fwd: REVIEW: "Digital Democracy", Cynthia J. Alexander/Leslie A. Pal

[Kurt Cockrum]

Culled from Risks Digest 20.41 <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.41.html>:
 Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 08:40:11 -0800
 From: Rob Slade <rslade at sprint.ca>
 Subject: REVIEW: "Digital Democracy", Cynthia J. Alexander/Leslie A. Pal

 BKDGTLDM.RVW   990326

 "Digital Democracy", Cynthia J. Alexander/Leslie A. Pal, 1998,
 0-19-541359-8, U$26.50
 %E   Cynthia J. Alexander
 %E   Leslie A. Pal
 %C   70 Wynford Drive, Don Mills, Ontario   M3C 1J9
 %D   1998
 %G   0-19-541359-8
 %I   Oxford University Press
 %O   U$26.50 212-679-7300
 %P   237 p.
 %T   "Digital Democracy: Policy and Politics in the Wired World"

 As a techie, I more comfortable with the "hard" sciences with provable
 outcomes, such as the "running code" (1) of the Internet.  However, as
 one interested in the social aspects of the net, I have to respect the
 softer sciences, since without "rough consensus" (2) there would be
 neither protocol standards, nor the real heart of the communications
 that goes on.  As Dimwiddy and Bunkum state (3), though, PoliSci is so
 soft as to be positively mushy.

 Right from the beginning (4) the text is heavily larded with
 footnotes, which sometimes threaten to overpower the essays they are
 supposed to support (5).  Oddly, though, these footnotes do not give
 any impression of the strength of the material in the book, quite the
 contrary.  Instead, they tend to lend credence to the statement that
 94.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot (6).  The content of
 the book tends to be strangely unformed, with statements ranging
 between unsupported bombast that we are simply assumed to accept, to
 citations of studies without much discussion of relevance or validity.

 After an introduction, there is a piece on "social forces in the
 hypermedia environment" that seems to want to talk about economics, a
 discussion of national security, and something looking at the national
 or global information infrastructure.  None of these pieces, and,
 indeed, nothing in the book, seems to have any real idea of the
 technology involved, or the implications of the technology.  A look at
 women on the net states that "Few will argue the impact of written
 language or--many centuries later--the printing press in shaping new
 societies" (7) while blithely ignoring the fact that we have very
 little idea of what those impacts might have been.  Leslie Pal's own
 contribution, examining the outcry over the Communications Decency
 Act, seems to have the greatest understanding of modern communications
 systems, but even there (8) does not comprehend that the technical
 aspects of "flooding" algorithms and dynamic rerouting were what
 forced commercial services to lobby against the bill.

 The paper on teledemocracy bemoans the fact that lack of a touch tone
 phone disenfranchises a massive 5% of the population (9), while
 ignoring as insignificant a 12% disparity in polling results (10). 
 His lauding of Ted White's telephone polling (11) was of particular
 interest to me, since I live in White's riding and a) didn't get a
 pin, b) could have reproduced White's polling system using local
 technology at far lower cost to both constituents and the government
 (12).

 There is a pedestrian piece on intellectual property.  Then there is
 the mandatory article on pornography.  (Can we have a Rimm shot? 
 Thank you.)  The Rimm "study" (13), and another equally suspect,
 categorize a bunch of feelthy peechers, and we are then told that
 there is a clear benefit for regulation of pornography (14).

 The essay on privacy takes for granted that you cannot have freedom
 without privacy (15), ignoring items like David Brin's "The
 Transparent Society" which proposes a remarkably free environment
 almost completely devoid of privacy (16).  The article also decries
 identification numbers of all types, and then goes on (17) to laud
 public key encryption, seemingly unaware that a public key is a
 number.

 Neither the discussion of health care nor that of indigenous people
 really looks at social aspects of the technology.

 This seems to be my week for dumping on compatriots (18).  However, my
 rabid nationalism does not extend so far as to defend those resident
 in my country when they don't know what they are talking about, and
 this book seems to be almost completely devoid of experience of the
 technology under examination.

 (1) Dave Clark (of MIT), IETF Conference, 1992
 (2) ibid
 (3) I made them up, of course.
 (4) Well, I suppose not; there are no footnotes in the
 acknowledgement; but the first one comes in the second paragraph of
 the preface on page xii.
 (5) They never actually do.
 (6) This figure is embedded in one of my brother's sigblocks: I think
 he made it up.
 (7) p. 88
 (8) p. 111
 (9) p. 140
 (10) p. 135
 (11) p. 136
 (12) White used Maritime T&T, had to spend $11,000 setting up a single
 poll, and it cost people $1.95 per time to vote.  A PC based system
 could have, at the time, been established for about $5,000 altogether,
 and could have been reused at any time for further polling.
 (13) lucky, eh?
 (14) p. 176.  I'm not exactly on the side of pornography, but there
 are a few steps missing in the proof, here.
 (15) p. 181
 (16) cf. BKTRASOC.RVW
 (17) p. 187
 (18) See also "Roadkill on the Information Highway" (BKRKOTIH.RVW)

 copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999   BKDGTLDM.RVW   990326
 rslade at vcn.bc.ca  rslade at sprint.ca  slade at victoria.tc.ca p1 at canada.com
 http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev    or    http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade
--kurt
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *  From the Listowner  * * * * * * * * * * * *
.	To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to:
majordomo at scn.org		In the body of the message, type:
unsubscribe scn
==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ====
* * * * * * *     http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/     * * * * * * *