I was really excited to see Lessig involved in this week's conversation. I was familiar with his more recent work on copyright, Internet technology, and open source creativity (his lecture/video included here is a must-see if you're interested: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6122403781064290619 ) So I was additionally intrigued to see him included in our readings on regulating behavior and etiquette, among other things.
His main argument, delivered with a lot of humor and humility, is simple and brilliant: "cyberspace teaches a new threat to liberty" (86) through the existence of regulators/constraints that when applied indirectly, misdirect responsbility (96). He highlights 4 constraints that have the ability to regulate: law, social norms, market, and architechture. He focuses primarily on the last constraint as it relats to the use of code and design in cyberspace. Although most of his examples relate to the governement, all of his lessons (especially about applying constraints indirectly) can easily be applied to community design.
What I found most interesting, and applicable, from this reading was his emphasis in the late pages about applying regulators indirectly to influence behavior by making it hard for people to do things. He begins by talking about ex post sanctions to collude laws or norms after the fact, but then he includes an interesting quote that says, "the regulator has a range of means to effect the desired constraint, but the values that these means entail need not align with the efficiency. The efficient answer may well be unjust..." (91). I suppose this would be the equivalent to kicking someone out of a discussion group for using incorrect grammar/spelling (God save our discussions on this site!) But when thinking about this reading in the context of Kim's reading on etiquette, it's very interesting to consider *when* a designer informs users of the motives or consequences of design plans. If Professor Resnick warned us about grammar/spelling would we all be more careful? If one by one we all started dropping off after being removed, would we get wise and regulate ourselves?
I think this extended conversation of self-regulation is an important one regardless of how we answer the above questions. If things are made easy or difficult for users on sites, how much influence will they effect? I'd be very interested in hearing people's examples from their sites they encounter.
Chris's summary of the Lessig reading is really well done, so I just wanted to add a few thoughts. From my understanding, Lessig seems to spend a good amount of time first downplaying the regulatory influence of government regulation and law, and instead emphasizing that norms, market, and architecture are the behind-the-scene regulatory sources that threaten liberty. After making the connection to cyberspace settings, Lessig begins stressing how architecture (or code, in this case) is the true influence. Finally, Lessig makes the claim that government regulation actually shapes the other three regulatory sources.
At first, Lessig seems to jump back and forth between saying that one primary regulatory source shapes the others and at the same time, everything surrounding the "pathetic dot" should be considered together. While I realize Lessig is ultimately saying that each regulatory source influences and shapes each other, his conclusion seems to emphasize greatly on all the substantial influence that indirect and direct governmental regulation and laws have. Lessig then begins discussing how some regulations seem to have hidden agendas that are the ultimate threat that we face in online cyberspaces. The final sentence of this chapter is equally puzzling, "...feature of the code determines much about the power of the government". So Lessig is now backtracking and suggesting that architecture has more influence?
On another note, I actually felt that Lessig mentioned something as important in the beginning: the importance of discussing something like "what threatens liberty" by considering the particular time and place, rather than making generalizations. Similarly, in analyzing threats to online communities, it might be easier (or at least as useful) to start by trying to analyze the constituents, participants, domain, and type of interactions, instead of focusing on whether norms shape developers or whether a web-service’s subscription fees is the result of government hidden agendas.
Essentially, I agree with Lessig's warning that we "should worry about a regime that makes invisible regulation easier," and found his words of warning to be the most interesting part of the article.
I'm fairly farmiliar with Lessig, and read "Code" as I was giddily preparing to come to SI at the suggestion of someone on the new student orientation Ctools site. What strikes me as the most challenging ethical issue discussed through out the book is the notion of policy and legal frameworks not being able to keep up with the speed at which information technologies adapt and evolve.
Indirection is a powerful tool used both to constrain regulatory behavior and to permit it. This is readily apparent if you note the prevalence of off-shore gambling sites to give an IT-related example, or just general corporate out-sourcing.
The same ambiguity and information asymmetry that creates a space in which the types of case studies that Lessig discusses can allow governments to indirectly regulate behavior, also allows for the gaps in regulation that allow for innovative ways around regulation (open source software, for instance)....
I think the history of code so far has shown that its a fairly flexible tool that accomodates evading regulation in ways that are both legit and transparent. At least as of yet...
