Philip E. Agre

Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process

Research on the Internets role in politics has struggled to transcend technological determinism--the assumption, often inadvertent, that the technology simply imprints its own logic on social relationships. An alternative approach traces the ways, often numerous, in which an institutions participants appropriate the technology in the service of goals, strategies, and relationships that the institution has already organized. This amplification model can be applied in analyzing the Internets role in politics. After critically surveying a list of widely held views on the matter, this article illustrates how the amplification model might be applied to concrete problems. These include the development of social networks and ways that technology is used to bind people together into a polity.

Changing places: contexts of awareness in computing

By allowing any social institution to structure activity in any place, wireless information services break down the traditional mapping between institutions and places. This phenomenon greatly complicates the analysis of context for purposes of designing context-aware computing systems. Context has a physical aspect, but most aspects of context will also be defined in institutional terms. This essay develops two conceptual frameworks for the analysis of context in mobile and ubiquitous computing. The first framework concerns the relation between architecture, practices, and institutions; it directs attention to the complex middle ground in which information services make use of whatever computational resources happen to be in the users physical surroundings. The second framework is called the capture model; it rationally reconstructs the traditional systems analysis methods, which reorganize work activities to enable a computer to capture the information it needs. Context-aware computing devices that depart from the capture model face a difficult set of design tradeoffs.

P2P and the promise of internet equality

Technologies often come wrapped in stories about politics. These stories may not explain the motives of the technologists, but they do often explain the social energy that propels the technology into the larger world. In the case of P2P technologies, the official engineering story is that computational effort should be distributed to reflect the structure of the problem. But the engineering story does not explain the strong feelings P2P computing often evokes. The strong feelings derive from a political story, often heatedly disavowed by technologists but widespread in the culture: P2P delivers on the Internets promise of decentralization. By minimizing the role of centralized computing elements, the story goes, P2P systems will be immune to censorship, monopoly, regulation, and other exercises of centralized authority.

INFRASTRUCTURE AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE IN THE NETWORKED UNIVERSITY

Many people believe that information technology will bring massive structural changes to the university. This paper draws on concepts from both computer science and social theory to explore what these structural changes might be like. The point of departure is the observation that the interaction between information technology and market economics creates incentives to standardize the world. Standardization can be a force for good or evil, depending on how it is done, and this paper develops normative ideas about the relation between the forces of standardization and the places in which university teaching is done. Information technology allows these places to be more diverse than in the past, and a good rule of thumb is that the places in which learning occurs should be analogous in their structure and workings to the places in which the learned knowledge will be used. Universities can support this increased diversity of learning places with appropriate structural reforms, including decentralized governance and explicit attention to certain aspects of the university organization, such as media services and the career centre, that, historically, have been marginalized.

Hierarchy and History in Simon's "Architecture of Complexity"

Herb Simon came to artificial intelligence from organizational studies in New Deal-era public administration, and only now, it seems, after Simons sad passing in early 2001, are we in position to place this development in historical context. His dissertation, published in 1947 after wartime delays as Administrative Behavior, remains a landmark in the empirical study of organizations. Departing from the prescriptive tradition that preceded it, Administrative Behavior looked beneath the official representations to discover the complementarity between human cognition and institutional context. Although he was a liberal Democrat and active in political causes, Simon did not frame his research on public organizations as a political project.1 Yet, in bringing empirical evidence to the study of organizational rationality, he was contending with the central political questions of his times. It was his successive attempts to formalize the limitedly rational processes of organizational decision making that led Simon, together with Allen Newell and other colleagues, to found the field of artificial intelligence in the 1960s.2

From high tech to human tech: empowerment, measurement, and social studies of computing

Abstract“Empowerment” has become a pervasive term of art in business practice, particularly in the United States. The term traces its roots to the organizing models evolved by populist social movements, but within business discourse it refers to an emerging organizational philosophy that largely replaces conventional hierarchies with nominally autonomous teams. Proponents of empowerment frequently cite information technology as a crucial enabler of this shift without, however, spelling out fully the logic of the connection. A reconstruction of this logic provides evidence for the emergence of a novel vision of work-discipline, the empowerment and measurement regime. This regime is discussed in relation to market dynamics, Taylorism, and research on the social organization of information technology and its use.

Social Choice about Privacy: Intelligent Vehicle‐highway Systems in the United States

Broad coalitions of companies, governments, and research institutions in several countries are currently designing massive electronic infrastructures for their roadways. Known collectively as intelligent vehicle‐highway systems (IVHS), these technologies are intended to ease toll collection and commercial vehicle regulation, provide drivers with route and traffic information, improve safety and ultimately support fully automated vehicles. Although many aspects of IVHS are uncertain, some proposed designs require the system to collect vast amounts of data on individuals′ travel patterns, thus raising the potential for severe invasions of privacy. To make social choices about IVHS, it is necessary to reason about potentials for authoritarian uses of an IVHS infrastructure in the hypothetical future. Yet such reasoning is difficult, often veering towards Utopian or dystopian extremes. To help anchor the privacy debate, places IVHS privacy concerns in an institutional context, offering conceptual frameworks t...

Understanding the digital individual

This special issue of The Information Society explores the emergent phenomenon of the digital individual. The digital individual is the form of social identity that individuals acquire as their activities become influenced by—and often mediated through— digital representations of themselves. The articles in the special issue describe numerous aspects of the digital individual, from its construction within organizations to its construction in relation to individual others, and from the potential for new forms of social domination to the potential for new forms of social action. This introduction describes the articles and outlines the various themes that draw them together.

Supporting the intellectual life of ademocratic society

Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the supreme test of all political institutions and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the all-around growth of every member of society (Dewey 1920: 186).