In Comey Firing Trump Gets Notification Wrong Again

Any number of news outlets communicated a sense of outrage over the fact that James Comey apparently learned he'd been fired by looking up at news coverage on TV monitors while speaking before an audience in Los Angeles.

What these commentators were zeroing in on was the violation by Trump of what I call "notification norms."  One just doesn't tell someone they are fired by telling someone else who then releases it to journalists so that one literally "hears about it on the news."

Now, from a strictly utilitarian perspective, it might not matter much; you're out of a job either way. But, we might say, how you find out can add insult to injury.  But how, exactly, does that extra sting of shame happen?  People felt it vicariously; as when the scalpel comes out on a medical show, one's instinct is to turn away, though here it was not the integrity of skin that is violated, but the integrity of the self.  One part of the self's integrity requires that certain kinds of information breaches "just are not done."

Every relationship comes with a set of informational expectations - things that a member of the relation knows she will be told in a certain way in a certain order.  Your mother does not learn of your pregnancy from a casual acquaintance who heard it from a friend in the grocery store. One winces just thinking about such things.  In professional settings, you learn where you are in the status order by which meetings you are invited to, which announcements are run by you before they are released, which things you learn about when others are asked to "give us the room."

In the Comey affair, we experienced a gigantic collective wince as we saw someone of relatively high status - the director of the FBI on a ten year contract - socially demoted by a massive notification violation at the same time as we wince watching another high status actor, the president, wantonly disregard a notification norm. That's the thing with norms - we feel it not just out of sympathy for the proximate victim of the violation; we feel the norm violation because it tells us all that we might not live in the kind of world we thought we lived in.

But the public discourse, especially in the media, about the inappropriateness of the notification does something to restore our sense of the world. What we saw last night, almost no matter what channel we tuned in to, were fellow citizens, not themselves victims of the breach of etiquette, calling it out. With each comment saying how inappropriate the manner of Trump's notification of Comey was, we got a small step of the way back to being able to take for granted that certain information behaviors just aren't done.

See also

• The Theory of Notification
• Bloomberg Contra Notification Norms
• Notification on your Blackberry
• Notificational Webs in Circles of Friends
• Relational Notification Norms on "Mad Men"
• What Goes on Page One?
• Democracy and the Information Order
• Children as Spies

Squirrels and Democracy

Essay in progress (w GKH):

HRC criticized DJT as unfit to lead because he could fly off the handle over an insulting tweet, get distracted by a minor outrage. Is the opposition, collectively, guilty of the same thing?

Was the Hamilton tweet affair a case of the left half of the country having a "squirrel!" moment and thus taking its eyes off the nomination of some seriously scary men to cabinet and agency head positions?

More generally, does our hair trigger ability to pounce on racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, culturally appropriative, or personally insulting comments, our readiness to rush to join in on an internet "take down" of someone who says or does something ideologically scandalous, reduce our capacity for thoughtful and effective counterplay?

Does the other side know this, at least implicitly, and take advantage of it? Are we duped into thinking that accumulating likes from people who already are like us is effecting positive change?Are we sometimes party to a media loop in which we react to something, react to one another reacting, and then satisfiedly watch ourselves on the news (or as something trending online), basking in the solidarity of shared outrage?

Weber famously described politics as the long, slow boring of hard boards.  Has the internet become such a drug of instant ideological gratification, has it so enabled instant, coordinated outrage that the demos, too, is unfit to rule?

The Socially Competent Node

Consider the following deviant characters: loose cannons, blabbermouths, gossipers, and yentas, stool pigeons and canaries, tattlers and squealers, garblers, the nosy, the deaf to hints, talkers-out-of-school, missers-of-winks, leakers, spoilers of surprises, whistle blowers, betrayers, moles and turncoats, unreliable messengers, and friends who “didn’t realize you’d want to know” or forget to mention. In each case the deviance lies in the social handling of information. 

