Some notes in response to comments on recent messages, plus a fresh
haul of cheap pens, a batch of URL's, and more books than you probably
want to know about.
As a periodic reminder, to unsubscribe from this list, you can send a
message that looks like this:
To: requests@lists.gseis.ucla.edu
Subject: unsubscribe rre
Archives of past RRE messages and answers to frequently asked questions
can be found on the RRE web site:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html
Please consider bookmarking this page so you can find it later.
Eudora users are once again asked nicely (well, sort of nicely) not
to use the antisocial "redirect" command when forwarding RRE messages.
You are welcome to forward any RRE message that does not say anything
to the contrary, but please use some other command besides "redirect"
to do it. The aforementioned RRE FAQ explains the problem with the
ungood "redirect" command.
Just to make sure, the paper that I sent out entitled "Cyberspace
as the New Frontier" was written by Fred Turner, not me. I edited
the header in a clumsy way and Fred adopted some of my boilerplate
copyright stuff, which together misled some people into thinking that
the paper was mine. Fred is a graduate student in my old department
at UCSD, and even though he is a much-published author (e.g., "Echoes
of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory", Anchor, 1996), to
my knowledge this is the first academic paper that he has circulated.
I'm sure he'd appreciate any constructive comments you might have.
Fred swears that he is not the reincarnation of Frederick Jackson
Turner, the historian who published a famous essay on the role of
the (geographic) frontier in American culture just over 100 years ago.
One reader, a forward-thinking educational technologist, figures that
the real point of my draft chapter about the institutional context of
digital libraries could have been written in a quarter of the words.
While my first drafts are not always compact, I think he is probably
wrong, and for an interesting reason. Technical people frequently
think that papers in social theory can be rewritten in small numbers
of words. Of course they are sometimes right. But what they don't
realize is that social theoretic writing, at least until the last few
years' onslaught of manneristic poststructuralism, is usually designed
to yield more meaning to people who have read more of the background,
without being impenetrable to people with only a basic background.
Someone who has read Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, for example, will
understand that the text is alluding to particular concepts of theirs;
someone who is familiar with the ongoing conflict in political science
between liberals and communitarians will likewise notice echoes of
that dispute; and so on. In fact, this theoretical background is
most important when it is invisible even to a sophisticated reader:
a serious paper is one that fails to run afoul of any of the major
intellectual blunders that those theorists have identified. But then
someone who is unfamiliar with these ideas will, like my friend the
educational technologist, get a quarter of the point without feeling
overly assaulted. It's a good system. When I was writing that
particular chapter, I was mainly afraid that it would be impossibly
dense, in that just about every sentence makes a separate point with
little elaboration. And maybe for a different audience I was right.
We'll have to see what the editors of the book think, and the readers.
A similar disciplinary disconnect happened when I sent out the URL
for Ideo, an extremely interesting industrial design company founded
by David Kelly, a member of Stanford's equally interesting mechanical
engineering department (see ).
After looking at the Web site (), one computer
scientist wrote to complain that it wasn't usable. Surely a design
company could be expected to make a Web site that a real person could
navigate! The problem here is that industrial designers and computer
scientists think about interfaces very differently. First of all
the industrial designer possesses no such concept as "interface" --
industrial design, after all, has mainly been concerned with three-
dimensional objects like furniture and appliances and motorcycles.
Graphic design, for its part, has been concerned with two-dimensional
objects that don't interact. Once those design communities started
taking hold of computers, they brought their own way of doing things.
They see designed artifacts as bearers of signs: they choose a few
elements of the artifact's functionality and they design the visible
form of the artifact (and, to a lesser degree, the audible, tangible,
navigable, etc) to give those symbolic expression to those elements.
Innovation in the designers' world means coming up with new ways to
express the functionality of an artifact in its physical form, and
the reward system is geared to producing endless streams of that kind
of novelty.
Computer scientists are different. Their language and methods are
deeply influenced by ergonomics, with its mechanistic understandings
of people and its orientation to measurable efficiency. To this end,
they have invested vast effort in the development of a single paradigm
of interaction, the mouse-menus-and-windows interface with which we
are all familiar. They've explored some other paradigms, of course,
especially recently, but their reward systems are much more geared
to the incremental development of existing paradigms of interaction.
Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses. The designers are
more tuned to the place of an artifact in culture and history. They
see a computer or Web page as part of symbolic dialogue that stretches
across millennia, and they are endlessly exploring the properties of
this dialogue. On the other hand, as Don Norman documented in the
caustic expose that opens "The Design of Everyday Things", they are
also rewarded much more for how things look than for how they work.
Computer scientists are much more tuned to usability-in-depth, at
least a particular kind of depth, one that is suited to the design
of extremely complicated artifacts. But they have an ahistorical,
acontextual understanding of their "user". They believe (if only
tacitly) that "usability" is a property of the artifact itself, and
not a relation between the artifact, the user, the context, and the
culture. As a result, they are prone to getting caught in historical
traps: because everyone is accustomed to one paradigm of interaction,
that one paradigm is regarded as inherently more "usable" than the
ones that nobody is accustomed to. Coming upon the Ideo Web site,
therefore, a computer scientist will quickly become frustrated and
disgusted because his or her conventional interface expectations
aren't being met, and because the site isn't otherwise howling to
be used in some other particular way. The idea that someone might
benefit by taking a moment to figure out and learn a new interaction
paradigm, like the ones that the designers generate in such numbers,
is not part of their worldview.
