IP: EFF "Cyberlife" book project - call for participating authors

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

CALL FOR AUTHORS TO CONTRIBUTE TO EFF BOOK ABOUT "CYBERLIFE"






The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom Forum Media Studies
Center are soliciting your contribution to a book project titled CYBERLIFE:
THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF ONLINE SOCIETY. This book will consist
primarily of first-person accounts from people like you -- stories about
the experiences people commonly have when encountering online forums,
virtual communities, the World Wide Web, and the immense scope of freedom
of speech in cyberspace. The book will be edited by Mike Godwin, staff
counsel of EFF and  fellow at the Media Studies Center (a project funded by
the Freedom Forum), and should be completed by fall of 1998.


--Why assemble a book like this?


There are two reasons that we have chosen to take this approach. First, the
strength of the Net is its ability to give voice to individuals without
having those voices translated or transmuted by editors or by traditional
media institutions. While this book has an editor, his role will be
primarily to choose contributions and help those contributors in preparing
their texts. We're trying to combine the best aspects of the
book-publishing world (permanence, reach into mainstream audiences) with
those of the Net (diversity, disintermediated points of view).


Second, other books about the Net tend to be written from a single
viewpoint, and, as such, have been inadequate in countering the mainstream
media's tendency to paint the Net as primarily a haven for pedophiles,
hackers, terrorists, and other threatening people.


For a more detailed discussion of the focus of this book, see "True Stories
of Free Speech in Cyberspace," the prospectus for CYBERLIFE, appended to
the end of this call for authors.


--Why should I want to contribute?


One reason to contribute is to tell your story about your own experiences
in cyberspace -- a story that may not have been told in previous books, or
in accounts in other media. If you feel that TV, newspapers, and magazines
have distorted the picture of cyberspace -- especially in the eyes of those
who have not yet logged on -- this your change to help correct the record.


Another reason is that you may have wanted to contribute to the Electronic
Frontier Foundation and its work, but may not have had the money to do so.
Since this book will be owned by EFF, its earnings will contribute to EFF's
operation -- to the extent that you can help make this book better, you can
help EFF remain in the black and do good work for freedom and privacy in
cyberspace.


Whether or not your contribution is included in the final volume, any
contribution of a thousand words or more will earn you a one-year
membership in EFF. And if your contribution is included, you'll get a
membership no matter how long your contribution is.




--What kinds of things should I talk about?


We'd like to hear how the Internet has had an impact on your life, and what
different directions you might have taken because of this powerful medium.
What would you change about it if you could?  What do you think about
government attitudes about cyberspace, and how do you feel about media
treatment?  What do you think about social attitudes in general toward the
internet?


We're also interested in what kinds of things you want people to know about
your experiences of the online world, and about cyberspace in general.


--What about my copyright? Will EFF own my words? Will I be able to
republish my story elsewhere?


EFF will hold only a nonexclusive license to print your story in the book
CYBERLIFE and to use it in subsequent Web-based or TV projects. You will
retain the primary rights to your story, and you will not be restricted in
how you use them. (You could sell the story to a magazine, for example.)
Our interest is not in possessing your words but in enabling you both to
contribute to EFF and to improve general understanding about cyberspace.


--How long should my story be? If EFF chooses to use it, will be it edited
or changed?


Your contribution can be as long as you like. Take as much space as you
need to tell your story (or stories). Our editor, Mike Godwin, may in fact
ask you to elaborate on parts of your contribution. Our experience has been
that most people who spend a lot of time in the online world are articulate
writers and have a pretty good idea about how to tell their stories. Mike's
role as editor, other than to make help each writer tell his or her story
in the clearest possible way, will be a supervisory one. We expect a
certain amount of give-and-take concerning editorial suggestions, but the
spirit of this project is to allow individuals, as much as possible, to
tell their stories in their own voices, expressing their own concerns.




--Who is this Mike Godwin guy?


For more information on Mike, see http://www.eff.org/~mnemonic


--Is there any information about myself that I have to include?