Curiously, they can all be distinguished from the most well know information deviant, the liar, by the fact that they can be deviant while handling "the truth."  These characters are "deviant nodes" who fail at their duties in a social information networks.  They do so by passing along what they should not, or by transmitting to the wrong people, or by notifying in the wrong manner, time, or sequence.  They fail to discriminate.  They introduce errors into the message.  They do not distinguish relevant from irrelevant.  They miss the real message, fail to appreciate urgency or delicateness. They let down those who trusted them to stay silent or to speak up.

The list above shows that we have lots of nouns to describe those who talk out of turn, but few for for those who fail as nodes by saying too little.  Adjectives abound: "diffident"implies not speaking up when one could or should, and "reticent" means "to remain silent" and implies a hesitance to pass along information.  And there are familiar utterances such as "What? Why didn't you tell me?" or "I didn't think you would want to know…" that are evocative of the node who falls down on the job, but the social types seem not sufficiently crystalized to have names the way the overzealous communicators do. We do have terms of approbation to describe those who positively exceed expectations of discretion and reticence: confidantes, bosom buddies, pals, and cronies are all characters with whom information is safe, but even these are not as general as the negative types, each being tied to specific others.

While the colorful terms above describe empirically unusual roles, the potential for each of the behaviors is high.  The social networks of everyday interaction are full of opportunities for nodes to get it wrong or go rogue. Each of us walks around "recording" images and sounds and actions and utterances, we engage in conversations and we have random thoughts, all material that we could "post" to our ("real world") social networks, pass along to the next person we run into.  But mostly we do not.  

What stops us from describing to colleagues the sounds a co-worker just made in the bathroom or what one's spouse said last night? Why do we not worry that our kids will narrate for their friends the details of her parents' recent fight or that our colleague will reveal the source of that tidbit about the boss we passed along? Even people who completely take to heart advice to "never put something in an email that you don't want the world to see," are far less guarded and vigilant in everyday life.  

The relative worry that we put into Facebook privacy settings compared to the nonchalance with which we participate in everyday social networks suggests the phenomenally high levels of "privacy settings" we take for granted in the people around us.  Most of the nodes in our everyday social networks, we seem to assume, know how to be socially competent nodes.  

Before they are very old, before they've been friends for very long, before they have much experience on the job, they are masters of nuance and signaling, they understand the security clearance levels in within circles of friends and family, they understand what is for attribution and what is not, what is on the record, what is off; without being explicitly told they know what does not leave a room, what was not said by you, and what was never said at all;

But how do they get that way?  How does one learn to be a (competent) node? That's what this chapter is about.

Religion and Learning to be a Node

A short excerpt from zeroth draft of chapter "Learning to be a node"

The chapter is about how social networks depend on competent nodes and how competent nodes are made rather than born.  I show how primary and secondary socialization help us learn what we can tell to whom when.  Other sections in the chapter are about children as spies; discretion as a social achievement; humor, drama and the incompletely socialized node; the social organization of omniscience; and the social control of nodes in corporations and states.

For Jews and Christians, the most well known religious exhortation about information behavior is probably the commandment "thy shall not bear false witness" (Exodus 20:16, Deuteronomy 5:20), but sacred texts are rich in behavioral guidance for nodes in social networks.  The admonitions are general guides for information behavior and suggest misgivings about humans as untutored nodes in community communication networks.

The most basic suggestion is to err on the side of silence.  Imam Nawawi, the 13^th century Islamic commentator,[1] says 

"It is obligatory for every sane adult to guard his tongue against talking, except when it contains a clear benefit. If talking and remaining silent are of equal benefit, it is sunnah (normative) to abstain, for permissible talking might lead to something undesirable or forbidden, as in fact is very often the case, and nothing matches safety."

The book of Proverbs (21:23) suggests "Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble" and in Ecclesiastes (3:7) we are reminded that there is "a time to keep silence, and a time to speak."  In the Christian New Testament, Saint Paul exhorts the Ephesians  to "[l]et no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear" (4:29). The Koran is on the same page: "He does not utter a [single] word, except that there is, with him, [an angel] ready and waiting [to record it]" (50:18).