Who is right? Both and neither. That is why I see a big future
for the synthesis of the two approaches, for example in companies
like Ideo. Another example would be Fitch Richardson Smith; see for
example John Rheinfrank and Shelley Evenson, Design languages, in
Terry Winograd, ed, Bringing Design to Software, Addison-Wesley, 1996.
You may recall that I sent out a message complaining about Amazon.com
deciding to withdraw a book from sale worldwide because of legal
action against it in the UK. I had been traveling, so that message
had sat in my mailbox for about two days before I sent it out. Once
I did send out, within minutes I started receiving messages from RRE
subscribers who had complained to Amazon, all of whom had received
an identical form letter (albeit signed by a dozen different Amazon
employees). Amazon, apparently, had acted in haste when they became
aware of the UK legal action, and only after receiving complaints
did they come up with a way to avoid sending the book to the UK
while continuing to sell it everywhere else. A couple of the people
who wrote to me were slightly annoyed that I had sent out the alert
after the issue had already been settled. But I was surprised, and
impressed: the entire issue evolved from uproar to resolution within
a couple of days. Before the Internet it could have taken months to
achieve the same effect, or weeks at best if one were working with an
existing phone tree, or with the cooperation of a journalist.
It doesn't matter one bit, of course, that Al Gore is easily the most
intelligent and accomplished of all of the prospective presidential
candidates. We stopped caring about that a long time ago. What we
really care about is the weird look on the guy's face when he's being
interviewed on television. Is he in pain or what? No way can we
live with that expression on our sets for the next eight years. That
said, I really have a problem with two assertions that the Republicans
have made so frequently that they are now reported as routine matters
of fact in the newspaper. One is that Gore claimed to have invented
the Internet, and the other is that the Internet was invented by the
military in 1969. I believe that the currently fashionable term for
statements like these is "lies". His words were, "[d]uring my service
in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the
Internet". This is not Elena Ceaucescu giving herself prizes for her
supposed scientific discoveries -- it's a politician taking credit,
as politicians always do, for supporting funding bills that led to
good things in the world. Yeah, okay, it's logically possible that by
those precise words he inwardly meant that he "invented" the Internet,
but that's only the least charitable by far of several interpretations,
to the point that it's just dishonest. And to say that the Internet
was invented by the military in 1969, as the Republicans did in radio
advertisements, is also dishonest. The ARPANET was invented back
then, but the Internet was certainly invented during Al Gore's time
in Congress. Now, his claim is certainly exaggerated; he is probably
referring to somewhat later initiatives related to NSFNET and the
like. But he didn't claim to have invented the thing, and the routine
drumbeats to the contrary are yet more evidence of the conservative
domination of the media.
Let us turn now to the world of cheap pens. The "middle column"
article on the front page of the 6/15/99 issue of the Wall Street
Journal concerned the fashion for gel pens (aka "gelly pens"),
especially of the "milky" variety, among American schoolgirls,
who have discovered that they are good for writing on one's skin.
(The ink wipes off easily.) The pen companies, however, strenuously
insist that they do not recommend using their products for this
purpose, because to do so they would need approval from the FDA.
This is all important cultural news.
I bought a couple batches of pens on a recent trip to Europe. I
bought the first batch at the Terminal 1 shopping mall at Heathrow.
Maybe this got past you: Heathrow is no longer an airport in any
recognizable sense of the word but rather a set of shopping malls that
airplanes fly in and out of. They provide only enough seats for the
hard-core disabled and the food court eaters, and they don't announce
the gates until the last minute to maximize shopping time. The men's
stores carry shirts in the most dreadful, chemical-looking colors.
It is not a happy place.
Nonetheless, stranded like everyone else in my three-hour layover,
I stopped at the Terminal 1 W.H. Smith store to check out the pens.
I am positively inclined to W.H. Smith because when I lived in England
ten years ago, I used the W.H. Smith A4 sketchpads with the spiral
binding on the top and found them very nice. For purposes of writing,
a sketchpad should ideally be rather thin, so that one's wrist can
rest on the table while writing down toward the bottom half of the
page. The W.H. Smith sketchpad was particularly good in that regard,
and the spiral binding at the top meant that one's hand isn't always
bumping against the spiral binding at the left or right edges of the
page. In any case, this experience may have made me unduly credulous
about the pens at the Terminal 1 W.H. Smith, for they turned out to be
major turkeys.
Take this Pentel Superball BL36. Please. On the right kind of paper
it's actually somewhat nice; it produces an usually robust-looking
line, and the pen itself is a tiny bit thicker than most others, which
is better for my clumsy hands. The problem is that it is exceedingly
sensitive about what kind of paper it is used on, and on the wrong
kind of paper it is incapable of producing a steady line. I have
a semi-serious theory. You know those little pads of paper that
stationery stores provide so you can try out the pens? I'm thinking
that the W.H. Smith people, or perhaps the Pentel people, provided the
Pentel pen display with a pad of test paper that was slightly slicker
than your usual writing paper, in order to show the Pentel Superball
in the best light. That's my theory. In any case, I must have been
in an optimum buying environment, because I also bought a Ball Pentel
Fine Point R50, a vinyl-tipped pen whose point is anything but fine.
