Hacker 2/HACKER2.mdf/cud/cud518d.txt

Text File | 1995-01-03 | 16KB | 386 lines

Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 20:26:36 EST
From: Arnie Kahn <[e-mail]>
Subject: File 4--London Times Educational Supplement Article

****
Originally from:
From--Mike C Holderness <[e-mail]>
Subject--Invisible (internet) college

Greetings everyone --Here, belatedly, is the article for the Times
Higher Education Supplement in which you expressed an interest. The
published article was very little different, apart from some errors
of
punctuation which they introduced... A conspiracy of silent
communication

"In the high-tech world, if you're not on the net, you're not in
the
know." Thus the Economist included the Internet in its festive
guide
to networks -- alongside the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission,
and others which only the best-informed conspiracy theorists can
fret
about. More seriously, Lynne Brindley, head of the British Library
of
Political and Economic Science, asks how, as a young researcher,
"you
break in to a discipline if you haven't source journals to look
at".
Increasingly, research is being discussed on the Internet rather
than
on paper: by "those in the know, in these invisible colleges who
can
safely whizz their way round draft documents and papers," as
Brindley
puts it.

Research has always involved "invisible colleges", whether they
meet
at conferences or exchange ideas in the post -- what the electronic
community refers to as "snail mail". Does the age of electronic
communication herald newer, more invisible and more exclusive
colleges?

"Despite the normative description of science as an arena of
fully-open communication, the new communication technologies
exacerbate the practical problem of some groups of people having
more
access to information than other people." That's the conclusion of
Bruce Lewenstein, of the departments of communication and Science
&
Technology Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York state.

The first thing about an exclusive network is that many people
don't
even know about it. So some history is in order. The Internet grew
out
of a project by the US Department of Defense to build a
communication
system which would function after a nuclear attack. In the 1970s,
programmers working for the DoD got themselves connected, and
started
sending electronic messages containing working notes, queries and
--crucially -- gossip.

The technology was taken up by the US National Science Foundation
to
make super-computer resources available to universities across the
country. More and more local university networks joined. The
British
Joint Academic Network (JANET) gained a high-speed connection to
the
US, shared with NASA.

The Internet is deeply decentralized: an institution "joining" it
need
only be connected to a few "neighbours", which forward messages on
to
their neighbours, by whatever route is available, until they reach
their destination. So no-one knows quite how large it is. One
recent
estimate is that about 7 million people --somewhere between 3.5
million and 14 million -- have full access through their university
or
employer.

What's the Internet good for? You could, with permission, sit at a
kitchen table on the isle of Jura and run a programme on a
super-computer in Cambridge -- or, equally easily, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, or both at once. But most researchers deal more in
text
than number-crunching.

If you want to exchange text with colleagues around the world, you
first need an "account" on a computer, or a local network, with an
Internet connection. You compose your message in a word-processor
and
convert it to unadulterated plain text (ASCII in the jargon). You
locate the account name for the person you want to write to -- more
on
that later. Type the command "mail [e-mail]" and
attach the text; a few minutes or hours later jones looks at her
computer in the notorious University of Winnesota and discovers
your
message waiting for her.

Immediately, you can see the possibility of collaborative writing
with
anyone, anywhere. You can form a group, too. A "mailing list"
re-distributes all the messages it receives to all its subscribers.
And you can have public discussions: a message sent to one of the
more
than 2000 "news-groups" is visible to anyone who cares to look, and
possibly to reply.

It's not, of course, quite as easy as that.

Assume, for the moment, that you can type, in English. Assume that
you
have access to the necessary equipment. Assume that you're able and
prepared to learn the sometimes baroque commands needed to access
the
system. Assume that you're tolerant of the fact that when you make
a
mistake, as you will, the system may fail to notify you at all, or
may
throw screeds of gobbledegook at you.

For these assumptions to be true, you're quite likely either to be
a
member of an academic institution in a Western industrialised
country,
or very well-to-do in world terms. You're also likely to be male.
And
the public area of the news system bears this out. An high
proportion
of messages -- over 90% in an unrepresentative sample of
discussions
of physics -- comes from the USA. An even higher proportion (of
those
with identifiable senders) comes from men.

