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Regulating Digital Context danah boyd 6 June 2002 Internet & Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control Introduction From its earliest days, one of the primary purposes of the Internet was to engage people socially. People gathered online to share ideas, acquire support and otherwise build community. Socially based programs represent many of the most successful pieces of online software, from email to Usenet to web browsers to video games. Yet, the social environment online is not without problems. Due to interface limitations, miscommunication created social rifts early on, even with the relatively homogenous community that was online back then. Flame wars were the most frequent response to such misunderstandings, but as many people knew each other offline, things often got resolved relatively quickly. As more people went digital, the limitations of the software became more problematic, and there was less solidarity between the participants. Problems increased from flame wars to harmful deception, identity theft, and hate speech. Social pressure became less and less effective as a tool for regulation. Since those early days, the digital arena has grown and other forms of regulation have started to emerge to control various social issues. Expanding Bill Mitchell’s physical model of constraints (Mitchell 1995), Lawrence Lessig argues that four primary constraints regulate an individual’s behavior in both the physical and the digital world – the law, the market, architecture and social norms (Lessig 1999). Each modality affects the others as well as the individual’s behavior by structuring what is legal, what is economically feasible, what is possible and what is acceptable. Applied in conjunction, these four present a powerful constraint against engaging in activities that are considered unacceptable (such as committing a murder). Although a utopian anarchist social environment would exist without external regulation, the Internet is not that place. It needs regulation, although how, when and where that regulation should exist is highly debatable. In its earliest stages, the Internet was simply regulated by architecture and social norms. As the digital population grew and the market saw a value in online social interaction, corporations become increasingly involved in creating and regulating the digital realm. Alongside 1 the market’s involvement came legal regulation, often to defend or denounce an action by the market. At this point, all four of Lessig’s modes of regulation are impacting digital social interaction, but the original anarchistic element of the Net is not tamed. While such freedom is advantageous for many, its abuse continues to wreak havoc for many while curtailing the development of the Internet as a social space. While new ways of regulating digital behavior continue to emerge, many of their creators lack a basic understanding of the differences between physical and digital social interaction. As such, these new regulations do not take into account how the differences in architecture have created differences in social norms and pressures and thus behaviors. In this paper, i will discuss one fundamental difference between the two social realms – that of context. In doing so, i will discuss why the approaches to regulating social interaction offline do not directly apply to the digital realm. By showing how the differences in contextual understanding impacts the social behavior of digital inhabitants, i hope to offer one example of why regulation of digital spaces must be treated differently than that of the physical. To ground the discussion, i will begin with some examples from the digital social world of what happens when regulation fails, followed by the response of the market and the law to such situations. Deception and Anonymity Online Although a concern since the early days of the Internet, deception and anonymity online have caught the attention of both the market and the law. For this reason, i introduce a few examples of deception and identity theft. Next, i will discuss the market’s response to these events, which they saw as problem with anonymity and anarchist social environments. As the market’s response is seen as an attack on privacy, i also briefly introduce the law’s ongoing responses to issues of privacy online. What’s important in this section is that much of what is seen as problematic is typically regulated by social norms. Such regulation is possible in the physical world, since there are drastically different architectures. This section begins to highlight how the regulatory responses are not taking the differences in architecture into consideration, and thus fail to see the underlying problem. Social Deception and Identity Theft 2 Since their conception, bboards, chatrooms and MUDs/MOOs provided a home for people to explore their identity by allowing them to present themselves as they saw fit. It was quite common for people to explore presenting themselves as someone of the opposite sex. At the same time, many of these environments felt like communities to their participants, full of trust and expectations. While most of these spaces had sysops, regulation was primarily through social norms and slight tweaks of the architecture, with no formal structure for what to do when those forms of control failed. The lack of control was made quite public in two separate, but well documented cases of deception and identity theft in these