It too works well on particular kinds of paper, but it's really more
like a marking pen, useless for writing legible words and sentences.
Finally, I bought a Hybrid Gel Grip, which is as you might expect a
fair-to-middling gel pen with a rubber grip, nothing terribly special.
My luck changed for the better, however, once I got to Vienna. In
the city center I found a couple of shops with very interesting pens.
I found a Rotring Xonox Rollerball F. This is the pen whose existence
I theorized about in my very first message about pens in November
1997. It resembles the superlative Reynolds Ink Ball, and while it
doesn't provide the same sense of gliding precision as the Reynolds
it is still quite worthwhile. (I've just realized that I accidentally
referred to it way back when as the "Liquid Ball". Oh well. You
can see this outstanding pen, by the way, at the Reynolds Web site:
. No word yet on whether it is
possible to order the pens online.) Far more remarkable, however,
is the Super-GP pen that I found with a 1.6mm tip. You will recall
my discussion of the 0.7mm and 1.2mm versions that can be found at
Kinokuniya stories. 1.2mm is already pretty darn wide for the tip
of a pen, at least one meant for writing. Well, this is a 1.6mm,
and writing with it is like steering a supertanker into port, except
in a good way. Last but not least, I found an Edding Control 77 pen,
which resembles the look-and-feel of the Reynolds Ink Ball even more
closely than the Xonox, and in fact is very close to it in quality.
Much better.
I've had some other, more dubious adventures in pen shopping. At a
"design" store recently I bought an Eversharp Astronaut Pressurized
Pen. ("Eversharp"? Like maybe you're worried your pen will get
dull?) You may recall my speculation that the ink cartridge in the
strange Pilot Hi-Tec-C contained pressurized air. Well, that's the
Eversharp Astronaut's claim to fame. "Originally designed in the
1960s for use by the astronauts in space, ... [t]he [pen's] design
uses pressure, not gravity to push the ink through the barrel ...".
(The rest of the sentence wasn't real grammatical so I left it out.)
You know how the only reason why any sane person would drink Tang
is because the astronauts do? Well, likewise with this crummy pen.
Its solid-metal construction, very small size, and ovoid shape seem
space-age retro cool just long enough for you to shell out the money
to buy it, but then you confront a few earth-bound facts: that the
ink gums up on the tip like any old Bic ballpoint, the ovoid shape
means that the cap is always shifting around on the back of the
pen when you're trying to write with it, and it's too bloody small
for any real astronaut to actually use -- unless you happen to be
one of those chimpanzees they sent up in the Mercury. Foo. On the
other hand, the same design store also sold me a very nice Pinetta
spiral-bound sketch pad whose covers are made of wood -- excellent
for carrying around in a backpack. It's very Italian, with nicely
textured cream-colored A4 pages.
Finally, I've been embarrassed lately by my fervent recommendation
of the Pilot P-700 pen. I know several people who went right out and
bought them, and they're just not working out. Although one person
said he found his P-700 to be scratchy, the real problem I've had is
that it doesn't maintain an even line for long periods. It worked
fine for the short period that I tested it before reporting on it, but
its flaws became evident when I wrote a whole speech in my notebook
with it. It is still an interesting kinaesthetic experience to write
with one of them, but I'm afraid it's not the last word in cheap pens.
The paper about broadband networking and universities that I sent out
a few weeks ago ("Visible Colleges: Infrastructure and Institutional
Change in the Networked University") is producing a strange response.
Libertarians seem to react strongly to it, and they all complain that
I have failed to use a particular word: "evolution". It took me a
while to figure out what problem these libertarians could be having.
After all, the whole point of that paper is that the technical and
economic dynamics around broadband networking can lead to overly
centralized institutions unless one is careful, and I explained what
being careful might look like. But these folks, the libertarians
who didn't like the paper, seem to be operating on a whole different
level. Simply warding off centralized institutions is barely the
beginning of their agenda. What they want is to eliminate the whole
idea of consciously designing anything. They say this.
At first I thought that my libertarian correspondents were operating
by keyword: I spoke in terms of "design" and "governance", therefore
I must be Josef Stalin. And this interpretation of their thinking
fits with a lot of evidence: libertarians today seem to live in a
Manichean world of libertarian good guys, who want everything to be
spontaneously ordered, and "statist" bad guys, who want everything to
be dictated and controlled by an all-powerful centralized government;
or between people who think that something called "change" is good,
namely themselves, and people who think that "change" is bad, namely
the aforementioned Stalinists, aka "technocrats". This whole way of
thinking is, of course, appallingly simplistic, part of the overall
corrosion of reason that has been accelerating in the past few years.
It seems powerful to its adherents because all evidence against one
extreme appears to confirm the other, when the real problem is simply
that it cannot conceive other alternatives. And it has affected their
thinking to such a degree that they seem genuinely bamboozled when
I, whom they regard as not a libertarian and therefore as evil to the
core, happily embrace various proposals for self-ordering that make
regulation unnecessary. They don't have a category for that.
