Phil Agre and the gendered Internet

There is an article today in the Washington Post about the odd disappearance of a computer science professor named Phil Agre.  The article, entitled "He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?" reminded me of a post by Agre in 1994 after a meeting of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Although it annoyed me at the time, a talk that I gave there triggered in him thoughts of gender issues;  as a women I was very much in the minority at the meeting,  but that was not the topic of my talk. But my talk also gave Agre thoughts about the missing humanity on the Web.

I had a couple of primary concerns, perhaps not perfectly laid out, in my talk, "Access, not Just Wires." I was concerned about what was driving the development of the Internet and the lack of a service ethos regarding society. Access at the time was talked about in terms of routers, modems, T-1 lines. There was no thought to organizing or preserving of online information. There was no concept of "equal access". There was no thought to how we would democratize the Web such that you didn't need a degree in computer science to find what you needed.

I was also very concerned about the commercialization of information. I was frustrated watching the hype as information was touted as the product of the information age. (This was before we learned that "you are the product, not the user" in this environment.) Seen from the tattered clothes and barefoot world of libraries, the money thrown at the jumble of un-curated and unorganized "information" on the web was heartbreaking. I said:

"It's clear to me that the information highway isn't much about information. It's about trying to find a new basis for our economy. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to like the way information is treated in that economy. We know what kind of information sells, and what doesn't. So I see our future as being a mix of highly expensive economic reports and cheap online versions of the National Inquirer. Not a pretty picture." - kcoyle in Access, not Just Wires

 Little did I know how bad it would get.

Like many or most people, Agre heard "libraries" and thought "female." But at least this caused him to think, earlier than many, about how our metaphors for the Internet were inherently gendered.

"Discussing her speech with another CPSR activist ... later that evening, I suddenly connected several things that had been bothering me about the language and practice of the Internet. The result was a partial answer to the difficult question, in what sense is the net "gendered"?" -  Agre, TNO, October 1994

This led Agre to think about how we spoke then about the Internet, which was mainly as an activity of "exploring." That metaphor is still alive with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but was also the message behind the main Web browser software of the time, Netscape Navigator. He suddenly saw how "explore" was a highly gendered activity:

"Yet for many people, "exploring" is close to defining the experience of the net. It is clearly a gendered metaphor: it has historically been a male activity, and it comes down to us saturated with a long list of meanings related to things like colonial expansion, experiences of otherness, and scientific discovery. Explorers often die, and often fail, and the ones that do neither are heroes and role models. This whole complex of meanings and feelings and strivings is going to appeal to those who have been acculturated into a particular male-marked system of meanings, and it is not going to offer a great deal of meaning to anyone who has not. The use of prestigious artifacts like computers is inevitably tied up with the construction of personal identity, and "exploration" tools offer a great deal more traction in this process to historically male cultural norms than to female ones." - Agre, TNO, October 1994

He decried the lack of social relationships on the Internet, saying that although you know that other  people are there, you cannot see them. 

"Why does the space you "explore" in Gopher or Mosaic look empty even when it's full of other people?" - Agre, TNO, October 1994

None of us knew at the time that in the future some people would experience the Internet entirely and exclusively as full of other people in the forms of Facebook, Twitter and all of the other sites that grew out of the embryos of bulletin board systems, the Well, and AOL. We feared that the future Internet would  not have the even-handedness of libraries, but never anticipated that Russian bots and Qanon promoters would reign over what had once been a network for the exchange of scientific information.

It hurts now to read through Agre's post arguing for a more library-like online information system because it is pretty clear that we blew through that possibility even before the 1994 meeting and were already taking the first steps toward to where we are today.

Agre walked away from his position at UCLA in 2009 and has not resurfaced, although there have been reports at times (albeit not recently) that he is okay. Looking back, it should not surprise us that someone with so much hope for an online civil society should have become discouraged enough to leave it behind. Agre was hoping for reference services and an Internet populated with users with:

"...the skills of composing clear texts, reading with an awareness of different possible interpretations, recognizing and resolving conflicts, asking for help without feeling powerless, organizing people to get things done, and embracing the diversity of the backgrounds and experiences of others." - Agre, TNO, October 1994

 Oh, what world that would be!

Google Books and Mein Kampf

I hadn't look at Google Books in a while, or at least not carefully, so I was surprised to find that Google had added blurbs to most of the books. Even more surprising (although perhaps I should say "troubling") is that no source is given for the book blurbs. Some at least come from publisher sites, which means that they are promotional in nature. For example, here's a mildly promotional text about a literary work, from a literary publisher:

This gives a synopsis of the book, starting with:

"Throughout a single day in 1892, John Shawnessy recalls the great moments of his life..." 