"Women in science worry that these 'private' network exchanges of
research results serve to reinforce the 'Old Boy Network' in
scientific research circles, especially given the overwhelmingly
male
demographics of e-mail and news-group users," says Ruth Ginzberg,
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University in the US.

Why should there be this preponderance of men? Sarah Plumeridge is
research assistant on a project to study women's use of computers
at
the University of East London. She comments that "A lot of research
suggests that women prefer computing when it's for use, as a tool,
when it's not taught as an abstract science." It's clear from the
tone
of messages in the public news-groups that the boys see them as a
playground.

Newcomers are often mercilessly attacked for stylistic solecisms.
Kerri Lindo, who teaches philosophy at Middlesex University, saw
the
Internet for the first time when interviewed for this piece.  She
immediately related it to her work on the French philosopher
Bourdieu
and remarked: "it's what I'd call a social Freemasonry -- you can't
join a club unless know in advance what the rules are. Someone who
learns the rules and then plays the game won't play it as
successfully
as someone who never explicitly learnt them -- just as people who
learn middle-class manners or second languages always get caught
out,
however fluent they become."

And Josh Hayes, a post-doctorate studying community ecology at the
University of Washington, may have hit on a sensible social reason
for
avoiding electronic communication: "For the moment, those of us who
use the net a lot are probably considered to be, well, a little bit
geeky. Real ecologists would be out in the field, don't you know."

There are more serious issues too. Cheris Kramerae of the
Department
of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana is,
working on the issue of sexual harassment on "the net". This
happens
in very specific ways -- men sending abusive messages to women,
often
having obtained their electronic addresses from the electronic
"personals column".  There is also the problem of socially retarded
students abusing the system to distribute digitised pornographic
images: the direct equivalent of the calendar on the workshop wall.
Kramerae concludes, however, that "Obviously it is not the
technology
but the policies which are presenting particular problems for
women."

Arnie Kahn runs a private mailing list for about 45 feminist
psychologists from James Madison University in Virginia. "A few
years
ago I was sending electronic mail to a few friends who, like
myself,
were feminist psychologists doing research on gender.... I
announced
to my friends that if they had a question, they could just send the
message to me and I would forward it to the rest of the group."

Kahn's list is, then, exactly an invisible college. Given the vast
space occupied by anti-feminist men in the open news-groups which
are
supposed to discuss feminism, it can only operate if it remains
private and by invitation.

Are there, though, fields in which access to the Internet is
essential, rather than helpful, to making progress? It seems so.
Jim
Horne, an Associate Research Scientist in high-energy physics at
Yale
University in the US, states that "a number of people in high
energy
(only those with tenure though) have even stopped sending their
papers
to journals. They only send their papers to the preprint bulletin
boards." Paper publication is quite simply too slow to bother with.

These collections of preprints are public, if you have net access
and
if you've been told where to find them. Stephen Selipsky, a physics
post-doctorate at Boston University, points out that, since the
preprints were made available in this way, "in the circles I move
in,
'private' mailing lists play very little role... There is very
little
point keeping results secret in theoretical work, and large career
rewards from disseminating results... in contrast to areas like
biochemistry, where people [want] to stay in the lead on a hot
topic."

Computer science is naturally another field where work is exchanged
exclusively on the net. A researcher at Edinburgh --who preferred
not
to be named "from shyness" -- says that "you tend not to chase up
the
actual publication (which can be months later). I have seen someone
appealing for information about where some papers were eventually
published, because you can't (yet) put '[e-mail]' in
a
bibliography entry." Here, too, there is at least one mailing list
which is private -- "in order to keep down the traffic and free it
from the 'can anyone tell me what a neural network is?' questions."

In some fields, electronic distribution is the only practical
method.
If you've ever watched someone laboriously typing DNA sequences out
of
a journal into a computer -- "ACG ACT AAG TAG" and thus for pages
--you'll see why this is the case for molecular biology.