I think 3 of the "ovals" LL talks about are fairly easy to translate into online behavior regulations ie:
- design the system so you *can't* misbehave (architecture)
- enforce against misbehavior through official "police" (law)
- community norms prevent misbehavior through ignoring or flaming the perp (norms)
I had a much harder time coming up with ways online where the market contrained misbehavior -- ie that certain types of undesirable behavior were so expensive that they wouldn't be actioned. I have to believe at least in World of Warcraft this would be the case in something.
Submitted by Matt Adamo on Wed, 02/06/2008 - 23:33.
2
points
I also had a hard time mapping the market concept to regulating community behavior. My thought was that voting mechanisms create a sort of market where members compete for a limited number of votes. This competition gives members incentive to contribute to the community in a meaningful, productive way and to strive to stand out among the other community members. So communitites like Digg and our own 684/884 course site might be good examples of communities that use markets to regulate behavior. But, if the voting feature regulates our behavior, at least it's transparent, right?
That's a really good point, in some ways the "market for attention" may give people incentive to regulate behavior if votes are being "spent" to signal the value of contributed content. Similarly, it may regulate against misbehavior if getting voted down carries consequence such as recieving negative reputation.
It's a little hard for me to distinguish if this is really just a concrete enforcement of norms, or if this is really a "market" situation, but it is a very interesting insight nonetheless.
Submitted by Paul Resnick on Mon, 02/11/2008 - 07:42.
0
points
I think you're pointing to an ambiguity in how the term "the market" is used in popular discourse these days. Sometimes it refers to situations where costs and prices influence behavior. And sometimes it refers more broadly to any mechanism that aggregates and makes visible public opinion.
To the extent that reputation has only social value, producing status, I would think of it as just a reinforcer of norms, not as a market force (i.e., I would adopt the first, narrower definition). To the extent that reputation can be traded, or converted to something of tangible value (e.g., attention that generates ad revenue, or grades) then we might think of it as a market force.
I think that the three translations provided by the OP (architecture, law, norms) are nicely summarized.
As the OP suspected with his suggestion of WoW, virtual worlds tend to provide good examples of market constraints. In my community of study (a MUD), we use a variety of market constraints to manipulate different behaviors. For example, "gold farmers" can be a real nuisance for typical players when they take over the local turf. To mitigate this behavior, our world takes measures of hunting pressures and dilutes the loot spawned for a specific region or mob type. Furthermore, "underhunting" (killing things intended for players of a much lower level) mobs that provide large monetary returns causes new characters greater difficulties in advancement because they must compete against more experienced players. To combat this, players receive loot penalties for underhunting, providing incentive for them to pick on something their own size. Both of these methods are quite effective and, I think, good examples of regulation through market constraints.
This might not be the right idea, but maybe captchas are a constraint on people automatically creating spam emails. Because captchas are costly to solve automatically (computers can't and human labor costs a lot), this misbehavior is thwarted. Please let me know if this is right or totally wrong!
Submitted by LizBlankenship on Fri, 02/08/2008 - 00:40.
0
points
I heard that spammers hire people to just sit around and solve captchas all day to sign up for e-mail accounts. Hopefully that's a thing of the past. But anyway... I think captchas are definitely a constraint that affects spam. It's not a norm but more of a technological constraint, in a sense, the kind the regulates and supports by using technology.
Submitted by Paul Resnick on Mon, 02/11/2008 - 07:47.
0
points
They're intended to be a code constraint, so that only people can do the action, not computer programs.
But because spammers can hire people (or get porn surfers to enter captcha answers), it is converted into a market constraint-- it costs a few cents per captcha solved.
I think this is a good point. Online it takes virtually no investment to produce content so activities that are constrained in the real world flourish online. The obvious example here is mailers vs. spam. If mailers were as cheap to send as spam our mailboxes would be overflowing.
The market view that I took was the attention market. This is constrained in a number of ways, because human have a finite amount of attention and the Internet is infinitely full of crap. To me this is the constraint that the online markets optimize for, getting peoples attention.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Submitted by John Blair on Wed, 02/06/2008 - 23:13.
0
points
John Blair
The relevance here is hard to miss, as I interpreted code quite literally, as did Lessig, in the following passage: "The code writer, as Ethan Katsh puts it, is the "architect."
The thing that really struck however is the next passage: "But how can we "make and maintain" this balance between modalities? What tools do we have to achieve a different construction? How might the mix of realspace values be carried over to the world of cyberspace? How might the mix be changed if change is desired?
