Network neutrality is the idea that everyone's messages should pass on the Internet according to the same rules. Technically speaking it means that everyone's packets are all tangled up together. Some get lost, some get rerouted, some go faster than others, but whatever happens it happens equally to everyone's traffic.

The reason why this is an issue now is because the companies that provide the Internet's backbone – the trunk, where your service provider (e.g. Earthlink) is the branch and individual websites are the leaves – are having trouble making money. That's it, plain and simple. Their profit margins are small, and they realized that by allowing companies to pay extra fees to have their packets delivered faster than other people's they could make some dough. And that's on top of what companies already pay for their Internet access. So, enter Congress, the FCC, everyone, and their brother.

(For some background on this issue, see this Washington Post article, a somewhat geekier take from Wikipedia, or this interview of Tim Berners-Lee.)

There's a lot of debate about what to do by people much more informed than I am. It's all very interesting, but I have the solution: do nothing. That's right, forget about it. Don't pass a law that allows companies to charge more for faster access. And whatever you do, don't pass a law banning it. Don't pass a law that defines neutrality. Don't legislate on who has the right to define neutrality. Don't have a series of open forums and a public feedback period. Don't put it through its paces in the courts. Do nothing. Just drop it.

Now, I know that's never going to happen. There are lots of good arguments on both sides, but the truly interesting thing to me is that, once the subject has been broached, there's no going back. The arguments, at this point, must be made, and someone has to 'win'. There's influence to be exerted, connections to exploit, and public opinion to court. We don't seem to be satisfied with the idea that if companies do what they want, and people do what they want, eventually the market and public opinion will find a solution. It won't be clean, it won't be fast, and it won't leave anyone a hero or a martyr, though, and so it won't happen. In this case, the phone comapnies have chosen to lobby Congress, instead of directing their attention towards customers. That's because if they did, they'd get their heads chopped off.

Of course, if you took that argument to its logical conclusion you might think you could say the same thing for, say, murder. Eventually the market and public opinion will come to a resolution about it, so why legislate? But there's a difference. Murder comes up as an issue for public debate because it goes against basic human values, because our sociocultural system has decided that it's abhorrent. Network bias, on the other hand, comes up because some companies just want to make some more money. Plain and simple.

That's not the most bullet-proof argument in the world, but hopefully it gets the point across.

Ben Hill, my co-conspirator for Mycroft, our distributed collaboration project, appears as one of two guests on this week's edition of Jon Udell's weekly podcast over at InfoWorld. The other guest is Nathan McFarland of castingwords.com. CastingWords is a podcast transcription service that uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk as the outsource labor provider.

Jon wanted to to talk about the possibilities of 'harnessing collective intelligence,' (a la Tim O'Reilly) a phrase I really like. Collective intelligence is really built when people can collaborate and contribute in the course of their daily activities. When you make a dedicated activity out of it, you begin to move towards the individual side of the individual/collective continuum. We built Mycroft with this in mind, and it was the main reason we chose to focus in on tasks that take only a few seconds – tasks you can do without ever leaving whatever page hosts the Mycroft module. I think enabling these casual, fun interactions will be the key to sustaining a high participation rate over time.

Recently I've been using a really neat new service called 'la la.' In a nutshell, la la provides the infrastructure so that you can trade away CDs you don't want, and for $1.49 per CD get a different CD that you do want. Basically you just make two lists – CDs you have and CDs you want. When a CD you have is on someone else's want list, you send it to them with a plastic sleeve and envelope (postage paid!) provided by la la. That entitles you to a receive a CD off of your want list. The catch is that you don't get to decide which one. I assume it just registers that you're due a CD, and then the first person who ponies up any of the CDs on your list sends it to you.

So, la la is great. I love it – simple, well executed idea. Ryan complained about their lousy metadata, but I have to say for the music I listen to, it's not a problem. And I have a TON of old CDs I'm ecstatic to get rid of. Ace of Base for Count Basie? You bet! I can't figure out how they make money on the deal though – the margin for each transaction, after all the overhead (including postage) must be small. But I guess even a small margin tens of thousands of times will net you a tidy profit.

