting question. The registries are online and searchable, with the idea that this amounts to information empowerment that keeps state officials accountable -- a kind of open-government move: if the official don't do their job, the public will find out. But, of course, "the public" suffers from the same information overload that police departments do. Knowing that there are 1500 registered sex offenders in your county may not be all that helpful in terms of making decisions about where to live, send your kids to school or how high a fence to build around your pool. Some "experts" say we should make some distinctions and prioritize rather than lumping teenage sex in the same category as a violent rape and kidnapping. But that raises 5he challenging problem of where to draw the line. I'll bet the equilibrium in that game is always over on the side of TMI -- too much information to be really useful. In other words, most collectives would opt for more information than they can "make sense of" even if it means they will "see" less than if they had less information.

Let's Take It Seriously

2009-08-23T07:48:00.000-07:00

To my colleagues in higher education: Let's take assessment and accountability seriously AS AN INSTITUTION. There is a tendency to equate assessment with measuring what professors do to/with students. The buzz word is "accountability" and there's this unspoken assumption that the locus of lack of accountability in higher education is the faculty. I think that assumption is wrong.

We should broaden the concept of assessment to the whole institution. Course instructors get feedback on an almost daily basis -- students do or don't show up for class; instructors face 20 to 100 faces projecting boredom or engagement several times per week; students write papers and exams that speak volumes about whether they are learning anything; advisees tell faculty about how good their colleagues are. By contrast, the rest of the institution has little, if any, opportunity for feedback. It's important: one substandard administrative act can affect the entire faculty, so even small things can have a big negative effect on learning outcomes.

In the name of accountability throughout the institution I propose something simple, but concrete: every form or memo should have a "feedback button" on it. Clicking on this button will allow "users" anonymously to offer suggestions or criticism. These should be recorded in a blog format -- that is, they accumulate and are open to view. At the end of each year, the accountable officer would be required in her or his annual report to tally these comments and respond to them, indicating what was learned, what changes have been made or why changes were not made.

The important component of this is that the comments are PUBLIC so that constituents can see what others are saying. Each "user" can see whether her ideas are commonly held or idiosyncratic and the community can know what kind of feedback an office is receiving and judge its responsiveness accordingly.

Why anonymous? This is feedback, not evaluation. This information cannot be used to penalize or injure anyone. The office has opportunity to respond either immediately or in an annual report. Crank comments will be weeded out by sheer numbers and users who will contradict them. In the other direction, it is clear that honest feedback can be compromised by concerns about retribution, formal or informal. Further analysis along these lines would further support the idea that comments should be (at least optionally) anonymous.

We should note that we already do all of this in principle -- many offices around campus have some version of a "suggestion box." What is missing is (1) systematic and consistent implementation so that users get accustomed to the process of providing feedback, and (2) a protocol for using the feedback to enrich the community knowledge pool and to build it into an actual accountability structure.

The last paragraph makes the connection to a sociology of information. Information asymmetries (as when the recipient knows what the aggregate opinion is, but the "public" does not) and the atomization of polities (this is what happens when opinion collection is done in a way that minimizes interactions among the opinion holders -- cf. Walmart not wanting employees to discuss working conditions -- preventing the formation of open, collective knowledge*) are a genuine obstacle to organizational improvement. Many, many private organizations have learned this; it's not entirely surprising that colleges and universities are the last to get on board.

* as opposed, say, to things that might be called "open secrets"

Conference on Information and Networks

2009-08-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

A Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN) will be held at the Stern School at NYU in late September. Here's how they describe what they are up to:

The increasing availability of massive networked data is revolutionizing the scientific study of a variety of phenomena in fields as diverse as Computer Science, Economics, Physics and Sociology. Yet, while many important advances have taken place in these different communities, the dialog between researchers across disciplines is only beginning. The purpose of WIN is to bring together leading researchers studying ‘information in networks’ – its distribution, its diffusion, its value, and its influence on social and economic outcomes – in order to lay the foundation for ongoing relationships and to build a lasting multidisciplinary research community.

Madoff, Courts, Information, and Reform

2009-07-02T09:19:00.000-07:00

NPR's All Things Considered carried a piece on 29 June titled "Madoff Victim: Financier's Apology Does Nothing" that contained an interview with, Miriam Siegman, an investor who lost her life's savings to Madoff who had spoken in court at the sentencing hearing. The interviewer asks Siegman whether the experience offered any catharsis.

It did not:I guess not really and the reason I say that is...what I think all of us had hoped for was the truth that might have come up at trial. You know, when you have a trial you have subpoena power and people get on the stand and are cross-examined....

She goes on to say that she worries that there will be meaningful changes to the system.

When a comment like this is heard from someone engaged in a lawsuit we sometimes dismiss it as window dressing covering up the fact that, really, "it's about the money." But in this case the statement comes from someone who (1) is not going to receive money, (2) has, in fact, already lost all her money, and (3) who got from the court one result she wanted -- a maximal sentence for the defendant.

Two things are sociologically interesting here. First, Ms. Siegman says "I think all of us had hoped for" and she speaks of change of the system. These are not empty and platitudinous comments, I think. This is an example of "speaking for society." In fact, the judge, in explaining the 150 year sentence he imposed, spoke of the importance of symbolism, an important dimension of "the social." But Ms. Siegman's answer points us toward something important. The interviewer was asking "did the courtroom process provide you with any emotional or psychological benefit?" and she replied not just "no" but by changing the terms of the question. This is not about the emotional payoff from "having one's say" but rather about the court as a venue where we, collectively, can find out, as equals, what others, who have set themselves over us (she'd earlier said that she felt that Madoff had treated his victims like "roadkill") know. This is precisely the "informational equality" that Gillian Hadfield and I have written about under the phrase "Democracy and the Information Order" (also the subject of several other posts in this blog: here and here).

Siegman's statement is a perfect illustration of the social value of the informational role of courts. The victims got the most they could have hoped for on the vengeance dimension, but because the case was settled with a plea bargain they were denied something important. Legal efficiency was perhaps achieved -- punishment was meted out at minimum expense. But perhaps this was done at a cost: a deficit in the democratic function of law -- victims and non-victims, equal members of the democratic polity are left wondering how this happened, how this could happen. It may be that various official inquiries by the SEC, by congressional panels, by the Madoff trustee, or by investigative journalism will ferret out answers to such questions, but the victims, the people, will be passive recipients of the information produced by those processes, not equal participants in the asking.

And she may also be right on a social-efficiency dimension: reform might be more likely if the courts got to play this informational role in a case like this. But that's an empirical question.

Google, Trademarks, Society, and Information

2009-05-15T10:24:00.000-07:00

Reports today of a potential class action lawsuit against Google on behalf of trademark holders in Texas. At issue, apparently, is Google practice of allowing companies to "buy" as search words the trademark of a competitor. Thus, Dell, for example, could pay Google so that when someone searches for "Gateway," Dell appears high in the search results or a Dell ad appears in the "sponsored links" box.

Apparently, trademark owners say that this "use" of a trademark is violation of their property rights. Audrey Spangenberg, a software company owner who filed the suit, suggested:

It is inappropriate for Google to sell my trademark for a profit. It really misleads our customers and our potential customers.

The theory here would be that a company has invested in the creation of its brand identity (which "exists" in the minds of all of us out here who recognize the trademark and have particular associations with it) and that the other company is profiting from the use of this "thing" that the trademark owner has built. The word itself is physically in an index on the Google server and when the user types it in an action is triggered and this action is potentially profitable to the other company.

(She uses the word "misleads" here because that's a key concept in the law of trademarks -- more on this idea below.)

That's fine as far as it goes, but it makes a mistake that is common in conversations about trademark, copyright, brand identity, and so on. And that mistake is forgetting to think about the substance, the "thing-ness" that's of value. That substance is an association in my head, in all our heads. If, as a consumer, I do a search for "Gateway," it is likely that I am looking for, say, a personal computer. Fortunately for Gateway Corporation, I have some association in my head between this category (what I am actually looking for) and their trademark. But what I am trying to do is get the best deal on the best computer I can find. I use a search tool called Google to pursue my goal. Will Gateway begrudge me the use of my association between their trademark and the category I'm looking for? The fact that I use "Gateway" as a gateway to "good computer"? Do they really want to suggest that my association of their trademark with a generic category should serve to obscure, in practice, other entities in that category? And that if it does not do that -- if it, in fact, leads me into the very marketplace where I can find out who else sells computers -- that it is misleading me? Do they think they own my associations? Do I mislead myself by using their trademark as a lever with which to locate many things in the category of interest to me?

In fact, I think they are renting my associations and they should be paying me for their use. Their entire "brand identity" (the value of which, by the way, they are allowed to put on their balance sheet as an asset) exists in our heads. Is my slipping and saying "xerox" instead of photocopy a whole lot different from putting a xerox logo on my car? They might pay me for the latter, but not for the former.

Why is any of this important for a sociology of information? Because figuring out what kind of property different types of information represent is a big project for the 21st century. A significant portion of the information that is valuable to corporations resides in consumer interest, practice, and their social networks. The social, in other words, is creating a lot of the value of information.

Think about this in connection with recent debates about copyright in which it is implied that all the value of, say, a Beatles song, resides in the song itself. If we, collectively lose interest, there's nothing there at all. If, on the other hand, we hum along, talk about it, dance to it, request it on the radio, play covers of it, etc. then it has value. The record company wants all the value to lie in the thing itself because that's what they control and that's what they know how to extract value from. But without the social, they got nuffin'.

The Origins of Life/Information

2009-05-14T19:35:00.000-07:00

Now you will know I'm a little loonie.