There are some ways in which electronic communications can break
down
boundaries. "Speaking as someone at a relatively small and remote
institution," says Steve Carlip at the physics department of the
University of California Davis, "the biggest handicap is not
private
electronic distribution, but rather the fact that so much happens
at
seminars and in conversations."

Robert Gutschera finished his PhD last year and is now an Assistant
Professor of mathematics at Wellesley College in the USA. "The
heaviest users of electronic mail seem to be younger researchers,"
he
says. "Getting into a field is always hard, but I think e-mail
makes
it better rather than worse."

Some are positively evangelical. Lewenstein quotes Tom Droege, who
is
looking for "anomalous" heat production from palladium electrodes
in
heavy water -- the notorious cold fusion experiment -- in his
basement
laboratory. Droege communicates and discusses all his results
publicly
on the Internet -- finding negative interest from his work
colleagues
at Fermilab. "...the real experiment I am trying to do is e-mail
science. The 'anomalous heat' project is just an excuse. I think
this
is the media of the future."

You may notice that most of the people quoted here work in the USA.
This is, as you might guess, because their comments were obtained
on
the Internet -- neatly demonstrating the bias it introduces. On the
one hand, the research for this article might have been impossibly
expensive without it. On the other, people with net connections are
tempted to talk only to the connected.

Kerri Lindo, as a total newcomer, was immediately struck by the
possibility of finding others working on Bourdieu -- until she saw
the
content of the one public philosophy news-group: "It's a real
shame,
isn't it..." She composed and sent a message anyway -- and was able
to
predict what the programme would do next, which suggests that the
computer software for sending messages isn't as awful as it's often
made out to be, at least for post-graduate philosophers. She got
just
one response, from a group with an estimated 23,000 readers, and
this
could be summarised as "who he?".

Some of those ten or thirty thousand occasional readers of the
philosophy news-group could probably be useful collaborators for
Lindo. But how to find them? The sheer volume of public
tittle-tattle
-- known on the net as "the noise-to-signal ratio" --means that
only
those with time to kill will pay attention. The Internet has no
equivalent to a phone book. If you know that you want to contact a
particular person, you know what institution they work at, and you
can
guess or find out that institution's electronic address, there are
tools which may locate them -- but they're cranky and unreliable.

Often the easiest way to find someone's electronic address is a
phone
call, which may involve explaining exactly what electronic mail is
to
three or four departmental secretaries. On the other hand, once
you've
made contact, the computer screen is a great leveller. If you can
work
out how to de-gender your personal name, then all the information
the
reader has about you is what you choose to put into your text. (Or
maybe not: Lindo recalls an small experiment in which she could
tell
the gender of pseudonymous essayists with 93% accuracy, though this
was from hand-written scripts.) An intelligent and literate amateur
could still conceivably enter into collaboration with a
professor...

If you work in the humanities, you can probably put off coming to
grips with the technology for a few years. You might want, however,
to
consider the rich seam of research on how this medium affects the
nature of the messages. Lindo is not the only person to speculate
that
"It's possible that [the net] will influence the whole structure
and
nature of knowledge as much as the printing press did." Consider,
too,
that if Cyril Burt's twin studies had been published
electronically,
some awkward person --very possibly an amateur -- would have run
his
figures through a statistics programme and spotted something funny,
probably within 24 hours.

If you work in some fields -- certainly high-energy physics and
molecular biology, and probably mathematics -- you'd better get
connected, get retrained, or get a highly computer-literate
graduate
assistant ("a nerd", in the jargon) to do it for you.  Lewenstein
concludes that though electronic communication "will not replace
traditional face-to-face interaction... researchers with access to
these forms of communication [are] making progress while other
researchers, still awaiting information through more traditional
slower channels, have not yet begun to work." For them, the ability
to
use computer communication is an essential part of literacy.

Dorothy Denning works on computer security, and teaches computer
literacy, at Georgetown University in Washington DC. She "doubt
that
the electronic research communities will be any harder to break
into
than non-electronic ones. Based on my own experience, I expect they
will be much easier to join (assuming you have the resources). Her
qualification is vital -- funders, take note.

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