What I thought of here is: we're all programmed - or at least suffer the constraints placed upon us by the programs (their architecture) that we interact with every day. So given that, how do we design systems, applications, programs to allow the user to not be faced with the constraints of the "code writer". Of course this is being done to a certain degree with modular / re-usable code, methods, objects, etc, that allow the user to determine what the code will do. But this is only a "pathetic dot" in the path of the steam roller. There has to be other things we can do to control our own environments more.
Carrying this into other areas of life, as Lessig does, how do we get the government to allow us to govern ourselves? Hoping they'll be direct is likely out of the question, so what options do we have left when they essentially dictate all the regulators?
Submitted by Satyendra on Thu, 02/07/2008 - 11:28.
4
points
Lessig makes some thought provoking arguments about regulation of behavior. As I was reading it I thought he is just stating the obvious and felt that his numerous examples were beginning to seem similar and a little boring. However, later in the article he makes the point about laws indirectly regulating behavior by manipulating the three other constraints, Social, Economic, and Architecture and then the purpose of all those examples seemd much clearer to me. It provided me with a framework to frame a problem of regulating (or influencing) behavior in.
Supposing our goal in our community is to regulate behavior.
From the article we can list the constraints and how they act.
Constraints ------------ Act Through
1. Law ------------ Threat of punishment
2. Social ------------Stigmas, Norms
3. Market ------------Economic means
4. Architecture ------------ Physical boundaries
Now we have four ways to regulate the behavior.
Let's see the feasibility of each.
1. The law I presume is going to be pretty hard to change just for our community, and perhaps something not in our locus of control
2. Social norms - Perhaps something we can set and change for our site but again not very easy to change.
3. Market - Cost of things - This is perhaps much more in our control and easier to change, but still driven by market economics and the range of our prices will be dictated by the larger market.
4. Architecuture - for an online community - essentially the code and the interaction behavior. For online communities and web based ventures this is by far the easiest to control for the owners of the site and thus perhaps the best instrument they have to regulate behvior.
Therefore in most caeses it might be a good idea to try to design the architecture, code, and interaction of the community to regulate the behavior.
Some other takeaways from the reading which I found interesting:
Law can either act directly or it can act indirectly.
When acting directly it threatens through some form of punishment.
When acting indirectly it modifies one of the other structure of constraints.
Choosing which path to take is determined by the cost vs. benefits of each.
Indirectly influencing the other three constraints through law can be either good or bad for the community (good and bad of course might be different depending on what side you are, but the basic argument is indirect influence in itself isn't good or evil). However, indirect influence has some subtle consequences which we should watch out for, particularly if the agent redirecting could have directly affected the law.
Indirection Misdirects Responsibility:
If an authority can impose a law directly but it uses indirection, it is transferring responsibility, thus undermining transparency. If transparency is of something the society values then indirection muddles it. Further, this kind of misdirection can not only muddle responsibility but effect the entire meaning of things because it changes the agent who carries out the action.
We should worry about regimes that makes invisible regulation easier. Invisibility provides an incentive for bad regulation because responsibility can be muddled.
Along with feasibility, I wonder if some methods are generally more desireable than others.
I would put laws at the bottom of the list - laws are builky, hard to adapt, hard to maintain, etc. Social norms, in comparison, seem like a much better alternative. They are light-weight because they exist within the shared organizational knowledge of the community. They are adaptive to community changes. They are enforced through the behavior of many, not the burden of one.
Architecture has a lot of front-loaded design work. It is also poorly adaptive. However, once its in place, regulation of the desired action should be automatic, because it is built into what is possible. If a violation is not possible, it can't be violated.
Submitted by LizBlankenship on Fri, 02/08/2008 - 01:01.
0
points
I think you're right on with your assessment that market and especially architecture are the places where we can have an effect on regulating behavior in the online communities we make or manage.
I am similarly concerned about the indirect, invisible regulating that can happen. I much prefer transparency and I'm totally with you that we need to prevent it - the example about abortions bothered me because the gov't was practically telling people what to believe by abusing respect for doctors' authority. I think in that case it's a personal freedom that should not have been taken away from them to be able to talk about abortion. People often need to find a doctor who agrees with some of their fundamental beliefs in order to be served well, and in this case, that just couldn't happen.
Submitted by Paul Resnick on Mon, 02/11/2008 - 10:25.
