Category Archives: Book Review

Daniel Solove's The Future of Reputation

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The first book I’ve read in full on my Amazon Kindle is Daniel Solove‘s “The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet.” It’s a book I’ve been meaning to read since it came out; it did not disappoint. I was glad to have the joint experience of reading a first full book on the Kindle and of enjoying Solove’s fine work in the process.

Before I picked up “The Future of Reputation,” Solove had already played an important part in my own thinking about online privacy. The term that he coined in a previous book, “digital dossiers,” is a key building-block for the chapter of the same topic in Born Digital, which Urs Gasser and I have just finished (coming out in August). Solove advanced the ball in a helpful way, building on and refining previous scholarship of his own and that of Jonathan Zittrain, Paul Schwartz, Simson Garfinkel and others.

This book has the great virtue of being accessible to a reader who is not a privacy expert as well as being informative to those who know a good bit about it to begin with. Solove repeats a lot of lines that one has heard many times before (for instance, at the outset of Chapter 5, Scott McNealy’s line: “You already have zero privacy. Get over it.”), but also introduces some new ideas to the mix. It’s good on the theory, but it also offers practical policy guidance. He also poses good questions that could help anyone who wants to think more seriously about how to manage their reputation in a digital age.

One other thing I appreciated in particular: Solove is clearly a voracious reader and does an excellent job of situating his own thoughts in within the works and thought of others (variously Henry James and Beecher; Burr and Hamilton; Warren and Brandeis; Brin, Johnson & Post, and Gates) and in historical context, which I much enjoyed.

As for the Kindle itself: it’s fine. I don’t love it, but I also have found myself bringing it on planes with me lately, loaded up with a bunch of books that I’ve been meaning to read. So far, the battery life has been poor (might be my poor re-charging practices), so that the technology of the Kindle is sometimes less good than the technology of the classic book (which cannot run out of batteries in the middle of a long-haul flight, as my Kindle always seems to). The eInk is soft on the eyes; no problem there. The next and previous page functionality is fine, and the bookmark works pretty well. And FWIW, I’ve now got Mark Bauerlein’s “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30)” on there, which is up next for a review — as its premise cuts against the grain of Born Digital.  One advantage of the Kindle is cost, once you have device: the Solove and Bauerlein books cost a mere $9.99 each.

Learning Race and Ethnicity, in the MacArthur Foundation/MIT Press Series

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Learning, Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media is the fourth book I’ve read in the MacArthur/MIT Press Series on Digital Media and Learning. This volume, edited by Anna Everett, is the furthest from my own field — law — and, for me, the most challenging.

Prof. Everett’s opening essay, (which follows the excellent foreword by the series authors, as with each volume in the series), is an effective overview of what follows in the volume. She takes up the familiar debate about the term “digital divide” and why it now rankles more than it helps. She also reminds us that the old joke about how online nobody knows you’re a dog is no longer true, with the advent of rich media and other “advances” in digital technology and how it’s used. I was left, from her chapter, with one line resonating in particular: “the color of the dog counts.” (p. 5)

The rest of the volume consists of three clusters. Future Visions and Excavated Pasts is the first. Dara Byrne leads off with a piece on the future of race. She pulls in and incorporates a series of great quotes from message boards and other online public spaces; takes up (and takes on) John Rawls on the public/private question that runs through so many of our discussions of online life, (p. 22); and digs deep on the future of whether there will be dedicated sites for different races as we look ahead. The punchline is that yes, “minority youth must have access to dedicated online spaces, not just mainstream or ‘race neutral’ ones.” (p. 33)

Tyrone Taborn’s “Separating Race from Technology” is the other essay in this first cluster. Tayborn compares the likelihood of any group of students (“majority white or minority, rich or poor”) knowing Kobe Bryant and Dr. Mark Dean, the African-American engineer involved in IBM’s development of the first PC. His point is clear. As one of a series of possible solutions to the problem of too few minority youth having mentors and heroes in the technology world, Tayborn calls for Digital Media Cultural Mentoring (p. 56).

The second cluster of essays take up art and culture in the digital domain. Raiford Guins guides the reader through a tour of the ways that hip-hop culture, art, and use of technology come together online in the form of “black cultural production in the form of hip-hop 2.0.” (p. 78) It’s a must-read essay; heplful to read with a browser open and a fast broadband connection on tap. Guins has an intriguing segment on the future of the music label, among other take-aways (p. 69 – 70).