This is not about libertarianism as such. In the old days you had
people like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, libertarians of an
economic bent whose arguments were spelled out in sufficiently great
detail that one could actually argue with them. One could observe,
for example, the precise ways in which Hayek's institutional theories
come unglued, or the striking parallels between his deep distrust
of democracy and that of the Weimar-era protofascist Carl Schmitt.
Now, however, the dominant metaphors among libertarians are not from
economics but biology. The great attraction of evolution for this
new generation is that it gives rise to great and complex innovation
without the need for conscious choice. It would thus seem to counsel
us not to design, not to govern, but to take our hands off and let
nature do its thing, the outcome of which will surely surpass anything
our centralized selves could have imagined. Choice and responsibility
are someone else's job, someone else's, always deferred. Thus one
of them, who actually teaches at a university, could blandly label my
paper "totalitarian", among other accusations, on the sole ground that
it used the word "design".
But evolution, of course, is not a new theory of society. It used
to be called Social Darwinism back in the day when people admitted
that evolution is a matter of the strong killing and eating the weak.
Now, however, we speak in terms of ecosystems, which we regard as
fragile things of beauty. This kind of language does encourage us to
treat the earth with respect, but it also tends to obscure the outrage
of applying biological metaphors to human beings and their lives.
Intelligent people now applaud the idea that human society is, or
will soon become, a beehive. The analogy is of course old, having
been the basis of Bernard Mandeville's pathbreaking rationalization
of human selfishness just short of 300 years ago. Mandeville seems to
have known little about bees, but an author writing in the 1990s will
surely have heard the news that a beehive is an insanely hierarchical
caste system in which all of the workers are literally clones. The
beehive is a flat hierarchy to be sure, very much like the radically
"delayered" organizational diagrams that one encounters in the books
of cyber management consultants. But this is hardly the picture of
human freedom as it has historically been understood. It used to be
that consciousness, back when it was called the soul, was precisely
what distinguished us from the insects. Now, however, consciousness
itself is under attack, and we have become so addled that we embrace
this upside-down rubbish as the highest expression of civilization.
We love Big Brother.
The underlying problem here, historically anyway, is about theology.
Most of the institutions of the West were once religious, and even
committed atheists talk in ways whose inner logic is descended from,
and analogous to, religious discourses from the Middle Ages. And
this inner logic is usually organized around a central tension: one
is encouraged to know God, listen to God, follow God, and be like God,
but this creates the calamitous temptation to think and act as though
one were God, and this is so dangerous a temptation for finite and
sinful beings such as ourselves that the West is endlessly caught up
in struggles between corrupt institutions that pretend to be God and
spiritually traumatized communities that regard those institutions,
either literally or beneath the thinly secularized language of
political conspiracy, as the enemies of God. These struggles are
especially intense in the United States, for the simple reason that
Europe sent all of its major religious fanatics to us. Any country
that harbors large numbers of Anabaptists is bound to be a really
interesting place.
This pattern applies just as strongly to technology and economics.
Conservatives argue that totalitarianism arises from man's attempt to
play God, and the historical evidence suggests that this is at least
partly right. Lenin took his ideas about technology and economics
straight from the United States, and he found them congenial precisely
because they posit a single, centralized point of view: the engineer
or the auctioneer. This is why Hayek was so suspicious of science:
its attempt to acquire God's knowledge of the universe led inevitably
to political institutions that occupy that same cosmological vantage-
point. And it is why he was so suspicious of neoclassical economics
in particular: its willingness to posit a single vast equilibrium
equation that allocates all of society's resources leads too naturally
to a single vast bureaucracy that computes that equation on everyone
else's behalf. This is precisely what Lenin set out to do, and the
Soviet Union failed in part because its computers were not big enough
to solve the linear programming problems that its economic theory said
needed solving. The Soviet Union was likewise the homeland of heroic
engineering, and Lenin (and Stalin even more) was a direct descendent
of the medieval engineer who thought of himself as building God's
perfection on earth. Indeed, one of the most terrible institutional
deformities of the former communist countries is that their managers
are trained in technology and economics but not in Barnard and Drucker
and so on -- the "human side" of organizations that the West has come
to know as management. The American economists who flew into former
communist capitals in the early 1990's didn't help matters when they
reinforced this exclusively economic mindset, oblivious as they were
of the vast institutional background that makes actually existing
capitalism work when the econ texts aren't looking, and much of the
subsequent misery in those countries can be surely laid at their feet.
What follows from this? It is understandable as a matter of cultural
psychology that people who were traumatized by the great institutional
church of centralized technology and economics should feel driven
to the opposite extreme. But that doesn't mean that we should follow
them. Extremes feed on one another, and they keep feeding so long as
we allow them to pretend that all of their evils are justified by the
evils of the opposite extreme. And in particular, we should not allow
the extremists to capture important words like "freedom". Attempts
to extirpate human consciousness in the name of freedom are just as
perverse as their opposite evil twin: communist attempts to extirpate
freedom in the name of consciousness. The rational middle ground is
called democracy. Democracy doesn't make for easy slogans; it always
loses when people who think they are God are fighting with people who
think they are fighting Satan. But democracy is still the right way
to live. It requires consciousness, and it requires collective action
and choice, and it requires these things precisely in order to create
the conditions for freedom. That's what freedom is, and that seeming
tension is not a logical contradiction but something inherent in the
human condition. Beliefs become actions, actions become institutions,
and institutions define the framework within which free people take
their experiments in a thousand directions and then return to tell
one another what they have learned. Information technology doesn't
care: it can be part of the democratic story, or it can be part of
the totalitarian or libertarian messes that await us at the extremes.
