[Reader-list] shared expereince - unpredictable encounters

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

I am enclosing a book review from nybooks.com.

The recent discusssion in the list around speech and silence initiated by 
Gayatri Chatterjee and following other postings, we can initiate a new thread 
reflecting about the nature of  the `list based communication` itself along 
with issues that was raised during the discussion. 

This review raises a very interesting point around `formation of shared 
expereinces` and `unpredictable encounters` and it's relation to the Net. A 
discussion on this will be helpful in understanding the nature of 
interactions that we are all in.

Pratap, Gayatridi and Shuddha lets give it a try.

best
jeebesh

-----------------------
The New York Review of Books
March 14, 2002 ReviewHe's Got Mail 
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15180

republic.com
by Cass Sunstein
Princeton University Press

By James Fallows  

Is the Internet Good for Democracy?
the Boston Review
a discussion of republic.com in the Boston Review, Summer 2001, and on line 
at bostonreview.mit.edu/ndf.html1.

The story of technology is largely the story of people who guess wrong about 
which problems will be easy to solve and which will be hard. For example, 
less than a decade before the Wright Brothers' flight, Lord Kelvin announced 
that "heavier than air flying machines are impossible." The Scientific 
American of 1909 concluded that "the automobile has practically reached the 
limit of its development," on evidence "that during the past year no 
improvements of a radical nature have been introduced." Thomas Watson of IBM 
famously said in the 1940s that "there is a world market for maybe five 
computers."[1] In The Road Ahead, published in 1996, Bill Gates of Microsoft 
said that his?or anyone's? predictive writings about technology were bound to 
be judged harshly ten years after publication. "What I've said that turned 
out to be right will be considered obvious, and what was wrong will be 
humorous."

People in the computer industry have already criticized Gates for one such 
"humorous" error. In the early 1980s, Microsoft made its historic deal to be 
the sole supplier of operating-system software for the first IBM Personal 
Computer. This was like being the sole engine supplier for the first 
mass-produced automobiles, and it was the foundation of Microsoft's later 
dominance. But the software that Microsoft provided, known as MS-DOS, had 
various limitations that frustrated its early users. One quote from Gates 
became infamous as a symbol of the company's arrogant attitude about such 
limits. It concerned how much memory, measured in kilobytes or "K," should be 
built into a personal computer. Gates is supposed to have said, "640K should 
be enough for anyone." The remark became the industry's equivalent of "Let 
them eat cake" because it seemed to combine lordly condescension with a lack 
of interest in operational details. After all, today's ordinary home 
computers have one hundred times as much memory as the industry's leader was 
calling "enough."

It appears that it was Marie Thérèse, not Marie Antoinette, who greeted news 
that the people lacked bread with qu'ils mangent de la brioche. (The phrase 
was cited in Rousseau's Confessions, published when Marie Antoinette was 
thirteen years old and still living in Austria.) And it now appears that Bill 
Gates never said anything about getting along with 640K. One Sunday afternoon 
I asked a friend in Seattle who knows Gates whether the quote was accurate or 
apocryphal. Late that night, to my amazement, I found a long e-mail from 
Gates in my inbox, laying out painstakingly the reasons why he had always 
believed the opposite of what the notorious quote implied. His main point was 
that the 640K limit in early PCs was imposed by the design of processing 
chips, not Gates's software, and he'd been pushing to raise the limit as hard 
and as often as he could. Yet despite Gates's convincing denial, the quote is 
unlikely to die. It's too convenient an expression of the computer industry's 
sense that no one can be sure what will happen next.

There are many examples showing how hard it is to predict the speed of 
technological advance or its effect on social or commercial life. Space 
travel. Cloning. Cures for cancer. The search for clean or renewable energy 
sources. The sense of apprehension in the last days of 1999 arose from the 
fact that while most experts believed the "Y2K bug" would not shut down 
computer systems, no one really could be sure.