In a former life I spent a lot of time studying chemistry and mathematics and I have for some time been thinking about molecules and information. In particular, I've been puzzling over the question of how information carrying molecules like RNA and DNA came into existence and how they manage to "code" for more information than they "contain." And I've been recently urging the idea of catalysis as a metaphor for infrastructure on my partner.

And so I was quite excited to read Nicholas Wade's report in this morning's Times ("Chemist Shows How RNA Can Be the Starting Point for Life") on the work of John D. Sutherland and colleagues at the University of Manchester. The abstract of their article in Nature this week starts out like this:

At some stage in the origin of life, an informational polymer must have arisen by purely chemical means.

They go on to describe how molecules that could be present in a pre-biotic "warm pond" -- cyanamide, cyanoacetylene, glycolaldehyde, glyceraldehyde and inorganic phosphate -- can react to form the building blocks of RNA. (The chemistry of the reaction is shown in a nice series of graphics here.)

Can I say something really clever about what this really has to do with the sociology of information? No. But stay tuned. I can connect back to that comment about infrastructure and catalysis, though. The authors of the article note that the presence of phosphate not as an reactant but earlier in the process:

its presence from the start is essential as it controls three reactions in the earlier stages by acting as a general acid/base catalyst, a nucleophilic catalyst, a pH buffer and a chemical buffer.

In other words, its presence changes the environment, makes possible reactions that energetics would otherwise forbid or discourage. That seems like an interesting definition for infrastructure.

Information and Fairness

2009-05-02T16:59:00.001-07:00

Insider trading is a classic example of the instrumental value of information and it reminds us of how markets are socially constructed (not in the sense that they are figments of the collective imagination but in the sense that they generally need the support of some social norms, rules, and laws in order to function well.)

The New York Times reported last November (in "S.E.C. Accuses Mark Cuban of Insider Trading") that Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has been accused of selling all of his shares in a company a few hours after receiving confidential inside information suggesting the stock price would drop. At first glance it would appear that the "bottom line" is the monetary value of the information (that Cuban had but others did not), but consider how a source explained things, as quoted by the article's writer: "It is fundamentally unfair for someone to use access to nonpublic information to improperly gain an edge on the market." The "technical" reason for prohibiting insider trading is that markets can fail if people think others have private information, but this comment suggests that there's a social norm at work too: it's just not informationally fair.

Friends of Friends

2009-04-04T11:29:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about social networks today, and how they grow. In particular, I've noticed that sometimes when I "make" a new friend on Facebook, I comb over their friend list to see if there's anyone on it that I should try to friend.

And so, I've been trying to coin a term for this (maybe someone already has -- probably someone already has). The first candidates I considered were friend-poaching, friend-lifting (via shoplifting), and friend-pilfering (to steal in small quantities).

A focus on going through the friend lists (rather than the act of making the friend request) might be called friend-prospecting (I like the triple entendre here -- one of looking for precious minerals, the other of a salesperson sending out feelers, "looking for prospects," and lastly, the image of scanning the horizon (of your network)); related would be "friend-foraging."

I rejected words like pillage or appropriate because you don't remove them (friend as non-zero-sum phenom). That imagery pushed me to think about friend-piracy, friend-cribbing, and friend-plagiarizing. Friend-sponging has the attraction by analogy to friends using friends. Friend-riding as a variation on free-riding captures something essential, especially among those who ONLY get their friends this way (thereby contributing little to other folks' ability to do the same*).

I'm working on a simulation that analyzes how network structures change if this is the dominant mode of growth. Stay tuned for an online applet illustrating this.

Any ideas? Any of these strike you as closer to the mark to describe what you are doing when you scan friends' friend lists? Or what you think about others doing this to yours? Or friends who are only connected this way ("you didn't think of me yourself! you just saw me on X's list!")?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts. If you are interested, I also just started the "virtual focus group" blog as an experiment in collecting data on things like this.

*Important from network analysis point of view, though, is that this would not be completely true since if I forage among the friend lists of multiple friends, everyone I manage to snag becomes available to all of my friends.

Whose Information?

2009-03-26T14:29:00.000-07:00

Robert Smith had a piece ("Sept. 11 Families Want Confidential Files Released") on NPR's Morning Edition today that dovetails nicely with a number of posts that have appeared here* on the relationship between courts and the information order. Our argument has been that courts play a role in enacting an important relational component of equality in a democracy: under certain circumstances, formal equals cannot arbitrarily withhold information from one another.

The three remaining plaintiffs are arguing that materials they've obtained during the discovery phase of their trial -- materials about airline and airport security on 9/11 -- should be made public. The defendants are claiming that the material is meant for "the lawyers' eyes only."

The case reminds us of the informational role played by courts and civil litigation. As generic members of the public who happened to have been singled out by having a relative killed on 9/11 these plaintiffs are exercising their formal informational equality before the court. They get to say "tell us what you know about that day" and the usually much more powerful organizations are not allowed, in this forum, to say, "we don't have to tell you."

Now the question is whether their right to ask (and be answered) is tied to their formal status as equals before the court as a place where information "comes to light," or whether it's interpreted in strictly transactional terms -- since their lawsuit requires the information, they may see it, but the other party gets to maintain its right to say "we don't have to tell you" to the public at large.

Even apart from how the judge rules on the contest between the public interest of disclosure and the private interest of confidentiality here, in light of the frenzied demand for "confidential corporate information" from the bailed out insurer AIG in recent weeks, we might remind ourselves that the airlines received a pretty hefty bailout from the taxpayers after 9/11. Perhaps they'll want to be careful about how vigorously they argue that the public does not have the right to know.

*See these posts:

Information Rot

2009-03-26T08:23:00.000-07:00

A whole chapter in my book on the sociology of information will be about information permanence and impermanence and so this posting by David Pogue caught my eye: "Should You Worry about Data Rot?" It's text of an interview that was a part of a video piece he did for CBS a few weeks ago. The basic idea is that we store our data on media that are subject to degradation and that require for play back hardware or software that have short lifetimes. We are left with the problem of constantly "migrating" our data to new formats.

An important observation : the pace at which data recording formats become obsolete and unreadable is accelerating. The experts cited in the piece suggest we are currently at the ten year mark -- at this point, one needs to migrate to new media every ten years.

The video piece ends with the observation that there's never been, nor ever will be, a data recording technology that lasts forever. Of course, one's first thoughts go to clay tablets from ancient Persia, which seem to have held up rather well. True, but of all the clay tablets ever produced, we have, in all likelihood, but a small fraction. But then, given what's on most of them (e.g., records of grain sale transactions or inventories of food storage), it's not clear that the information order is impoverished by their absence. Of what fraction of our current information holdings could the same be said of. One wonders, but one migrates one's own data, just in case.

Foolishness as a Fount of Robustness

2009-03-23T14:05:00.000-07:00

It has often been said that information is at the heart of the current economic crisis: markets grind to a halt as opacity erodes trust between investors.

In many of the diagnostic dissections of the crisis foolishness plays a central role, foolishness in the form of ill-advised risk-taking. In the wake of either getting burned or seeing others get burned, the players all withdraw to the sidelines, unwilling to put their money on the line.

We envision a process of rebuilding that will involve clearing out the bad assets, replenishing reserves, rewriting regulations, finding fault and assigning responsibility. In short, we imagine that it won't be over (that is, the players won't venture back out into the game) until all the t's have been crossed and all the i's have been dotted.

But maybe we'll yet be rescued by the very same foolishness that got us into the problem in the first place. It might well be that just a few glimmers of hope, a few signs that the government knows what it is doing or is willing to step up to the plate, at least a mild indication that the loonier folks won't be allowed to demagogue, a few bright spots in terms of basic indicators, and oila, the players are out there, slightly irrationally, ready to play again. If they really were careful assessors of the status quo and careful evaluators of the odds, they'd hold back and wait for all those t's and i's. But these are the same folks who thought it was fun to play with loaded guns, blind folds, and beer. It may be that the very characteristics that got us in will be what hastens our way out.

An appetite for being "only so careful" may be evolutionarily robust. It could well be that a population of more careful actors would still get into such messes every now and then (if, perhaps, a little less frequently), but they'd have less chance of climbing back out. Populations with a plentiful supply of crazies, though, might have a better chance of getting on with things.

One might think, by way of analogy, of relationships in which friends are emotionally somewhat volatile in comparison to those in which everyone is very even keeled. The former find themselves frequently at odds and at one anothers' throats, but they rapidly make up and get on with things. The latter have far fewer blowups but have a much lower chance of recovering from one when it occurs.

We'll see how the stock market does tomorrow....

Du-Jour-ism: The Cost of Short Term Culture

2009-03-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

Listening to the news media parrot politicians' posturing over the AIG bonuses made me see some disturbing parallels. It seems that the search for A story consistently gets in the way of the search for THE story. Way too many reporters and their editors seem more concerned with getting something on the front page today than on zeroing in on what, in the long run, really matters.

The parallels are with the economic system and politicians. We've nearly been done in by CEOs who've been more concerned with this quarter's financial results than with long term stability, growth and profitability. And it seems almost impossible for anyone in congress to think beyond their rant of the moment.

I (though I'm probably not the first) call this tendency to be enthusiastically distracted by the short term du-jour-ism. It has caused collective blindness about the value of long term investments in education, infrastructure and institutions. Where's the concern about the number of engineers we'll be producing in 2020? Why aren't we putting our best minds to work on redesigning financial institutions and regulation (and focusing our spotlights on the importance thereof)? Why does the media allow various players (on both right and left) get away with falling back on their old hobbyhorses (e.g., "It'll be socialism!!!") rather than asking hard questions (e.g., "Our education system is not up to the tasks of the 21st century -- what are we going to do about it?")? Where are the reporters saying "Well, yes, but economists have shown that X is irrelevant."?