If the Soviet economic ministries had a billion dollars' worth of
Pentium IIIs then they would probably still be up and running today.
We can make conscious use of information technology in building
a democratic society, or we can use it to build a better beehive.
That's a choice, an inescapable human choice, and it's our choice now.
Some URL's.
Microsoft Anti-Trust Trial: Interview with Nicholas Economides
http://economics.about.com/library/weekly/aa060199.htm
http://raven.stern.nyu.edu/networks/ms/
Divx DVD backers call it quits
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,37894,00.html?st.ne.fd.gif.d
New Pew Grants to Encourage Technology in Courses With Large Enrollments
http://chronicle.com/free/99/06/99061602t.htm
The Growth and Development of Cyberspace Law
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/decade.html
another spontaneous wireless networking scheme
http://www.research.digital.com/wrl/projects/Factoid/
archiving Silicon Valley
http://www.salonmagazine.com/tech/feature/1999/06/10/stanford/
local fights over broadband network access
http://www.nogatekeepers.org/
http://www.mhcrc.org/CurrentIssues/atttci_transfer.htm
http://www.ivn.net/strat/access.html
http://www.opennetcoalition.org/action/
http://law.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa012699.htm
http://www.state.vt.us/psd/newcablepage.htm
http://www.state.vt.us/psd/6101ltp-bs.htm
http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/print/980824/346945.html
Teaching as a Social Process
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/html/erm9932.html
Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/conferences/sigir99/
ACM Conference on Digital Libraries
http://fox.cs.vt.edu/DL99/
Why the Internet is Good: Community Governance That Works Well
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/reagle/regulation-19990326.html
Staedtler pens
http://www.staedtler.com/index_en.htm
David Brin's very funny review of the new Star Wars movie
http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/06/15/brin_side/
conflict over amazon.com's trademark
http://www.computerworld.com/home/news.nsf/all/9904165amzn
East European Constitional Review
http://www.law.nyu.edu/eecr/
Web Broker Trading Index
http://www.keynote.com/news/announcements/pr060899.html
IEEE Conference on Standardisation and Innovation in Information Technology
http://www-i4.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~jakobs/siit99/home.html
My list of books on social aspects of computing for 1996-1997 still
continues to grow. Here are some of the books that have been added
since I last sent out the list, which now has well over 800 entries.
The whole list: .
Prudence S. Adler, Copyright and the NII: Resources for the Library
and Education Community, edited by Patricia Brennan, Association of
Research Libraries, 1996.
Peter Bogh Andersen, A Theory of Computer Semiotics: Semiotic
Approaches to Construction and Assessment of Computer Systems, updated
edition, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar, RAND, 1996.
Christopher Barnatt, Management Strategy and Information Technology:
Text and Readings, International Thomson Business Press, 1996.
Neil Barrett, Digital Crime: Policing the Cybernation, Kogan Page,
1997.
Dave Barry, Dave Barry in Cyberspace, Crown, 1996.
Jon A. Baumgarten, Business and Legal Guide to Online-Internet Law,
Glasser LegalWorks, 1997.
Marilyn J. Bazeli and James L. Heintz, Technology Across the
Curriculum: Activities and Ideas, Libraries Unlimited, 1997.
Gary G. Benesko, Inter-Corporate Business Engineering: Streamlining
the Business Cycle From End to End, Research Triangle Consultants,
1997.
Yochai Benkler, Rules of the Road for the Information Superhighway:
Electronic Communications and the Law, West, 1996.
Jacques Berleur and Diane Whitehouse, eds, An Ethical Global
Information Society: Culture and Democracy Revisited, Chapman and
Hall, 1997.
Cristoforo S. Bertuglia, Silvana Lombardo, and Peter Nijkamp, eds,
Innovative Behaviour in Space and Time, Springer-Verlag, 1997.
Hossein Bidgoli, Modern Information Systems for Managers, Academic
Press, 1997.
Robert W. Blanning and David R. King, eds, Organizational
Intelligence: AI in Organizational Design, Modeling, and Control, IEEE
Computer Society Press, 1996.
Susan Bodilly and Karen J. Mitchell, Evaluating Challenge Grants for
Technology in Education: A Sourcebook, RAND, 1997.
Kevin W. Bowyer, Ethics and Computing: Living Responsibly in a
Computerized World, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1996.
Daniel L. Brenner, Law and Regulation of Common Carriers in the
Communications Industry, second edition, Westview, 1996.
William E. Burgess, The Oryx Guide to Distance Learning: A
Comprehensive Listing of Electronic and Other Media-Assisted Courses,
second edition, Oryx, 1997
Janice M. Burn and Maris G. Martinsons, eds, Information Technology
and the Challenge for Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 1997.