early chats. Social Deception: “The Strange Case of an Electronic Lover” (Van Gelder 1985). During the mid-1980s, a male psychologist decided to login to a CompuServ chatroom as a paralyzed female neuropsychologist. Curious to know about the differences between female-female and male-female friendships, he saw this forum as a perfect opportunity for a small experiment. Yet, as time passed, he became more involved with his subjects and they started to grow attached to the persona he had created. Over time, they started offering different types of support to the issues he fabricated and eventually, they started pressuring to meet him offline. Caught up in his deception, the psychologist created more lies until he eventually killed the character he created. Suspicious, some of the members of the chat started to investigate until eventually his lies were revealed. While no physical harm occurred, his actions left emotional scars on many of the people he had deceived; their sense of trust was betrayed and they were angry or depressed as a result. In addition to the stress he caused individuals, his lies weakened the group as a whole. Identity Theft: “A Rape in Cyberspace” (Dibbell 1993). With mischievous intentions, a member of LambdaMOO wreaked social havoc by stealing the identity of various other members and using the co-opted characters to act out violent sexual acts. Outraged, members of the community jumped to determine who this person was and how to punish them for their horrific actions. With no precedent, there was immense disagreement over what actions should be taken, but eventually the “rapist” was banned from the MOO, only to reappear at various times under different logins. This incident not only fractured the social aspect of the MOO, but many members stopped participating in social activities. These two situations highlight a very common event in online communities: someone commits a socially inappropriate action (intentionally or not); the entire community gets outraged; the community tries to determine how to punish the individual and to guarantee that such behavior is prevented in the future; the discussion continues to fragment the community; many loose faith in the forum and 3 leave. In many cases, such events destroy the forum completely. In some cases, such destruction is the purpose of committing socially inappropriate behavior, exemplified by the invasion of rec.pets.cats by members of alt.tasteless with posts about how to cook and electrocute cats, nail them to breadboards and the effects of pouring acid on them1. An outraged member of rec.pets.cats contacted the ISP of one of the invaders; with the threat of losing Net access, the invasion ceased. These activities, while legal, are considered socially unacceptable and highly problematic. They cause strife in the environments and distrust in the users. The regulatory factors that exist in the physical world would probably curtail many of these events. Discussed later in this paper, the underlying differences in context make social regulations ineffective in the digital world. The market reacts Although many online social environments originated as research projects or free software, corporations identified this software as an attraction for the market. Thus, the tech boom resulted in most spaces being controlled and operated by corporations. The affected members of deceptive environments were outraged; and corporations saw this behavior as economically problematic. As such, they were determined to regulate it. When possible, portal sites started requiring credit cards and email addresses to authenticate users. Some sites started tracking the IP addresses of users and reporting abuse to the ISPs while others censored content. More recently, to build a “network of trust,” corporations such as Microsoft, AOL and Sun have started building systems to authenticate users through a universal login. Unfortunately, systems such as Passport control deception through invasive techniques. First, there are immense privacy concerns raised in any system that tracks individuals - Who owns the data? For what purpose? How may it be used? What control do users have? Thankfully, many privacy activists and organizations, such as EPIC, are actively involved in raising these concerns 2. In addition to the privacy issues, there are social concerns. The market sees such tracking as advantageous to community sites by creating authenticity in the users; what it is not aware of is how such identity control eliminates the techniques users have to manage their online presence in a socially and contextually appropriate manner. The law jumps in “The War Between alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats” http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.05/alt.tasteless_pr.html 2 Sign Out of Passport. http://www.epic.org/privacy/consumer/microsoft/ 1 4 Although there has been no American legal response to identity management tools such as Passport, it is seen as an issue of privacy. While the issues of digital privacy and surveillance are becoming more prominent, the law operates by precedent. This means that, unless the Internet is shown to be any different than the physical world, the current privacy laws are going to have significant impact in any legal response to such market creations. Regulating data collection has historical precedent within US law, most notably the Privacy Protection Act of 19743. This act limits what informational databases the government can build