The most dramatic recent demonstration of this problem involves the Internet. 
As a matter of pure technology, the Internet has worked far better than 
almost anyone dared hope. A respected engineer and entrepreneur, Robert 
Metcalfe, who invented the networking standard called Ethernet, predicted in 
1995 that as more and more people tried to connect, the Internet would "go 
spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." (Metcalfe 
later had the grace to literally eat his words, pureeing a copy of the column 
containing his prediction and choking it down before an amused audience.) In 
fact, the Internet has become both faster and less crash-prone the larger it 
has grown. This is partly because of improved hardware but mainly because of 
the brilliance of the "distributed processing" model by which it operates, 
which automatically steers traffic away from any broken or congested part of 
the network.

The financial assumptions surrounding the Internet have of course changed 
radically in a very short time. It was only three years ago that Lawrence 
Summers, then secretary of the treasury, joked that Brazil could solve its 
debt problems by changing its name to Brazil.com, since venture capital would 
then be sure to flow in. Until the summer of that year, any dot-com was 
assumed (by financiers) to be a winner, whether or not it had a plan for 
making profits. Since the spring of last year, any dot-com is assumed to be a 
loser, even if it in fact is becoming profitable. 

On-line sales continue to grow, despite the general recession and the 
depression among dot-com companies. In 2001, sales at "normal" retail stores 
were flat, but sales by on-line merchants rose by 20 percent. The two most 
celebrated dot-com bankruptcies in 2001 were DrKoop.com, a medical advice 
site and on-line drugstore, and WebVan, a grocery-delivery service that in 
2000 had a market value of $1.2 billion. There was nothing preposterous about 
either of their business concepts, only about the lavishness with which they 
were carried out. Sooner or later some company will make money letting 
customers fill prescriptions or order staple groceries on line. The 
successful companies will probably be branches of established drugstore or 
grocery chains. The hit film Startup.com, released a year ago, told the story 
of the rise and embarrassing fall of GovWorks.com, which was intended to let 
state and local governments do part of their business on line. This, too, is 
a sound concept, one that seems destined to spread. Few people who have the 
choice to register a car on line will want to trudge downtown to do it the 
normal way. But for now, the overcorrection and rush from dot-com investments 
leaves good ideas as underfunded as bad ideas were overfunded before.

While assessments of the Internet's economic prospects have gone through 
manic swings, interpretations of its political and social effects have 
displayed a kind of stable schizophrenia. That is, through the last 
half-dozen years of the Internet's explosive rise, observers have agreed that 
it would do something significant to society, but have disagreed about 
whether the effect would be good or bad. 

The utopian view, strongest in the Internet's early days but still heard now, 
boils down to the idea that the truth will make people free. Elections will 
become more about "issues," as voters can more easily investigate each 
candidate's position. Government will become more honest, as the role of 
money is exposed. People in different cultures will become more tolerant, as 
they build electronic contacts across traditional borders. Tyrants will lose 
their grip, as the people they oppress gain allies in the outside world and 
use the Internet to circumvent censorship. Liberal democracies will govern 
with a lighter hand, as information technology makes them more efficient and 
responsive. The recent struggles of dot-com companies have dampened the 
enthusiasm of some of the strongest exponents of these views, and have 
postponed estimates of when the desired effects might occur. But the concepts 
have not gone away. 

The opposing, dystopian view shares the assumption that the Internet will 
weaken traditional power structures, but it emphasizes all the ways in which 
that will be bad. Families and communities will be weakened, as each member 
spends more time with "virtual" friends and associates. Childhood may be 
destroyed, because of the lure of pornography?of which a huge supply is 
available on the Internet?and of addictive on-line games and the threat of 
sexual predators. If the Internet ultimately erodes the barriers among people 
and parts of the world, then any culture, community, or institution that 
requires a sense of separate identity to survive is threatened. A variant of 
this concern has been the strongest international complaint about the 
Internet: that it would be another means of promoting American values and the 
English language. 