A.P. Cameli, ed, The Information Superhighway: Issues and Challenges,
Nova Sciences, 1996.
Michael L. Carroll, Cyberstrategies: How to Build an Internet-Based
Information System, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1996.
Mary E. Carter, Electronic Highway Robbery: An Artist's Guide to
Copyrights in the Digital Era, Peachpit, 1996.
Jean M. Casey, Early Literacy: The Empowerment of Technology,
Libraries Unlimited, 1997.
William L. Cats-Baril and Ronald L. Thompson, Information Technology
and Management, Irwin, 1997.
Kuldip Chand, ed, Information Marketing: Status and Prospects, Batra
Book Service, 1996.
Warren Chernaik, Marilyn Deegan, and Andrew Gibson, eds, Beyond the
Book: Theory, Culture, and the Politics of Cyberspace, Oxford
University Computing Services, 1996.
James W. Chesebro and Dale A. Bertelsen, Analyzing Media:
Communication Technologies As Symbolic and Cognitive Systems,
Guilford, 1996.
Franklin Clark and Ken Diliberto, Investigating Computer Crime, CRC
Press, 1996.
Laurel A. Clyde, School Libraries and the Electronic Community: The
Internet Connection, Scarecrow Press, 1997.
Peter Cochrane, Tips for Time Travellers: Visionary Insights Into
New Technology, Life and the Future By One of the World's Leading
Technology Prophets, Orion Business Books, 1997.
Kevin G. Coleman, ed, Reengineering MIS: Aligning Information
Technology and Business Operations, Idea Group, 1996.
Janet Collins, Michael Hammond and Jerry Wellington, Teaching and
Learning With Multimedia, Routledge, 1997.
Robert Corn-Revere, ed, Rationales and Rationalizations: Regulating
the Electronic Media, Media Institute, 1997.
Susan Cotter, ed, Commercial Alliances in the Information Age, Wiley,
1996.
Thomas J. Courchene, ed, Policy Frameworks for a Knowledge Economy,
John Deutsch Institute for Economic Policy, Queen's University, 1996.
Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar, eds, Transit Lounge: An Interface Book
from 21.C, Craftsman House, 1997.
Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other
Unpopular Ideas, Autonomedia, 1996.
Robert W. K. Davis and Scott C. Hutchison, Computer Crime in Canada:
An Introduction to Technological Crime and Related Legal Issues,
Carswell, 1997.
Donald L. Day and Diane K. Kovacs, eds, Computers, Communication and
Mental Models, Taylor and Francis, 1996.
Elisa M. del Galdo and Jakob Nielsen, eds, International User
Interfaces, Wiley, 1996.
Vasant Dhar and Roger Stein, Seven Methods for Transforming Corporate
Data into Business Intelligence, Prentice Hall, 1997.
Alan J. Dix and Russell Beale, eds, Remote Cooperation: CSCW Issues
for Mobile and Teleworkers, Springer, 1996.
Pam Dixon, Virtual College: A Quick Guide to How You Can Get the
Degree You Want With Computer, TV, Video, Audio, and Other
Distance-Learning Tools, Peterson's, 1996.
Anne-Marie Duguet, Heinrich Klotz, and Peter Weibel, Jeffrey Shaw: A
User's Manual, From Expanded Cinema to Virtual Reality, Cantz, 1997.
Michael Dunkerley, The Jobless Economy? Computer Technology in the
World of Work, Polity, 1996.
Peter V. Eijsvoogel, Telecommunications Regulation in the Netherlands,
Kluwer, 1997.
Donald P. Ely and Tjeerd Plomp, eds, Classic Writings On Instructional
Technology, Libraries Unlimited, 1996.
Robert E. Emeritz, ed, The Telecommunications Act of 1996: Law and
Legislative History, Pike and Fischer, 1996.
Barbara Etzel and Peter Thomas, Personal Information Management: Tools
and Techniques for Achieving Professional Effectiveness, New York
University Press, 1996.
Charles D. Ferris, Guidebook to the Telecommunications Act of 1996,
Matthew Bender, 1996.
Layna Fischer, Electronic Commerce: Profiting from Business On-Line,
Lighthouse Point, FL: Future Strategies, 1996.
Joseph S.P. Fong and Shi-Ming Huang, Information Systems
Reengineering, Springer, 1997.
Charles E.H. Franklin, ed, Business Guide to Privacy and Data
Protection Legislation, Kluwer, 1996.
Batya Friedman, ed, Human Values and the Design of Computer
Technology, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
W. Mark Fruin, Knowledge Works: Managing Intellectual Capital At
Toshiba, Oxford University Press, 1997.
David Gillies and Roger J.W. Marshall, Telecommunications Law,
Butterworths, 1997.
Jeff Goodell, The Cyberthief and the Samurai, Dell, 1996.
Barbara Gorayska and Jacob L. Mey, eds, Cognitive Technology: In
Search of a Humane Interface, Elsevier, 1996.
Sara Grostick, Mary Alice Hanken, and Ellen Jacobs, eds, Health
Information: Management of a Strategic Resource, Saunders, 1996.
Nagy Hanna, Sandor Boyson, and Shakuntala Gunaratne, The East Asian
Miracle and Information Technology: Strategic Management of
Technological Learning, World Bank, 1996.
