From bn890 at scn.org Wed Jan 5 15:45:16 2000 From: bn890 at scn.org (Irene Mogol) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 15:45:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: Information Please Message-ID: Melissa & Steve, et al. I am passing on a request for information on SCN from Mr. Thomas Rasmussen, Director, Mayor's Office for Senior Citizens, Human Services Dept. Tel # 206 684 0492 Fax # 206 684 0494 E-Mail Tom.Rasmussen at ci.seattle.wa.us I had the pleasure of meeting him today and he is very interested in SCN and what we do. Please fill him in. Thanks, Irene * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 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/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Sun Jan 9 14:16:38 2000 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 14:16:38 -0800 Subject: Web design Message-ID: <200001092216.OAA08410@scn.org> x-no-archive: yes =========================== Is Navigation Useful? by Jakob Nielsen Alertbox 1/9/00 For almost seven years, my studies have shown the same user behavior: users look straight at the content and ignore the navigation areas when they scan a new page. (Remember, users almost always scan - they rarely read carefully online.) The big picture of user behavior has held constant as the dominant browser has cycled through Mosaic; Netscape 1, 2, and 3; and IE 4 and 5. It is clearly a fundamental phenomenon. Recently, my findings have been confirmed in independent studies by several others. This is truly a general phenomenon that characterizes user behavior across sites and studies. User studies typically find: ...users comment on the content first; if the content is not relevant, then they don't care about any other aspect of the design when they arrive on a page. ...users ignore navigation bars and other global design elements: instead they look only at the content area of the page. ...users don't understand where they are in a website's information architecture. ...users are extremely goal-driven and look only for the one thing they have in mind - they don't spend much time on promotions for anything else in pursuit of their goal. ...users often rely on search as their main hunting strategy. ...users rarely look at logos, mission statements, slogans, or any other elements they consider fluff (in particular, they ignore advertising and anything that looks like an ad). ...if a page does not appear relevant to the user's current goals, then the user will ruthlessly click the Back button after two to three seconds. ...if users don't understand a certain design element, they don't spend time learning it - instead, they ignore it and continue the hunt for their own goal. Some analysts conclude that navigation is useless and that navigation elements should be removed from Web pages. Don't try teaching users the site structure, don't try showing them where they are, don't try telling them where else they can go. Instead, just show people content. I don't fully agree with this analysis. Navigation is overdone on many sites. In particular, the so-called spoke design where every page is linked to every other page leads to reduced usability. Similarly, many sites have overblown footers that link to too many meta-features (say, "about the company" or a privacy statement). There is no reason to mention all features of the site on all pages. Instead, select a very small number of highly useful features and limit pervasive linking to maybe five or six things like search: users turn to search when they are lost, and you cannot predict when that may happen. Less is more: having a small number of standard links on every page makes it more likely that users will notice those links they do need. In contrast, a link like "how to contact us" can safely be relegated to the home page, which is where users will go when they need it. (Exception: Contact info also needs to be on order confirmation pages.) Similarly, a new site does not need to list all the headlines in the margin of every news article. Nor is it necessary to link to all the other sections. Restrict linking to basic features (say, search, copyright, and a few more), the home page, and the main page for the current section. Then use the available space to add useful links to related articles and to the author's biography. Do not link to all sections of the site from all pages. What is the probability that a user will go from looking at hairdryers to looking at grunge music? More to the point: what is the probability that the user will need the link on the one day in human history when he or she wants to make this transition. Why not just go back to the home page (one click to a page that is already cached and thus displays in half a second if coded correctly). Instead, provide links to all levels of the hierarchy above the current location. Breadcrumb trails serve two purposes: ...the context of the current page (how it is nested) allows users to interpret the page better (you don't just know that you are looking at product 354, you also know that it belongs to the widget product family). ...the links allow users to go directly to a higher level of the site in case the current page is not what they wanted, but they do want something similar. True, users will often ignore the structural links, but sometimes they will notice them, especially when they are interested in understanding a page better. Without structural links, pages become orphans that are not contextualized. And since users often arrive at pages through search or other means that bypass the higher-level navigation pages, it is necessary to provide a path back to these higher levels. In particular, it is useful to link to a page that provides an overview of the current subsite or region. Local links to related content are also very useful. Users rarely land directly at the desired page, especially when using a search engine. But