The Internet's effect on language already seems to be evolving in an 
unexpected way. Initially nearly all the Internet's users were native English 
speakers, and nearly all Web pages were in English. Now well under half of 
all users are native English speakers, and the proportion can only fall. But 
the proportion of English-language pages is falling more slowly. It was 85 
percent five years ago and about 60 percent now, as pages in Japanese, 
German, Chinese, Spanish, French, and other languages have been added 
rapidly. But in many parts of the non-Anglophone world, users are posting 
pages in English along with their national language, or instead of their own 
language, to make the sites comprehensible to the broadest-possible group of 
readers. One recent academic study of this trend, called Internet? Flagship 
of Global English?, concludes that the Internet will cement the role of 
English as universal lingua franca. The study was carried out at the 
University of Lecce, in Italy, and the results were posted in English.[2]

Previous big, modern innovations have made a significant difference in 
family, community, and national life. Antibiotics and immunization 
dramatically cut childhood mortality in the developed countries, which in 
turn altered family patterns and the place of women. So too for electricity, 
the telephone, automobiles, air travel, radio and television, and modern 
techniques of farming. The Internet could have effects as profound as any of 
these? but they won't be clear all at once.2.

The discussion that has surrounded Cass Sunstein's republic.com is a useful 
way to begin considering these long-term effects. I emphasize the discussion 
as much as the book, for it highlights some of the issues in the book in an 
unusual way. republic.com was published last spring. In it Sunstein, a highly 
regarded law professor and First Amendment specialist at the University of 
Chicago, addressed two different subjects with different degrees of authority 
and success. 

One of his subjects was the connection between information flow and 
democratic government. His argument was that in a democracy "free expression" 
must mean something more than mere absence of censorship. Instead, a 
"well-functioning system of free expression," one adequate to equip citizens 
for self-government, had additional tests to meet:First, people should be 
exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unplanned, 
unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself.... I do not suggest 
that government should force people to see things that they wish to avoid. 
But I do contend that in a democracy deserving the name, people often come 
across views and topics that they have not specifically selected. Second, 
many or most citizens should have a range of common experiences. Without 
shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult 
time in addressing social problems.... Common experiences, emphatically 
including the common experiences made possible by the media, provide a form 
of social glue. 

Roughly half the book is a constitutional and political analysis supporting 
this view of free expression, and it is convincing and clear. The first kind 
of exposure, to information one has not chosen in advance, is important 
because otherwise one's views would never change. The second kind of 
exposure, to common experiences, is especially important in a big, racially 
and economically diverse nation in which citizens may have very few 
assumptions in common. America's "shared experiences" of the last generation 
have largely been spectacles: entertainment (the Oscars, Survivor); sports 
(the Super Bowl); "public" events that attracted more attention for their 
melodramatic rather than their political meaning: the O.J. Simpson trial, the 
death of Princess Diana, the Gary Condit affair, even the sex drama that 
became the occasion for a presidential impeachment. The reaction to the 
September 11 attacks was the most truly consequential shared experience in at 
least a generation.

There was another half to republic .com, and a less convincing one. Having 
defined the kind of free expression that was necessary for democracy, 
Sunstein went on to identify a major threat to it: namely, the Internet. In 
particular, he was concerned about the "filtering" and the personalizing 
technology of the Internet, which would in principle allow people to define 
in advance exactly the information they did ?and did not?want to see. The 
more efficient the filter, the less chance that a citizen would be exposed to 
healthy surprise?or share experiences with the rest of society. As technology 
evolved, democracy would deteriorate. The "Daily Me" was Sunstein's name for 
the news publication of the future. It would destroy the underpinnings of the 
"us" that is democracy. 

His book began with a "thought experiment" about the nature of this new 
world:It is some time in the future. Technology has greatly increased 
people's ability to "filter" what they want to read, see, and hear.... With 
the aid of a television or computer screen, and the Internet, you are able to 
design your own newspapers and magazines.... You need not come across topics 
and views that you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able 
to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less. 

"In reality, we are not so very far from complete personalization of the 
system of communications," he concludes. "The changes now being produced by 
new communications technologies are understated, not overstated, by the 
thought experiment with which I began." 