about its citizens, but it does not limit what commercial vendors and individuals may collect. In addition to that general law, there are quite a few court cases and laws built around specific types of collectable information, such as driving records4, postal records5, students’ names6, credit7, etc. These laws create a set of standards that, if directly applied to the Internet, fail to address how architectural differences between the physical and digital make such data collection and (ab)use tremendously different now than in 1974. Because the architecture of the digital world makes surveillance and data collection so much simpler than in the physical world, breaches of the spirit of the 1974 Privacy Protection Act occur frequently. Users have no mechanism for recourse when, or if, their reputation score is poor on a particular site; users have no say in how their data is used when a company is sold and changes privacy policies. Technology is in place for practically any site owner to track the behavior of its visitors and the market makes it possible to aggregate this data for a moderate some of money. Although lawyers and critics have been emphasizing that database technology creates new concerns for collection and use of data, these thoughts do not appear to be derailing digital data collection agencies or laws supporting them (Lessig 1999; Garfinkel 2000; FTC 2000; Declan McCullagh/Politech8). Yet, while lawmakers do not focus on the social impact that such data collection has, they do recognize the potential for enforcement. This awareness was used in developing the Patriot Act 9, 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The Privacy Act of 1974. http://www.usdoj.gov/04foia/privstat.htm Drivers Protection Act of 1994. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/pIch123.html Postal Privacy Act of 1995. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d104:h.r.434: Student Privacy Protection Act. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:s.00290: The Fair Credit Reporting Act. http://www.ftc.gov/os/statutes/fcra.pdf Politech Archives. http://www.politechbot.com/ Patriot Act. http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html 5 which puts an end to many electronic surveillance provisions, and InQTel 10, an organization funded by the CIA to acquire data from failed .coms. Missing the point While issues of privacy and identity management tools are extremely important, they all stem from a need to regulate social behavior online. Yet, there is little consideration for why traditional social pressure is not operating as a regulating force. To understand this, it is important to consider how the issue of context is relevant to social behavior online and how context reveals a fundamental difference between the physical and digital architectures. This knowledge is essential for developing a cohesive regulation scheme, where all four modalities of regulation work to promote a common set of social behaviors. Understanding digital context Everyday public social interaction operates on the ability to see and be seen by one another. As articulated best by Goffman’s thoughts on social presentation as performance, there are three fundamental components to the passage of social information between individuals – that which is given, that which is given off, and that which is inferred (Goffman 1956). When negotiating social interactions, people present information about themselves, which they expect to be read by others. Although sometimes intentional, the presentation of social cues is quite unconscious and is not just limited to speech. Simmel suggests that the reader takes all possible social information to position the individual within a mental model based on previous experiences (Simmel 1971). These initial impressions are crucial since people are more likely to reinterpret future experiences to fit their expectations than to adjust their initial classification of others (Aronson 1995). Since most people want to be seen in a positive light, they are naturally (or neurotically) motivated to suppress their own desires in order to please others (Rank 1932; Moustakas 1972). This is how social conformity, or collective action operates. While there is a general urge to conform, one’s personality helps to determine how an individual reacts to social expectations (Snyder 1974). Termed self-monitoring, this personality variable can be used to explain why some individuals are more aware of the ways in which they present themselves. High self-monitors are highly attuned to the expectations and reactions of others and are extremely conscious of presenting themselves in a way that creates the desired impressions, either positive 10 InQTel. http://www.inqtel.com/ 6 or negative. Conversely, low self-monitors ignore social feedback when constructing their presentation. Socially normative regulation operates through pressure to conform to the group behavior. It is interesting to note that the behavior of a crowd can often take on a different set of values than the average of the individuals’ beliefs (Le Bon 1952/1895). Likewise, social pressure from a perceived authority can motivate people to complete tasks that would otherwise be unthinkable (Milgram 1974). Although a high-level overview, these are just a few of the psychological and sociological factors that contribute to how people self-regulate through social pressure. For most people, the fear of embarrassment or poor impressions is enough to keep them in line