they often get close. Close, but no cigar, as far as most sites are concerned, since it is rare to find links to similar or related pages. Link to: ...similar products that are a little cheaper or a little more expensive than the current product (if you only try to upsell, you will lose trust). ...related products that go well with the current one (but only cross- sell relevant products; not whatever happens to be overstocked in your warehouse - specials are for another part of the site). ...products that differ from the current product in some important dimension (for example, link to a color printer if the user is looking at a black-and-white printer). ...different versions of the current product (for example, the same blouse in yellow) - note that such links may be considered attribute manipulation and not true hypertext navigation. ...earlier or later versions of the topic discussed on the page. ...background information, author biographies and lists of other articles by the same author. ...a message board or other discussion about the current topic. ...news about the current topic (but not all news). Hypertext research from the 1980s showed that structure does help users navigate. Structure has been under-valued on the Web for four reasons: ...Most sites have miserable information architectures that mirror the way the company internally thinks about the content and not the way users think about the content. Predictably, users ignore such unhelpful structure. ...Most page designs have hidden the important structural information among a flood of irrelevant information (say, links to all possible other options), preventing users from identifying the structure. ...All Web browsers have neglected the need to visualize structural information. Pre-Web hypertext systems often did this, and the research showed that good structural visualizations (not whizzy 3D views) helped substantially. ...Users are so impatient on the Web that they don't take time to learn about any individual website and its structure - instead, they proceed to the next site. Only the last of these four reasons is fundamental. Websites can be designed better. And I predict that Internet Explorer version 8.0 will be the first good Web browser that actually helps users navigate. Even user impatience can be overcome. True, most users will treat most sites superficially. But some users will take the time to learn some sites, once those sites become worth learning. In the future, it will become an important competitive parameter to treat loyal users so well that they will want to learn more about the site and to make it possible for them to do so. (While maintaining a design that is approachable by the larger number of users who just want to visit briefly.) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 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/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Fri Jan 14 09:28:10 2000 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 09:28:10 -0800 Subject: Activism on the net Message-ID: <200001141728.JAA09709@scn.org> x-no-archive: yes ========================= Net Activism Without Borders by Jaideep V.G., OJR Contributor (Online Journalism Review)---Barely three hours after Japan's worst nuclear accident, at Tokaimura last September 30, anti-nuclear activists from Citizens for Alternatives to Nuclear Energy, a Bangalore-based non-governmental organization, downloaded technical information on the disaster and possible health effects on the local population. They relayed these reports to activists in Sirsi, a small town in Karnataka, in South India. Sirsi is home to the Kaiga Nuclear Power Plant. The Sirsi activists in turn, translated the reports into Kannada, the local language and circulated these reports to villagers living in the immediate vicinity of the Kaiga Nuclear Power Plant, which had its reactor core activated last September. According to members of India’s Citizens for Alternatives to Nuclear Energy (CANE), 17 reports downloaded from the Internet helped put safety issues concerning nuclear reactors into perspective. Efforts like these, to reach remote areas of the country with important information, with little financial resources, were unheard of before the Internet changed activism in India. The reports also helped people compare the preparedness of officials manning the reactor at Tokaimura to their counterparts in the Nuclear Power Corporation of India at the Kaiga plant. "These reports were sent by Dr. Hoso Kawa, a professor at the University of Saga in Japan," said Y.B. Ramakrishna, leader of CANE, who was responsible for relaying information to activists in Sirsi. "The accident occurred at about 10:30 a.m. local time and reports were e-mailed to us by 1 p.m. We had to cull information that would be of use to villagers at Kaiga and transmit the information to Sirsi. The next day, the local daily, Dheyanishta Patrakarta, translated the information and carried it on its front page." "This went a long way in increasing the awareness of the people affected by the Kaiga nuclear plant," he added. "We had to inform people living in areas near the Kaiga plant about the safety issues involved in Japan and the level of preparedness of the Japanese government. It is very important to understand that the government here is not equipped to act as swiftly and efficiently in the event of a nuclear accident," Ramakrishna said. After they were given the information, villagers got together to organize a privately funded medical study of all villages within a 10- kilometer radius of Kaiga. They took water samples from bodies of water around the reactor and will compare them with samples collected after the reactor begins generating power, Ramakrishna said. The villagers have also demanded Geiger counters at strategic places to identify radiation levels, so they know when radiation levels reach dangerous