The baseline recommendation, then, for nodes is mindfulness about what they transmit; in a word, nodes should not always be "on." But all of these traditions go into greater specificity about what responsible and socially competent nodes should and should not "put on the network."

Both Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions address gossip and "tale-telling" as a continuum of network behaviors that require regulation. Three levels are specified in the Torah: mere idle talk; negative truths about others; and negative falsehoods about others. The first, Avak lashon harah, follows from the suggestion to err on the side of silence, prohibiting rechilut or “peddling,” prattling on, repeating things for the sake of repeating them (Leviticus 19:16).  A more serious network sin is for a node to be a conduit for negative information, even if it is true, unless it is specifically intended to improve a bad situation.  Lashon hara means repeating negative truths.  The most serious infraction is Hotzaat shem ra, slander or defamation through spreading untrue negative things about others.

This suggests an awareness that a community depends on actors to socially attenuate what gets through to the network, to apply generic content rules to what they do and do not transmit.  And nodes are not only prohibited from sending gossip along, they are actually also enjoined from Mekabel lashon harah, accepting and believing gossip or slander (Pesachim 118a).  This is, perhaps, a recognition that the temptation to pass gossip along is so strong that the only way to avoid it is to prevent the information's arrival in the first place.

In Sharia law, slander, gossip, and backbiting, or "ghiba" is regarded as a major sin, perhaps more serious than adultery (Al-Ghazali 2008):

"O you who believe! Avoid much suspicion, for some suspicions are a sin. Do not spy on one another, nor backbite one another. Would one of you love to eat the flesh of his dead brother? Nay, you would abhor it, [so similarly, avoid backbiting]. And fear Allah. Indeed, Allah is Most Forgiving, Most Merciful." (Qur'an, [49:12])

The excessive attention given in these traditions to the regulation of gossip suggests a keen awareness of the deleterious effects of unregulated communication networks. In the book of Proverbs the transmission of gossip is connected to social conflict: "Without wood a fire goes out; without gossip a quarrel dies down" (26:20) and the destruction of relationships: "He who covers over an offense promotes love, but whoever repeats the matter separates close friends" (Proverbs 17:9). These traditions are also aware of the non-linear effects of deviant information transmission; in the epistle of James we read "The tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell" (James 3:5-6).

Too, nodes are admonished to eschew second hand information:  "And do not follow that of which you do not have knowledge. Indeed, the hearing, the sight and the heart - [you] will be asked about all of those" (Qur'an, [17:36]).

In these sources we even find attention being paid to the micro-sociological aspects of nodal behavior. Rashi, the medieval Torah commentator, notes that winking is a behavior common among those who would traffic in gossip. "To eat the food of winking" was understood as a way of sealing the deal – you spread gossip and your willingness to break break proves your sincerity but the winking part means that some folks are in on it and know it is gossip while those unsuspecting hearers take it as reportable truth. [2]

The counsel to prefer silence is not an absolute that would shut networks down.  Believers are reminded that even as they are enjoined from spreading malicious gossip, nodes still have obligations upon receiving certain kinds of information:

If you hear it said about one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you to live in that wicked men have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, "Let us go and worship other gods" (gods you have not known), then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. Deuteronomy 13:12-15

Another aspect of being a competent node is to wisely pick the nodes to which you are connected.  The Book of Proverbs suggests that gossip reveals meta-information about the gossiping node:

With his mouth the godless destroys his neighbor, but through knowledge the righteous escape... A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy man keeps a secret (Proverbs 11: 9;13).

and

A gossip betrays a confidence; so avoid a man who talks too much (Proverbs 20:19).