0
points
I think you're taking Lessig too literally. Instead, draw analogies.
An online community can have its own legal system. But you have to analyze carefully who the authorities are, what actions they can monitor, and what punishments they have available.
Government has and will influence the cyberspace. Lessig gives examples of government implementing its agenda directly or indirectly. So far I think the government has stayed away from Internet. Perhaps Net neutrality will be the first acid test in government regulation in Internet.
I have an argument against government becoming a major influencer. I think we are moving from a nation based society to a corporation based society. Today some of the biggest commercial entities are commercial companies. They fund politicians campaign. So they indirectly influence the policy making of the government. Google is not opening a office in DC to sell lava lamps!
Community owners can use indirect means to implement their agenda. Default settings is a classic example. Most users don't change the default settings in products/services, so the default settings like wallpaper, search engine matter a lot. This could be a design alternative to implement the code of conduct in the community.
Submitted by Tracy Liu on Thu, 02/07/2008 - 12:33.
0
points
This chapter discusses four tools to regular individuals’ behaviors which includes laws, norms, market and architecture. Several examples are listed to illustrate their different functions to support regulation. One important claim is that “the same constraint can be achieved through different means, and the different means are differently costly”. Therefore, the efficiency about achieving the same goal using different methods is also articulated with different cases. As a background chapter, it provides a broad basement for the regularity of Internet.
As code is one important tool to regulate Internet, I have a specific question about the relationship between programmer and web designer, how do they communicate with each other? Are their goals always consistent with each other?
Lessig provides a frame of regulating behaviors, and catches some interactions between different constraints. The main design clam of this reading could be: in order to regulate a subject or behavior, there are four main ways to achieve the goal (regulation), including laws, norms, markets, and architecture. For example, if car radio theft is a problem, you may regulate it by
Law: increase the penalty for car radio theft
Architecture: make the radio no longer effective once stolen.
Market: Decrease the price of the radio. If it’s not valuable, no one will steal it.
Norms: Educate children not to steal. (Indirectly influenced by law)
Also, law can regulate misbehavior not only directly but also indirectly, that is, law can aim to change other constrains to achieve the regulator’s goal. However, I would say law could be changed by other constrains as well, such as norms. In addition, he points out by regulating code writing, the government (site owner) may make invisible regulation easier.
I like this reading a lot. While Kim talks about creating ground rules, this reading reminds me to think about any other effect the rules might cause. I can’t help thinking of new requirements for obtaining a Michigan driver's license and wonder what other consequences of this are.
Here is what I get out of Lessig's reading. From the perspective of someone who is regulated ot constrained -- whom he referred to as a dot -- Lessig restated the importance of a built environment of social life. Several constraints are mentioned as important, which are legal, norms, market and technology related. Lessig illustrated his points over these constraints through the smoking example, which does make a lot of sense. And the ultimate point then is induced that any change in any one of the above mentioned constraints may have more or less effect on the whole. These constraints are not independent and each can support or oppose the others.
He then continued to talk about the role of law -- the key takeaway in this chapter I guess. An interested example has been presented at this point and by reading througth the whole example of car radio theft, he explicitly explained his ideas that same constraints can be achieved through different means and in terms of the decision process, cost benefit analysis will be the proper approach.
Another point I noticed is that Lessig mentioned that law can change several things, such as social norm, architecture and etc. In addition, it does not always play a positive role and it can be either direct or indirect. groups of examples help to understand better the idea.
Fascinating article, with much in the form of practical constructs and best practices for designing transparent and indirect regulatory systems. Even though Lessig's four constraints are certainly applicable to online communities, he didn't provide too many examples. In the same spirit of his examples that denote ways architecture was changed to further collective or social ends, I would like to explore two examples that explore ways information architecture was changed to further collective or social ends in online communities.
1) Facebook just announced that next week, applications that generate positive responses from news feed alerts will be permitted to increase the volume of notifications, while applications that generate less excitement will have their volume of notifications restricted. This serves two collective ends for the Facebook community: a) With the number of applications and application installs ever increasing, news feed alerts are increasingly overwhelmed by newsfeed notices. This information architecture redesign will make the volume of communication regarding application activity manageable. b) In any open software development platform, application quality will obviously vary. By abstracting news feed announcements of applications that generate activity (clickthroughs, installs, etc.), Facebook is taking steps to encourage the cream rises to the top.