It ends by letting the reader know that this was a bestseller when published in 1948, and calls it a "powerful novel."

The blurb on a 1909 version of Darwin's The Origin of Species is mysterious because the book isn't a recent publication with an online site providing the text. I do not know where this description comes from, but because the  entire thrust of this blurb is about the controversy of evolution versus the Bible (even though Darwin did not press this point himself) I'm guessing that the blurb post-dates this particular publication.

"First published in 1859, this landmark book on evolutionary biology was not the first to deal with the subject, but it went on to become a sensation -- and a controversial one for many religious people who could not reconcile Darwin's science with their faith."

That's a reasonable view to take of Darwin's "landmark" book but it isn't what I would consider to be faithful to the full import of this tome.

The blurb on Hitler's Mein Kampf is particularly troubling. If you look at different versions of the book you get both pro- and anti- Nazi sentiments, neither of which really belong  on a site that claims to be a catalog of books. Also note that because each book entry has only one blurb, the tone changes considerably depending on which publication you happen to pick from the list.

First on the list:

"Settling Accounts became Mein Kampf, an unparalleled example of muddled economics and history, appalling bigotry, and an intense self-glorification of Adolf Hitler as the true founder and builder of the National Socialist movement. It was written in hate and it contained a blueprint for violent bloodshed."

Second on the list:

"This book has set a path toward a much higher understanding of the self and of our magnificent destiny as living beings part of this Race on our planet. It shows us that we must not look at nature in terms of good or bad, but in an unfiltered manner. It describes what we must do if we want to survive as a people and as a Race."

That's horrifying. Note that both books are self-published, and the blurbs are the ones that I find on those books in Amazon, perhaps indicating that Google is sucking up books from the Amazon site. There is, or at least at one point there once was, a difference between Amazon and Google Books. Google, after all, scanned books in libraries and presented itself as a search engine for published texts; Amazon will sell you Trump's tweets on toilet paper. The only text on the Google Books page still claims that Google Books is about  search: "Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books." Libraries partnered with Google with lofty promises of gains in scholarship:

"Our participation in the Google Books Library Project will add significantly to the extensive digital resources the Libraries already deliver. It will enable the Libraries to make available more significant portions of its extraordinary archival and special collections to scholars and researchers worldwide in ways that will ultimately change the nature of scholarship." Jim Neal, Columbia University

I don't know how these folks now feel about having their texts intermingled with publications they would never buy and described by texts that may come from shady and unreliable sources.

Even leaving aside the grossest aspects of the blurbs and Google's hypocrisy about its commercialization of its books project, adding blurbs to the book entries with no attribution and clearly not vetting the sources is extremely irresponsible. It's also very Google to create sloppy algorithms that illustrate their basic ignorance of the content their are working with -- in this case, the world's books.

Transparency of judgment

The Guardian, and others, have discovered that when querying Google for "did the Holocaust really happen", the top response is a Holocaust denier site. They mistakenly think that the solution is to lower the ranking of that site.

The real solution, however, is different. It begins with the very concept of the "top site" from searches. What does "top site" really mean? It means something like "the site most often pointed to by other sites that are most often pointed to." It means "popular" -- but by an unexamined measure. Google's algorithm doesn't distinguish fact from fiction, or scientific from nutty, or even academically viable from warm and fuzzy. Fan sites compete with the list of publications of a Nobel prize-winning physicist. Well, except that they probably don't, because it would be odd for the same search terms to pull up both, but nothing in the ranking itself makes that distinction.

The primary problem with Google's result, however, is that it hides the relationships that the algorithm itself uses in the ranking. You get something ranked #1 but you have no idea how Google arrived at that ranking; that's a trade secret. By not giving the user any information on what lies behind the ranking of that specific page you eliminate the user's possibility to make an informed judgment about the source. This informed judgment is not only about the inherent quality of the information in the ranked site, but also about its position in the complex social interactions surrounding knowledge creation itself.

This is true not only for Holocaust denial but every single site on the web. It is also true for every document that is on library shelves or servers. It is not sufficient to look at any cultural artifact as an isolated case, because there are no isolated cases. It is all about context, and the threads of history and thought that surround the thoughts presented in the document.

There is an interesting project of the Wikimedia Foundation called "Wikicite." The goal of that project is to make sure that specific facts culled from Wikipedia into the Wikidata project all have citations that support the facts. If you've done any work on Wikipedia you know that all statements of fact in all articles must come from reliable third-party sources. These citations allow one to discover the background for the information in Wikipedia, and to use that to decide for oneself if the information in the article is reliable, and also to know what points of view are represented. A map of the data that leads to a web site's ranking on Google would serve a similar function.