This same observation also shows up in a Spanish proverb, "Quienquiera chismea a ti chismeará sobre ti"(best-quotes-poems.com. 2007): Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you. (worldofquotes.com 2013). Publilius Syrus, a first century BC wit also counseled picking friends on the basis of their nodal competence: "Count not him among your friends who will retail your privacies to the world" (worldofquotes.com 2013)(Wikipedia Editors 2013). Horace (65BCE-8BCE) gives similar advice: "Percunctatorem fugito, nam garrulus idem est; / Nec retinent patulæ commissa fideliter aures" : Avoid an inquisitive person, for he is sure to be a gossip; ears always open to hear will not keep faithfully what is intrusted to them (Wood 1899).

References

1. Al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad. 2008. “TheRules of Backbiting.” Qibla - for The Islamic Sciences.
2. Best-quotes-poems.com. 2007. “Cotizaciones y Refranes Del Chisme.”
3. Wikipedia Editors. 2013. “Publilius Syrus.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
4. Wood, James. 1899. Dictionary of Quotations From Ancient and Modern, English andForeign Sources. London, New York: Frederick Warne & Co. .
5. Worldofquotes.com. 2013. “Gossip Quotes.” WorldofQuotes.

---

[1] Nawawi (1234–1277 CE) wrote about Fiqh, an expansion of conduct rules found in the Quran,

 and hadith which are reports of the sayings of the prophet.

[2] See Vayikra - Leviticus - Chapter 19.  Note emphasis there on spying on your neighbors so you could talk about them.  This relates directly to the material on children as spies.

Institutional Reports and TagAlongs

While talking with GKH about writing today, I figured out what was wrong with a draft of an institutional report I read yesterday: it was packed with tag-alongs: words and phrases not invited to the sentences and paragraphs I was trying to read.  Their presence unnecessary and their company unwelcome, but all such familiar rhetorical faces that authors forget to play the doorman, ticket taker, bouncer, or maître d'hôtel and so all comers were admitted and seated.  Too polite to thin their own ranks, some sentences meander from initial cap to final period like an oversubscribed progressive dinner.  Some paragraphs careen down the page like overstacked, overstuffed pickup trucks you hate to drive behind for fear they'll tip over and spill their load.  And things that need saying and arguments worth making are left to fend for themselves, like a shy guy trying in vain to get a bartender's attention in a crowded, noisy pub.

This phenomenon is a variation on what Orwell had in mind when he wrote that "modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug" (1946).  He was advocating for elevated political discourse, but his characterization of it as "language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought" works for institutional uses of language too, which are too often, as Orwell says of political language, as if "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

When it comes to reports, perhaps we'd do better to charge by the word instead of paying by the hour.

Conference Tools for Twitter

Recent experience of following (and contributing to) Twitter stream at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association inspired a number of ideas (not all original, I'm sure, and some probably already implemented) in connection with Twitter and conferences:

1. Conference organizers should devise and disseminate a simple hashtag schemes for sessions/presentations.
2. Set up scheduled tweets that announce sessions, say, 15 minutes ahead of time.  Tweet can contain a link to web page with detailed information about session.
3. Presenters can submit brief, say 5 to 10,  tweet summary of the points they are making and these can be automatically scheduled to be tweeted during the talk.
4. If talks are being live streamed, start of each talk can be marked by a tweet with URL to the stream.  Major point tweets could be synced to location in recorded video/audio.
5. Develop an app that aggregates and archives live tweets of presentations for live and followup discussion.

What would you add?

Sociology of Information Nuggets

Elections and a three course semester have crowded out blogging over last few months.  And so, the blogger's cop out of pointers to some recent interesting reads:

Maya Alexandri has a fun post, "What Thomas Cromwell had in common with the Dewey decimal system" calling attention the theme of information revolutions as noted in the Joan Acocella review of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall in The New Yorker.  Alexandri and Acocella note interesting similarity of Cromwell's time and our own as eras in which "information is being radically reorganized."  It's precisely the desire to clarify such recapitulations that drives my own work on the sociology of information.