It'll take some brave and strong voices (and intellects) to break out of the cycle of du-jour-ism. Some commentators over the last few days have made some arguments along these lines about AIG, but so far their voices have been largely drowned out by hysteria and posturing.

Why is this about information? Du-jour-ism represents a style of thinking and communicating -- one that characterizes informal chit chat, gossip, and mobs of various kinds. It is a style of information behavior that is characterized by a focus on trees rather than forests, inconsequence rather than consequence, personality rather than substance, emotion rather than fact. It is information handling that is driven by delivering what recipients want and expect, what they already think, what is easy to receive and digest rather than what they may find surprising or disturbing or that may require re-evaluating assumptions.

An information order dominated by this sort of information behavior becomes top-heavy with convenient fictions and invites an eventual clobbering by inconvenient facts.

Why are Newspapers Disappearing

2009-03-15T14:28:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks we've read of the demise of several major newspapers. Most of the analytical conversation about these events suggests that newspapers are getting throttled by new technology. The internet is changing their operating environment and the newspaper companies have not succeeded at changing their business model to succeed in the new environment. There have been shifts in the world out there and so media institutions need to adjust.

Certainly plausible.

But I wonder if this obvious explanation doesn't obscure things a bit. By keeping the focus on technology, we avoid asking hard questions about the product and practice of journalism. Could it be that the changes that the environment is "calling for" include new ways of producing information as well as new ways of delivering information produced using conventional practices?

I put this out there because I've noticed that the two most obvious "initiatives" carried out by media organizations are (1) delivering the same old stuff over new media and (2) spicing up delivery to make it more entertaining. I have not, though, noticed any fundamental changes in the production of information. Have journalists taken up any new analytical tools? Do we see a move toward journalists developing new levels of substantive expertise?

In the wake of the financial crisis there's been lots of "why didn't anyone see this coming?" hand wringing. Of course, if you look closely, you'll see that there WERE lots of pieces out there giving us a warning. But a big piece of our after-the-fact-wisdom is that things were just too complex for observers to decipher. So, is there any chance that this experience will provide an incentive for higher degrees of expertise among journalists? Or will we stick with the "find a source who will tell you what to write" approach (often enough balanced by some other expert who is willing to claim something to the contrary)?

It's Never About the Content

2009-02-28T15:44:00.000-08:00

Breaking News Alert The New York Times Saturday, February 28, 2009 -- 6:09 PM ET ----- Obama Is Said to Pick Kansas Governor for Health Post President Obama asked Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas to become his nominee for secretary of health and human services on Saturday. Ms. Sebelius accepted the president's invitation and will be introduced by Mr. Obama at the White House on Monday, said an administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid upstaging the formal announcement.

So, if we knew the source's name it would upstage the announcement, but knowing ahead of time the content of the announcement does not. Oh, OK, I think I get it.

Notificational Webs in Cricles of Friends

2009-02-27T10:29:00.000-08:00

In the most recent New Yorker, a short story, "Brother on Sunday" by A.M. Holmes, opens with a woman on the phone:

“Are you sure?” she whispers. “I can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. If it’s true, it’s horrible. . . . Of course I don’t know anything! If I knew something, I’d tell you. . . . No, he doesn’t know anything, either. If he knew, he’d tell me. We vowed we wouldn’t keep secrets.” She pauses, listening for a moment. “Yes, of course, not a word.”

The scene is a delightful example of how notification expectations are intertwined with how we understand relationships. We get two quick "network inspections"--"if I[he] knew, I'd[he'd] tell you[me]"--that reassure the caller that silence doesn't indicate a fracture in the local information order. And the conversation ends with one more bit of meta-notification, the speaker assuring the caller that she understands the rules that attach to the information just obtained.

Sandy is the woman on the phone. Her husband, Tom, is overhearing the conversation and asks who it was.

“Sara,” she says.
“And?”
“The usual.”
He waits, knowing that silence will prompt her to say more.
“Susie called Sara to say that she’s worried Scott is having an affair.”

This rather personal bit of information is being shared third-hand -- Susie called Sara who called Sandy who is now talking with Tom. Lots of talking's been going on, along with lots of meta-talking about the talking : Sara finished by extracting a promise that Sandy wouldn't tell anyone. We can assume that Susie extracted a similar oath from Sara. As I've described elsewhere, notification norms are famously honored in the breach.

The narrative takes Tom and Sandy to the beach with a circle of friends they've been seeing regularly for a long time and then, later, that day, to dinner with them at a nice restaurant. In the middle of dinner, another bit of "information sharing" goes on; Tom and a friend end up in the men's room at the same time:

When they are side by side at the urinals, the friend says, “I’m leaving Terri.”
“What are you talking about?” Tom says, genuinely shocked.
“I can’t stand it anymore. I’m miserable.”
...
“Terri doesn’t know.”
“About the other woman?”
“About anything. I’m telling you first. I don’t know what to say to her. We’ve been married for twenty-six years.”
“That’s a long time.”
“She’ll be fine,” he says, “once she gets over the initial shock.”
At the sink, Tom checks his face in the mirror. “When are you going to tell her?” he asks, watching himself talking.
“I don’t know,” the friend says. “Please don’t tell Sandy. The girls can’t keep a secret.”
“Not a word.”

The friend shines a light on his relationship with Tom by meta-notifying: "I"m telling you first," and this sets up one of the story's notificational punches when he suggests that it's the very length of his marriage that makes it so hard to tell his wife. And then, finally, we get the condescending bit of meta-notification -- don't tell the girls -- with a theory about how this particular network functions. But while it may read as condescending, we know from the the opening of the story that in this case, it's on the mark.

Paying for Online (Media) Information

2008-12-17T14:11:00.001-08:00

James Surowiecki has a piece in the current New Yorker "News You Can Lose" (22 December) about the increasingly common disappearance of local newspapers. He notes that a common explanation for the problems faced by newspapers is that, like the railroads last century, they have failed to recognize what business they are in. If "newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net."

True enough perhaps, Surowiecki writes. But something else interesting is going on: "The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular." We blog about what's in the paper; we forward articles millions of times a day. I do it; you do it. What most of us don't do, is pay for online subscriptions.

Why don't I, as an avid consumer of news, opinion, and commentary, and as one of those bloggers who spread the renown of NYT content, have more online media subscriptions? Simple reason: they all require me to pay up front before I know whether and how much I will actually look at them in practice. Sure enough, that's the same commercial relationship I have with them on the newstand or when I sign up for home delivery (not exactly -- I usually don't have to sign up for, say, a year at a time).

Why don't they agree to at least split the risk with me? I sign up today and if I end up using them everyday, my annual subscription is X. If I only visit on average once a week, then I'll pay, say, X/30. If I check them out only a few times and then never come back, they get a small token payment and we part ways. Notice that this is not "per use" pricing -- that's not attractive -- it won't work for either of us if I have to make new purchase decisions every time. But any media outlet confident enough to say "we think we're good enough that if you start looking at our pages, you'll be back regularly" would stand a pretty good chance of signing me up. And, if it turns out I really did like them and use them regularly, they'd get a year's worth of subscription fee from me. I'd likely try out numerous publications under such a plan, knowing that in the end, I can stay within my media budget because I only have so much time to read. The one's who keep me coming back get the bigger slice of my media spending (and their advertisers get my eyeballs and maybe even my clicks).

Fundamentals: information, society, and economy

2008-12-14T17:32:00.000-08:00

Provocative short piece on Keynes in NYT Magazine today: "The Remedist" by Robert Skidelsky. At issue is the question of just what it was that Alan Greenspan was backing off from when he said that his policies had been based on a "flaw." Skidelsky channels Keynes to suggest that it's an information problem that lies at the heart of our financial woes. The ideas that the market system, unregulated, will generate, in prices, all the information needed for social actors to act wisely (whatever that means) AND that the right calculations could capture all the relevant uncertainty (and thus price it correctly so that actors could make informed choices) both turn out to be not quite right. A discovery for some, but something Keynes and others said before.

Hence the title of this post. Weber wrote his "Economy and Society" almost one hundred years ago. What I'm imagining for a sociology of information is to insert "information" into that holy duo. We create systems and structures that can be either "net obscuring" or "net clarifying." That is, they help us to see the world more clearly or they make that world even harder to comprehend than it already is. How we do so is what a sociology of information looks at.

What Goes on Page One?

2008-12-05T09:46:00.000-08:00

I am today working on a chapter called "Learning to be a Node" about how we need to be socialized into our roles as nodes in social information networks. While playing around with different metaphors and analogies I been playing with journalism metaphor: the idea that the competent node (what I mean by this is, generically, someone who "gets notification right," that is, doesn't inappropriately "spill the beans" or "talk out of school" or "overshare" or their converses) is someone who knows what goes on page one (and what does not).

To manage our relationships -- with spouses, friends, co-workers, etc. -- our encounters need to be governed all day by composing and recomposing what's on page one of our personal newspaper. People expect relevant stuff first (and relevance varies with each person and we are expected to know how it varies). They don't want to read on page one what they've already heard (and we are responsible for having an idea of what they have already heard). And we are expected to have multiple editions -- page one of the workplace edition won't look anything like page one of the family edition.

To get back to the "learning" part: with each new role we take on we have to learn a new set of guidelines for "what goes on page one." A good bit of the formal socialization in a new job, for example, concerns what goes in reports to whom, while the informal socialization will include things like what never gets written in an email, what happens only behind closed doors and what can only be said in surreptitious meetings on park benches (a favorite device in film). In relationships there tends to be a sort of ongoing socialization as partners remind one another about what they expect to be told and when (also a common dramatic device: see, for example, "Relational Notification Norms on 'Mad Men'".