Guins’ essay is well-paired with Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre’s celebration and contextualization of Judy Baca’s work at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in LA. (One wonders why LA gets more than its fair share of intriguing digital media production experiments and narratives?) Among other things, Sandoval and Latorre challenge the notion of “digital youth” and the challenges of overly delimiting based just on age — a helpful reminder of a point too easily forgotten. (p. 85) In the final essay of the cluster, Antonio Lopez offers insights into (and concerns about) digital media literacy with respect to Native American populations, told largely in the first person.

Jessie Daniels opens the third cluster with a jarring piece on hate, racism, and white supremacy online. Daniels picks up on themes about the fallacy of colorblindness established in Anna Everett’s introduction. With a link to Henry Jenkins‘ work, Daniels argues for a “multiple literacies” approach to shaping our shared cultural future online and offline. (p. 148 – 50)

Yet more jarring, to me anyway, is Douglas Thomas’s piece on online gaming cultures, called “KPK, Inc.: Race, Nation, and Emergent Culture in Onling Games.” Thomas draws us into gaming environments only to reveal a culture of wild adventure, first-person shooter games, acquisition, treasure, money, and hate all rolled together. The crux of his argument centers on the “Korean problem,” (p. 163-4), a blend of bigotry, nationalism, and competitiveness. The racists that Thomas exposes “are usually Americans / Canadians and white” — and gamers. (p. 164) Along the way, Thomas distinguishes his approach from that of our Berkman colleague Beth Kolko. (p. 155-6)

The final essay, by Mohan Dutta, Graham Bodie, and Ambar Basus takes us in a new direction, further afield, toward the intersection of race, youth, Internet, health, and information. The authors synthesize a great deal of disparate information in unexpected ways. The essay left with an expanded frame of vision, and a frame that I never would have come up with on my own. Their punchline: “disparities in technology uses and health information seeking reflect broader structural disparaties in society that adversely affect communities of color.” (p. 192)

On balance, this collection of essays hangs together very well. Each essay takes a on strong point of view. Overall, the collection both informed my thinking and provoked more by raising hard issues about the impact of growing up online for race, ethnicity, identity, and health.

Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected

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The MacArthur Foundation’s Series on New Media and Learning, published by the MIT Press, includes a book called Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected (2008); open access version here. I opened this book first when I was writing a chapter on Innovators, for Born Digital, a book I’m co-writing with Urs Gasser. I had reason to come back to this book again in thinking about the Task Force we’re chairing, called the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, as there’s a chapter that centers on risk and moral panic in the context of Internet safety. (I’ve previously written about the series as a whole and the volumes Youth, Identity, and Digital Media and Civic Life Online.)

As with the other volumes in the series, there’s much in this book that informs and provokes.

The first essay, by editor Tara McPherson, has a title with particular to the lawyer interested in this topic: “A Rule Set for the Future.” It did not disappoint. This first essay serves both as a guide to the book as a whole as well as a description of six rules to lead to a bright future. As McPherson points out, “This volume identifies core issues concerning how young people’s use of digital media may lead to various innovations and unexpected outcomes, including a range of unintended learning experiences and unanticipated social situations. While such outcomes might typically be seen as ‘positive’ or ‘negative,’ our investigations push beyong simple accounts of digital media and learning as either utopian or dystopian in order to explore specific digital practices with an eye attuned to larger issues of history, policy, and possibility.” (p. 1) She promises that the book will take up a broad range of issues within this frame, including “policy, privacy and IP,” and to do so in a way that will inform a series of core questions, about what’s really new here, the historical background for these changes, the manner in which these changes are occurring, and what recommendations one might make for “policy, curriculum, or infrastructure.” (p. 2)

These issues that McPherson raises are in many ways the same questions we are seeking to answer in Born Digital, to be honest. She puts them nicely here. (And as a side note: the first footnote of McPherson’s opening essay points to the fact that there have already been — at least — three books on roughly the topic that Urs and I are working on: Prensky’s Don’t Bother Me, Mom — I’m Learning; Tapscott’s Growing Up Digital; Howe and Strauss’ Milliennials Rising.)

The bulk of McPherson’s opening essay is devoted to laying out “six maxims to guide further research and inquiry into the questions motivating this study.” (p. 2) These six maxims, or rules, are wonderful, both on their own and as a guide to the essays that follow. I will not ruin it by citing them all in this blog-post; you should read them for yourself if you are interested enough in this topic to be reading this paragraph of this obscure blog post. I will say that in Rule 4: Broaden Participation, she cites to a number of the prominent cyber-lawyers, including Lessig, Boyle, and co.