This line of reasoning, which warns against the Internet as an impediment to 
democracy, has two problems: one involves the Internet, and the other 
involves the nonelectronic ways in which citizens interact.

Sunstein's warnings last spring about the ominously perfect info-filtering 
technology did not, to put it mildly, have the easy authority shown in his 
discussions of the First Amendment. They were more like suburban fretting 
about the bad things that must be happening on the other side of town. After 
his opening "thought experiment," Sunstein proceeded with a list of Internet 
companies whose advanced filtering technologies were leading to the "Daily 
Me." Several of these companies had gone out of business by the time 
Sunstein's book appeared, and several more have since. Sunstein can't have 
spent much time using any of these sites if he thinks their filtering is 
effective enough to pose a threat. To see for yourself, go to one of the main 
news sites that offers a personalized compendium of information, such as 
CNN.com, MSNBC.com, or Go.com, and see how "me"-like you can make it. You can 
set it to display your city's weather, and the stock quotes you care about, 
and the movie listings in your neighborhood, and the scores for the local 
teams. But the rest of the information you see has a high chance of being 
"unexpected."

The filtering available on Internet sites is primitive compared to the 
filters, cushions, and blinders that surround us the rest of the time. The 
patterns Sunstein warns about?a lack of shared experience and the 
balkanization of Americans according to class, region, religion, and 
ethnicity?are real and worrisome enough. But the Internet is a trivial source 
of the problem? let's say one thousandth as important as the educational 
system, from school districts with their unequal funding to the faulty system 
of college admissions. Or residential patterns. Or who marries whom. Or tax 
policy. Or the existing broadcast media, which let you drive coast to coast 
listening to nothing but right-wing talk radio or NPR. Or cable TV, with one 
channel showing only bass fishermen and another showing only 
success-motivation seminars. Or patterns of commuting, which have evolved 
from buses to cars, and remove people from accidental contact with others. 
You could un-invent the Internet and still have every problem Sunstein fears.

The discussion of Sunstein's book since it was published has itself been 
telling. In its summer issue last year, the Boston Review printed comments on 
republic.com from seven scholars and writers. All sympathized with Sunstein's 
concern about ensuring healthy, democratic discussion. Most were skeptical 
about the Internet as a source of the problem.[3]

Michael Schudson, of the University of California?San Diego, said, "The 
Internet may very well reduce our common media fare, as Sunstein fears, but 
even in our mass-mediated era we do not live very much of our lives through 
the media." He mentioned the evidence that the Internet may actually 
encourage more civic engagement?through means as simple as e-mailed community 
newsletters?rather than less. 

Ronald Jacobs, of SUNY?Albany, argued persuasively that major portals like 
yahoo.com and aol.com, with their search engines, links to news stories, chat 
and message board services, and advertising, "function precisely like the 
general interest intermediaries that Sunstein thinks are so important. That 
is, they provide unanticipated encounters as well as common experiences." 
Shanto Iyengar, of Stanford, said there was no "serious ground for concern 
that online sources will only attract users who already share their points of 
view. The available evidence suggests the contrary." Henry Jenkins, of MIT, 
offered a sarcastic "thought experiment" of his own:Some years ago, a local 
bank announced plans to discontinue its "Time and Temperature" service, 
prompting me to whimsical speculation about how this decision could lead to 
total anarchy. Without a means of synchronization, our clocks would gain or 
lose time until we drifted out of sync with each other. Workers would arrive 
late or leave early; teachers wouldn't know when to end classes; participants 
in social and professional gatherings would stomp off impatiently when the 
expected party failed to arrive. Some groups of friends might create their 
own time zones and ignore everyone else. 

Running through all these comments is an appreciation of something that 
Sunstein may not have wasted enough time in front of a computer to share. 
Compared with most other indoor activities, time with the Internet is less 
filtered, more open-ended, more likely to lead to surprises. If you read a 
book or magazine, you usually keep reading. If you watch a video, you watch. 
But if you start looking up information on Web sites, you almost never end up 
where you expected. There's a link to something you'd never heard of before, 
some news you hadn't known was interesting. It's not the same as walking to a 
new part of town, but it's a lot more surprising than listening to the radio. 
The feeling is similar to that of going through library stacks?if there were 
no dust and you could instantly zoom from floor to floor.