The process of learning to be a node occurs across the life course. Small children need to be trained how NOT to be muck-raking publishers of personal and family secrets (see "Children as Spies"). Teenagers need to be cajoled into not producing "empty editions." Gossips need to learn the limits of even bad taste. Organizations are forever fiddling with reporting lines. And there's always more to be done -- "stovepiping," cited as a big problem in the intelligence community in the 9/11 report, is really a pathology of notification in which nodes have learned the "wrong" rules about who ought to be informed about what.

O.K., enough of that metaphor for now.

Information and Fairness

2008-11-17T10:31:00.000-08:00

Insider trading is a classic example of the instrumental value of information and it reminds us of how markets are socially constructed (not in the sense that they are figments of the collective imagination but in the sense that they generally need the support of some social norms, rules, and laws in order to function well.)

The Times just reported (in "S.E.C. Accuses Mark Cuban of Insider Trading") that Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has been accused of selling all of his shares in a company a few hours after receiving confidential inside information suggesting the stock price would drop. At first glance it would appear that the "bottom line" is the monetary value of the information (that Cuban had but others did not), but consider how a source explained things, as quoted by the article's writer: "It is fundamentally unfair for someone to use access to nonpublic information to improperly gain an edge on the market." The "technical" reason for prohibiting insider trading is that markets can fail if people think others have private information, but this comment suggests that there's a social norm at work too: it's just not informationally fair.

Equality, Information and the Courts Redux: The Dan Rather Report

2008-11-17T09:06:00.001-08:00

Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS isback in the news*. The gist of the suit is Rather's claim that the network allowed political considerations (over his reporting on President Bush's military service) to influence their pressuring him to resign. Readers may recall I've previously commented on this lawsuit under the title "Courts and the Information Order."

The reporter on the story makes an important initial point, Rather's status as plaintiff permits him to access information that his status as reporter, employee or concerned citizen would never have given him access to.

"Using tools unavailable to him as a reporter — including the power of subpoena and the threat of punishment against witnesses who lie under oath — he has unearthed evidence that would seem to support his assertion that CBS intended its investigation, at least in part, to quell Republican criticism of the network."

This nicely highlights several "layers" of social information access. We ordinary members of the public are reading about this in the newspaper. Rather, as a reporter, could not access this information. Rather as a member of a bureaucratic organization was clearly kept out of certain loops. But Rather the plaintiff is formally, if temporarily, informationally equal to his adversaries. The two parties' "equality before the law" is partly enacted by the fact that one can say "you have to tell me" and the other one is compelled – by all of us – to tell him.

While the defendant (CBS) maintains that the case is "meritless" and that they will, in the end, prevail, Rather has already achieved a part of what he set out to do:

"One of Mr. Rather’s initial goals was to compel depositions of many of his former bosses and colleagues under oath. Thus far, in addition to Mr. Heyward and Ms. Mason, his lawyers have questioned Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS; Gil Schwartz, executive vice president of communications for CBS; Sandra Genelius, a former CBS News spokeswoman; and Michael J. Missal, who helped oversee the panel report on behalf of Mr. Thornburgh."

The judge has not yet ruled on a motion "to gain access to several thousand documents that were used by the investigative panel to compile its report, including notes from interviews and e-mail messages from top executives."
Defendant lawyers claim it's just a "fishing expedition" and that information is privileged and something about which CBS should be able to say "you can't see it." Plaintiff lawyers say it is relevant to the issue at hand and as such it is something that an equal party should have access to it.

*NYT 16 November 2008, Jacques Steinberg: "Rather’s Lawsuit Shows Role of G.O.P. in Inquiry"

Notification on your Blackberry

2008-11-16T10:38:00.000-08:00

A textbook perfect example of notification appeared on the front page of the NYT business section today. Geraldine Fabrikant tells the story of Sallie Krawcheck's leaving Citigroup("When Citi Lost Sallie") and a good bit of the story of the story has to do with how notifications were handled.

Long story short, Krawcheck was a top exec at Citi who was "shunted aside" in an internal shakeup in September. After speaking to colleagues at a corporate retreat she went back to her room and fired up her Blackberry:

"A friend had written to warn her that within a few days Citigroup would announce that it was stripping her of most responsibilities...."

The article goes on to note:

"[t]hat she was being shunted aside was not a surprise to [her].... What infuriated [her] was that the bank moved up its announcement without telling her...."

Plain vanilla notification. Even when it doesn't matter consequentially, it does matter to us when and how we find things out (or find out that others are finding out).

Apparently, though, her superiors were not being entirely crass. When she got back to New York she found a voice mail "formally notifying her that the timing of the announcement was being accelerated." Evidence then, that a phone message (presumably from (near) the horse's mouth) is preferred to finding out via a leak and rumor (I leave it to the reader to figure out where hearing such news face-to-face fits in this scheme).

And, from the organizational side, the idea that the threat of a spreading leak can create an imperative to officially announce was suggested by sources who told the reporter that the announcement was moved up "because news of it was already spreading."

Finally, we get a nice taste of how notification rights and obligations are organizationally structured and how they are regarded and disregarded in interaction. At several points in the article the reporter quotes anonymous sources who cannot be named because they are "not authorized to speak publicly about the company." Such disclosures are of course common -- how many times do you hear (or say) "OK, here's the info but you can't tell anyone I told you (because I am, in fact, not authorized to tell you)"? It tells us something about the information order that such departures from protocol do not disqualify a source. More importantly, it shows how the information order is built up out of a complex network of notification norms honored in practice and dishonored in rhetoric and vice versa.

Where Does the Information Go? Preserving a Sense of History

2008-11-11T21:11:00.000-08:00

In the last few days I've read a number of blog posts and letters to the editor in which the writers expressed discomfort (a kind way of putting it) with the post-election enthusiasm of Obama supporters. My attention was drawn especially to those who clearly harbored a lot of resentment toward those celebrants who communicated a sense of the victory as a decisive one. The writers frequently called the supporters "arrogant" or "presumptuous" or similar. While I'm sure there have been some annoyingly boisterous winners, the losers were talking like this was a first time phenomenon unique to Obama supporters.

Hello?!? Does history really fade so fast or circulate so little that these writers completely forget how recent republican victories have been celebrated? Reagan's victories were touted as the end of an era, the obliteration of the 60s and the New Deal and his policies as self-evident. The excess and dismissive arrogance of the campus young republicans after Bush's 1988 election shocked me at the time. But more recently, in two elections that W barely (if actually) won, both he and his supporters paraded around talking about mandates and having political capital to burn.

And now, if I can, for one moment, engage in a little post election rhetorical excess of my own: of course it's not really a matter of history being forgotten or erased. It's just that the information in history's database can be hard to access from inside its dustbin.

The Intellectual World as Magazine Shop

2008-10-20T16:21:00.001-07:00

Just back from "Family Weekend" at MIT (very well done, BTW) and catching up on things. The following appeared in the American Sociological Association's newsletter this month. It reminded me of the stunning fragmentation of intellectual discourse -- the number of mutually exclusive conversations going on at one time, even among those who claim membership in one discipline in one country.

Just when you thought it was safe to start reading again....

An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays on the Zombie seeks proposals for an interdisciplinary volume discussing the zombie from a variety of perspectives and within a range of contexts. Submissions from all disciplines are invited. In addition to theoretical essays on zombies, we also welcome critical discussions of specific zombie films, novels, and graphic novels, including those both pre- and post-Romero. Proposals should be between 200 and 300 words. Include brief author biographical details with their submissions, including name and academic affiliation. Submit proposals either electronically or by regular mail. Deadline: October 31, 2008. Contact: Cory James Rushton, Dept. of English, St. Francis Xavier University, PO Box 5000, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, B2G 2W5, Canada; crushton@stfx.ca; or Christopher M. Moreman, Dept. of Philosophy, California State University-East Bay, 25800 Carlos Bee Blvd., Hayward, CA 94542; christopher.moreman@csueastbay.edu.

My title refers to the fact that the value of targeted advertising can make it economical to publish magazines aimed at extremely small niche readerships. If you scan the titles in a magazine shop it's easy to start thinking, "there can't be that many people around here interested in moose hunting!" And you're right, there aren't. But the ones that are out there love reading that magazine and the sellers of moose hunting paraphernalia really need to reach them, not you. It's a small world with lots of villages.

Who Knows What Everybody Knows?

2008-10-09T12:47:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I was hanging out with a group of folks from National Public Radio's "Next Generation Radio" Project. Participants were sitting around a room editing stories on their laptops. At some point one, who didn't strike me as a techie, showed one of the real tech whizzes that you could change the case of text in MSWord with a single command. He thought this was the coolest thing he had seen in a while.

I sat their trying to figure out how this guy who seemed like he knew way more about computers than I did could possibly not already know this. It reminded me of a bit from the Devil's Dictionary: "self evident -- evident to the self and no one else."

Relevance for the sociology of information? Any bit of information we possess potentially has a "meta-informational wrapper" that tells us who else knows it. We experience this wrapper along a continuum from, say, "I've got a secret" to "duh, everybody knows THAT." What's interesting, though, is how hard it is to achieve anything like 100% accuracy on this meta-informational front.

I was motivated to think about this while reading David Pogue's blog/column in the NYT the other day ("Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User"). In it he listed a few tips that are useful for those of us using computers -- things like "you can select a word by double clicking it." He doesn't come out and put it like this, but I think a take-away from the piece is that these are things that if we know them we don't think of them as "tips" -- they are just things one knows about the machines one uses. It's actually another cognitive step to recognize these taken-for-granted bits of know-how as things that lots of other people might not know. Nobody, after all, wants to pass along a tip that's not really a tip ("duh" hurts!).