In her essay, “Practicing at Home,” Ellen Seiter does the unexpected: she “draw[s] out the similarities between learning to play the piano and learning to use the computer.” (p. 28-9) One such similarity is the barrier to entry of cost. Overall, it’s a worthy exercise. She informs nicely the issue of how to conceive of digital literacy in the curriculum. Her assessment of the digital divide data and literature, with an overlay of concerns about cultural capital and participation, (e.g., pp. 37-8) invoke Henry Jenkins’ fine work on the participation gap as a better way to think about the relevant split. (There’s also a critique of a passage in Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks on related grounds. (pp. 41-2) Ultimately, as Seiter admits, hers “is a pessimistic essay,” (p. 49) though one worth engaging with, especially for those of us who are hopelessly optimistic.

Justine Cassell and Meg Cramer take up the safety issue in the third essay, which is why I picked the book back up again now. It is a bit unexpected to see this essay in this volume — it fits less neatly than some of the others do with the rest — but is very helpful, especially when thinking about what we should really be worried about with respect to young people online. Cassell and Cramer lay out the facts about how great the risks are to young women of using the Internet, wonder why the media portrayal of the issue is quite so hyperbolic and misaligned with these facts, and ultimately “argue that the dangers to girls online are not as severe as they have been portrayed, and that the reason for this exaggeration of danger arises from adult fears about girls’ agency (particularly sexual agency) and societal discomfort around girls as power users of technology.” (p. 55) Cassell and Cramer do an especially nice job of placing into historical context the worry around teens online, in light of previous, similar fears that cropped up as earlier communications media became popular.

Christian Sandvig’s piece on “Wireless Play and Unexpected Innovation” offers a nice overview of how unexpected innovation may happen and what the prerequisites are for its occurrence. He locates Eric von Hippel within the literature and Sandvig’s own argument, which, as a von Hippel devotee, I found a helpful anchor for aspects of his argument. (p. 89) The last paragraph is an accurate — possibly scolding, certainly daunting — call to action. “‘Participatory culture,'” Sandvig contends, “will only move beyond the elite if the desire for decentralized control and widespread participation can animate changes in our society’s fundamental structure of opportunity.” (p. 94)

A cluster of essays that drive down further on the literacy and curricular questions follow. Sonia Livingstone offers insights aplenty in her strong essay on Internet Literacy. She stresses “the historical continuities between internet literacy and print literacy,” to great effect. (p. 115) She ends with a challenge nearly as ambitious and daunting (and just as accurate) as Sandvig’s. Paula Hooper has an instructive take on the use of programming in the curriculum. Sarita Yardi writes up a fun take on the “backchannel” in the classroom — “an exciting innovative space for a new learning paradigm.” (p. 160) Henry Lowood dives deep into games and “the expressive potential of machinima.” (p. 191) Robert Heverly reviews the topic of “growing up digital” and its impact on identity, privacy, and security — with many themes invoking the work of danah boyd (such as persistence).

The second-to-last essay, by Robert Samuels, is the most challenging. He argues, off the bat, “that in order to understand the implications of how digital youth are now using new media and technologies in unexpected and innovative ways, we have to rethink many of the cultural oppositions that have shaped the Western tradition since the start of the modern era.” (p. 219) Like the challenges at the end of the Sandvig and Livingstone pieces, Samuels’s argument strikes me as right, and hard work. He also argues “that we have moved into a new cultural period of automodernity.” I admit I did not understand it in full. (p. 219, 228-33) But I suspect that I like the idea of what he sees ahead: “by defending the public realm against the constant threats of privitization, we can open up a new automodern public space.” (p. 238) It sounds like something you need a whole conference on to understand properly, rather than the one-way street of a 20-page essay.

In the final essay, Steve Anderson and Anne Balsamo explore perspectives on the current state of digital learning. I am glad I made it this far in the book — propelled by the fine essays that preceded it — because they take up some efforts near and dear to our hearts at the Berkman Center, including Prof. Charles Nesson’s Harvard Law School/Harvard Extension School/Second Life class, CyberOne, taught with his daughter and my law school classmate Becca Nesson. (p. 249-51) Anderson and Balsamo end with a spirited manifesto for “Original Synners,” which I intend to think about adopting in my own teaching. (p. 254-7)

Taken together, these essays fit together as a series of detailed examples that string together issues that are not immediately connected in one’s mind. McPherson predicted as much in her opening essay. As she puts it, together, these essays, “encourage us to recognize that innovation as a cultural phenomenon often happens in unexpected places (as does learning) and produces unanticipated outcomes. They remind us to ask who innovation serves and how we might best reap its benefits for broader visions of social equity and justice. And, finally, they underscore that the term ‘innovation’ is value laden and historically complex.” (p. 5) It’s worth making it all the way through; the connections become clear in the full telling of the tales.

Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth

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I’ve been making my way with care (and great pleasure) through the fine series of books that the MacArthur Foundation and MIT Press have put together on Digital Media and Learning. There are six in total, each worth reading. (I previously blogged about the volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital Media.)

I’m trying to finish the edits on Born Digital, the book on related themes that Urs Gasser and I are writing. The sticky chapter for me at the moment is called “Activists.” It will probably end up as the next-to-last chapter. I think it’s crucially important as a topic. A few weeks ago, our wonderful-and/but-tough editor at Basic Books said the chapter had to be rewritten from scratch, starting with a blank, new page (she doesn’t like Microsoft Word much). As I’ve gone through the rewrite, I am working in inspiration from another of the DM&L books, Civic Life Online. As I’ve felt about the others, it’s a great contribution to our understanding of a critical topic. The entire collection of essays is worthy of a read; I point out just a few things that jumped out at me, but I don’t mean to imply that other segments aren’t helpful, too.

The opening essay, by editor W. Lance Bennett, sets the frame for the book. He looks at “Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age,” and compares two paradigms: one of young people as engaged and active in civic life, the other as disengaged and passive. He argues that we need to “bridge the paradigms” or else our youth, digitally inspired or not, will continue to get disconnected from formal civic life. He argues in favor of a better approach: show young people how, through their use of new technologies and otherwise, they can have an impact on the political process (p. 21). In the process, we ought to enable young people to “explore, experiment, and expand democracy.” Sounds quite right to me.

Kathryn Montgomery traces a growing youth civic culture in the second chapter. Her emphasis is on the 2004 get out the vote (GOTV) efforts. She challenges the movement toward the insertion of corporations and their brands into the Rock the Vote process and other online communities. This strand of argument brought to mind the core themes of Montgomery’s recent book, also by MIT Press, called “Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet,” in which she builds out further on the issues of corporate branding in the online space and marketing geared toward children. To build on the growing youth civic culture, Montgomery calls for “a broader, more comprehensive, multidisciplinary effort, combining the contributions of communications researchers, political scientists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists and young people themselves.” This too sounds right, though I was amused to see us lawyers left out of the mix of who might be useful — especially when the “key policy battles” that she refers to earlier in the chapter include intellectual property, net neutrality, and online safety, which seem to me issues on which lawyers might have something to say. (Perhaps we are indeed more trouble than we’re worth.) Lots of mentions here, too, of the work of danah boyd and Henry Jenkins to keep bad things from happening in the Congress.

In “Not Your Father’s Internet: The Generation Gap in Online Politics,” Michael Xenos and Kirsten Foot take up the fascinating question (to me, anyway) of how young people are getting their news and information about politics. They argue, as many others do, that young people do so in ways that are generally quite different from the ways that older people do. Young people, they find, are more likely to access news and information about politics either online (and in social contexts) or through comedy programs rather than through print newspapers and evening newscasts — which seems true enough. “Clearly coproductive interactivity is foundational to the way that young people, more than any other age group, engage with the Internet,” they claim. (p. 57) They do a nice job also of linking their theories back to the actual uses of the Internet by campaigns and pointing, in the process, to the kinds of interactivity that work for campaigns to engage young people by building a sense of efficacy and trust. (p. 62) They call, in the end, for a balanced approach between “transactional and coproductive web practices.” (p. 65)

Howard Rheingold has a typically (for him) colorful and engaging piece on the bridging of media production and civic engagement. It’s great to have his voice directly in the set of essays, especially since many others throughout the MacArthur series cite or quote him, especially for his work on Smart Mobs. Rheingold, not surprisingly, has the money line of the whole book, perhaps the series: “Talking about public opinion making is a richer experience if you’ve tried to do it.” (p. 102). He then sends the reader through a tour of exercises and points us to a wiki where we can play ourselves. Many of us talk about Media Literacy. Rheingold (like Henry Jenkins and others) is doing something about it. Right on.

Much in the same spirit, I loved the opening line — as well as what follows — in Peter Levine’s essay: “Students should have opportunities to create digital media in schools.” (p. 119) I get teased for this, but I believe it’s true not just for younger students but for law students, too. Levine’s four strategies are convincing. Marina Bers, our neighbor at Tufts, expands on this point. She uses a lively set of examples (including pulling the reader briefly into virtual worlds). Just as helpful, Bers sets the challenge of developing an effective civics curricula into a helpful theoretical framework. Kate Raynes-Goldie and Luke Walker take a deep dive into one of the most promising projects in this space, TakingITGlobal. They also set TIG in context of related sites.