Another interesting project is CITO, the Citation Typing Ontology. This is aimed at scholarly works, and it is a vocabulary that would allow authors to do more than just cite a work - they could give a more specific meaning to the citation, such as "disputes", "extends", "gives support to". A citation index could then categorize citations so that you could see who are the deniers of the deniers as well as the supporters, rather than just counting citations. This brings us a small step, but a step, closer to a knowledge map.

All judgments of importance or even relative position of information sources must be transparent. Anything else denies the value of careful thinking about our world. Google counts pages and pretends not to be passing judgment on information, but they operate under a false flag of neutrality that protects their bottom line. The rest of us need to do better.

Instant WayBack URL

Last night I attended festivities at the Internet Archive where they made a number of announcements about projects and improvements. One that particularly struck me was the ability to push a page to the WayBack Machine and instantly get a permanent WayBack URL for that page. This is significant in a number of ways but the main advantages I see are:

1. putting permalinks in your documents rather that URLs that can break
2. linking to a particular version of a document when citing

You will not want to use this technique if you are intending to link to, for example, a general home page where you want your link always to go to the current version of that page. But if you are quoting something, or linking to a page that you think has a limited lifetime, this ability will make a huge difference.

When you go to the WayBack machine (whose home page has changed considerably) you will see this option:

Once you provide the URL, the system echoes back the WayBay machine URL for that page at that moment in time:

You can also view the page on the WayBack machine, to make sure you captured the right one:

The page is available through the URL immediately, and will be available through the regular WayBack machine index within hours. This has great implications for scholarship and for news reporting. Note that the WayBack Machine will not capture pages that are closed to crawlers, so if you are on a commercial site, this probably will not work. I'm still very enthused about it.

Hackers and heroes

Recent events have led me again to a contemplation of the equation of hackers and heroes. How is it that an essentially cerebral and sedentary activity gets equated with heroics? And why computing and not, say, bioscience?

If you've read your obligatory Joseph Campbell you know that the hero myth is ubiquitous in human cultures. Each culture adds its own flavorings and decorations, but the general story is the same: a usually young, alone male goes through transformational trials, performs some task that makes a difference to the world, and is then declared a hero.

In the story-telling world, it ends there. You don't get the post-hero narrative, although, like love stories, there is an implicit "and they lived happily ever after." This makes it easy to forget that in real life "heroism" is a moment, not a lifetime. The fireman who saves the baby from the burning building, the batter who hits the World Series-winning home run: this is a moment of glory before the person goes back to being an ordinary Joe.

When Steven Levy wrote "Hackers, heroes of the computer revolution" in 1984, the hero myth was perhaps new to the computer world. By the early 1990's consumer computing magazines were full of hero and superhero images. This presents an odd contrast to the stereotype of the out-of-shape, asocial, code-writing computer geek. Since then graphics capabilities have allowed the hero myth to move to the screen in the form of first-person games in which anyone with the time and inclination can play at being a hero.

Levy's "hacker heroes" were in fact ordinary computer geeks, and not even the first. Levy focuses on a group of young men at MIT starting in the late 1950's, but they had been preceded in the 1940's and early 1950's by those who were truly the first computer programmers, many of whom were women. There was no attribution of heroics to those pioneers, neither at the time nor retrospectively. What changed?

Many of the studies of the decline of womens enrollment in computer science ask a similar question, which is: how did computer science become a male bastion when it had once seemed welcoming to women? And why did it take on a hyper-masculinized culture, with home brew, skateboarding the hallways, pizza delivered to midnight coding frenzies, and heroes?

I don't have, and have not encountered in my reading, an answer to that question. I do want to caution, however that the hero aspiration has a down side that is played out as tragedy. It might be best to limit our heroes to the mythological realm and leave computing to mortals. It just might become a friendlier place for everybody.

What's the question?

I've been meaning to comment on this for a while... If you receive the New York Times in hard copy, and if, like some of us, you turn perhaps too quickly to the page with the famed "Crossword, edited by Will Shortz," for quite a while now you have seen Google's addition to the "puzzle page."

First, let me describe the page, in case you are not an aficionado. Along side the remainder of one or more articles begun on an earlier page, the page contains the aforesaid famed crossword puzzle, two "KenKen" math puzzles, and two "adverpuzzles": the Jeopardy "Clue of the day" and the "Google a day."

The interesting thing is the difference between the two "adverpuzzles." The Jeopardy one gives you one of the answers that will be used on that evening's Jeopardy show. (In Jeopardy, for those who are living in a different culture to mine, you are given an answer, and you must come up with the question.) The Jeopardy adverpuzzle is one column wide (about 2 inches) and about 5 inches high.