Semil Shah offers a  panegyric post about Timehop, an app that automatically sends you a photo of what you were doing a year ago today.  It purports, among other things, to be a "solution" to the problem of having boxes of memories that you either never find the time to look at or into which you unintentionally dump hour or hour of time you don't have.  Shah's optimistic take is

The carousel of old slides, the cigar box of warped pictures, and the Instagrams you’ve taken, now in your pocket, delivered to you in just the right way.

There are some great research questions swirling around issues like personal memory, artifacts, the externalization and automation of recall, search as every-ready reconstruction of the past.  Stay tuned.

Scoops in Journalism and Everyday Life

Jay Rosen has a post today titled "Four Types of Scoops" that will surely make it into my sociology of information book.  The four types are the "enterprise scoop" where the reporter who gets the scoop gets it by doing the "finding out."  The information may be deliberately hidden or obscured by routine practice, but it would not have become known to the public without the work of the reporter.  Then there is its opposite, the the "ego scoop": the news would have come out anyway, but the scooper gets (or provokes) a tip or equivalent.  The third type Rosen calls the "trader's" scoop where early info has instrumental value -- as in a stock tip.  Finally there is the "thought scoop."  This is when the writer puts two and two together or otherwise "connects the dots" to, as he says, "apprehend--name and frame--something that's happening out there before anyone else recognizes it."

The information order of everyday life is conditioned by information exchanges that might be similarly categorized.  But even before that we'd notice a distinction between exchanges that are NOT experiences as scoops -- I think there are two extremes: information passed on bucket-brigade style with no claim at all to having generated it or deserving any credit for its content or transmission.  "Hey, they've run out of eggs, pass it on, eh?"  and statements of a truly personal nature: "I'm not feeling well today" that do not reflect one's position or location or worth in the world.

Between these there are all manner of instances in which people play the scoop game in everyday interaction.  The difference between an ordinary person and a reporter in this regard is that the reporter's scoop is vis a vis "the rest of the media" while the scoopness of the person's scoop is centered in the information ecology of the recipient.  We have all met the inveterate ego scooper who moves from other to other to other trying to stay one step ahead of the diffusing information so that s/he can deliver the "scoop" over and over.  And the enterprising gossip who pries information loose from friends and acquaintances and is always ready with the latest tidbit.   In everyday interaction the wielder of the traders' scoop often generates the necessary arbitrage because others are willing to "pay" for information they can use as ego scoops.  Alas, as in the media, the thought scoop is probably the rarest form in everyday life too.  It's probably less self-conscious in everyday interaction and too more ephemeral which is too bad.  Those conversational insights are probably more often lost than their counterparts in "print."

Tomorrow's Social Science Today? By Techies?

If you generate the data, the analysts will come.  And more and more of the technologies of everyday life generate data, lots of it. "Big data" takes big tools and big tools cost big bucks.  The science of big data is mostly social science but, for the most part, it's not being done by social scientists.  What's left out when social scientists leave themselves out of the conversation? And what happens to the funding for non-big-data social science when resource-hungry projects like this emerge?  And what will be the effect on the epistemological status of non-big-data social science?

from the New York Times...

THE BAY CITIZEN

Berkeley Group Digs In to Challenge of Making Sense of All That Data

By JEANNE CARSTENSEN

Published: April 7, 2012

"It comes in “torrents” and “floods” and threatens to “engulf” everything that stands in its path.

No, it is not a tsunami, it is Big Data, the incomprehensibly large amount of raw, often real-time data that keeps piling up faster and faster from scientific research, social media, smartphones — virtually any activity that leaves a digital trace.

The sheer size of the pile (measured in petabytes, one million gigabytes, or even exabytes, one billion gigabytes) combined with its complexity has threatened to overwhelm just about everybody, including the scientists who specialize in wrangling it. “It’s easier to collect data,” said Michael Franklin, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, “and harder to make sense of it.”

Read full article...

Is There a Right to Data Collection?

What's more socially harmful: politicians not knowing what sound bite will play well or voters being mislead by scurrilous misinformation?