Interestingly, the blog turns out to be a great vehicle for eliciting tips from folks without the disincentives of (1) worrying that the person you give the tip to will not think it is a tip, or (2) having to make the observation that the recipient does not know something so as to be "safe" in giving the tip. If you read the 1000 plus tips people have sent in, you will no doubt find some of them to be "obvious" and "well known" but others will provide an "aha" moment.

He suggests at one point that of all the stuff you know that "everybody probably knows" probably only 40% of everybody actually knows. I don't know about the numbers, but the point is a good one. Most of us are probably not very good estimators of how much of what we know is idiosyncratic, local, general, or universal knowledge.

Silence on the Soc of Info Front

2008-10-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

Week's worth of silence here was due to a quick trip to Paris in the company of my partner, Gillian Hadfield, who was talking at a conference on new institutional economics. Sociologists spend a lot of time attacking their straw-person version of economics, but I find that I learn a whole lot from them, especially these smart institutional economists. Prediction: I'll probably start investing some serious time in learning more game theory. That probably sounds like apostasy to some of my sociology colleagues, but so be it; I find a catholic approach to things intellectual, and a disregard for disciplinary boundaries to be the most fruitful approach to understanding the social world. It's a hard nut to crack and we need all the tools we can find.

So, I'll be back on the information trail soon.

Oh: Paris was great. What a city!

Calibrating Blog Traffic Tracking

2008-09-26T09:49:00.000-07:00

A classic information illusion arises on the net: the conflation of a click with a look with a read. It's easy to track how many far away computers access a web page, not so easy to figure out whether anything on that web page was seen, read, thought about, etc.

So, a small experiment so I can come up with a tentative correction factor for the "visitor" count. If you actually read a post here could you post a very short comment to the effect of "yes, in Portland (or where ever)"? I'll set it so it can be anonymous and not require signin and so on. I'll leave this hear for a day or two to see if it garners any results.

Just click on "comments" below and a new window will open up.

Thanks,

Dan

Notification and the Life Course

2008-09-24T09:27:00.000-07:00

We've become so aware of our embeddedness in networks that it's easy to forget that you have to learn how to be a node. Competent execution of one's responsibilities as a part of social information networks is a learned skill. A lot of early childhood socialization is informational; kids need to learn what needs to be reported to whom. What kinds of things you tell everybody and what kinds of things you say only at home? Which things need to be reported to adults immediately and which not? They learn that it's not nice to tattle, never to cry wolf, always to tell the truth, etc. And such informational socialization is a life-long process.

Perhaps the network in which we all spend the greatest share of our social time is the family. It turns out that there's a neat evolution of notification expectations and practices across the life course. First we teach kids to notify us if they feel sick, see something dangerous, get approached by strangers, etc. Then they have to learn that some things are not disclosed to people outside the family, that it's not nice to tattle, and that they should never cry wolf. As our roles in the family change, it is a continuing challenge to "get notification right."

For several pre-adolescent years kids are pretty much informational open books. Parents are either in on or let in on much if not almost everything that happens in their lives.

Then, as the teenage years approach, parents have to ask and prod and they start receiving "none of your business" type responses. As kids get the use of the car and gain other access to spatial independence, parents become more and more dependent on what the child elects to notify them about. They have to invest more and more in notificational oversight: "call me when you get there," "tell me who you are with," "let us know when you are leaving." This is notificational socialization round three, training the kid in the notificational expectations that attach to their new status as semi-autonomous semi-adult. Rules and norms are called on to replace more direct information channels previously supplied by first-hand surveillance.

A big source of emotional conflict around notification at this stage is the growing contradiction of informational asymmetry experienced by the teenager. They know the parent can ask "where, when, with who, how long," and they know well that they have no hope of extracting similar information from the parent.

But then the kids go off to college and their entire life is suddenly out of view. We switch to phone calls and emails and spend out time exhorting them to call or write more often and to have more to say when they do.

And around this time, we see emerging an interesting conflict between parents as one forgets to mention right away, news received in a phone call or email. You know the response when in the company of friends one parent says "Our oldest just the other day said she was having an interesting time in her math class" and the other parent thinks "Hmmmm, that's news to me...." The classic notificational rebuke will follow: you should have told me that sooner!

Those same parents have parents of their own, of course, and will soon experience the notificational conflicts that go on between older adults and adult children. They get a phone call from mom describing a medical or financial emergency that occured a week or two before: "Ma! I can't believe you are just telling me this now!" It's quite possibly a vain attempt at late life socialization, but the adult children will work this angle just the same. The comeback is standard: "We didn't want to worry you."

The adult child is robbed of the ultimate informational comfort: no news is good news. They have to worry all the time and they say this makes them feel like they are dealing with a child. And it does, of course. But it's different too. Parents often withhold information from kids because they are too young to be told or because they don't need to worry about something. As older adults with adult children, there are vestiges of these sentiments – our adult problems are ours – and to yield to their adult children's "you should tell me right away" is to give up some of the relational adultness they have earned. And for the adult children to demand it is, in a way, an attempt, innocent as it may be, at replacing the adult-adult relationship by adopting the adult role and tilting their informational relationship with their adult parents toward notificational asymmetry.

Quick Followup : More notification in "Mad Men"

2008-09-20T11:01:00.000-07:00

An earlier post (8 September) described the use of notificational deviance as a dramatic plot device using the television series Mad Men as an example. The most recent episode provided another delightful example of the use of notification to communicate and structure social relationships.

Early in the episode "A Night to Remember" there is a great scene where Pete and Duck are leaving Don's office. As the two are heading out the door, a quick conversation about an upcoming dinner/meeting occurs between Duck and Pete. Pete is obviously out of the loop (and wasn't invited). He lingers for a fraction of a second behind Duck and shoots Don a look. Don's shoulder shrug and "oh well" facial expression do a marvelous job of putting Pete in his place. He doesn't even deserve an explanation of what it is he has been left out of and he so feels it that he doesn't display his usual out-of-place brashness.

Notification and the Public Sphere

2008-09-20T10:21:00.000-07:00

Working today on the outline for a chapter on "notification and the public sphere." In previous chapters the focus was notification and the maintenance of relationships among individuals. In this chapter I look at the broader distribution of information in society and the institutions that give rise to it.

The raw material I am working with runs the gamut from sunshine and freedom of information laws, mandatory disclosure regulations, discovery in legal context, state mandated notification, truth and reconciliation commissions, emergency warning systems, diplomatic protocol, gag rules, and privacy standards. Generically, I'm thinking of these as "information institutions."

This is admittedly a big bucket of diverse phenomena; today's work was a first stab at grouping and categorizing and discovering underlying dimensions that organize these things as manifestations of basic informational forms.

Here are my preliminary categories.

Sunshine, Stickers, Labels, and Report Cards. Laws and rules that say that the state and private and public actors cannot keep (all) secrets. Some of these are things like sunshine laws that promote accountability or combat corruption, others are disclosure rules that address information asymmetry between producers and consumers or between service providers and the public. This category resonates with the "is more information always better" posts that have appeared here previously.

Structured Honesty: Social Organization of Informational Equality. Being able to say "I don't have to tell you" is an important manifestation of inequality with both material and symbolic consequences. In various forms, the capacity to maintain some control over the disposition of some information is widely recognized as a key component of autonomous personhood. This category includes institutions that collectively enforce (true) information sharing -- from legal rules of discovery to truth commissions. It is, I think, distinct from the previous and next categories, but I'm still working on a rigorous way to distinguish them. The "democracy and the information order" posts that have appeared previously would fall into this category (6 August 2008, 20 September 2007, 22 May 2007, 11 March 2007)

The Social Organization of Omniscience (includes warning systems). These can be distinguished from the disclosure examples because in those cases one entity either has the information and just needs to be compelled to release it or has/controls access to the information and needs to be compelled to collect and release it. By contrast, this category includes cases where either the information is dispersed and we organize a means to detect and aggregate and channel it. Or, where a special channel is set aside to that one type of information (perhaps a rare one) can take precedence. Examples: ER doctors who must report abuse or abortion providers who must provide parental notification for minors, emergency warning systems (tornado.,hurricane, tsunami), airport announcements that recruit everyone as a lookout for unattended bags (see also post on children as spies).

Protocol. In diplomacy, for example, protocol strongly regulates who would speak with whom. As in computer communication protocols, these institutions allow us to tie systems together.

Socially Sanctioned Non-Telling. This is almost the opposite of the first category (leaving an interesting space in between) -- secrets that are socially organized. Gag rules and sealed agreements, trade secrets, intellectual property regimes, governments classification systems (top secret, etc.), official secrets acts, privacy standards.

The Economy and Information : Does More Info Make the World a Better Place?

2008-09-19T08:13:00.003-07:00

This week's serial superlatives in things economic -- each day the "events of recent days" were "the most stunning thing to happen since the thirties" -- has led to lots and lots of hand wringing and calls for new kinds or amounts of regulation. And a lot of what folks are saying has to do with information -- more of it, in public, is what we need!

This brings to mind two things I've recently read. One is a 2007 book by Fung, Graham, and Weil called Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency (Cambridge University Press). It is a report on an empirical study of 18 cases of what they call "targeted transparency" -- legislated requirements that corporations (or other private entities) disclose specific information so that the public can make informed choices about their products, services, etc. They looked at the history of disclosure as public policy, why it emerged when it did, whether it's likely to continue to expand, and whether, and under what conditions, it works. In a nutshell, they conclude that it works well in some cases, not at all in others. The process is always political and it works when the results of the political process produce a system that is "user oriented" and "sustainable." I'll post a full review of the book here in the near future.