heights. Environmentalists say this information is important, as there are no concrete evacuation procedures or even a government-backed health survey of villagers living in the vicinity of Kaiga. In fact, villagers mistook a mock disaster test held a few weeks ago for an earthquake response. Many groups strongly opposed construction of the Kaiga Nuclear Power Plant due to environment and relocation issues. Environmentalists argued that the site was in an ecologically fragile zone very close to prime fishing grounds in the Arabian Sea. Besides, they said, the area was heavily populated, and enforcing a 1-mile exclusion zone around the plant, as required by Indian nuclear safety rules, would be difficult. However, the plant was built with delays and went critical in September 1999. The reports that were sent to Sirsi also contained information collected by a Greenpeace team that conducted experiments at the accident site in Japan. The data collected revealed that background radiation at the site was between 4,000 and 8,000 times higher than normal levels. He said the flow of minute-by-minute data was made possible because of an “information clearing center” based in Malaysia. “This virtual clearing house connects anti-nuclear activists in Asia and is a vital information base,” he explained. [Site for clearing house can be accessed by e-mail at: nonukesasia at toach.kmis.co.jp] "In fact, another group of activists in Gujarat, which publishes a magazine called Anumukti [Hindi for liberation from nuclear power], also wanted the same information but was unable to access it. They put out a general request on the Internet, which we intercepted here and promptly mailed them the reports. All this would not have been possible without the Net," Ramakrishna said. Efforts undertaken by groups like CANE are drastically changing perceptions of communication by showing that the Internet can be used for more than just e-mail, that activist groups can network, collate and disseminate information over the Internet. "It is not enough that the Internet is being used merely to gather information from various resource bases, we want to use the Net as a cheap and efficient means of communication. Most non- governmental organizations in India have very little money to work with and cannot invest in expensive communication equipment, I think access to the Net is changing activism in both urban and rural India," said Leo Saldanha of the Environment Support Group, a group that deals with environmental issues in Coastal Karnataka and the Western Ghats, the state’s most biologically diverse region. Quick to spot the infinite opportunities the Internet has to offer, Saldanha and oneworld.net, got together in November to instruct NGOs from all over India on the nitty-gritty's of Internet activism. The two organizations organized the first workshop for NGOs to help build South Asia’s first Internet-based development, environment and justice information network. "The groups that use the Net for communication or to collect information are fragmented. The workshop aims at helping them network, build Web sites and source information from scratch," Saldanha explains. The front-end benefit of the exercise is to form a Web-based magazine that is backed by a searchable database of over a million documents ranging from the struggle to stop the Narmada Valley Project -- a dam that will displace thousands of indigenous people -- to the declining population of waterfowl in Southeast Asia. "We (activists) in Bangalore have used the Net much more than in other parts of the country. And we wanted to let other groups know that the Net can be used for more than just dashing off e-mails," Saldanha said. The program not only received a huge response from various activist groups in the country, but also was actively backed by Philips Software, which allowed the activists to use its Research and Development facilities. While a large corporation like Philips is backing efforts such as the one undertaken by Saldanha, smaller, more region-specific organizations like Mahiti are helping groups to achieve Web- presence, to raise funds online and get minority groups like gays and lesbians together. "We have worked on at least 30 online projects for organizations ranging from the Karnataka AIDS forum to sustainable and meaningful eco-tourism alternatives for groups like Equations, an NGO that successfully fought hotel-giant Taj against setting up shop in the sensitive forests of Nagarhole in Karnataka," says Sunil Abraham of Mahiti. Equations uses the Internet to contact eco-tourism activists in Africa, New Zealand and Madagascar, where eco-tourism is better defined and has ground rules on how not to disturb eco-systems while setting up tourist destinations, he added. "I have found that more and more groups want to get on the Net, not only because of cost options, but because they instantly have a plethora of related sites and experiences to delve into and incorporate in their own work ethic," said Abraham. He feels that organizations like Mahiti, which have begun operations exclusively to look at options for NGOs and activists on the Internet, represent a telling trend. When oneworld came to India, the traffic for NGO sites increased by 4 million hits a week, Saldanha says. Ramachandra says the future will see networks expanding to village headquarters. He predicts rural computing will make progress with the Department of Telecommunications' assurance that all exchanges in the state will be digital by 2001, and chief minister S.M. Krishna's announcement that all district commissioners will soon be networked by computers and video conferencing. Non-Governmental Organisations in nerve centers like Bangalore will then be able to access and even collect field data simply by networking with their field agents in any remote part of the state, he said. This essentially means that an alternate rural network will be