In a forthcoming book, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined,[4] David Weinberger, who 
runs the Web site "Journal of the Hyperelinked Organization" at www 
.hyperorg.com, elaborates this theme of the chaotic, always surprising nature 
of the Internet. Without mentioning Sunstein's book, he refutes its central 
claim that the Internet has a narrowing effect on people's minds. With the 
World Wide Web's ceaseless growth, he says,there is more and more to distract 
us?more sites to visit, more arguments to jump into, more dirty pictures to 
download, more pure wastes of time. The fact that the Web is distracting is 
not an accident. It is the Web's hyperlinked nature to pull our attention 
here and there. But it is not clear that this represents a weakening of our 
culture's intellectual powers, a lack of focus.... Maybe set free in a field 
of abundance, our hunger moves us from three meals a day to day-long 
grazing.... Perhaps the Web isn't shortening our attention span. Perhaps the 
world is just getting more interesting. 

I suppose I shouldn't say that the Boston Review exchange illustrates the 
give-and-take of the Internet, since it originally appeared in the printed 
magazine. But the seven responses, and Sunstein's reply, are now available on 
line along with two dozen other Boston Review exchanges.[5] The very ease of 
reading through them that way, and comparing them with comments in other 
exchanges on other topics posted months or years earlier, creates a kind of 
discovery and linkage that would be harder to equal in any other way. What it 
could lead to politically is as unpredictable as ever.

Sunstein responded to the Boston Review replies with an intriguing shift of 
position. He began his response, which also serves as an afterword to the 
forthcoming paperback edition of his book, with this restatement of his two 
main contentions:1. A democracy requires both a range of common experiences 
and unanticipated, unchosen exposures to diverse topics and ideas. For those 
who accept this claim, democracy might well be jeopardized by a system in 
which each person decides, in advance, what to see and what not to see....2. 
The Internet is bad for democracy, because it is reducing common experiences 
and producing a situation in which people live in echo chambers of their own 
design. For those who accept this second claim, the current communications 
system is inferior to one in which general interest intermediaries dominated 
the scene.I endorse the first claim.... But I do not endorse the second 
claim. I believe that the second claim is basically wrong, because the 
Internet is allowing millions of people to expand their horizons and to 
encounter new worlds of topics and ideas.

You have to admire the panache of this statement. Apparently the Boston 
Review panel was lulled, as I was, into misunderstanding Sunstein's true 
intent, by sentences in the book such as "For countless people, the Internet 
is producing a substantial decrease in unanticipated, unchosen encounters," 
or "There can be no assurance of freedom in a system committed to the 'Daily 
Me.'" But I also take his revised view as a sign of the collective effort 
underway to improve and revise our understanding of this new technology? and 
the likelihood that whatever we think now may soon prove wrong.An E-mail from 
Bill Gates

Denying he ever said "640K should be enough for anyone," Bill Gates wrote me 
recently as follows. Some technical expressions are explained in brackets:

This is one of those "quotes" that won't seem to go away. 

I've explained that it's wrong when it's come up every few years, including 
in a newspaper column and in interviews.

There is a lot of irony to this one. Lou Eggebrecht (who really designed the 
IBM PC original hardware) and I wanted to convince IBM to have a 32-bit 
address space, but the 68000 [a Motorola-designed processing chip, eventually 
used in the Apple Macintosh] just wasn't ready. Lew had an early prototype 
but it would have delayed things at least a year.

The 8086/8088 [the Intel-designed chip used in early personal computers] 
architecture has a 20-bit address bus [the mechanism used by the 
microprocessor to access memory; each additional "bit" in the address bus 
doubles the amount of memory that can be used], and the instruction set [the 
basic set of commands that the microprocessor understands] only generates 
20-bit addresses.