The other piece I was reminded of was by Malcom Gladwell in a January 2007 New Yorker: "Open Secrets: Enron, intelligence, and the perils of too much information." In it Gladwell builds on, among others, the work of Yale law professor Jonathan Macey who, in a review article about the Enron debacle, argued that the problem was not information that Enron hid, but the fact that no one could put together the puzzle pieces represented by the information they disclosed.

I recommend both Fung et al. and the Gladwell piece as grist for your thought mill this week.

See also this old post on the "is more better" question.

Talking to Ourselves

2008-09-19T08:13:00.000-07:00

This post is not my usual brand of sociology of information. It's true that the topics I'm including under that title DO veer off in the direction of media and journalism and related public discourse realms, but since there are already well established and well defined fields that study that stuff, I've felt there's no reason for the sociology of information to be intellectually imperialist in its aspirations.

But just the same....

My local radio station is fund-raising this week. During one of the pledge breaks the hosts were talking about a lefty show that had an episode on voter suppression (meaning republicans are trying to prevent folks from voting democratic). They bantered back and forth to the effect of "We know there was lots of voter suppression in the 2004 election and it's still going on, you know...." My politics being more or less the same as theirs, my main reaction was a simple "yup" between spoonfuls of cereal. The next thing they said was that there would be a local show about the presidential debate next week. Both sort of tripped over words trying to express something like "because we're different [from the national crowd] here in the (San Francisco) Bay Area."

First, I'm sure that if I played with my radio dial or sat down at my computer I could really fast find a right wing radio show that was all up in arms about "voter fraud" (meaning some people who shouldn't be allowed to vote voted democratic). So what? Seems so symptomatic of the state of our public discourse : preaching to the choir on both sides; demonization and fear mongering. "Our" side is probably right, but I just found myself wondering what we hope to accomplish with this kind of "journalism." Does it fan the flames of my indignation? Burn in more deeply my conviction? Or does it just make it less and less likely that we'll ever manage to have a conversation with someone who disagrees with us and less likely that either will budge if we did?

For the second thing, back to the radio hosts' comment about the Bay Area being different. Again, I suspect there are lots of radio hosts around the country saying more or less the same thing this morning. And each of them is comparing local sensibilities to an idealized version of some "outsider" them. We Texans are a might bit different from those New Yorkers! We Floridians are not like the rest of the south. We south Floridians are not like the rest of Florida. And on and on. If we (whoever we are) really want to win this election, you'd think one of the most important things would be to listen to people who are not like us, listen good, and learn how to talk with them too.

It is interesting that we could live in an "information age" and yet maybe have lost the ability to talk.

Perhaps of Interest

Diana C. Mutz Hearing the Other Side. Cambridge University Press

Information, People, Machines, and Systems

2008-09-15T11:36:00.001-07:00

Last week United Airlines (or more properly its stockholders) had an unfortunate information experience. It turns out to be pretty delicious stuff from a sociology of information point of view. Apparently, a small newspaper in Florida linked to an old news story about UAL declaring bankruptcy (in December 2002). A google search by a staff member at a financial information website brings up the article (some sources say on a page with that day's date on top so that it was easily mistaken for new news as opposed to old news). The info goes on the newsletter site and they are picked up by Bloomberg, perhaps the most widely distributed financial news service. Services like Bloomberg serve up headlines that anyone can see with links to full stories available only to subscribers. Once the headline hit Bloomberg, traders around the world start dumping UAL stock and other news services apparently compounded the misinformation by repeating it.[see also FN1]

Now much of the post mortem inquiry into this event seems to suggest that the main culprit was automation (e.g. Katherine Thompson on The Editors' Weblog). One version of this is that what we saw was a tightly knit network of automated search agents and news consolidators run amok (I'm imaginging someone has already thought through the "small world" and "preferential network attachment" angles on this). Humans, this take suggests, serve a useful purpose as governors (in the mechanical sense rather than the state government sense) because they can have a "that sounds funny to me" reaction and double check something before passing it on.

So there's lots of grist here for my chapter on technology and the information order, but for the moment I'm stuck on what we learn here about our assumptions about humans as components of information networks. Of course, we all know examples of people who don't think before passing along what they have heard, but we recognize that we think of it as a basic norm of communication network membership: use common sense, don't be a hollow, mechanical repeater. It's a responsibility hinted at by many religions' prohibitions against gossip, idle talk, and so on, although these are often primarily about spreading harmful (true or false) personal information.

In addition to the above ideas, I'll file this under "the headline problem" -- how info on the net is easily passed around (or acted on) by folks who have not read past the headline and how news consolidators and interfaces that show abbreviated titles can exacerbate this.

FN1: On a completely different analytical trajectory, one might inquire as to whether there will be a tendency here for the fingers to point, and the investigative paths to lead, in the direction of the deepest pockets (probably google).

Notification and Disclosure

2008-09-13T10:37:00.000-07:00

Sooner or later, the analysis of notification leads to a consideration of disclosure. The two terms blend into one another in dictionary and thesaurus but we can make a useful distinction (useful, that is, for sociology of information purposes).

To notify is to inform or make known to a particular notifyee (it can be a large number of people -- even "the public"). To disclose, though, is to release information without a target recipient. Again, the point here is not whether this distinction covers all the empirical usages of these words; rather, the point is to zero in on a useful distinction. For us, that distinction is whether the teller is telling because of a specific relational obligation to an identifiable other or whether the telling is more a revelation for all to see.

A further analysis of this will come up in a still to be written chapter on notification and the public sphere. I was motivated to think about it today, though, while reading an article in the paper about a new disclosure law ("Note to Civic-Minded - Prepare to Reveal Riches" by Alison Leigh Cowan) being discussed in New York by the city's Conflict of Interest Board. At issue is whether volunteer members of civic boards should be required to disclose financial interests and the like.

The case brings up a lot of interesting sociology of information issues. The whole thing falls under the "information order" category as it concerns the social regulation of who gets to know what. The arguments for and against the measure (and the articles (perhaps even more interestingly) which boards will be subject to the regulation and which ones not) will be fascinating. What does the public deserve to know? What do (wealthy) people get to hide? What do we make of the way engaging with "the system" changes one's informational environment (the same thing has come up recently in discussions about the private lives and backgrounds of politicians in connection with Governor Palin's nomination)? How do we think differently about legislated disclosure and media snooping? How do privacy and a public "right to know" intersect? Etc.

The article suggests that "Albany passed the law because of a sense that public authorities...were operating off the radar screen." We note in passing that it's interesting that information about members was seen as a way to improve oversight of what boards DO. Another source added "What they’re saying here is you got to fill out disclosure forms if you’re an alter ego for government." This resonates with something Gillian Hadfield and I have written about under the heading "democracy and the information order": a part of our experience of the generic equality we are promised in a democracy is the expectation that under certain circumstances you don't get to say to me "I don't have to tell you." The regulations ARE designed to ferret out actual material conflicts of interest, but to the degree that they "feel right" it would seem to be a manifestation of the principle that of those who are, or would be, public servants can be more powerful and wealthier than the average Joe but they don't get to say "I'm not telling you."

Somewhat predictably, this is exactly the sticking point. The city council is considering toning down the regulation so it requires only a short form that demands only limited information. The article quotes a former public board member who had experience filling out the current 32 page disclosure form:

"It takes a long time to complete and do a careful job, and it is a complete undressing," he said. "I can tell you," he said, referring to the slew of billionaires who sit on the Central Park board, "the members of that board would jump out of their skins if forced to file those forms."

I think this suggests something interesting about social stratification and the sociology of information. Stay tuned.

Sociology of Information Gaffes

2008-09-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

Much has been made of VP candidate Joe Biden's capacity to put his fut in his mouth. In this morning's paper, reporter John Broder ("Hanging On to Biden’s Every Word") reviews the issue and highlights a few recent events. In one of them, Biden either did not know or forgot an important bit of information about someone:

In Columbia, Mo., this week, Mr. Biden urged a paraplegic state official to stand up to be recognized. “Chuck, stand up, let the people see you,” Mr. Biden shouted to State Senator Chuck Graham, before realizing, to his horror, that Mr. Graham uses a wheelchair.

“Oh, God love ya,” Mr. Biden said. “What am I talking about?”

How is this kind of gaffe is different from those which amount to inelegant diction or impolitic revelations? The "offense" here is certainly not anti-disability bigotry or insensitivity, and the sociologist of information should not get distracted by (either republican or disability-rights) activists who might want to make hay about the event. Rather, it's a failure to be aware of, or keep track of, a relevant piece of information about someone. As such, it is, before all else, relationally revealing : a basic norm of relationships is to keep track of relevant information about the other. When one utters the phrase "my friend," even if it is ritualized political speech, it triggers some informational expectations. When these aren't met, we find it jarring or even offensive (consider the simple case of getting a form letter that mis-addresses you as Mr. or Ms. -- it quickly becomes even junkier mail than it already was).

Normally, politicians can synthesize relationships such as "my friend..." because their handlers can remind them of information-you-ought-to-know-about-the-other as they make their way toward a handshake. Getting such things right may not mean anything in an objective sense, but in terms of the relational work it does, it can certainly be consequential.

The take-away is that relationships, even those created artificially for the purposes of the moment, always come with informational expectations and obligations.