with the collective. In order for social norms to operate as a form of regulation, 1) people must be able to observe what the socially normative behaviors are; 2) everyone must be able to detect when their behavior is not acceptable by experiencing the disapproval of others; 3) people must know that they will be socially admonished if they do not conform. In order for people to understand what is socially normative, they must be able to understand the context of an environment. Based on prior experiences, the context of a space conveys what the expected behavior is. Specifically, there are three different types of context that people consider in evaluating what appropriate behavior is – spatial, temporal and people contexts. Spatial context refers to the aspects of the architecture and environment that conveys what activities normally take place (i.e. an opera house compared to a football stadium). Given the particular time (of day, of year, in history), an individual recognizes the information of temporal context. People-based context is determined based on assessing what is acceptable for the people in that space at that given point in time, thus determining their roles in relation to you for that interaction. Together, these notions of context help an individual judge what is appropriate in that given time, space and with specific groups of people. People present themselves differently in particular situations, not because they are hiding aspects of themselves, but because some behaviors are more appropriate in one context than another. A professional mother does not use babytalk in a boardroom meeting; the language that one uses at a pub is not appropriate for church; while leather skirts meant one thing in 1985, they mean something very different in 2001. When contextual information is missing, people have two options – either present themselves in a manner that would be acceptable to everyone 7 everywhere over all times, or prepare to handle the consequences when the behavior is seen the wrong light. The more one self-monitors one’s behavior, the more difficult it is to handle the consequences of being misread. In addition, the more universally unacceptable one’s presentation is, the more magnificent the consequences. For most people, embarrassment is the worst reaction; for marginalized individuals, more is at risk. For example, if a closeted gay man’s relationship with his lover is presented to his homophobic workplace, this could be quite damaging. An individual’s tendency to explicitly segregate aspects of their behavior is dependent on how private the individual is and how painful the consequences might be. While information is presented in a particular context with the intention of remaining there, people are always aware that there’s a possibility that their words or actions will not stay contained. At a non-technical level, gossip has always allowed for the words from a particular context to spread to other ones. Although gossip can be quite problematic, it is not considered a replica of original speech; the perceived truth-value of the message depends on the messenger. Because of the ease with which people can gossip, this awareness becomes a part of the perceived people-based context. The more that people trust the others present, the more free that they might feel with their words. With technology comes the ability to record words and images and show them outside of a given context. Yet, for the most part, people are aware of when they are being recorded and adjust their behavior accordingly. People act differently when they are performing for a camera than when they are engaging one-on-one; they act differently in a crowd than by themselves. When adjusting to a given context, people treat recording devices as an aspect of the spatial context. For most people, being recorded surreptitiously is quite unnerving and brings up fears of Big Brother and the Panopticon; as such, most physical architectures make it quite apparent to people that they are being recorded. Even store surveillance cameras are frequently large enough to be obvious, or signs are posted at the front of the store. While such recordings are not exact replicas of the recorded event, they provide enough proof for most people to believe what is contained in the recording; thus, their perceived truth-value is higher than that of gossip. Digital context brings up a whole host of new concerns in the recording of information. Not only can almost all information be saved or recorded, but one does not need special technology to do so. Rather than relying on word of mouth, people can share duplicates of emails or chatlogs to show that certain exchanges had 8 occurred. While this suggests that the digital is more like a recorded physical space, people do not perceive it as such; the architects have convinced the users that their concern should be more like that of gossip than that of recordings (i.e. do you trust your friend?). Thus, the actual contextual information and the perceived contextual information do not coincide; the architecture is misleading. When metaphors fail Architectural and spatial metaphors span the writings on cyberspace, suggesting that most aspects of the digital landscape can be compared directly to a physical replica. This metaphor is taken up in the spatial language that we use to discuss digital environments - chatrooms, websites, message boards, and portals all exist in the realm of cyberspace. Yet, while these notions are sold for ease of