However, here's my itch, and I hope someone scratches it. There absolutely needs to be a la la notifier. The basic problem is that unless I log in all the time to see what CDs I have that others want, I miss the chance to trade a lot of CDs. People who can afford to spend all day on la la can do more trading than I can because they watch their list all the time and pounce on new arrivals before I ever see them. I'm sure tons of opportunities to trade CDs come and go during the day in between times when I log on. There should be a small, unobtrusive tray icon to let me know when someone requests a CD I have. Or is there already and I haven't seen it?

Yochai Benkler gave a talk related to his new book 'The Wealth of Networks' at Boalt Law School at Berkeley today. (See my previous post on this book.) I didn't get a chance to go, sadly, but Joe recorded it. And Joe also says that it was the second greatest talk he's ever heard. Now that's an advertisement if I've heard one!

There has been a lot of well-deserved discussion and praise around Paul Dourish's Implications for Design paper at this year's Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference. (Or so I've read, since I'm not actually there.) For the unfamiliar, CHI is a multi-disciplinary but computer science and design dominated conference. Many of the practitioners and researchers in that community have adopted various versions of ethnography in recent years, mostly bastardized, and almost always subsumed by a technology and design-centered focused.

Much of what Paul has to say mirrors debates that have been going on inside of anthropology over the last 25 years or so. (Writing Culture and after. For a nice, succinct synopsis of the last 75 or so years of anthropology see this.) More recently some of them have spilled out into the applied anthropology community, primarily I think because it is multi-disciplinary and hierarchically aligned much the way CHI is. I mention this not to degrade what Paul says – actually the opposite. One of the greatest challenges of applied anthropology is what we might call cultural brokerage – a translation between stakeholders inside of diverse groups. (Disclaimer: Wikipedia's discussion of applied anthropology is pretty good IMHO, up until it gives a set of 4 example problems that do a remarkably terrible job of capturing what applied anthro. is about today.)

Paul clearly believes in the potential of ethnography but is keenly aware of the prevalence of misuse and misunderstanding. Case in point – and my own personal pet peeve – the widespread misconception that ethnography is a qualitative method. (In fact, ethnography is a mixed-methods approach that entails a specific perspective and analytical frame.) The paper is well organized and written, and does a clear job of illustrating his main points: that ethnography is too often poorly or incorrectly applied in the CHI community in a way that both misrepresents what ethnography is about (e.g. theory AND practice) and drains it of much of its potential for informing ongoing understanding about the design and use of technology in everyday life.

I tried to make many of these same points in my paper Cultural Assessment for Sustainable Kiosks which I'm presenting at next month's International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, but I haven't been nearly as eloquent about it as Paul has. Still, I hear a lot of people asking healthy questions like "What's *is* ethnography really?" and thinking about how to apply it in the most meaningful way. I hope that signals a shift out of this transitional period where folks seem to know that ethnography is a powerful tool but have very little concept of how or when to use it, what to do with data once they've got it, or how to ground ethnography in theory.

I really appreciate what Paul is trying to do, and I think he's uniquely positioned to do it. He's someone who is extremely accomplished and respected as a member of the CHI and CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) communities, but clearly has a command of the disciplinary history of anthropology and the theoretical and analytical foundations of ethnography. That his paper has sparked so much interest and debate at CHI (including a nomination for the best paper award) is a testament to his quality as a thinker and writer.

Yochai Benkler, author of the seminal paper 'Coase's Pengiun' (pdf) which lays out the merits of commons-based production and open source, has released a new book called 'The Wealth of Networks' under a CC license. Find the downloadable PDFs of the book here, or order it from Amazon. See also an audio file in which Benkler discusses the idea here. (via Wikimedia Commons)

Coase's Pengiun is the theoretical foundation, really, of Mycroft, which is all about massively distributed peer production. (See other posts on my blog here and here, as well as coverage from the Institute for the Future) We, like, Benkler, see the potential lying dormant in the minds and hearts of millions of people, especially in the long tail, who only need a means to communicate and collaborate. Hopefully Mycroft will be that way.

Today's NYTimes is carrying an interesting article about the ways that newspapers have had to alter the way they write headlines and articles to try and increase traffic from search engines. Because web crawlers can't recognize a witty headline – or more specifically because they don't assign a higher pagerank for a witty headline – online media sites are dumbing them down to 'just the facts.'

