It's Been a While...

since the last posting here. What's the main take-away from that observation? There are two: one, last semester I was wicked busy, and two, the more I read and the more I observe, the less enchanted I find the "new media" realm. The one superlative that I think is deserved is that it may be the most self-referential phenomenon the world has ever known.

Courts and the Information Order

Dan Rather is suing CBS and affiliated corporate entities for $70 million. Ostensibly, it's a contract case: CBS promised him something and he says they did not deliver. But the NYT may have gotten the real story right in today's article when a picture of Rather was captioned

"I’d like to know what really happened,” Dan Rather said of the inquiry that led CBS to force him out as news anchor."

Sure, it's a story about a public figure having a somewhat public fight with a former employer. But it's also a story about the information order and the role that courts play in leveling informational playing fields and redistributing information. The rest of Rather's quote points us in the right direction: “Let’s get under oath. Let’s get e-mails. Let’s get who said what to whom, when and for what purpose.”

Many will focus on the money here and imagine that the main thing the court can do is decide whether Rather has been materially injured and, if so, how he should be compensated. But perhaps in the case of someone who has made 5 or 6 million dollars a year for part of his career, we'll give some thought to the issue if he says "it's not about the money."

Virginia Tech Report and Information

A report on last year's Virginia Tech shootings was released last week (full report | executive summary). It highlights a number of sociology of information issues among its findings:

• Widespread misunderstanding about what privacy laws did and did not prohibit in terms of communicating information about mental to family and school officials
  
  
• Some states report information about mental health to a federal database used to conduct background checks on would-be gun purchasers, but there is ambiguity about what kind of mental health treatment history triggers this action.
  
  
• Errors were made in assuming that initial leads were correct. The report suggests that officials "did not take sufficient action to deal with what might happen if the initial lead proved erroneous."
  
  
• Notification: "The VTPD erred in not requesting that the Policy Group issue a campus-wide notification that two persons had been killed and that all students and staff should be cautious and alert."


• Medical facilities did a good job at providing care but there were many challenges at cross agency communication.
  
  
• "The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner properly discharged the technical aspects of its responsibility ...." but "[c]ommunication with families was poorly handled."
  
  
• "State systems for rapidly deploying trained professional staff to help families get information, crisis intervention, and referrals to a wide range of resources did not work."

What Society Knows

The lead editorial in the NY Times today ("What You Don't Know Can Hurt You") addresses the question of the state's role in the generation of public knowledge. The piece argues that congress should restore funding for census bureau projects that produce important economic data, noting, in reference to financial markets, that "the system cannot thrive without good and timely information." True, no doubt in other sectors too. A question worth asking is whether the political actors who cut funding were aiming only at saving money or keeping government small or were responding to parties who have an interest in restricting the amount and quality of public information that's out there. We can imagine two scenarios: (1) some actors prefer to function in an environment of relative public ignorance; (2) some actors don't want the government to produce and supply information that could be sold for a profit.

We shall see.

"The More Information the Better"?

Take a look at BARRY MEIER's May 23, 2007 NYT article "For Drug Makers, a Downside to Full Disclosure." It's about how GlaxoSmithKline made drug study data available online as a part of the settlement of a lawsuit from a few years back. The "story" of the article is that a scientist stumbled on the data, analyzed it, discovered that a drug posed a health threat, and published the results. This then leads to the big question of the pros and cons of public disclosure, selective publication of results, who has the expertise to analyze and interpret, and so on.

A quick list of sociology of information issues that come up here:

• If datasets contain "information" that could serve the public interest but that might not be extracted by private actors should that data always be made available?


• How should we think about the disincentive to collect data to begin with that will likely emerge if corporations have to always consider the downside of a third party discovering in it information that is contrary to the corporate interest?


• Where do we put the inevitable disputes that will arise over which experts extracted information from data in the correct manner? Does the "more info is always better" stance merely push social uncertainty up one level?


• The article also notes that "Roughly a decade ago, some experts raised concerns that doctors were not getting the full picture about a drug’s risks and benefits because they tended to hear or read about only those trials in which the medication showed a benefit." This raises two issues. First there is the obvious one: "deliberate" bias in terms of what information gets passed on. But there's a second one too -- we need to look at the social networks and channels through which information passes. The more these structures are institutionalized, the more likely, I suspect, there is a built-in bias to what information gets through. Public disclosure might disrupt this just enough to make it a little more likely that the benefits of "marketplace of ideas" and "truth will out" will be realized.

What do you think?

Democracy and the Information Order I

Consider Adam Liptak's front page article in the Times today. It's about a website that publishes information about people who agree to be witnesses for the government. The information, it seems, is all gleaned from public documents so there's no big violation of privacy type question here, but it does bring up lots of questions and not just the obvious ones.


On the one side, you have prosecutors pointing out that this might massively de-incentivize (sic) truth-telling. Seen more economically, we might speculate that it will just make it a lot more expensive (since part of the impetus for the website seems to be focusing on the "deals" that are offered for information).


So, it's interesting to the sociologist of information in that it makes us think about the way that transactions in (presumably) the truth are valued and how secrecy about who is doing the truth telling and why affects the "price," not to mention the perceived veracity.


If you think only about whistle-blowing and organized crime prosecutions, it's easy to lean in the direction advocated by some judicial policy makers: information about informants and deals should perhaps be sealed or in some way less accessible to the general public.


But if you think for a moment about the democratic functions of the legal system, especially the role they have in fostering openness in the information order, you might not be so sure about that.

If you go further and think about other places and other times, as depicted, for example, in the recent film " The Life of Others" ("Das Leben der Anderen"), then the idea of "outing" informants might seem like even less of a good idea.


We are reminded, in any case, that new technologies change the meaning of the phrase "it is known that...."

Tooting My Own Horn

Well, the sociology of information has made it to the big time now. John Tierney has a piece (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/science/22tier.html?ex=1337659200&en=6619e8ff1cb79513&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink) in the New York Times Science Times section about my work on notification.

He's also got a bit on it in his blog, Tierney Lab, where readers are posting examples of botched notification. So far, the stories people have contributed are pretty awesome. I plan to spend some time analyzing them and then posting a response.

O.K., back to work.