Stephen Coleman, a British scholar and one of the giants of this literature, concludes the book with a short essay that puts the entire work in context for governments themselves. Coleman points to six things (pp. 202 – 3) that governments can do “to promote democratic youth e-citizenship” plus four “policy principles” (p. 204). Coleman links his themes back to arguments by Rheingold, Bers, and Levine in the process, bringing things full-circle.

I put down this volume hopeful again about what we can do to engage young people in civic life. It’s clear, from the work of these scholars, that we’ll have to expand our thinking about what we mean by “civic life” if we mean to engage these young people. It’s clear, too, that experiential learning — learning that is rewarding and fulfilling and encourages them to come back to these activities — is an essential part of what we have to do next, whether that’s something that we structure in the classroom or that we just encourage and promote when young people just do it themselves.

MacArthur/MIT Press Series on Youth, Media, and Learning

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Last month, the MacArthur Foundation, along with MIT Press, announced the release of a series of new books on youth and new media. The series is a treasure trove.

I have been working my way through the six books over the past several weeks as I’m simultaneously working on late drafts of the book that Urs Gasser and I are writing on a similar topic, called Born Digital (forthcoming, Basic Books, 2008).

I’d highly recommend to anyone remotely interested in the topic to read these books. They are academic in style, structure and language, but remarkably accessible in my view. I’m not a social scientist, nor an expert in most of the fields that are represented by the authors (in fact, I’m not sure if there are any lawyers at all in the list of authors!), but the editors and authors have done a lovely job of making their fields relevant broadly.

For starters, the series Foreword, by the group of “series advisors,” is wonderful. I can’t imagine how six people came to agree on such a clear text, but somehow they did. There must have been a lead author who held onto the pen; it’s far too coherent to have been written by committee. (The advisors are: Mizuko Ito, Cathy Davidson, Henry Jenkins, Carol Lee, Michael Eisenberg, and Joanne Weiss. One imagines that the voice of the program officer at the MacArthur Foundation who made it all possible, Connie Yowell, is in there somewhere too.)

The Foreword is worth reading in full, but a few key lines: “Unlike the early years in the development of computers and computer-based media, digital media are now commonplace and pervasive, having been taken up by a wide range of individuals and institutions in all walks of life. Digital Media have escaped the boundaries of professional and formal practice, and the academic, governmental, and industry homes that initially fostered their development.” Those are simple statements, clear and right on. One of the reasons to pay attention to this topic right now is the pervasiveness, the commonplace-ness of the use of these new media, especially by many young people.

Also, their working hypothesis: “those immersed in new digital tools and networks are engaged in an unprecedented exploration of language, games, social interaction, problem solving, and self-directed activity that leads to diverse forms of learning. These diverse forms of learning are reflected in expressions of identity, how individuals express independence and creativity, and in their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically.” The work of the series authors, I think, bears out this hypothesis quite convincingly.

At the same time, the series advisors make plain that they are not “uncritical of youth practices” and note that they do not claim “that digital media necessarily hold the key to empowerment.” It is this spirit of healthy skepticism that one can hear through most of the essays in the series — and which is essential to the academic enterprise they’ve undertaken.

So far, I’ve finished the book on “Youth, Identity, and Digital Media” (ed. by David Buckingham) and “The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning” (ed. by Katie Salen) and am part of the way through each of the others. Each one is excellent.

In the ID book, I found particularly helpful the first piece on “Introducing Identity” by David Buckingham, which took on the hard definitional and discipline-related questions of identity in this context. He put a huge amount of scholarship into context, with sharp critiques along the way. The essay by our colleague danah boyd (on “Why Youth (heart) Social Network Sites,” a variant of which is online) is already a key document in our understanding of identity and the shifts in conceptions of public and private (“privacy in public,” and the idea of the networked public — related to but not the same as Yochai Benkler’s similar notions of networked publics). And the notion of “Identity Production as Bricolage” — introduced in “Imaging, Keyboarding, and Posting Identities” by Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell — is evocative and helpful, I thought. The many warnings about not “exociticizing” (danah often using the word “fetishizing”) the norms and habits of young people and their use of technology, as well as echoes of Henry Jenkins’ work on convergence and his and Eszter Hargittai’s study of the participation gap came through load and clear, too. (I am pretty sure I can hear dislike of the term “digital natives” in between certain lines, as well.)