Roy L. Harmon, Reinventing the Business: Preparing Today's Enterprise
for Tomorrow's Technology, Free Press, 1996.
Peter K. Heldman, Competitive Telecommunications: How to Thrive Under
the Telecommunications Act, McGraw-Hill, 1997.
Carla Hoekendijk, ed, DEAF96: Digital Territories, V2_Organisatie,
1996.
Jim Hoskins and Vincent Lupiano, Exploring IBM's Bold Internet
Strategy, Maximum, 1997.
Geoffrey James, Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite: 34
Winning Management Strategies From Ceos At Microsoft, Compaq, Sun,
Hewlett-Packard and Other Top Companies, Times Business/Random House,
1996.
Daniel S. Janal, 101 Successful Businesses You Can Start On the
Internet, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1997.
Daniel S. Janal, Online Marketing Handbook: How to Promote, Advertise,
and Sell Your Products and Services On the Internet, Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1997.
D. Lamont Johnson, Cleborne D. Maddux, and Leping Liu, eds, Using
Technology in the Classroom, Haworth, 1997.
M. Kanakachary, Towards Networking of the Humanities Libraries in
India, Ess Ess, 1996.
Roberta R. Katz, Bruce P. Keller, and Lance Rose, eds, The Fourth
Annual Seminar On Legal and Business Aspects of the Internet, Law
Journal Seminars-Press, 1997.
Owen Kelly, Digital Creativity, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1996.
Charles H. Kennedy and M. Veronica Pastor, An Introduction to
International Telecommunications Law, Artech House, 1996.
Richard Klingler, The New Information Industry: Regulatory Challenges
and the First Amendment, Brookings Institution Press, 1996.
Leon T. Knauer, Ronald K. Machtley, and Thomas M. Lynch, eds,
Telecommunications Act Handbook: A Complete Reference for Business,
Government Institutes, 1996.
Robert Koechley, ed, Libraries and the Internet, Highsmith Press,
1997.
Cheryl Laguardia, Teaching the New Library: A How-To-Do-It Manual for
Planning and Designing Instructional Programs, Neal-Schuman, 1996.
John F. LeBaron, Catherine Collier, and Linda de Lyon Friel, A Travel
Agent in Cyber School: The Internet and the Library Media Program,
Libraries Unlimited, 1997.
Kelley Lee, Global Telecommunications Regulation: A Political Economy
Perspective, Pinter, 1996.
Martin C. Libicki, Defending Cyberspace, and Other Metaphors, National
Defense University, 1997.
Les Lloyd, ed, Technology and Teaching, Information Today, 1997.
Henry C. Lucas, Jr. Information technology for Management, sixth
edition, McGraw-Hill, 1997.
Eduardo Luzio, The Microcomputer Industry in Brazil: The Case of a
Protected High-Technology Industry, Praeger, 1996.
Lotfi Maherzi, World Communication Report: The Media and the Challenge
of the New Technologies, UNESCO, 1997.
Richard L. Manweller, Funding High Tech Ventures, Oasis, 1997.
Lyn Elizabeth M. Martin, ed, The Challenge of Internet Literacy: The
Instruction-Web Convergence, Haworth Press, 1997.
William D. May, Edges of Reality: Mind Vs. Computer, Insight, 1996.
Randall M. MacDonald, The Internet and the School Library Media
Specialist: Transforming Traditional Services, Greenwood Press, 1997.
Melanie McGrath, Hard, Soft and Wet: The Digital Generation Comes of
Age, HarperCollins, 1997.
H.R. Mgombelo and M.C.M. Werner, eds, Telecommunication for Business
in Africa, IOS, 1997.
John Mingers and Frank Stowell, eds, Information Systems: An Emerging
Discipline?, McGraw-Hill, 1997.
Christopher Morgan, Wizards and their Wonders: Portraits in Computing,
ACM Museum, 1997.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Technobrat: Culture in a Cybernetic Classroom,
HarperCollins, 1997.
Raymond T. Nimmer, Information Law, Warren, Gorham and Lamont, 1996.
Donald M. Norris and James L. Morrison, eds, Mobilizing for
Transformation: How Campuses Are Preparing for the Knowledge Age,
Jossey-Bass, 1997.
Celestine A. Ntuen and Eui H. Park, Human Interaction with Complex
Systems: Conceptual Principles and Design Practice, Kluwer, 1996.
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Industrial
Competitiveness in the Knowledge-Based Economy: The New Role of
Governments, OECD, 1997.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Towards a
Global Information Society: Global Information Infrastructure Global
Information Society: Policy Requirements, OECD, 1997.
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Information
Technology and the Future of Post-Secondary Education, OECD, 1996.
Sarah Ormes and Lorcan Dempsey, eds, The Internet, Networking, and the
Public Library, Library Association Pub. 1997.
Marilyn M. Parker, Strategic Transformation and Information
Technology: Paradigms for Performing While Transforming, Prentice
Hall, 1996.
Gregory S. Paul and Earl Cox, Beyond Humanity: Cyberevolution and
Future Minds, Charles River Media, 1996.
