Prying Information Loose and Dealing with Loose Information

A sociology of information triptych this morning. Disclosure laws that fail to fulfill their manifest/intended function, the secret work of parsing public information, and the pending capacity to record everything all bear on the question of the relationship between states and information.

In a 21 Jan 2012 NYT article, "I Disclose ... Nothing," Elisabeth Rosenthal (@nytrosenthal) suggests that despite increasing disclosure mandates we may not, in fact, be more informed. Among the obviating forces are information overload, dearth of interpretive expertise, tendency of organizations to hide behind "you were told...", formal rules provide organizations with blueprint for how to play around with technicalities (as, she notes, Republican PACs have done, using name changes and re-registration to "reset" their disclosure obligation clocks), routinization (as in the melodic litanies of side-effects in drug adverts), and the simple fact that people are not in a position to act on information even it is abundantly available and unambiguous. On the other side, the article notes that there is a whole "industry" out there -- journalists, regulators, reporters who can data mine the disclosure information even if individuals cannot take advantage.

Rachel Martin's (@rachelnpr) piece on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, CIA Tracks Public Information For The Private Eye describes almost the mirror image of this: how intelligence agencies are building their infrastructure for trying to find patterns in and making sense of the gadzillions of bits of public information that just sits their for all to see. It's another case that hints at an impossibility theorem about "connecting the dots" a priori.

And finally, in another NPR story, "Technological Innovations Help Dictators See All" Rachel Martin interviews John Villasenor about his paper, "Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments" on the idea that data storage has become so inexpensive that there is no reason for governments (they focus on authoritarian ones, but no reason to limit it) not to collect everything (even if, as the first two stories remind us, they may currently lack the capacity to do anything with it). I if surveillance uptake and data rot will prove to be competing tendencies.


The first piece suggests research questions: what are the variables that determine whether disclosure is "useful"? what features of disclosure rules generate cynical work-arounds? if "more is not always better," what is? can we better theorize the relationship between "knowing," open-ness, transparency, disclosure and democracy than we have so far?

The second piece really cries out for an essay capturing the irony of how the information pajamas get turned inside out with the spy agency trying to see what's in front of everyone (we are reminded in a perverse sort of way of Poe's "The Purloined Letter"). Perhaps we'll no longer associate going "under cover" with the CIA.

And the alarm suggested in the third piece is yet another entry under what I (and maybe others) have called the informational inversion -- when the generation, acquisition, and storage of information dominates by orders of magnitude our capacity to do anything with it.

Sociology of Information Gaffes

Much has been made of VP candidate Joe Biden's capacity to put his fut in his mouth. In this morning's paper, reporter John Broder ("Hanging On to Biden’s Every Word") reviews the issue and highlights a few recent events. In one of them, Biden either did not know or forgot an important bit of information about someone:

In Columbia, Mo., this week, Mr. Biden urged a paraplegic state official to stand up to be recognized. “Chuck, stand up, let the people see you,” Mr. Biden shouted to State Senator Chuck Graham, before realizing, to his horror, that Mr. Graham uses a wheelchair.

“Oh, God love ya,” Mr. Biden said. “What am I talking about?”

How is this kind of gaffe is different from those which amount to inelegant diction or impolitic revelations? The "offense" here is certainly not anti-disability bigotry or insensitivity, and the sociologist of information should not get distracted by (either republican or disability-rights) activists who might want to make hay about the event. Rather, it's a failure to be aware of, or keep track of, a relevant piece of information about someone. As such, it is, before all else, relationally revealing : a basic norm of relationships is to keep track of relevant information about the other. When one utters the phrase "my friend," even if it is ritualized political speech, it triggers some informational expectations. When these aren't met, we find it jarring or even offensive (consider the simple case of getting a form letter that mis-addresses you as Mr. or Ms. -- it quickly becomes even junkier mail than it already was).

Normally, politicians can synthesize relationships such as "my friend..." because their handlers can remind them of information-you-ought-to-know-about-the-other as they make their way toward a handshake. Getting such things right may not mean anything in an objective sense, but in terms of the relational work it does, it can certainly be consequential.

The take-away is that relationships, even those created artificially for the purposes of the moment, always come with informational expectations and obligations.