in place, complete with decision-making centres, data collection agencies and even agents to make immediate decisions. Jaideep V.G. is a senior correspondent for The Asian Age, a daily newspaper in India. He works in Bangalore and reports on defense and environment issues. Copyright 2000 Online Journalism Review * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 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/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Fri Jan 21 08:37:55 2000 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 08:37:55 -0800 Subject: Hate speech Message-ID: <200001211638.IAA24548@scn.org> x-no-archive: yes ========================== (Jeri Clausing, NY Times)---In a new twist to the debate over free speech on the Internet, federal officials have invoked an unlikely statute in their quest to prosecute the alleged operator of a hate site: the Fair Housing Act. The lawsuit is one of just a handful filed in this country over hate speech on the Internet. And civil libertarians say it raises questions about just how malicious or personally threatening Internet material must be to override First Amendment protections on speech. The case was filed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in Philadelphia last week. It stems from accusations that a man named Ryan Wilson and a white supremacist group that he runs, ALPHA HQ, posted death threats on a Web site in 1998. The threats targeted Bonnie Jouhari, who worked at the Reading-Berks Human Relations Council in Reading, Pa., and was also chairwoman of the Hate Crimes Task Force for Berks County. Part of her job was to help people file discrimination complaints under the housing act. The charge filed by HUD against Wilson says he violated the law by threatening Jouhari in order to prevent her from enforcing the Fair Housing Act. Jouhari's job was to help housing discrimination victims file complaints under the act The secretary of HUD, Andrew Cuomo, announced the lawsuit on Monday, the federal holiday commemorating the birth of Martin Luther King. "Tragically, this case shows that the racism and the terrible discrimination that Dr. King fought so hard to abolish remain alive and well, and have even moved into cyberspace,'' he said. But whether or not such hateful speech is a violation of the Fair Housing Act or other laws is open to debate, said Chris Hansen, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. "The interesting question to me is, even assuming it's a violation of the housing act, is it First Amendment protected speech," he said. "Pretty much everybody agrees that threats are not protected by the Constitution. On the other hand, hyperbole and colorful speech are protected." The federal housing act prohibits anyone from discriminating against people when renting or selling housing. It also prohibits anyone from threatening, coercing, intimidating or interfering with anyone "exercising a fair housing right or assisting others who exercise that right." HUD officials, in a statement on Monday, said they filed the case because they believed the Web site and comments that Wilson made in a television interview were clearly threats to the woman. But Hansen said that what constitutes a threat in real life and what constitutes a threat over the Internet are not always the same. "Saying 'I'm going to punch you in the nose' is something we think of as a threat when you are standing nose-to-nose with a person. But almost by definition, on the Net such a threat is less imminent," he said. According to HUD, the site, which is no longer on the Internet, featured a picture of Jouhari, who is white, and labeled her a "race traitor." It said: "Traitors like this should beware, for in our day, they will be hung from the neck from the nearest tree or lamp post." The site also called Jouhari's biracial daughter a "mongrel" and displayed an animated picture of Jouhari's office being blown up with explosives. Jouhari and her 16-year-old daughter fled the Reading area following the threats, HUD officials said. Hansen, who emphasized that he had never seen the site in question, said figuring out whether the comments were a genuine threat is no easy task. And there have been only a few other relevant cases involving Internet speech. Two of those involved threats made through e-mail, and two others involved Web sites. In a Michigan case, a boy who wrote and posted to the Internet a detailed story about wanting to kill a classmate was charged but later exonerated on a free-speech defense. In Oregon, people who provided information to a Web site that appeared to be a hit list of abortion doctors were successfully sued under a law protecting access to abortion clinics. Hansen said determining whether something was a threat involved three tests: Was it intended as a threat? Was it taken as a threat? And would a reasonable person take it as a threat? "The only one clear answer [in the Jouhari case] is that she took it as a threat, because according to HUD, she moved out of town," he said. "The other two questions are not as clear." Jordan Kessler, senior research analyst with the Anti-Defamation League, said the Web site was quite graphic and was clearly interpreted by local law enforcement as a threat against Jouhari. The more interesting question, he said, is why HUD is pursuing a case now, nearly a year after the Web site was taken down after local officials filed charges against its creator. "It is an interesting twist," he said. "I think that this woman was never really satisfied that adequate measures were taken." Indeed, after the Pennsylvania charges were filed, Ryan took the Web site down and never appeared in court. No further action was pursued. Jouhari, who has moved several times out of fear for the lives of herself and her daughter, is quoted in a recent interview on the Web site HateWatch.org as saying that she had pushed for action from the Justice Department. When it failed to act, she said, HUD stepped in. In the interview, Jouhari applauded HUD for filing the lawsuit, which could result in civil penalties of at least $22,000, plus monetary compensation to Jouhari, according to a HUD statement. "Cuomo is doing the best that he can with what the Justice Department is allowing him to do," Jouhari, who lives in an undisclosed location, is quoted as saying. "HUD was only allowed to begin pursuing this case in July or August. [The Justice Department] haven't even had the decency to formally decline to prosecute my case," she said. Jouhari said the lawsuit "restores some of my faith in the federal government." Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 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/ * * * * * * * From janossz at scn.org Mon Jan 24 16:01:18 2000 From: janossz at scn.org (Janos Szablya) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 16:01:18 -0800 (PST) Subject: Clever UN initiative Message-ID: If you are inclinded to visit this site.... Corparations are not all bad... Janos > A little philanthropy. > > > >Go to the Hunger Site at the UN; All you do; is click a button > >and somewhere in the world some hungry person gets a meal to eat at no cost > >to you. The food is paid for by corporate sponsors. All you do is go to the > >site and click. But, you're only allowed one click per day so spread the > >word to others. > >Visit the site and pass the word.; > > 2� 2� SCN's Voice Mail message will be updated if there are any system problems. 2� Please call (206) 365-4528 to get the most current information. 2� 2� 2� ** We (and SPL) were disconnected from the Internet nearly all morning due 2� to a network problem at our Internet portal. The network is still not 2� connected - it was supposed to be fixed at noon. Dialup works, but mail 2� into and out of SCN will be delayed. 2� There was no message update on voicemail all day as far as I know. Why do we have it if we're not going to use it. The rationale for going from an answering machine to USWest Voicemail (tm) was accessibility and immediacy for _all_ voicemail team members to change the message to report on system status. This is not the first time that this has failed to happen (not by far), this is just the first time I've been peeved enough to bang a trash can lid about it. Paying $$$ for a commercial voicemail service makes sense _only_ if it's going to be used to advantage every time. Okay, maybe not every single time we have a system glitch, but it should be the rare exception rather than the rule. -Andrew * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 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/ * * * * * * * From bb156 at scn.org Fri Jan 28 10:00:45 2000 From: bb156 at scn.org (Andrew Higgins) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 10:00:45 -0800 (PST) Subject: Message Update Message-ID: SCN motd 1/27 5:30pm 2� 2� SCN's Voice Mail message will be updated if there are any system problems. 2� Please call (206) 365-4528 to get the most current information. 2� 2� 2� ** We (and SPL) were disconnected from the Internet nearly all morning due 2� to a network problem at our Internet portal. The network is still not 2� connected - it was supposed to be fixed at noon. Dialup works, but mail 2� into and out of SCN will be delayed. 2� Why are we paying for voicemail if it's not going to be used? As far as I know there was no message update today informing users of the nature of the outage, yet someone at SCN had knowledge of it before 12pm today. The rationale for obtaining USWest Voicemail(tm) was to give _all_ on the vm team the accessibility and immediacy to address this *exact* situation. This is not the first time that this has failed to happen (not by far), this is just the first time I've been peeved enough to bang a trash can lid about it. If the standard message is all we're going to offer 85-90% percent of the time we are better off paying $19.95 for a bare bones machine at Radio Shack. Voicemail is a needless and foolish expenditure if not used as it was originally intended. -Andrew * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 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/ * * * * * * * From steve at advocate.net Fri Jan 28 08:02:10 2000 From: steve at advocate.net (Steve) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 08:02:10 -0800 Subject: Info vs power Message-ID: <200001282002.MAA06094@scn.org> x-no-archive: yes ============================== Gaining Freedom by Modem by Robert Wright (NY Times)---At the end of the 20th century, American foreign policy acquired a new premise: history is on the side of freedom as never before. The basic idea is that economic and political liberty -- which always had a fairly close relationship -- are now, suddenly, joined at the hip. What joined them is information technology. As President Clinton said in 1998, justifying his policy of economic engagement with China: "In this global information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal freedom is essential to the greatness of any modern nation." Or, to put the argument in less gauzy terms: These days, for markets to work well, microcomputers and modems must cover the economic landscape. As a side effect, state control of information is eroded and citizens are empowered. So governments that want prosperity must sooner or later tolerate political freedom. In assessing this argument, it helps to realize that the 20th century wasn't the first time a new information technology tightened the link between political and economic freedom. Much the same thing happened five centuries ago, after Johannes Gutenberg introduced the movable-type printing press to Europe. A look at that revolution, while broadly justifying Mr. Clinton's faith in the liberating potential of technology, also suggests that breaking out the champagne would be premature. This