The Theory of Notification

2008-09-12T08:56:00.000-07:00

As you might know, I'm on sabbatical this year working on a book on the sociology of notification (alas, along with two other projects and a few projectlets). It's time to move on to the first-drafting (the second version since I start with a "zeroth" draft) of my "theory" chapters. Chapter four examines how notification varies as a behavior -- who we tell, how we tell, when we tell -- and how these are dependent on the information content and our understanding of the relational ecology in which we find ourselves. As a first approximation who, how, and when can be seen as dependent variables while content and relationships are independent variables. Notification norms link these together: when we acquire a particular bit of information they tell us whom to tell and how and when to do it given the relationships we think we are in (or, see next paragraph, want to be in).

That's the hyper-simplified version. The first complication is that, in fact, the process goes both ways: we can manipulate relationships and the meaning of the content based on our notification choices. We share inside information with close friends, but we also draw others close by sharing inside information.

I still haven't quite settled on what the "punch" of chapter 4 will be. In its current form, I think that what it does is demonstrate the many dimensions along which notification behavior can vary (and which matter in practice -- it's key that senders and receivers are not indifferent about them), thereby making the argument that the norms that direct the system are really accomplishing something pretty amazing. That's not as gripping as I'd like. I think what I want to do here is get the reader pretty jazzed up about how much relational work she is doing all the time.

The following chapter, working title "The Micro-sociology of Notification," is where I get all phenomenological and social psychological. Will it be of any interest at all to the general reader? Hard to say. The main framework here is the self-world axis; to have a self is to have a world and vice versa (I'm primarily channeling Alfred Schutz here). The challenge of being in the world with others is to keep our worlds aligned (I coin the not-as-mellifluous-as-I'd-like term syncosmize for this). We do this, in part, by selectively disseminating what we know (take) to be the case. The last chapter described how we do that. This one pushes a bit more and asks how the competent node accomplishes the task. In addition to relatively passive knowledge of the rules/norms of notification, she needs to keep track of who would want to know what, who already knows what, etc. Ultimately, this means maintaining a model of the other's world and of the local epistemological ecology. This chapter describes how we do this.

Children as Spies

2008-09-10T15:19:00.000-07:00

I'm working today on my chapter about how we are socialized into our roles in information networks. It's called "Learning to Be a Node." The section I'm working on is about the use of children as spies. Huh? What this refers to is how up to a certain age kids are informationally unsophisticated and are treated as such. They can go "back stage" (Goffman 1959) and no one even thinks about it. If they reach the age where they can observe and report on their observations before they learn what one does and does not talk about "out there," then outsiders can take advantage and use kids to peer inside the family unit.

The first example is the largely apocryphal case of Pavlik Trofimovich, a Russian boy who, in the 1930s, is reputed to have been killed by his family after he turned his father in for anti-communist behavior. The next examples are the case of the Romanian secret police apparently using children for similar purposes during that country's communist era and the attempts in the 80s and 90s by anti-drug zealots in the US to get kids to call 911 at the first sight of anything related to drugs in their own homes (that is, to turn their parents in to the police).

Those examples are all about how the state can use kids to pierce the information firewall that surrounds the family. The last example comes from a 1967 anthropology article in which John Hotchkiss describes how villagers in Chiapas, Mexico, employ their own kids as roving information gatherers to learn what's happening in other families. The kids are given free reign and adults act unguardedly around them so that their own parents can ask them, when they come back from errands or from visiting with friends, "what's going on over there? Is Sr. Gonzales still drinking?"

Of course, the kids are potential double agents. One of the reasons that adults are unguarded around them is because they can also pump the visiting child for information about her own home. Hotchkiss is primarily interested in the ways that the kids act as intermediaries that permit information to flow and for material transactions to occur without the adults losing face (cf. Goffman 1959). It serves my purposes, though, because it shows how, until we are socialized into the notification and information norms of each network, we are sources of potential "leaks" by spilling beans that we don't know are beans (and, correspondingly, the sources of blindspots by not passing along things that we ought to).

You might detect an undercurrent here that will connect this chapter to the one on notification in organizations: the whole question of how to build an effective intelligence network so as to avoid "stovepiping" and related problems that were said to be behind the intelligence failures that led up to 9/11.

Sources Mentioned

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Hotchkiss, John C. 1967. "Children and Conduct in a Ladino Community of Chiapas, Mexico." American Anthropologist New Series, Vol. 69:711-718.

The CONSEQUENTIALIST View of Information

2008-09-09T09:24:00.000-07:00

Most of what I'm writing about under the banner "sociology of information" focuses on the relational and symbolic value of information and information transition in distinction to its instrumental, consequential, or material value. For the latter, the "value" of information derives from the benefits one can acquire (or costs one can avoid) by having the information. Analytically, that's to distinguish what I'm doing from information economics -- my basic point is that there is a component of human information behavior that can't be reduced to material consequences without a loss of explanatory power.

An example of the instrumental value of information showed up in the paper today (NYT "A Mistaken News Report Hurts United"); apparently, a false news flash that United Airlines had filed again for bankruptcy sent it's stock price tumbling.

This is the instrumentalist or consequentialist side of information because the value comes in the form "if I had known it was false I would not have sold my stock" or "if I had known then I could have made a killing." We think of the import of the information here in terms of what we could have done differently had we known. Contrast this with the "Madmen" character Betty pointing out to her husband that she expected to be called about his accident whether or not she could do anything about it because that's the kind of information that spouses share with one another immediately.

Relational Notification Norms on "Mad Men"

2008-09-08T08:53:00.001-07:00

I joked that I wanted a footnote while watching a recent episode ("The New Girl" season 2 episode 5) of the TV show "Mad Men." A scene between Don and Betty Draper was almost verbatim from the first page of the book I'm currently working on (working title Notification and the Information Order).

Don's just come home around dawn after having a car accident while carousing with a client's wife. Betty, his wife, has apparently been awake all night wondering where he was and that's her first question when he comes into the bedroom. "I was in an accident," he explains. Then there's a back and forth where she says "why didn't you call me?" and he says he did not want to worry/wake her and so on. She says, basically, "I'm your wife, you idiot -- when this sort of thing happens, you call, it doesn't matter what time it is." She then adds that it doesn't matter whether or not she could do anything about it, spouses call, period, the end. They follow this with him mentioning that the doctor told him he had high blood pressure and she gets bent out of shape all over again because he'd failed to tell her this earlier too.

In the book I use an almost identical scene to make the point that social relationships come with specific informational responsibilities and that these are constitutive of the relationship -- in other words, they are a part of how we know we are in a particular kind/level of relationship. This relational dimension of information exchange is largely independent of the instrumental value of information (as in, you should have told me so that I could have done something different and achieved a better outcome for me or us) and so introduces an object of study for a sociology of information that is distinct from the object of, say, the economics of information.

Notification issues popping up on "Mad Men" was not actually an unusual event. It turns out that mis-nofitication is an incredibly common dramatic and humorous device. I started keeping a list a few years back when an episode of "The West Wing" (titled "17 People") was all about how the characters squared their sense of their status in the White House inner circle and their relationships with one another and the president with the order and manner in which they found out about the president's illness. It soon became obvious that variations on this theme were so common as to not warrant an exhaustive cataloging.

These ideas were first introduced in my 2006 piece in Sociological Theory (24,3): ―"Getting the Word Out: Notes on the Social Organization of Notification."

Notification, Everywhere

2008-09-02T09:20:00.000-07:00

The multiple strands of the Sarah Palin Chronicles* are littered with notification relevant tidbits. The McCain campaign insists that they knew all about the pregnancy and the ethics investigation and who knows what else when he made his selection. There's a practical issue here, of course, in the question of how careful the prospective VP was vetted and how careful the candidate was in making the selection. The relational dimensions of notification, though, come out too. McCain cannot be seen to be caught by surprise by the news because that means he was out of the loop -- secrets were kept from him, Palin, et al. talked with him and failed to mention something that he'd pretty obviously want to know.

What's interesting is how enthusiastically they are all saying "we knew it all ahead of time" because this DOES make them seem a little lacking in the judgment realm. Did they not think it would become a big distraction? Did they not think that it would put the poor kid in a harsh and nasty spotlight**? The obviousness of these downsides underlines the symbolic importance of being in the loop; they'd rather expose their judgment to question than to appear to have been blindsided.

Another notification dimension comes up in news reports as investigators try hard to determine when and how McCain found out about the daughter's pregnancy. Again, there is an instrumental, legal angle here (the classic "what did he know and when did he know it?"), but reporters are also trying to learn something about the campaign organization and the organization of the VP selection process. The handling of information, who is told what by whom when, and the patterns of secret keeping tell us a lot about an organization.

* For example: "Disclosures on Palin Raise Questions on Vetting Process" by Elisabeth Bumiller, "The Caucus: Palin Dominates Convention Talk" by Kate Phillips and Michael Falcone

**No doubt many will simply fault the press for being unscrupulous, but they should stop and think about how the conservative media would have been all over a similar turn of events had it concerned the Democrats?

Notification Norms in the News

2008-08-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

An article in the NYT today ("Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod" by J. Glater) would seem to be an "information" article because it was about colleges and universities giving students Iphones and trying to figure out how to use them in instruction and other college related activities. Yes, but since the story didn't really give us much in the way of ideas about how that would happen it was mostly just an empirically interesting story: "Hey, did you know this was going on?"

Buried in the piece, though, was a little bit of "information behavior":

It is not clear how many colleges plan to give out iPhones and iPods this fall; officials at Apple were coy about the subject and said they would not leak any institution’s plans.

“We can’t announce other people’s news,” said Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPod and iPhone marketing at Apple. He also said that he could not discuss discounts to universities for bulk purchases.

Nothing earth-shaking here, but reminder that there's another meaning of "property" when it comes to information and that information is often entangled with relationships.