I and many others have said the industry "uses" an extra address bit every 
two years, as hardware and software become more powerful, so going from 
16-bit to 20-bit was clearly not going to last us very long. The extra 
silicon to do 32-bit addressing is trivial, but it wasn't there. The VAX was 
around and all the 68000 people did was look at the VAX! 2 to the 20th is 1 
megabyte (1024K), so you might ask why the difference between 640K and 
1024K?where did the last 384K go?

The answer is that in that 1M of address space we had to accommodate RAM 
[random access memory], ROM [read-only memory], and I/O addresses 
[Input/Output addresses used for "peripherals" like keyboards, disk drives, 
and hard drives], and IBM laid it out so those other things started at 640K 
and used all the memory space up to 1M. If they had been a bit more careful 
we could have had 800K instead of 640K available. 

In fact, we had 800K on the Sirius machine, which I got to have a lot of 
input on (designed by Chuck Peddle, who did the Commodore Pet and the 6502, 
too). The key problem though is not getting to use only 640K of the 1M of 
address space that was available. It's the 1M limit, which comes from having 
only 20 bits of address space, which is all that chip can handle! 

So, this limit has nothing to do with any Microsoft software. 

Although people talk about previous computing as 8-bit, it was 16-bit 
addressing in the 8080/Z80/6800/6502 [all early processing chips]. So we had 
only 64K of addressability.

Amazingly people like Bob Harp (Vector Graphics?remember them?) went around 
the industry saying we should stick with that and just use bank switching 
techniques. Bank switching comes up whenever an address space is at the end 
of its life. It's a hack where you have more physical memory than logical 
memory. Fortunately we got enough applications moved to the 8086/8 machines 
to get the industry off of 16-bit addressing, but it was clear from the start 
the extra 4 bits wouldn't be sufficient for long.

Now you MIGHT think that the next time around the chip guys would get it 
right.

But NO, instead of going from 20 bits to 32 bits, we got the 286 chip next. 
Intel had its A team working on the 432 (remember that? Fortune had a silly 
article about how it was so far ahead of everyone, but it was a dead end even 
though its address space was fine). The 286's address space wasn't fine. It 
only had 24 bits. It used segments instead of pages and the segments were 
limited to 24 bits.

When Intel produced the 32-bit 386 chip, IBM delayed doing a 386 machine 
because they had a special version of the 286 that only they could get, and 
they ordered way too many of them.

It's hard to remember, but companies were chicken to do a 386 machine before 
IBM. I went down to Compaq five times and they decided to be brave and do it. 
They came out with a 386 machine! So finally the PC industry had a 32-bit 
address space.

We have just recently passed through the 32-bit limit and are going to 
64-bit. This is another complex story. Itanium is 64-bit. Meanwhile, AMD on 
its own has extended the x86 to 64-bit.

Even 64-bit architecture won't last forever, but it will last for quite a 
while since only servers and scientific stuff have run out of 32-bit space 
right now. In three or four years the industry will have moved over to 64-bit 
architecture, and it looks like it will suffice for more than a decade.

Apollo actually did 128-bit architecture really early, as did some IBM 
architectures. But there are tradeoffs that made those not ever become 
mainstream.

A long answer to just say "no." I don't want anyone thinking that the address 
limits of the PC had something to do with software or me or a lack of 
understanding of the history of address spaces.

My first address space was the PDP-8. That was a 12-bit address space!

Even the 8008, at 14 bits, was a step up from that.Notes

[1]The Experts Speak, by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky (Villard, 1998), 
is a collection of "authoritative" predictions that were quickly 
disproved.[2]"Tesi di Lucio Fabio Baccassino,"  
www.tesionline.it/default/tesi.asp?idt=5236. 

[3]I also wrote an article questioning some of Sunstein's claims about the 
Internet when the book first came out. It was published in the Industry 
Standard, a magazine covering the Internet economy, which in the year 2000 
sold 7,558 advertising pages, more than any other magazine in history, and in 
2001 went out of business. See 
www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,23229,00.html.

[4] David Weinberger, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the 
Web (Perseus, May 2002).

[5]See  bostonreview.mit.edu/ndf.html.
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