New Hampshire is one state where legislators listened when voters complained about "push-polling" -- the practice of making campaign calls that masquerade as surveys or polls.  Perhaps the most infamous example is George Bush's campaign calling South Carolinians to ask what they think if John McCain were to have fathered an illegitimate black baby.

The gist of M. D. Shear's article, Law Has Polling Firms Leery of Work in New Hampshire" (NYT 1 March 2012) is that pollsters and political consultants are whining that "legitimate" operations are getting gun-shy about polling in New Hampshire for fear of being fined.  Actual surveys won't get done, they suggest, because poorly worded legislation creates too much illegitimate legal liability.

They do not take issue with what the law requires and some even call it well-intentioned. Paragraph 16a of section 664 of Title  53 of New Hampshire statutes requires those who administer push-polls to identify themselves as doing so on behalf of a candidate or issue. In other words, if that's what you are up to, you need to say so.

The problem, they say, is that the law is poorly written -- good intentions gone bad, they suggest.  So, what does the statute actually say?  Not so ambiguous, really.  It says if you call pretending to be taking a survey but really you are spreading information about opposition candidates then you are push-polling:

XVII. "Push-polling" means:

1. Calling voters on behalf of, in support of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office by telephone; and
2. Asking questions related to opposing candidates for public office which state, imply, or convey information about the candidates' character, status, or political stance or record; and
3. Conducting such calling in a manner which is likely to be construed by the voter to be a survey or poll to gather statistical data for entities or organizations which are acting independent of any particular political party, candidate, or interest group.

And so, the question arises: why aren't pollsters themselves taking steps to stamp out the practice?  One supposes the answer is that they still want to use it, even if the "good guys" would not stoop to the level of sleaziness that Bush and Lee Atwater practiced.

Interestingly, one of the objections that the pollsters raised was that "complying with the law by announcing the candidate sponsoring the poll would corrupt the data being gathered."  It's interesting because they don't think that constantly adjusting question wording and techniques that are technically push-polling even if they could stay inside the New Hampshire law would corrupt the data.

But this brings me to my real point.  As a practicing social scientist I am consistently disheartened and often angered at the abuse of survey research engaged in by political parties and organizations.   I receive "surveys" from the DNC, DCCC, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, MoveOn.org, etc. etc. that triply insult me:

• They are, in fact, often push-polls (if gentle ones) whose real purpose is to inform and incite not collect data.
• They are couched disingenuously in terms of providing me an opportunity for input, to have my voice heard.
• As research instruments they are almost always C- or worse, violating the most basic tenets of survey construction.

Perhaps I should just humor them and wink since we do both know what's really going on.  Sometimes the political actor in me is content to do so.  But at other times the information order pollution that they represent really gets to me.  These things corrupt the data of other legitimate research efforts. If the results are used, they amplify the error in the information order.  These things undermine social information trust.  They cheapen the very idea of opinion research.  Imagine a certain amount of what passes as clinical trials is really just PR for pharmaceutical companies.  Or imagine that the "high stakes testing" used to study the education system was really just a ploy to indoctrinate children.  Or that marine biologists were just sending a message to the mollusks they study.

As a consultant helping organizations do research I used to ask "are you trying to find out something or are you trying to show something?" To this we could add "or are you just putting on a show?"

There's something disturbing when an industry like political polling can't do better than suggest that the one state that has taken steps to address a real democracy-threatening practice within that industry is somehow "the problem."  A republican pollster whined that the law has “a harmful effect on legitimate survey research and message testing that really impairs our ability to do credible polling,” as if we should care.  It doesn't take a Ph.D. to see that a little ignorance on the part of politicians about attitudes in New Hampshire as the price for stopping a practice that corrupts public deliberation is a tradeoff well worth making.

Should Your Company Tell You Your Secrets

Nice sociology of info two-fer in Forbes article about Target being able to detect pregnancy based on purchases (see also "How Companies Learn Your Secrets"in NYT). The first connection is obvious: data mining lets company detect information "given off" by ordinary behavior. Second is the notification question. In the article the "story" is that Target outs young woman to her dad by sending targeted circular for maternity supplies.