comparison, little is done to break down the differences between these spaces and their physical counterparts. Thus, as was noted in the brief discussion on reproduction, most users fail to adjust their expectations for the fundamental architectural differences. Their failure is quite often due to lack of awareness of how the differences in architecture might affect interaction. Architectural differences As Lessig clearly articulated, the architecture of the Internet is code, comprised of digital bits representing 0s and 1s. In combinations, these binary bits can be quite powerful and can be used to express everything that we see online today, from text to movies, chatrooms to video games. Digitally, there is no atomic difference between an MP3 and an email; they are both comprised of different combinations of 0s and 1s. Over seven years ago, Negroponte proselytized the notion that bits were not the same as atoms and thus must be treated differently (Negroponte, 1995). Unlike physical atoms, data transfer does not happen by exchange of atoms; all tasks requiring the movement of bits from one place to another (including the C drive to the D drive) require a copy function. The ability to copy bits is a core functionality of code. Bits require little to transport and can travel to the far ends of the earth in seconds. Bits are reproduced and altered with little effort, and with no observable difference from the original. Bits cannot be assumed to be ephemeral because they are by default recorded. While the feature difference between bits and atoms may seem trivial and irrelevant, it fundamentally impacts the architecture of the digital sphere, and thus the context. Digital conversations start out as bits and so are immediately subject to 9 the features of bits. This means that they can be copied, archived, and moved with little effort. Archived conversations can be aggregated and searched. Because of the simplicity of such tasks, spatial and temporal components of context can be quickly collapsed in a digital world. This occurs because a simple search allows you to see information from different spaces and different times, without requiring that the user access the information in its original context. Usenet tools, as discussed later, offer an astounding example of what happens when such contexts collapse. Not only does the digital architecture affect how conversational bits can be manipulated, it also affects the social awareness that people have of one another. Social awareness differences While people draw from a myriad of social cues in the physical world, they are presented with a dearth of such information online. Even a simple awareness of how many people are sharing a given space is rarely available. In physical crowds, it is easy to determine who is conforming to the norms and who is not with a quick visual glance. Yet online, you cannot see the crowd. Viewers cannot see digital traces of previous guests, whereas the crumbs and floor markings of a physical space say a lot about its context. People adjust their behaviors based on the reactions of others. Online, you cannot see the subtle reactions that others are offering. Thus far, we do not know how to reproduce the nuanced reactions that people initiate unconsciously using their bodies. People need have an understanding of others in the space in order to adjust for the people-based context, and identity information that is normally written on the body must be derived online. Embodied identity is conveyed through text, and may be either inaccurate or inadequate for people to properly build a mental map of others. Much of one’s identity presentation consists of two forms of signals: conventional and assessment (Donath 1999). Assessment signals follow the handicap principle, in that they are costly to possess, but are reliable signals; a person with large muscles can be reliably perceived to be strong. Conversely, assessment signals require little cost to the owner, but are not nearly as reliable; stating one’s strength is not nearly as effective as possessing large muscles. Because of the lack of physical presence, many assessment signals that we are accustomed to accounting for only exist as conventional signals online (such as sex). And while it may be useful, determining 10 the reliability of a statement requires far more effort than most people want to give when starting a digital conversation. Rather than taking the time to validate online conventional signals, people are more likely to accept them as if they were a physical assessment signal. While text does provide some information about one’s identity, it is not nearly as rich as the detailed information that one conveys through body and fashion. Although it might seem like any information is valuable, coarse data allows people to build mental models that are often tremendously misleading (boyd 2001). Since people are not likely to reevaluate initial impressions (Aronson 1995), minimal data can sometimes be more problematic than no data. The social awareness cues that we use to properly self-monitor ourselves in relation to others are missing or inaccessible online. Because this information is lacking, people have difficulty adjusting their behavior to properly fit the occasion. Dealing with additional information While the architecture makes much information inaccessible, it also provides different types of information for people to take into consideration. With search engines like Google, a few keystrokes can access extensive