There’s much more to like in the book, and much more to work into our own understanding of ID in this environment, than I can post here. There’s an equal amount of insight in the Games book too. (The class I am co-teaching with David Hornik starts in 31 minutes and I should probably prepare a bit more than I have already.)

Keith Sawyer's Group Genius

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On the long flight from Boston to Shanghai, I read R. Keith Sawyer‘s recent book, Group Genius. It’s definitely a worthwhile read for anyone who cares about how innovation really works as a functional matter; anyone who runs any kind of an organization; and anyone who ever struggles with trying to do something creative, whether alone or with others. Sawyer takes on the romantic myth of the solo author/inventor/genius with a persuasive argument about “the unique power of collaboration to generate innovation.” I happen to be pre-disposed to thinking he’s right, but the many examples he gives (Morse, Darwin, Picasso, companies like Whole Foods, YouTube, and Google, and so forth) helped to clarify my own thinking about innovation and creativity and how they come to pass.

A few thoughts that the book sparked in me (Sawyer talks a lot about “sparks”), for which I am grateful:

– Urs Gasser, Colin Maclay and I have a long-running series of conversations about collaboration across institutions, interdisciplinarity, and international comparative work in our field. It’s our shared (I think!) view that it would be very, very hard, if not impossible, effectively to study what we study — the implications of changes in information technologies on society, with an emphasis on law and policy — without collaborating with others. The Berkman Center, our shared professional home, works best, in my view, when it makes possible collaboration between creative people, some of whom work at Berkman/HLS and others who are just friends. In a more formal sense, we work deliberately with other institutions, like Urs’s Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen; JZ’s Oxford Internet Institute; Lawrence Lessig’s Stanford Center for Internet & Society; Jack Balkin and Eddan Katz’s Information Society Project at Yale Law School; our partner institutions in the OpenNet Initiative (the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab; University of Cambridge; and OII); and so forth. I am not certain that we are accomplishing “group genius” through any of these collaborations, but I am quite sure that our work would be much less richly rewarding without them. As the Berkman Center morphs from an HLS-based institution to one that draws more formally on the work of others at Harvard in the next year, we hope that our work will continue in this direction of more interdisciplinary, more comparative, and more creative.

– It made me reflect, too, on Urs’s recent blog-post about his two week stay with us in Cambridge this summer. We spent a good bit of time (never enough, of course) talking about what we want to say in the book that we are co-authoring, Born Digital, and what we hope to accomplish in the related Digital Natives project. This is a field in which many, many good and smart people have been working very hard to understand how young people use new information technologies and what it means. We hope for our work on this book and this project to be complementary, not competitive, to this emerging body of work. As lawyers, but also scholars interested in interdisciplinary work, we’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about what our “comparative advantage” is — what is it that our training and mode of analysis can enable us to offer to an increasingly rich body of literature. Our goal has to do with both understanding what others have come to know through good empirical and qualitative study; to use a global, not local, lens in assessing this emerging population (rather than generation) of digital natives; and then to offer useful thoughts on how to move forward to head off the worst problems (encroachments on privacy, intellectual property concerns, information overload/credibility issues) and take advantage of the opportunities (innovation, new modes of teaching and learning, civic activism, semiotic democracy). After conversations with Urs, Ethan Zuckerman, danah boyd, and others, I’m freshly persuaded that meaningful, lightweight collaboration is essential to doing sound work in our field (not that we’re there yet, but working on it, and the Group Genius argument helps a lot in this regard).

– Fundamentally, I’m persuaded also that our highest calling at the Berkman Center may be to create an environment in which scholars and teachers can do better work than they’d do on their own.

A few modest critiques:

– Sawyer’s last chapter talks about policy approaches to “Creating the Collaborative Economy.” Several of his proposals relate to intellectual property. Curiously, this chapter was the least persuasive to me of the book’s 11 chapters, even though I expect that I roughly agree with what he argues in his seven proposals. I think I was left unconvinced in part because it’s hard to talk about copyright terms, patent reform, mandatory licensing, non-competes, the standards-making processes, and other complex legal puzzles in a paragraph each. There’s at least one counter-argument for each of the arguments he makes that’s worth exploring, in most instances from the point of view of an economist. Also, with some of the arguments, such as “3. Legalize Modding,” I agree with the gist of the argument, but I wonder about the specifics of what Sawyer writes. First, how much of a problem there is in reality — is the DMCA Section 1201, with its current exceptions, standing in the way of much modding (other than very specific circumvention of TPMs that surround copyrighted works) in practical terms? Maybe, but there’s a serious empirical question to be answered. Sawyer claims: “There are thousands of people like the extreme bike jumper who invented a way to keep his pedals from spinning. One reason they don’t share is that those modifications are often illegal. The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act — designed to prevent users from making illegal copies of software, music, and movies — has the side effect of making it impossible to modify the products consumers purchase.” (p. 223) While I’m no big fan of DMCA Section 1201, to which Sawyer refers here, it’s not the case that most consumer modifications of things they buy in general are illegal. The DMCA 1201 makes illegal just the circumvention of effective technological measures designed to protect copyrighted works — a much more narrow statement than the one that Sawyer makes here. So, the ban he refers to is the ban on the act of circumventing a certain set of technologies, not the making of modifications to something you’ve bought (copyright, separately, might disallow certain modifications under the exclusive right to make derivative works, but that’s a different argument). I realize that the act of circumventing and making the modification are related, but they’re different, to be sure. In short: while the punchlines may be right in this final chapter, the analysis perhaps warrants its own book, rather than a short chapter.

