Whose Information?

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:

1. "Equality, Information and the Courts Redux: The Dan Rather Report,"
2. "Democracy and the Information Order,"
3. "Courts and the Information Order,"
4. "Suing for Information"

See also:

1. Hadfield, Gillian. 2009. "Framing the Choice Between Cash and the Courthouse: Experiences With the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund." Law & Society Review, Volume 42, Issue 3 (p 645-682)
2. Hadfield, Gillian and Dan Ryan. "Democracy and the Information Order" (unpublished draft)
3. Weiser, Benjamin. "Value of Suing Over 9/11 Deaths Is Still Unsettled." New York Times, March 12, 2009.

Information Rot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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"

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.