You can choose to be totally anonymous if you like, although of course this
would mean we can't give you an EFF membership (we wouldn't know where to
send the card). Or you can choose to tell us who you are, but ask that your
name not be included in the book. We'd prefer to know who you are, of
course, and we definitely want to know something about your background --
things like how old you are, what you do for a living, your feelings about
work, life, and cyberspace, and any other biographical information you want
to share with us, or that you think might shed light on your story.


--Where do I send my story?


You can send questions or stories to Mike Godwin at either mnemonic () eff org
or mgodwin () mediastudies org and please include your location and phone
number so that Mike can contact you quickly about


whether and how your contribution may be used. Please also include address
information for your EFF membership.


You may also post your contribution in a one of the CYBERLIFE topics on the
WELL or on ECHO and share it with users at one or both of these systems.
But please e-mail Mike if you do so he knows to go there to retrieve your
contribution.




--How will I know whether my contribution will be used?


You will be notified of the receipt of your manuscript as soon as we can do
so. Mike Godwin or his assistant will contact you within 30 days of receipt
of your contribution to tell you whether it will be included in CYBERLIFE.


--What is EFF anyway? And what is the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center?


The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit civil liberties
organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free
expression, and access to public resources and information online, as well
as to promote responsibility in new media. You can find out more about our
work by looking at our Web site, http://www.eff.org


The Freedom Forum is a nonpartisan, international foundation dedicated to
free press, free speech and free spirit for all people. Its mission is to
help the public and the news media understand one another better. For more
information about the Media Studies Center, a project operated by the
Freedom Forum, see http://www.mediastudies.org






-----------------------------------------------


CYBERLIFE: TRUE STORIES OF LIFE AND FREE SPEECH IN CYBERSPACE A prospectus
by Mike Godwin


I.      There is a story about the Internet that is not being told. It is a
story that has not appeared much in the tradtional news or entertainment
media, both of which have oscillated in only the last four or five years
from a utopian vision of the Net to a reflexively anxious and scapegoating
one. Yet it is a story that urgently needs to be told very soon -- we need
to tell it to each other as much as we need to tell it to our leaders and
policymakers -- because we are currently creating the consensus that will
govern whether and how our society will come to terms with a medium that
gives ordinary people the power to routinely communicate with mass audiences.


II.     The Two Internets We Know


A.      Computer-based communications were (fore)seen in the 1970s and 1980s to
be a catalyst for widespread social change.


1.      The potentially huge social impact of the Internet -- the first mass
medium in the history of the planet to be accessible on a widespread basis
to ordinary citizens -- was foreseen at least one or two decades ago,
depending on where you count from. It was arguably foreseen by sociologists
Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff in their 1976 book NETWORK NATION,
the first scholarly account of online social evolution, although their work
precedes the appearance of the Internet as we know it today.




2.      The revolutionary character of the Internet rests primarily on the fact
each citizen, at least potentially, will have the power to reach audiences
of a size that used to be reachable only by capital-intensive media
institutions -- most notably, newspapers, mass-market magazines, and
television.


3.      A secondary, but nevertheless important, consequence of the Internet is
that it becomes possible for individuals to access disintermediated content
from anyone else on the Net.


B.      The first wave of stories about the Net to appear in mainstream mass
media were essentially positive -- "the information highway" was seen as a
boon similar to that of the interstate highway system, or perhaps even the
printing press. (Sen. Gore _fils_ , writing about the "national information
infrastructure" in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and elsewhere, liked to evoke the
highway system, a project sponsored by Sen. Gore _pere_ decades before.)
The push was on to connect every school, library, hospital, and home to the
Net.


1.      This wave of enthusiasm was accelerated by the development of the World
Wide Web. The Web represented only one way a content producer/publisher
could use the Internet. But perhaps because of its conceptual and
functional similarity to traditional one-to-many publishing (newspapers,
books, TV stations), the Web caught on rather more quickly than distributed
conferencing systems -- which provided truly interactive "many-to-many
communications" -- such as Usenet and Compuserve had done. So the Web soon
displaced the other uses of the Internet, except perhaps for e-mail, in the
public mind, even as it supercharged a new flood of people and capital to
the Net.