week's announcement by the Chinese government that it would tighten Internet censorship may foreshadow a series of such efforts that, however futile in the end, could in the meantime prove quite consequential. That the printing press could decentralize power became apparent early on to the Church, whose authority had been hard to question when the cutting-edge publishing technology was monasteries full of scribbling monks. The threat to the Church wasn't just the one stressed in history textbooks -- that the Gutenberg Bible let lay people become lay theologians, hence more open to radical interpretations of scripture, like Martin Luther's. More vital to the Reformation was plain old pamphleteering. Luther posted his famous critique of orthodoxy on Oct. 31, 1517, and within a month reprints were rolling off the presses in three German cities. Before long secular authorities shared the pope's discomfort. In 1524, German peasants used the press to air complaints about feudalism. More and more, printing would be a weapon of the downtrodden in Europe. Ruling classes naturally tried to rein in a technology that could so sharply redistribute power. In the late 16th century, Britain's Star Chamber restricted printing to head off the "great enormities and abuses" caused by "contentious and disorderly persons professing the art or mystery of printing or selling of books." But rulers faced the stubborn fact that today confronts authoritarian regimes: as new information technologies spread, the cost of stifling them is high. After all, technical advance depends on the free flow of ideas. So, to shut down printing presses is to slow the rate of invention. In addition, free presses would increasingly smooth the day-to-day workings of capitalism. In the 18th century, newspapers became, as one scholar has put it, "appendages of the market" -- read for their commodity prices, their shipping schedules and miscellaneous business news. All of this helps explain why Britain, which by the end of the 17th century led Europe in liberty -- and which had a daily newspaper 70 years before France did -- is where the industrial revolution reached critical mass. It also helps explain why the Netherlands, which rivaled England in its aversion to despotism and in the vibrancy of its press, had paved the way for industrialization during its Golden Age in the 16th and early 17th centuries. This is the good news: when an information revolution lowers the cost of processing data, thus expanding the frontiers of technical progress and economic efficiency, political liberalization indeed seems to be the price for long-run prosperity. The bad news is that, even as some rulers harness this dynamic by permitting freedom, others sink into denial. They think they can be autocratic yet stay at the forefront of affluence. In fact, in many ways European government grew more absolutist in the centuries after Gutenberg's invention. To be sure, this resistance was futile. The economists J. Bradford De Long and Andrei Shleifer have shown that, in general, the more absolutist the governments during this period, the less prosperous their polities. Still, it took awhile for the logic of liberty to play itself out. Even as late as 1848, Europe's ruling classes managed to largely frustrate a continent-wide, print-lubricated revolt of the middle and lower classes, who sought political rights and/or national self-determination. This doesn't mean that the Internet's implications will take another several centuries to bear full fruit. Things are moving much faster now. In all probability, resistance to the Internet's political logic will be plainly futile within a decade or two. That's one reason engagement with China is the most reliable path to political pluralism and human rights. But both boosters and detractors of the engagement policy have acted as if it were supposed to work on a much shorter time scale. Mr. Clinton has sometimes spoken so bombastically as to suggest immediate results. So it is only fair play when opponents of engagement cite year-to-year downturns in Chinese freedom as if they refuted the policy's underlying logic. What's more, Mr. Clinton has soft-pedaled the turbulence that an information technology's centrifugal tendencies can bring. A century ago, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy refused to acknowledge that the spread of printing and of literacy, by empowering nationalists, had long since rendered the empire's Balkan holdings more trouble than they were worth. This self-delusion triggered World War I. Do we have a plan for encouraging Beijing to more gracefully accept the empowerment of Islamic separatists in western China, an almost certain consequence of the continued spread of microelectronic technology? he age of Gutenberg may not have been the first time that an information revolution decentralized power. In ancient Mesopotamia, when literacy spread beyond an elite group of scribes employed by the ruling class, greater economic and political pluralism seems to have followed. Cuneiform contracts from around 2000 B.C. reflect thriving private-sector commerce, a departure from earlier, more statist economies. And, at the same time, tablets show community assemblies, previously confined to judicial functions, deliberating on public policy. Maybe, then, today's freedom is the natural fruit of an evolution stretching back to the earliest communication technologies. Certainly that's a cheering thought. Still, if history shows that new information technology is a good bet for expanding liberty, it also shows that, after placing your bet, you should settle in for a long ride and fasten your seat belt. Robert Wright is the author of "The Moral Animal'' and, most recently, "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny." Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 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/ * * * * * * *