data about many people in the world, and this behavior is common for those who want to know more about a person they just met. Unfortunately, this information can be misleading because data online might not be representative of the person as a whole or might be completely inaccurate, or associated with a different person with a similar name. Even if extensive information about an individual were to exist, limited attention spans would most likely narrow what was viewed. Because much data online can be quantitatively evaluated, statistics about one’s behavior are frequently presented with various levels of meaning. For example, sites such as eBay can tell you about a users’ reputation, with a number. This simplification might make sense when you are evaluating a users reputation is one particular context (i.e. as a capable seller), but if reputation scores are calculated across different behavioral contexts, as is proposed by Microsoft Research, this could have tremendous social consequences (Smith & Fiore, 2001). Researchers at AT&T accidentally discovered some of the consequences of making statistical data available to users when they equipped a chat bot with the ability to tell people how statistically valuable they were in other people’s social network (Isbel, et. al. 2000). Although intended as a friendly feature for people to 11 understand their own network, people quickly used it as a method for how valuable they were in their friends’ eyes, which developed tremendous social tension. The consequences of failed metaphors Metaphors are one of the most effective means for people to build new conceptual models (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). This linguistic tool is effective because it allows people to simply translate their mental assumptions from one concept to the new one. Metaphors make the new concepts seem intuitive, by relying on previously understood ones. Of course, this is only successful when the assumptions can be accurately translated. In the case of the digital realm, translating physical expectations to the digital world is ultimately flawed. In physical rooms, people expect a certain level of privacy and control over their words; online, the difference in architecture and accountability means that the words said in one room might not be as ephemeral and static as the poster believes. This immediately creates a tension between the expectation that an individual has and the reality of the architecture. This is not to say that such differences are bad, but that the inaccurate metaphors are problematic. Although experienced users understand that the metaphors do not map directly, the architecture gives off an entirely different impression. As such, most people’s first encounter with being taken out of context is quite disconcerting. Usenet: an example of destroyed context In the 1980s, most people who had access to the Internet were either associated with universities or corporations. Usenet groups represented most of the interests of these people and they spanned an extensive range of topics. Yet, while there was diversity of interest, there was still an assumed homogeneity to the participants; it was not until 199211 that an AOL user posted to Usenet. Posters knew that they were posting to public forums and that anyone who had access could read their posts. Perhaps a little bit of hindsight makes it seem obvious that the Internet would one day be comprised of everyone and that those posts would be permanently archived and reassembled with search engines. And perhaps those posters should’ve had that foresight, but many of them did not. People posted messages with a particular thread and group in mind, having a full understanding of who tended to post to that forum. They generally assumed that most readers had 11 http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html 12 some vague interest in the topic at hand, but that their message was always read with the other messages and the thread as context. Most people expected that their messages would last for a few months, as they routinely saw old messages fade away from their server. Posters had a sense of people, temporal and spatial context, derived in part by assuming that it was like any group meeting space, where some people were vocal and others remained anonymous in the background. Yet, as time marched on, the masses jumped on the digital bandwagon and started to participate in all of its forums. Usenet grew rapidly; new groups were added; old inhabitants left; and the culture of the groups changed over time. In 1995, DejaNews was introduced as a searchable archive-based interface to Usenet; in 2001, Google acquired DejaNews and expanded the archive to 20 years worth of posts. Suddenly, with a few keystrokes, thousands (and millions) of grouped postings could be condensed into those that pertained to a given keyword. Perhaps perfect for searching for answers to questions, this interface quickly removes any of the original context in which the post was created. While the date and links to the thread are included beneath an excerpt of the message, the interface allows you to automatically browse these messages out of temporal or group order. Although most messages were created within the context of a particular group and thread, it is not necessary to know anything about that space to browse the messages. Nothing distinguishes the posts of one group from that of another. Without knowing the context and history of a given newsgroup, or