The Google one is more than one quarter of the page. It's about 5 inches wide by 11 inches high. Much of that is blank space. And nothing says "We've got more money than we know what to do with" than a daily purchase of blank space in the New York Times.

The other interesting difference is that the Jeopardy puzzle tests your knowledge. It gives you a difficult topic and you are supposed to come up with the answer. For example, today's Jeopardy answer is:

"No day shall erase you from the memory of time," from Virgil's Aeneid, is inscribed on a wall at this memorial."

The Google puzzle invites you to look up the answer on Google. It even provides a specific site for you to use, one that won't be tainted by the other users looking up the same answer.  There are no points for knowing the answer.

The third difference is that to find out if you got the right answer on the Jeopardy question you have to watch that evening's show. To get the answer from Google a Day you check the next day. But, presumably, you've already spent some time at http://agoogleaday.com/ looking for the answer. Here's today's answer to the previous question:

Yesterday's A Google a Day: If you compare the half-lives of cesium-137 and uranium-238, which one outlives the other?
How to find the answer: Search [half-life cesium-137] to find that it's 30 years. Search [half-life uranium-238] to learn that it's 4.5 billion years, which is just a bit longer.

 Maybe I'm making too much of this, but I see two conflicting cultures here: the one of knowing things, and the one of looking things up. It makes me wonder if in a few years there will be a hit TV show where contestants vie to see who can look it up the fastest. Heck, I don't know why we don't have such a show already. Knowing is definitely "old school," and as a librarian I am firmly ensconced in the "look it up" culture. But I have a strong gut reaction, a negative one, to becoming totally dependent on a network connection for knowledge. It could just happen that I could find myself out in some wilderness area with no satellite signal and a life-or-death need to know the half-lives of certain elements on the periodic table. And then what would I do?

Learning not to share

"Learning to share" used to be one of the basic lessons of childhood, with parents beaming the first time their offspring spontaneously handed half of a cookie to a playmate. But some time before that same child first puts fingers to keyboard she will have to learn a new lesson: not to share online.

The Facebook phenomenon has taken that simple concept of sharing with others to an industrial level. Any page you go to on the Web today connects into your online social life, so that while reading the news or watching a video you are exhorted to share your activity with your online "friends." I say "friends" in quotes because the way that Facebook involvement grows means that many of the people seeing your posts or learning about your activities are like second and third cousins; related to your friends but at least a step removed from the inner circle you relate to. It is easy to forget that those more distant relations are there, but bit by bit the links pull in more invitations and, since we have been told that it is impolite not to share, we rarely slam the digital door on those seeking our friendship.

To increase this digital sharing, the House has passed a revision to the Video Privacy Act. You may not recall the "Bork law" of 1988. It was one of the fastest privacy laws ever passed in the U.S. legislature. Here's the description from the New York Times article:

In 1987, the Washington City Paper, a weekly newspaper, published the video rental records of Judge Robert H. Bork, who at the time was a nominee to the Supreme Court. One of the paper’s reporters had obtained the records from Potomac Video, a local rental store. Judge Bork’s choice of movies — he rented a number of classic feature films starring Cary Grant — may have seemed innocuous.

But the disclosure of Judge Bork’s cultural consumption so alarmed Congress that it quickly passed a law giving individuals the power to consent to have their records shared. The statute, nicknamed the “Bork law,” also made video services companies liable for damages if they divulged consumers’ records outside the course of ordinary business.

 At the time the passage of the law had a comic aspect to it: you could imagine the thoughts going through the heads of members of Congress when they realized that any reporter could talk into their local video store and learn what they had rented. Zingo! New law!

The revised bill, stated in the article as being backed primarily by Netflix, would allow consumers (and that's all we are, right, consumers?) to sign a blanket waiver on their video privacy in order to facilitate sharing with friends.

The Times article has various quotes giving pros and cons, online services vs. privacy advocates, all talking about how much you do or don't want your "friends" to know about you. What the article fails to state, however, is that whether you like it or not, every site where you share is a de facto friend as well. If your Facebook friends get your Netflix picks, both Facebook and Netflix (and their advertising partners) also get your video viewing information. The more you share with your friends, the more you are sharing with an invisible network of corporations - who, by the way, you cannot "unfriend" even if you want to.

This is why we need to learn not to share: it's a lie, a deceit. We aren't really sharing with our friends, our friends are being used to get us to divulge information to faceless corporations who have insinuated themselves into our lives for the sole purpose of benefiting from our consumption. They have distorted the entire idea of "friend," and turned it into a buyer's club for their benefit.

Dear friends: I'm looking forward to seeing you ... offline.

Signs of success

Either this:



(unavailable)










Or this:














(reduced to using a raw ip address)