2.      Result: in the course of a two or three years, our society went from
(typically) not knowing what a URL is to routinely placing URLs on
billboards, in magazine advertisements, and even on the sides of city buses.


C.      The second wave of stories about the Net underscored how volatile the
initial social enthusiasm had been. Like the tulip craze in Holland, the
sudden Internet boom in the collective American awareness was headed for an
equally sudden bust. As with many other new technologies,  the blessings of
computer communications were not unmixed.  And the gap between a) the early
utopian predictions about the Net as an unqualified social good and b) the
Net as it really is, led to a backlash, both in the mainstream media and in
the public mind generally. The Net, which had been lavishly praised for its
potential to put the full measure of the First Amendment's speech and press
freedoms into any individual American's hands, began to be seen as a threat
-- precisely for the same reason!


D.      Traditional journalism and journalists did not function as a corrective
to either of these oscillating social perceptions of the Net. In fact, they
typically reflected and reinforced them. The Net is now often seen as a
functioning primarily as a conduit for pornography, a zone of predation for
pedophiles and stalkers, a resource for bomb-planting terrorists, a hideout
for conspiring criminals, a threat to the ability of authors and publishers
to be paid for their work, a source of knockoff, worthless
pseudojournalism, a free-fire zone in which no one's morality, no one's
children, no one's intellectual property, no one's privacy, no one's
knowledge about the larger world can reasonably be thought to be relatively
safe, even for a moment. Examples of news media's reinforcement of this view:


1.      TIME's cover story endorsing a "cyberporn" study that later turned out
to be a hoax.


2.      The overwhelming passage of the Communications Decency Amendment,
recently overturned by the Supreme Court for being, among other things,
unconstitutionally overbroad.




3.      The routine assumption in several press institutions that there is a
link between the bomb attack at the Olympics in Atlanta last summer and the
Internet, and the law-enforcement community's unsubstantiated statements
that reinforce that perceived link.


4.      The singling out of any computer-communications element to a news story
-- no matter how ancillary it is to the essence of the story -- in order to
make it more sensational. See, e.g., the New York Post's creation of the
"Internet rapist" story last summer, based on upon the perpetrator's having
met his victim first in an America Online chat room, and the national
media's abortive attempt to characterize the "Heaven's Gate" suicides as
being somehow linked to, or facilitated by, the cult's use of a Web site.
(TIME's cover copy: "The Web of Death.")


III.    The Internet We Don't Know


A.      It can fairly be said that we know the Net is not the catalyst for
utopia that it was once touted as being -- the very fact that people were
so quickly able to find aspects of the Internet to complain about proves
this point handily.


B.      But the picture of the Net as it is characterized in the current
backlash is also a misrepresentation, and perhaps even more so. For one
thing, the Net as a source of new terrors cannot be the same Net that
continues to inspire millions of new users to log on for the first time
every year, often for reasons they themselves can barely articulate.


C.      My thesis is that the Net has, for most of its participants, played a
transformative role -- providing individuals with new opportunities, new
connections with other people, new interests, and even new communities.
These individuals' accounts of their experiences vary in their particulars,
but they tend to have in common the fact that their use of the Net has
changed their lives in some fundamental ways ... and that the changes have
mostly been positive.


D.      If the current myth of the Net is that it is a place where, within
minutes of logging on, one is confronted with offers of pornography or with
rude propositions or with invasions of one's privacy, then it is long past
time to generate the "counter-myths of the Net" -- the near-archetypal (yet
true) stories that so many "netizens" have in common with each other. These
stories have to become as much a part of our collective perception of the
Net as the horror stories already have done, if only because the social
consensus necessary for preserving freedom of expression on the Net depends
upon a majority of us recognizing and being able to articulate what it is
that we value in it.




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See you at INET'98, Geneva 21-24, July 98   <http://www.isoc.org/inet98/>