the social norms of a given time period, messages can be easily misinterpeted. If a search for an individual shows postings from rec.pets.cats and alt.flame, and the searcher is not aware that angry postings are expected in the latter, the poster might easily be perceived in a negative light. Without knowing the context of the space, people do not know how to assess the specific social norms separate from a general view of normative behavior. Even a date-based search for Professor Zittrain suggests that the two most related groups are alt.support.childfree and alt.conspiracy.spy, and without knowing the group or the information being discussed, one might easily misinterpret what these “related groups” mean. Usenet highlights the contextual problems associated with digital data. Even though users post-1995 were not told about DejaNews, most 13 were aware that it existed and learned to accommodate for the reality that the context of their postings could be collapsed at any given point. Prior to that, many users lacked the assumed foresight; they did not anticipate these conditions. The architecture made archiving possible, but most posters did not predict that their messages would come back to haunt them. Although almost everyone concedes that posts were public, the notion of public to most people does not mean persistent across all space and all time. When a twelve-year-old states an opinion to a group of strangers in a public park, it is not assumed that this will be quoted out of context in a job interview 15 years later. To magnify the social problems brought on by collapsing various contexts in Usenet, Microsoft’s Netscan12 provides a vast range of statistical data about Usenet. There are many valuable uses for this public data, such as the ability to quickly determine what type of space is right for you. Problematically, without having to know anything about the context in which posts originated, you can explore statistics on anyone’s posting habits. Although it is not currently functional, imagine what happens when these author profiles are used to evaluate someone’s reputation as one number based on 21 years worth of data. While many people became accidental social victims of the collapsed Usenet, others figured out how to manipulate the idea of context so that it met their needs. In doing so, they show how the architecture can be manipulated to provide the social information necessary for basic interaction. Regaining Context Many Usenet users accidentally discovered an alternative to collapsed contexts by maintaining separate email addresses. Most commonly a separation between a work address and a personal one, this separation allowed users to present a different face to different groups of people in the way that people normally present a different face in different physical contexts. Instead of relying on the physical space to provide the point of context, users with multiple email addresses were able to assign a particular context to a given email address and use it purely for that purpose. This effectively avoided much of the collapses that others’ experienced, so long as a user was consistent about maintaining the separation and did not associate other traceable markers, such as name, with both email addresses. Although this may initially appear peculiar, multiple email addresses fill a desired void of the digital realm – the ability to control a given context. By creating and 12 Netscan. http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/ 14 maintaining personas online, a user is able to control when one’s faces are allowed to collide. While conceptually similar to the ability to present different faces in different environments, such behavior internalizes context management in a very unique way, differentiating this behavior from its physical counterpart. While such control mechanisms work as a substitute for the failure of digital context, they are only temporary bandages for a larger problem. Bits are quite different from atoms, but many qualities of desired social interaction remain the same. People know how to negotiate relationships in the physical world and would like the ability to do so online. Yet, to do so effectively requires feedback and context, an understanding of the social environment that one is in. The quick fix email-as-context is only temporary – it will be collapsed in the near future, either accidentally, through new technological advancements, or intentionally by systems like Microsoft’s Passport. What is important is that there is a fundamental desire to maintain context, for very personal reasons. Rethinking regulation When applying law, courts attempt to apply previous cases with similar conceptual intentions. Just as digital architects used metaphors to relate physical structures to digital ones, the law seems to be applying law intended to regulate the physical world to the digital sphere. In some cases, this is appropriate, but in many, little consideration is given to the underlying structural differences between the two. The structural differences must impact the way that the law regulates the digital arena, as they are already impacting other forms of regulation. In the physical world, the law does not act without significant help from other forces. Many laws recognize and take for granted the regulatory power of social norms; in theory, many punishments are directed specifically at creating social fear so that the normative response is to not engage in illegal activities. In order to be