Still Reaching Out to Touch Someone

2008-08-19T10:50:00.000-07:00

On several occasions during the Olympics medal winners were observed to whip out their cell phones as soon as the final results were in to call home and let friends or family members know they had just won a medal. The information could get there through other channels (and maybe even faster if the event was broadcast live), of course, so it wasn't always about the simple transmission of information. The fact is, it does a lot for a relationship when it comes right from the source and right away. And you get to say a lot when you pick a particular friend out as the one you call first. The fact that a cell phone is small enough to have on hand, that international plans make it relatively inexpensive to call halfway around the world, and, maybe, the fact that the events ARE being broadcast live, create an imperative for competitors to make that quick call to those who really matter. One can imagine a mother in the Ukraine saying "I can't believe you let me find out about your gold medal on the TV news!" I think AT&T was just a little bit ahead of its time when it used to say, "reach out and touch somebody."

Telling Practices in the VP Selection Process

2008-08-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

One part of Barack Obama's campaign strategy has been to build a network of supporters unlike any that's been built before in the U.S. An oft noted component of the organizational effort is the use of text messaging. One purpose of this is, of course, mobilization, and, specifically, rapid mobilization of supporters to rallies or to quash rumors and such. In addition to this, though, there is a symbolic function that almost certainly enhances the solidarity of the network: via the text messaging functions of their cell phones, supporters can be the first to receive campaign news. According to today's NYT ("Obama Ready to Announce Running Mate" by Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny), within the next few days, if all goes according to plan, they will find out about his choice of running mate directly from the campaign (maybe even directly from him) rather than having to "read about it in the papers" or "hear it on the evening news." This is a great example of using technology to achieve a profoundly social accomplishment on a massive scale—using notification to build social relationships.

There's an interesting tension between the ordinary hierarchical structure of the campaign organization and it's more egalitarian mass base. The VP vetting committee consists of a small inner-circle at the top. Under "ordinary" circumstances, we would expect some initial spreading of the news through a few other levels of inner-circle, but, apparently, that won't be quite how it works:

"…Mr. Obama’s deliberations remain remarkably closely held. Aides said perhaps a half-dozen advisers were involved in the final discussions in an effort to enforce a command that Mr. Obama issued to staff members: that his decision not leak out until supporters are notified."

And even the future VP nominee is not in the loop:

"Mr. Obama had not notified his choice — or any of those not selected — of his decision as of late Monday, advisers said."

Some of these considerations are purely instrumental attempts to maximize media impact, of course, but there's relational information in them thar hills too: each player learns where s/he stands in the information order and can decode this to ascertain where s/he stands in the pecking order.

For the "Organization of Ignorance" File

2008-08-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

News reports (e.g., Daily Journal, alas, by subscription) and blogs today mention the lawsuit brought by UCLA economist and law professor Richard Sander and others (including the California First Amendment Coalition) against the State Bar of California to obtain race tagged info on bar exam results. He wants the data for a research project testing his hypothesis that minorities who are admitted to elite law schools because of preferences are done a disservice and that they'd be better off going to mid-tier schools where they were admitted without preferences.

Why mention it here? Chances are most readers of the story will have strong opinions one way or another based on their political position on affirmative action. Well enough, me too. The story is filed here under "the organization of ignorance," though, as an example of information that exists and that could enlighten society about itself but that one group or another has specifically organized to keep "unknown." Debates about what data the census should or should not collect are another example.

Ironically, some of the players in the debate over this particular issue were also active in the so-called "racial privacy initiative" campaigns of a few years back. That proposal, which failed, would have made the collection of race-based data illegal. What all these efforts have in common is the fact that they are attempts to deliberately create blindspots in the information order. The motives may differ in each case (and may appeal to different political positions), but the form is the same: for one reason or another, we think we'd be better off if we did not know.

Note that this is an entirely different issue from when we decide that something would be too expensive and not cost-effective to find out (as when legislators decide not to spend money on a big physics experiment that might uncover the nature of the universe).

Background Links

September 2007 article on Law.com

Democracy and the Information Order

2008-08-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

Gillian Hadfield (USC Law) and I just gave a paper at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association called "Democracy, Courts and the Information Order." The paper brings together Gillian's work on the 9/11 victims' compensation fund (VCF) and my work on the information norms that govern social relationships.

What does the latter mean? Imagine, for a moment, that you get fired one day. You head home at the usual time, though, and greet your partner as usual, have a drink and a nice dinner and watch some T.V. Then, around 10 p.m. you say, "Oh, by the way, I got fired today." Your partner is furious: "how could you just sit there for the last three hours and not say anything?" "What difference would it make? It's not like you can get me my job back. I just wanted to enjoy a nice dinner with you." And you are right. But so is your partner. Anyone who understands what a spouse is will tell you: spouses have implicit expectations about the sorts of information that they share with one another and when. Sitting on the fact that you got fired for several hours is simply unacceptable. The argument that inevitably follows the above event will, in part, be a debate about what kind of information obligations are implicit in any spousal relationship -- not just yours.

And all the rest of our social relationships come with socially defined and constantly negotiated "notification norms" too. All day long we get feedback on where we stand in our various relationships through what kinds of information we are given and what kinds of messages come along with it ("I shouldn't be telling you but..." or "You're the only one I've told" or "Just don't let him know you heard it from me."). In particular, when we experience relationships as equal, there are symmetric expectations. We don't have to swap identical information, but a friend who keeps an ear out for information related to, say, my hobbies, would expect that I would pass along similar information (although perhaps on some other avocation). When the expectations and performances are not symmetric, we recognize that our relationship is not an equal one. The boss, then, might tell the secretary that she will be out of the office for a few hours but the secretary needs to explain why she needs to take an extra hour for lunch. The parent can ask the teenager where he is going for the evening and when he will be home, but the teen cannot demand the same information of the parent.

In the 9/11 VCF data (and in many other cases -- plentiful enough that examples are in the news almost every week -- some (1, 2, 3) have been written up on this blog), victims' families expressed a high level of ambivalence about accepting a cash payout but giving up their right to go to court. Over and over again one hears "It's not about the money -- I just want to find out what happened -- I just want to be able to ask why this happened."

In the paper we argue that the conventional interpretations of such statements (dismissing them as disingenuous or as "merely" emotional) misses the mark. They point, we claim, to an important function of courts in democratic societies that can be lost if the focus is exclusively on the financial damages. We argue that private law (that is, civil suits between persons as opposed to either criminal cases or cases between the state and individuals or corporations) courts serve a democratic function in society insofar as they provide an arena in which formal equality is experienced through the implementation of information norms that characterize equal relationships. Though in everyday life the more powerful routinely say to the less powerful "I don't have to tell you," in court they may not. As soon as a suit is filed -- importantly NOT only when there has been a judgment of wrongdoing -- the parties to the suit are transformed into abstract actors who get to ask, and are compelled to answer, questions relevant to the legal issue that underlies the case. We contend that the existence of an arena in which empirically unequal actors can experience the formal equality they are promised in a democracy (where all are equal before the law) is a critical component of a democratic society.

The Ontology of Mis-Information

2008-05-15T11:17:00.000-07:00

An editorial, "We'll Have to Check, Sir," in this morning's Times criticizes the apparent difficulties in purging incorrect information from the government's terrorist "watch list." It's not, at first glance, at all counter-intuitive that organizations put less energy in deleting data than they put into collecting and storing it. Further thought, though, and I think this is a point that's implicit in the editorial, suggests that databases that contain errors may be more costly than you would think. A catalog company, for example, that has stale addresses in its database wastes money when it sends catalogs to nowhere. We might guess that there's an equilibrium somewhere -- the cost of identifying and purging bad addresses stands in some relation to the cost of producing and sending an advertisement to a landfill. The problem comes when the costs are invisible or externalized or when a powerful entity operates on a "better safe than sorry" logic or has the "luxury" of imputing an infinite price for false negatives (e.g., since the cost of letting a terrorist get away is infinite, any effort wasted by a false positive is worth it).

But one wonders whether the Homeland Security policy would stand up to a thorough cost benefit analysis. Unless it has access to infinite resources, every time it detains a Ted Kennedy, or other unfortunately named individual, it is diverting resources from its important duties.

But all this brings up a more general sociology of information question. How should we think about mis-information. I don't mean the act of spreading mis-information. Rather, how should we think about recorded information which is false? This includes information recorded in databases that is incorrect as well as information in circulation that is either false or has been stripped of context in a way that renders it uninformative. It looks like information, but it is not.

One approach is to think like a statistician or electrical engineer and describe it as error or noise. That's helpful, but we probably need to distinguish random noise -- high entropy, "signal-less" gibberish -- and non-random, incorrect signals born of lies, mistakes, or unrecorded change (as when I move and don't update everyone who has me in their database).

How are the data-miners thinking about this? What will we learn about the sociology of information through trying to port concepts from EE? More to come....

Disclosure as Tactic and Strategy

2008-04-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

Robert Frank has a nice piece on the "full-disclosure principle" in today's NYT Business section. It's called "To Disclose or Not? Ask the Frogs." Give it a read to find out what the frogs have to say on the topic.

The full-disclosure principle suggests that it's alway better to disclose information to potential adversaries lest they think the worst on the assumption that in a population of competitors there are always some that you are better than; even if you info shows you in a poor light, it will make you look better than those who are in reality worse.

It's a great example of a simple result built on some simple assumptions and which very frequently doesn't seem to hold. Why is that a good thing? Because it points us right toward what is peculiar about the situations where it doesn't hold. This is precisely where we start to do a little "sociology of information." Frank does this in the article when he ponders why political candidates aren't full disclosers.