So now we are in the situation where data mining companies have to interrogate their notification obligations just like doctors, lawyers, and spouses. I will work up an analysis in subsequent post. I anticipate insights about how corporate-ness of knower figures into the notification norm calculation.

Is Your Information Your Business?

The Business section is fast becoming the sociology of information section.

In "Twitter Is All in Good Fun, Until It Isn’t," David Carr writes about Roland Martin being sanctioned by CNN because of controversial Twitter posts.  On the Bits page, Nick Bolton's article "So Many Apologies, So Much Data Mining," tells of David Morin, head of the company that produces the social network app, Path ("The smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love."), that got into hot water last week when a programmer in Singapore noticed it hijacked users' address books without asking. On page B3 we find a 14 inch article by T. Vega about new research from Pew about how news media websites fail to make optimal use of online advertising.

More on those in future posts.  Right next to the Pew article, J. Brustein's "Start-Ups Seek to Help Users Put a Price on Their Personal Data" profiles the startup "Personal" -- one of several that are trying to figure out how to let internet users capitalize on their personal data by locking it up in a virtual vault and selling access bit by bit.

This last one is of particular interest to me. Back in the early 90s I floated an idea that alarmed my social science colleagues: why not let study participants own their data? The idea was inspired by complaints that well-meaning researchers at Yale, where I was a graduate student at the time, routinely made their careers on the personal information they, or someone else, had collected from poor people in New Haven. The original source of that complaint was a community activist who had a more colorful way of describing the relationship between researcher and research subject.

The idea would be to tag data garnered in surveys and other forms of observation with an ID that could be matched with an escrow database (didn't really exist then, but now a part of "Software as a Service (Saas)"). When a researcher wanted to make use of data, she or he would include in the grant proposal some sort of data fee that would be delivered to the intermediary and then distributed as data royalties to the individuals the data concerned. The original researcher would still offer whatever enticements to participation (a bit like an advance for a book). The unique identifier held by the intermediary would allow data linking producing a valuable tool for research and an opportunity for research subjects to continue to collect royalties as their data was "covered" by new research projects just as a song writer does.

The most immediate objections were technical -- real but solvable, but then came the reasoned objections. This would make research more expensive! Perhaps, but another way to see this is that it would be a matter of more fully accounting for social costs and value, and for recognizing that researchers were taking advantage of latent value in their act of aggregation (similar to issues raised about Facebook recently). Another objection was that the purpose of the research was already to help these people. True enough. But why should they bear all the risk of that maybe working out, maybe not?

And so the conversation continued. I'm not sure I like the idea of converting personal information into monetary value; I think it sidesteps some important human/social/cultural considerations about privacy, intimacy, and the ways that information behavior is integral to our sense of self and and sense of relationships. But I do think it is critically important that we think carefully about the information order and how the value of information is created by surveillance and aggregation and how we want to think about what happens to the information we give, give up, and give off.

Related

• Business Insider. 2011. "Here's How Much A Unique Visitor Is Worth"
• Morey, Tim. 2011. "What's Your Personal Data Worth?" DesignMind blog. January 18, 2011
• Moody, Glyn. 2010. "'What "Nothing to Hide' is Hiding," on Open... blog 11 Jan 2010.
• Muffett, Alec. 2010. "Understanding Your Personal Information’s Value = The End of 'Nothing To Hide'" dropsafe blog 13 Jan 2010.
• Personal.com Blog
• Reger, Joe. 2005. "The Time Value of Personal Information," JoeReger.com blog 27 Dec 2005.

Prying Information Loose and Dealing with Loose Information

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

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:

1. "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."
2. "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."
3. "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."

See also Matthew Di Carlo on ShankerBlog, Bruce Baker on SchoolFinance 101, and Cedar Reiner on Cedar's Digest

New Book on Data Journalism

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

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

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

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

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

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.