– One thing in the book puzzled me; I am not sure if others who have read it had the same question. On p. 108, he’s talking about how the most creative scientists also happen to be the most productive. The argument, building upon the work of Dean Keith Simonton, reads in relevant part: “… the sheer productivity of a person — the raw output of creative products — is correlated with the creative success of that person … it turns out that for any given creator, the most creative product tends to appear during the time of most productivity. Paradoxically, slowing down and focusing on one work makes a person less creative.” (pp. 108 – 9). In the graph on that same page, titled the Distribution of Scientific Productivity, I think it shows those scientists with the fewest articles to the far left of the graph (with the greatest number of scientists on this end of the graph) and the most articles (and fewest scientists accomplishing this feat) on the far right. (Separately, I wonder if it is a Pareto distribution?) In any event, the text seems to place Darwin at the “left in the figure” (emphasis mine), whereas I would have expected Darwin to be at the right of the figure. (p. 108) I might be misreading this section or misunderstanding the graph, or perhaps it’s just a typo. It’s not that important; I think I get the point of the argument.

Separately, on recommendation engines: As an aside, I logged into Amazon.com to link to Sawyer’s book there. I noticed that my first recommended book in Amazon is William Gibson’s Spook Country. The Amazon recommendation engine is clearly getting good: that’s the most recent book I bought, at Logan Airport before I left (sorry, Amazon; nice try, though!).

At The School at Columbia Today

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I’m with a group of 20 wonderful educators talking about technology in the classroom at a NYSAIS workshop. It’s taking place at The School at Columbia University, a totally beautiful, wired school built three years ago. We’re looking now at the debates on a wiki format right now.

We’re talking also about what tags are. (David Weinberger has a book coming out in May, Everything is Miscellaneous, that will answer it for you!)

When Academics Write Fiction

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Those who write academic articles and books for a living are not always good at writing fiction. I’m reading a novel that, for me, breaks the mold: Stephen L. Carter‘s The Emperor of Ocean Park. As usual, I’m about 4 years after everyone else. Prof. Carter, a prolific scholar and the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale Law School, offers up a mystery about the death of a judge who narrowly misses becoming a Supreme Court Justice. (An interview with the author tells how the book came about.) The judge’s son, Talcott Garland, is a professor at an Ivy League law school set in a small city called Elm Harbor. It’s an incredibly fun (and long, which to me is a good thing, if it’s a good book) story, a mystery well worth the time (even though none of the characters are particularly likable).

What struck me most was a passage that many people who attend or teach in elite law schools might think, on their lowest days, but rarely articulate in public:

“… I return to my dreary classroom, populated, it often seems, by undereducated but deeply committed Phi Beta Kappa ideologies — leftists who believe in class warfare but have never opened Das Kapital and certainly have never perused Werner Sombart, hard-line capitalists who accept the inerrancy of the invisible hand but have never studied Adam Smith, third-generation feminists who know that sex roles are a trap but have never read Betty Friedan, social Darwinists who propose leaving the poor to sink or swin but have never heard of Herbert Spencer or William Sumner’s essay on The Challenge of Facts, black separatists who mutter bleakly about institutional racism but are unaware of the work of Carmichael and Hamilton, who invented the term — all of them our students, all of them hopelessly young and hopelessly smart and thus hopelessly sure they alone are right, and nearly all of whom, whatever their espoused differences, will soon be espoused to huge corporate law firms, massive profit factories where they will bill clients at ridiculous rates for two thousand hours of work every year, quickly earning twice as much money as the best of their teachers, and at half the age, sacrificing all on the altar of career, moving relentlessly upward, as ideology and family life collapse equally around them, and at last arriving, a decade or two later, cynical and bitter, at their cherished career goals, partnerships, professorships, judgeships, whatever kind of ships they dream of sailing, and then looking around at the angry, empty waters and realizing that they have arrived with nothing, absolutely nothing, and wondering what to do with the rest of their wretched lives.”