2) Mixx, a social news site for private groups, just rolled out a private messaging feature that lets any member message any other member. While private communication in social communities may harm the greater good by depriving users of access to the breadth of activity, it’s entirely possible (just harder) to subvert these blocked avenues and find ways to communicate externally using e-mail or IM. By rolling out this information architecture redesign, Mixx will capture member communication within its boundaries and thus foster more community loyalty by enhancing the formation of one-on-one relationships. However, moderation may become a problem of impossible scope. This creates an underground avenue for behavior that may oppose what Mixx owners have in mind for their brand.
Jon, I think these are great examples to illustrate Lessig's concepts. This article has also caused me to think about the effects of rules and laws, and what their intended purposes are.
The Facebook example is very interesting, because it shows that Facebook has realized a problem with its application architecture: too many spammy requests, and people stop paying attention to them altogether. So, they choose to change the architecture of the system (the code being the architecture in this case), with the hope of changing social norms as an effect. They hope that norms will change so that people will accept and respond to requests. It's good in this case that Facebook is being transparent about these changes; it helps to make people aware of the upcoming changes and be more likely to accept them.
It will be interesting to see if user behavior with requests does in fact change as a result of this action. And, will there be any unforseen consequences to this? One I can think of is that this will make it even harder for new applications, which are already at a disadvantage, to become popular.
Submitted by Paul Resnick on Mon, 02/11/2008 - 10:31.
0
points
This example looks like one where FB is trying to put market forces to work. Application owners now have an incentive to target their posts more effectively.
So, it's a change in architecture that generates market forces to regulate behavior.
I just want to add a few thoughts to what has already been said so well by others.
What I got most out of Lessig's article was the lesson about direct vs. indirect manipulation. Indirection is marked by a lack of transparency - it removes the regulator from responsibility and gets an effect without political cost. The big question is, should nontransparent means be allowed when transparent means are available? Lessig goes on in the rest of the book to argue how indirectly, by regulating code writing, the government is able to regulate the Internet in this way. This lack of transparency makes it hard for us to resist bad legislation, because we're not thinking about how it is affecting us.
Lessig in this article focuses on code, specifically, when he's talking about the Internet, but his arguments can certainly be applied to online communities. I think the biggest things to think about, as community designers, would be how to regulate your online community effectively by choosing the best possible means to create the change. The big difference is that online architecture, a.k.a. code, is much easier to change than is physical archictecture like roads, bridges, etc. This means that changing the code also can easily be done transparently - just a few edited lines of code, and voila, regulation can be achieved. The question is - is it ethical, and is it right to make big changes without notifying the community?
Typically, if a change is big enough, it will be noticeable, so this isn't normally an issue. Case in point: Digg recently made a big change to its algorithm of how submissions are promoted to the front page. The catch - they didn't inform the community about the changes or their intended results, and because of this, there has been an uproar by top Digg users. These 'top Diggers' believe that this change was made with the goal of making it harder for them to get their stories promoted - something they view as unfair and wrong for the community. Would this currently be such an issue if Digg had explained their reasoning for the changes first? I don't know, but it certainly is an interesting issue.
Design claim: Requiring registration as members before able to post comment, will support the goal of preventing "careless" comments in the forum, in the context of an open community.
Design alternative: The comment form can be designed to hint that the owners "know" who the commenters are (eg by displaying IP address), to show they are not anonymous. Or the form just doesnt appear without logging in (which requires registration). A realspace code.
Going through the three other regulators according to Lessig, we can institute a law/policy to require registration of users, but the effect maybe that the site will be ignored anyway. So law may not be the best route for regulation. In such a situation, indirection in the form of market can be done - by making those posting "careless" comments suffer (ban, gag, delete, etc) - or could that be law? Through norm, other members can post the offending user on a special list (ignore list?) or vote the offender out (permanently, or for a limited time).
This was supposed to be its own comment but I inadvertently added it as a reply. My apologies.
I've read most of Code before this class and I think Lessig has a tremendous ability to make a strong case for the things he advocates. The ubiquity of Creative Commons as an alternative to draconian copyright law is a testament to his vision of seeing the potential problems by having a copyright law with too many onerous restrictions. This foresight seems to indicate he understands the "law of unintended consequences" but I didn't feel like he made as strong of a case as he could have when talking about the regulatory constraints that act upon the "pathetic dot."