The article is both a description of why this phenomenon exists and a discussion of whether it's a good thing that online media outlets are doing this. But I think it misses at least one important point: people who search for media online often want something different from their experience than those who pick up a printed newspaper. After all, how do people usually end up at the NYTimes, for example, through a search engine (as opposed to through a feed or some other aggregation mechanism)? By starting with a goal for search, even if it's a loose and abstract one. The technology allows us to generalize a wide variety of contexts because if you want to search, there's no way of getting around it, you have to type in some search terms, a phrase, a topic. When the results come up, I'm not searching for the wittiest headline. Maybe I pick the one at the top of the list, or I'm searching for a page title that matches my keywords. It's all about knowing a valuable link when I see it.

Contrast that to the experience of a newspaper reader. When I pick up the paper, I am bombarded with articles that I didn't choose. I chose to buy the paper, yes, but the process of searching is about finding things that interest me in the mire. When headlines catch my eye, that's absolutely how I choose to start reading that article.

So, what I'm saying is, media outlets would do well to provide a solution that caters to both types of reader. It's not an argument about 'good' journalism, as this quote from the article suggests:

Such suggestions stir mixed sentiments. "My first thought is that reporters and editors have a job to do and they shouldn't worry about what Google's or Yahoo's software thinks of their work," said Michael Schudson, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who is a visiting faculty member at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

It's about understanding what readers want in different contexts.

Today's Distinguished Lecture at Berkeley iSchool was cancelled because the speaker, John Perry Barlow, got stuck in LA. Big bummer. The title of his talk was to be 'Is Cyberspace still anti-sovereign?' and I have to admit that I was going to go mostly for a view of the personality. So I was sad the lecture didn't happen.

But people still came, since they didn't cancel until the last minute. And it was an interesting group. I think Barlow brings the 'anarchists' and the 'hackers' out of the woodword – they glomb on to his rhetoric about freedom and regulation on the Internet. As we were standing around in the hallway, eating on the food that was supposed to be for the lecture reception, a guy walked up to me, dressed in a certain stereotypical way with torn clothes, patches and symbols, safety pins, jeans, a hoodie, etc… He had been sitting on the floor to the side with a friend. He raised his arms in the air and said 'Who's a programmer here?' Surprised, and not ready for my ethnographic encounter, I said something non-comittal like 'Well, I guess we all are sort of.' I was standing with some folks much more saavy in that department than I. The guy paused for a minute and said in the same sort of way 'Who's a hacker?' We looked at each other – probably because no one had ever asked us that before. I think a few thoughts went through my mind right then:

1. What's a hacker?
2. I suppose I'm a hacker – I try in my own little way to 'break' technology to do what I need it to do. But that's getting less and less unusual.
3. If I were really a hacker, would I admit it? Would I want to talk about it?

So I made some comment similar to the last. Not engaging, more surprised and confused than anything. He mentioned he runs a major 'Whacker' site – again, what's that? And that he thought he'd meet a lot of like-minded folks at the lecture. He was dissapointed it wasn't going on. Here's a definition of 'Whacker' I found on answers.com:

1. A person, similar to a hacker, who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities. Whereas a hacker tends to produce great hacks, a whacker only ends up whacking the system or program in question. Whackers are often quite egotistical and eager to claim wizard status, regardless of the views of their peers.

Then he started to rail on ICANN. He actually said 'Down with ICANN!' And I was surprised and unready again. Of all the evil tech. institutions in the world, I have found relatively little attention to ICANN. He also mentioned that he loves Tor.

So then we left. And he left. And as I walked away, I thought, 'Judd! You dumbass! You just missed a perfect opportunity to find out about another person's life, another POV!' I should have asked about 'Whacking,' and what he hates about ICANN, and why he likes TOR. I was curious what he does during the day, how he got into running a website, and why he likes John Perry Barlow. But I missed my chance. I hope, next time, I won't be so dumb. I'll be more prepared.

On Wed. morning I went to a great session titled “Knowledge Flow in 'Real' and 'Virtual' Spaces.”