Daniel Petre and David Harrington, The Clever Country? Australia's
Digital Future, Macmillan, 1996.
Michel Racicot, The Cyberspace Is Not a "No Law Land": A Study of the
Issues of Liability for Content Circulating on the Internet, Industry
Canada, 1997.
Roshan Raina, Library Resource Sharing and Networking: An Approach
Among Management Schools in India, Vikas, 1997.
L.S. Ramaiah, ed, Public Library Systems: Services and Networking:
A Festschrift Presented to Prof. K. Sarada, Ess Ess, 1997.
Chris Reed, Digital Information Law: Electronic Documents and
Requirements of Form, Centre for Commercial Law Studies, University of
London, 1996.
Thomas Reichmann, Controlling: Concepts of Management Control,
Controllership, and Ratios, Springer, 1997.
Robert Rindler and Deborah Willis, Techno.Seduction: An Exhibition of
Multimedia Installation Work by Forty Artists, Cooper Union, 1997.
M.D. Roblyer, Jack Edwards, and Mary Anne Havriluk, Integrating
Educational Technology Into Teaching, Prentice Hall, 1997.
Edward Mozley Roche and Henry Bakis, eds, Developments in
Telecommunications: Between Global and Local, Ashgate, 1997.
Jeffrey L. Rodengen, The MicroAge Way, Write Stuff, 1996.
Wingham Rowan, Guaranteed Electronic Markets: The Backbone of a
Twenty-First Century Economy?, Demos, 1997.
Blanca R. Ruiz, Privacy in Telecommunications: A European and an
American Approach, Kluwer Law International, 1997.
Greville Rumble, The Costs and Economics of Open and Distance
Learning, Kogan Page, 1997.
V. Sambamurthy and Robert W. Zmud, Information Technology and
Innovation: Strategies for Success, Financial Executives Research
Foundation, 1996.
Stuart J.D. Schwartzstein, ed, The Information Revolution and National
Security: Dimensions and Directions, Center for Strategic and
International Studies, 1996.
Colin Scott and Olivier Audeoud, The Future of EC Telecommunications
Law, Bundesanzeiger, 1996.
Judith B. Sedaitis, ed, Commercializing High Technology: East and
West, Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.
Robert J. Seidel and Paul R. Chatelier, eds, Virtual Reality,
Training's Future? Perspectives on Virtual Reality and Related
Emerging Technologies, Plenum, 1997.
Horst Siebert, ed, Towards a New Global Framework for High-Technology
Competition, Mohr, 1997.
Thomas J. Smedinghoff, ed, Online Law: The SPA's Legal Guide to Doing
Business On the Internet, Addison-Wesley, 1996.
Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt, eds, 24 Hours in Cyberspace:
Photographed On One Day By 150 of the World's Leading
Photojournalists, Macmillan, 1996.
Carolyn A. Snyder and James W. Fox, eds, Libraries and Other Academic
Support Services for Distance Learning, JAI, 1997.
Carolyn A. Snyder, Susan Logue, and Barbara G. Preece, eds, Role of
Libraries in Distance Education: A Spec Kit, Association of Research
Libraries, 1996.
Phillip L. Spector and Paul J. Kollmer, Communications and Technology
Alliances: Business and Legal Issues, Warren, Gorham and Lamont, 1996.
Kent D. Stuckey, Internet and Online Law, Law Journal Seminars Press,
1996.
Eugene Sullivan, David W. Stewart, and Henry A. Spille, External
Degrees in the Information Age: Legitimate Choices, Oryx, 1997.
Thomas F.P. Sullivan, ed, Official Telecommunications Dictionary:
Legal and Regulatory Definitions, Government Institutes, 1997.
Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz, eds, Reading Matters: Narrative in the
New Media Ecology, Cornell University Press, 1997.
Edwin E. Tozer, Strategic IS/IT Planning, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996.
Tom Trabin, ed, The Computerization of Behavioral Healthcare:
How to Enhance Clinical Practice, Management, and Communications,
Jossey-Bass, 1996.
Betty J. Turock, ed, Envisioning a Nation Connected: Librarians Define
the Public Interest in the Information Superhighway, American Library
Association, 1996.
C.M. Rob Verkoeyen, Albina I. Nikkonen, and Andrei Fursenko, eds,
Management Training in High-Tech and R&D: Concept for Enterprises
Under Transition, Kluwer, 1997.
Michelle M. Weil and Larry D. Rosen, TechnoStress: Coping with
Technology at Work, at Home, at Play, Wiley, 1997.
Benjamin B. Wells, The Computer Revolution, Nova Science, 1997.
Edward Wilding, Computer Evidence: A Forensic Investigations Handbook,
Sweet and Maxwell, 1997.
Jerry W. Willis, Elizabeth C. Stephens, and Kathryn I. Matthew,
Technology, Reading, and Language Arts, Allyn and Bacon, 1996.
Martin Wilson, The Information Edge: Successful Management using
Information Technology, Pitman, 1997.
Paul A. Winters, ed, Computers and Society, Greenhaven, 1997.
John P. Witherspoon, Distance Education: A Planner's Casebook, Western
Interstate Commission for Higher Education, 1996.
George Young, Designing Business: How to Develop and Lead a High
Technology Company, Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1997.
end