What he does well: Lessig goes beyond what we might expect to be normal regulatory forces upon the pathetic dot. I think market, law, and norms are relatively self-evident. However, the architecture, or code, constraint seems to be where Lessig is bringing his unique perspective to the issues. Normally, we might try to lump what Lessig defines as "architecture" in one of the other constraints, but he makes a strong case for why it should be its own entity.
Where it gets problematic: Lessig mentions how law can act upon archtecture to bring about change. As an example he mentions ADA (Americans with Disability Act). He describes how the law forces builders to change the way buildings are architected to make them accessible to people that are disabled e.g. a person in a wheelchair. I was reminded of a recent Freakonomics blog entry at the New York Time by Dubner and Levitt, titled "Unintended Consequences." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/magazine/20wwln-freak-t.html?fta=y
Dubner and Levitt actually use the case of ADA to illustrate how sometimes the laws we enact to create different behavior in the code backfire or misfire. I won't recap the whole article but their basic argument is the law is supposed to help people with disabilities – their example is a woman who is deaf trying to see a medical specialist – but sometimes it ends up hurting those it is supposed to help. In fact, two economists Acemoglu and Angrist found that ADA cause employment among disabled to drop after the law was enacted.
These unintended consequences are important considerations when we are looking at changing the archtectural/code constraint. Lessig obviously understands this, based on his work with the creative commons. And he certainly has the capability to make a strong case for his arguments. I'm just not sure he made a rock-solid case in this chapter.
I wonder if this revenge effects such as this are more likely to happen when we try to indirectly influence things because there may be other indirect consequences that happen simultaneously.
I think what Lessig is doing for deregulation of copyright,
and IP (i.e open source “anything”) is great.
I don’t think the problem is in regulation but in the aftermath- mainly
bureaucracy and corruption which is what he is supposedly doing quite a bit of
research on.
His books are all on the web for free (one such book is the
future of ideas which I have provided a
link to) under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Noncommercial
(which he championed through his company Creative Commons)
I agree 100% with him in believing that we should be worried
about a regime that makes it easier to regulate. This goes back to my other post on GSA(govt.
state apparatuses)
I still think norms underly all of his four mechanisms:
* law: obeying the law is a norm
* "architeture": accepting physical constraints involves norms
* market: how to behave in the market is a norm (and highly culturally contingent)
Lessig's take is great but he completely misses the concept of counterforce:
The hackers credo:
A closed door is an insult; a locked door is an invitation.
In other words, the presence of influencing constraints immediately provokes an attempt at circumvention. Just as culture (norms) produces counterculture, force produces counterforce, and code produces countercode.
Re: code making invisible regulation easier
Countercode creates an alternative. For example, the primary factor in China's decision to adopt Linux was the transparency of the code, i.e. it is precisely the concern over invisible elements in non-transparent code that led them to the decision.
-------------------------------------------------------- PHartzog@umich.edu
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser
Submitted by Daniel Zhou on Sun, 02/10/2008 - 22:52.
0
points
I think the four elements, law, norms, market and architecture, are woven together. I don't quite agree with Lessig that there is a uni-direction effect from law to the other three elements. Architecture might affect the law too. For example, in China where ordinary citizens are not involved in legislation, people can use the internet and make pressure to the government to pass certain laws.
Creating virtual speedbumps
I was really excited to see Lessig involved in this week's conversation. I was familiar with his more recent work on copyright, Internet technology, and open source creativity (his lecture/video included here is a must-see if you're interested: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6122403781064290619 ) So I was additionally intrigued to see him included in our readings on regulating behavior and etiquette, among other things.
His main argument, delivered with a lot of humor and humility, is simple and brilliant: "cyberspace teaches a new threat to liberty" (86) through the existence of regulators/constraints that when applied indirectly, misdirect responsbility (96). He highlights 4 constraints that have the ability to regulate: law, social norms, market, and architechture. He focuses primarily on the last constraint as it relats to the use of code and design in cyberspace. Although most of his examples relate to the governement, all of his lessons (especially about applying constraints indirectly) can easily be applied to community design.