effective, the different forms of regulation must be fundamentally integrated. Currently, the market and law are partially integrated in approaching regulation online and the market has tremendous influence over designing the architecture of the Internet. While the market controls most online architecture, it is trying to induce social regulation by forcing accountability through authenticated Passports and reputation schemes. Unfortunately, those approaches are at the expense of personal privacy and create systems that are more institutional than social. While accountability and reputation are an integral part of the social structure that 15 regulates behavior offline, they are practiced in a more ubiquitous and less invasive fashion. The law is only beginning to play a role in the regulation of online social spaces. It is impossible to say where the law will go with respect to digital privacy and surveillance regulations. Certainly, the Patriot Act was a step in privacy reduction, but there has been a general theme of eradicating privacy since 9/11 in favor of “security.” Although the European Commission has initiated an inquiry 13 into Passport, no such efforts are in place in this country. Intel vs. Hamidi 14 has the potential to radically affect where and how individuals can present their speech online (free speech? trespassing?), but the case is still in appeals. Although emails are frequently social babble, subpoenaed individuals15 have found that they are treated in courts as documents, removed from the context in which the messages have been created. More recently, quite a bit of attention has been given to what constitutes acceptable speech online. Although still in appeals, the creators of the “Neuremberg Files” (an anti-abortion website) were ordered16 to pay millions for “deadly treats,” but this is not how all offensive or threatening Internet speech is treated 17. The Communications Decency Act, which would have censored speech online that was considered obscene, was declared unconstitutional18. The law has only begun to address digital issues in the social realm. For this very reason, it is crucial that they are aware of and incorporate a fundamental understanding of the differences in social. The other important decision to be made is in determining what to regulate. The law has the opportunity to regulate the architecture, the corporations, or the social behavior directly. Ideally, the law would be able to create a scenario where regulation by social pressure would be more effective. To do so would require a change in architecture. The market’s proposed change in architecture might very well create an environment that would be selfregulating, although most likely to a harmful degree, eradicating privacy. I cannot even hazard a guess as to how policy makers and the court will respond to this kind Microsoft Faces European Commission Inquiry on Privacy Concerns. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/28/technology/28SOFT.html 14 Intel vs. Hamidi. http://www.intelhamidi.com/ 15 Really Bad Attitude Subpoenaed. http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html Microsoft decries Lessig is biased. http://www.wired.com//news/business/0,1367,9488,00.html 16 “Creators of Anti-Abortion Web Site Told to Pay Millions” http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/02/biztech/articles/03abortion.html 17 US vs. Baker. http://ic.net/%7Esberaha/baker.html 18 Communications Decency Act. http://www.epic.org/CDA/cda.html 13 16 of scenario. On one hand, the spirit of the Privacy Act of 1974 indicates that they might be opposed to the same activity being done by corporations. On the other, the advantages that it offers to enforcement agencies make it beneficial to both the government as well as corporations. Unfortunately, as has been clearly shown by the CBDTPA, the policy makers do not actually comprehend how technology operates. Unfortunately, this lack of understanding makes it difficult for lawmakers to initiate laws that elegantly regulate the subtle differences between the physical and digital realms. As issues of social behavior online become more prominent, the most important thing for lawmakers and their advisors to do is become well versed in the social characteristics of the different spaces. Exemplified in the previous discussion of context, the underlying differences in architecture between bits and atoms fundamentally alter the mechanisms for social interaction and regulation. Because of the nature of the medium, it is not possible to alter the architecture to completely replicate the physical world. With all of its benefits and problems, lawmakers must approach the digital sphere differently. They must take into account that regulation through social pressure does not operate at the level it does offline. They must consider that slight changes to the architecture can result in immense social behavior and expectation changes. When old laws are applied to this new medium, they must be done so in a manner that considers and accounts for the differences. Without doing so, the law cannot properly regulate the online world. Bibliography [1] Aronson, Elliot. 1995. The Social Animal (7th edition). New York: WH Freeman. [2] boyd, danah. 2001. "Sexing the Internet: Reflections on the role of identification in online communities." Presented at Sexualities, medias and technologies: theorizing old and new practices. University of Surrey, June 21-22. 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