Patricia Lange (San Jose State U.) led off talking about her analysis of 'tech talk' in online chats. She argued, in a nutshell, that debaters and 'flamers' often resort to morality as the basis for critiques in the great Linux/Windows debate. Her talk was an interesting mix of social-rhetorical analysis and ethnomethodology. Later on, Patricia and I talked a bit about whether the tense of statements in a chat room has any influence on the arguments, whether it's intentional, etc. What I mean is, in most chats you can either type something directly, in which case the text appears as “: ” or you can give a command that makes a statement in the 3rd person, as in “ thinks the Linux/PC debate is pointless.” These two different forms might say something about the speakers' strategy for conveying power or authority through online chats. Anyway, a point for further discussion.

Roxana Wales also gave a nice talk on her work at NASA with the Mars rover missions. She's just recently moved to Google, not to work on a product, but to study work practice and growing pains at Google itself. Very cool stuff, and I can't wait to hear more about it.

Elizabeth Churchill also gave a great paper in which she described her work with an interactive community bulletin board in a café space. I really loved her discussion, partly because it was well framed, and partly because it meshes really well with recent thinking I have been doing on the power of soundscapes as a shared 'canvas' for communication, collaboration, and creativity. Although Elizabeth's story ended sadly (the touch-screen bulletin board broke and no one paid to fix it) I think it's way ahead of its time. One question, largely unresolved, is how people will respond to the presence of new and potentially foreign interaction artifacts in their space. Which technological frames will they use to understand them? Are the ads? Are they like physical bulletin boards? Like computers or laptops? Fascinating questions.

Perhaps the best part of this session, which attracted a small but vocal and diverse group of people, was the discussion. We had a good 30 minutes of chatting about a variety of issues. This is why I love the SfAAs – they bring together a generous and curious group of folks who just want to share ideas. I hope there continue to be more IT-related folks at the meetings. Brigitte Jordan has been a fixture for the last few years, and I have really enjoyed her contributions, beginning with a roundtable on corporate anthropology at the 2004 meetings in Dallas.

More later…

Tomorrow I'm off to Vancouver to attend the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). This is a wonderful conference, and I highly recommend it. In the last few years the number of people who are doing work combining anthropology with design and various IT-related fields is growing – and fast. Add to that the fact that the meetings provide a genuinely diverse set of perspectives, and include a group of people that are (in my experience) knowledgeable, humble, friendly, and eager to collaborate. As compared to the AAA meetings, SfAAs tend to be more informal and to have a great deal more discussion and debate. Check out the program if you want to get a sense of it.

This year I'm giving both a talk and a poster. My talk, terribly titled 'Cultural Assessment of Kiosk Projects,' is on Wednesday from 3:30-5:20. Hopefully I can learn from some of the insightful comments on giving talks from Steve and Lorenz. It's on work I'm doing on integrating cultural assessment into the design and evaluation of projects in the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) space. This is getting to be a crowded field, and my own contribution is small, but I feel like I've got a good handle on the transitions that are happening from the perspective of applied anthropology.

And like many others, I have first hand experience with the fact that development researchers in many fields are starting realize that anthropology and ethnography are important, but they understand it as a set of methods only. While I have no pretensions about ethnography, as opposed to some who argue that 'real' ethnography can only be done by anthropologists, I do think many well-meaning researchers and practitioners in other fields actually do us a disservice by trying to use ethnographic-like methods. In trying to advance the case for ethnography to their colleagues, they often have no real 'ammunition' except that they know it ought to be done. This, in my opinion, is the same, and just as bad, as technologists who throw gadgets at development problems because they can, hoping that one will solve the problem.

My poster, during a session on Friday from 1:30-4, is based on work I did with Ben Gross regarding how people manage multiple email addresses, messaging accounts, and the like in the course of everyday life. We wonder: what are the factors that influence habits, perceptions, and decisions around complex, multi-faceted lives online? This is my first poster at the SfAA, and I'm kind of psyched for it. Poster sessions seem much more engaging than paper sessions, where the audience is always at a distance.

I hope to be online and blog some of the sessions as we go along. If you're also attending the SfAAs, drop me a line.