What I found most interesting, and applicable, from this reading was his emphasis in the late pages about applying regulators indirectly to influence behavior by making it hard for people to do things. He begins by talking about ex post sanctions to collude laws or norms after the fact, but then he includes an interesting quote that says, "the regulator has a range of means to effect the desired constraint, but the values that these means entail need not align with the efficiency. The efficient answer may well be unjust..." (91). I suppose this would be the equivalent to kicking someone out of a discussion group for using incorrect grammar/spelling (God save our discussions on this site!) But when thinking about this reading in the context of Kim's reading on etiquette, it's very interesting to consider *when* a designer informs users of the motives or consequences of design plans. If Professor Resnick warned us about grammar/spelling would we all be more careful? If one by one we all started dropping off after being removed, would we get wise and regulate ourselves?
I think this extended conversation of self-regulation is an important one regardless of how we answer the above questions. If things are made easy or difficult for users on sites, how much influence will they effect? I'd be very interested in hearing people's examples from their sites they encounter.
Some thoughts on Lessig reading
Chris's summary of the Lessig reading is really well done, so I just wanted to add a few thoughts. From my understanding, Lessig seems to spend a good amount of time first downplaying the regulatory influence of government regulation and law, and instead emphasizing that norms, market, and architecture are the behind-the-scene regulatory sources that threaten liberty. After making the connection to cyberspace settings, Lessig begins stressing how architecture (or code, in this case) is the true influence. Finally, Lessig makes the claim that government regulation actually shapes the other three regulatory sources.
At first, Lessig seems to jump back and forth between saying that one primary regulatory source shapes the others and at the same time, everything surrounding the "pathetic dot" should be considered together. While I realize Lessig is ultimately saying that each regulatory source influences and shapes each other, his conclusion seems to emphasize greatly on all the substantial influence that indirect and direct governmental regulation and laws have. Lessig then begins discussing how some regulations seem to have hidden agendas that are the ultimate threat that we face in online cyberspaces. The final sentence of this chapter is equally puzzling, "...feature of the code determines much about the power of the government". So Lessig is now backtracking and suggesting that architecture has more influence?
On another note, I actually felt that Lessig mentioned something as important in the beginning: the importance of discussing something like "what threatens liberty" by considering the particular time and place, rather than making generalizations. Similarly, in analyzing threats to online communities, it might be easier (or at least as useful) to start by trying to analyze the constituents, participants, domain, and type of interactions, instead of focusing on whether norms shape developers or whether a web-service’s subscription fees is the result of government hidden agendas.
Indirection and Misinformation
Essentially, I agree with Lessig's warning that we "should worry about a regime that makes invisible regulation easier," and found his words of warning to be the most interesting part of the article.
I'm fairly farmiliar with Lessig, and read "Code" as I was giddily preparing to come to SI at the suggestion of someone on the new student orientation Ctools site. What strikes me as the most challenging ethical issue discussed through out the book is the notion of policy and legal frameworks not being able to keep up with the speed at which information technologies adapt and evolve.
Indirection is a powerful tool used both to constrain regulatory behavior and to permit it. This is readily apparent if you note the prevalence of off-shore gambling sites to give an IT-related example, or just general corporate out-sourcing.
The same ambiguity and information asymmetry that creates a space in which the types of case studies that Lessig discusses can allow governments to indirectly regulate behavior, also allows for the gaps in regulation that allow for innovative ways around regulation (open source software, for instance)....
I think the history of code so far has shown that its a fairly flexible tool that accomodates evading regulation in ways that are both legit and transparent. At least as of yet...
Lisa McLaughlin
that was me!
I was the recommender of Code! I'm happy to find that someone found my recommendation useful. =D And it's odd to come across this in such a way.
market regulation of behaviors in online communites
I think 3 of the "ovals" LL talks about are fairly easy to translate into online behavior regulations ie:
- design the system so you *can't* misbehave (architecture)
- enforce against misbehavior through official "police" (law)
- community norms prevent misbehavior through ignoring or flaming the perp (norms)
I had a much harder time coming up with ways online where the market contrained misbehavior -- ie that certain types of undesirable behavior were so expensive that they wouldn't be actioned. I have to believe at least in World of Warcraft this would be the case in something.
Any ideas?
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oostendo@umich.edu
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Voting as a market?
I also had a hard time mapping the market concept to regulating community behavior. My thought was that voting mechanisms create a sort of market where members compete for a limited number of votes. This competition gives members incentive to contribute to the community in a meaningful, productive way and to strive to stand out among the other community members. So communitites like Digg and our own 684/884 course site might be good examples of communities that use markets to regulate behavior. But, if the voting feature regulates our behavior, at least it's transparent, right?
good point on voting -- reputation as a value
That's a really good point, in some ways the "market for attention" may give people incentive to regulate behavior if votes are being "spent" to signal the value of contributed content. Similarly, it may regulate against misbehavior if getting voted down carries consequence such as recieving negative reputation.