Only one side of the story, of course, but a pretty evocative, damning assessment of legal education and the life we lead as lawyers.

Internet and the United Nations

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I spent a few recent plane flights reading Paul Kennedy’s The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations. It’s a fine history of the UN, worth reading to be sure. (I loved his book from the late 1980s, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.) Kennedy starts, but does not long linger, on the period leading up to Bretton Woods and San Francisco and other meetings, (i.e., the interesting but unsatisfying story of the League of Nations and what came before it). Most of the book, organized thematically (phew!) rather than chronologically, takes up the treatment by the UN of key issues like security, peacekeeping, and economic development.

What sets the book apart, for me, was the treatment of “other” topics, such as environment, children’s issues, and cultural issues (what he calls the “softer face” of the UN) and human rights. Kennedy is not uncritical in his treatment of the UN’s role in these areas, but he seems to see in these activities great importance and even greater promise: “… it is difficult to imagine how much more riven and ruinous our world of six billion people would be today had there been no UN social, environmental, and cultural agendas — and no institutions to attempt, sometimes well and sometimes poorly, to put them into practice on the ground. It is a mixed record, but it is hard to see how it could be otherwise.” (p. 176). Amen.

In the human rights context, Kennedy lauds the work of Mary Robinson (p. 197-8) and others in the human rights context, while noting the many tensions that lurk in the treatment of human rights in the various relevant charters and institutions of the UN. One of these tensions bears on an issue that we’ve been working on at the Berkman Center for some time. In our shared work on the OpenNet Initiative (with Toronto, Oxford, and Cambridge), and with other partners in the related context of corporate ethics (Berkeley, St. Gallen, CDT), we’ve been puzzling over the sovereignty of states and the rights of individuals to civil liberties. On the one hand, of course, the several dozen states that filter the Internet and practice online surveillance (we imagine) of their citizens and visitors have a right to regulate activity within the jurisdiction that they control. On the other hand, the UN and its member states, through a series of treaties, have set forth the understanding that there are certain rights that attach to any individual in the signatory states regardless of the (good or bad) decisions that those states might make to abridge those rights. Kennedy frames much of the chapter on human rights in this same context: “How are world citizens and their governments to reconcile universal human rights with claims for state sovereignty?”

As those who study the Internet and care about human rights, we haven’t made the case clearly yet for where the rights of free expression and privacy in the Internet context fit in this balance. Many of us no doubt have strong convictions about which side of the ledger filtering and surveillance fall on; others, I know, see the issue are tricky and nuanced. There’s a field emerging here with enormous significance. The ability of activists to rely upon the Internet in repressive regimes is but one of the important things that hangs in the balance. I suspect that there are many captains of industry at large technology companies that feel caught in a purgatory wrought by this tension.

The most notable thing to me about Kennedy’s book — through no fault of his, to be clear — is the extent to which Internet plays essentially no role in the story of the UN’s first 60 years. The word appears four times in the text if the index is to be believed, and after reading the whole thing, I believe the index maker to have been accurate. No doubt the ITU or WSIS or the UN ICT Task Force could have made it into the text (they didn’t), but lots of other significant activities were likewise left out, understandably.

For Kennedy, Internet seems to be about an alternative way to tell the world about news, (i.e., the next chapter in the trajectory that starts with radio then goes to TV — and now it’s the net). That’s one way to talk about it, I suppose. The most extensive treatment appears on page 236: “… a more in-depth investigation of the place of news and cultural communications in the evolution of international affairs would need to consider the pervasive and transnational nature of the Internet. Since it has grown so fast in the past decade, and its popularity is exploding in the giant states of India and China, it is extremely difficult to get a good measure of its many impacts; but it seems fair to remark that because this is a medium that can be used and abused by anyone with electricity and a computer, it may become less and less a Western-dominated instrument.” An understatement, to be sure; and I am not certain that Kennedy is thinking of states as the abusers, but rather individuals — though the sentence is ambiguous enough that maybe my reading is wrong.

I can’t imagine that the history of the UN in 2065, written by the next eminent historian and chairman of a blue-ribbon commission, will have so little to say about information and communications technologies and the UN’s role in our field, but maybe it will — and maybe, though I am not so sure, that would be a wonderful thing if it were to come to pass.