It's a little hard for me to distinguish if this is really just a concrete enforcement of norms, or if this is really a "market" situation, but it is a very interesting insight nonetheless.
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oostendo@umich.edu
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market as costs or market as distributed information processor
I think you're pointing to an ambiguity in how the term "the market" is used in popular discourse these days. Sometimes it refers to situations where costs and prices influence behavior. And sometimes it refers more broadly to any mechanism that aggregates and makes visible public opinion.
To the extent that reputation has only social value, producing status, I would think of it as just a reinforcer of norms, not as a market force (i.e., I would adopt the first, narrower definition). To the extent that reputation can be traded, or converted to something of tangible value (e.g., attention that generates ad revenue, or grades) then we might think of it as a market force.
... market regulation
I think that the three translations provided by the OP (architecture, law, norms) are nicely summarized.
As the OP suspected with his suggestion of WoW, virtual worlds tend to provide good examples of market constraints. In my community of study (a MUD), we use a variety of market constraints to manipulate different behaviors. For example, "gold farmers" can be a real nuisance for typical players when they take over the local turf. To mitigate this behavior, our world takes measures of hunting pressures and dilutes the loot spawned for a specific region or mob type. Furthermore, "underhunting" (killing things intended for players of a much lower level) mobs that provide large monetary returns causes new characters greater difficulties in advancement because they must compete against more experienced players. To combat this, players receive loot penalties for underhunting, providing incentive for them to pick on something their own size. Both of these methods are quite effective and, I think, good examples of regulation through market constraints.
yes, this seems like market forces
Players can do what they want, but the payoffs direct their efforts in particular directions
Captchas as cost?
This might not be the right idea, but maybe captchas are a constraint on people automatically creating spam emails. Because captchas are costly to solve automatically (computers can't and human labor costs a lot), this misbehavior is thwarted. Please let me know if this is right or totally wrong!
yep, captchas are constraints
I heard that spammers hire people to just sit around and solve captchas all day to sign up for e-mail accounts. Hopefully that's a thing of the past. But anyway... I think captchas are definitely a constraint that affects spam. It's not a norm but more of a technological constraint, in a sense, the kind the regulates and supports by using technology.
intended to be code constraint; actually market...
They're intended to be a code constraint, so that only people can do the action, not computer programs.
But because spammers can hire people (or get porn surfers to enter captcha answers), it is converted into a market constraint-- it costs a few cents per captcha solved.
Attention Markets
I think this is a good point. Online it takes virtually no investment to produce content so activities that are constrained in the real world flourish online. The obvious example here is mailers vs. spam. If mailers were as cheap to send as spam our mailboxes would be overflowing.
The market view that I took was the attention market. This is constrained in a number of ways, because human have a finite amount of attention and the Internet is infinitely full of crap. To me this is the constraint that the online markets optimize for, getting peoples attention.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-Jorge Luis Borges
Are we programmed?
John Blair
The relevance here is hard to miss, as I interpreted code quite literally, as did Lessig, in the following passage: "The code writer, as Ethan Katsh puts it, is the "architect."
The thing that really struck however is the next passage: "But how can we "make and maintain" this balance between modalities? What tools do we have to achieve a different construction? How might the mix of realspace values be carried over to the world of cyberspace? How might the mix be changed if change is desired?
What I thought of here is: we're all programmed - or at least suffer the constraints placed upon us by the programs (their architecture) that we interact with every day. So given that, how do we design systems, applications, programs to allow the user to not be faced with the constraints of the "code writer". Of course this is being done to a certain degree with modular / re-usable code, methods, objects, etc, that allow the user to determine what the code will do. But this is only a "pathetic dot" in the path of the steam roller. There has to be other things we can do to control our own environments more.
Carrying this into other areas of life, as Lessig does, how do we get the government to allow us to govern ourselves? Hoping they'll be direct is likely out of the question, so what options do we have left when they essentially dictate all the regulators?
invisible laws
Lessig makes some thought provoking arguments about regulation of behavior. As I was reading it I thought he is just stating the obvious and felt that his numerous examples were beginning to seem similar and a little boring. However, later in the article he makes the point about laws indirectly regulating behavior by manipulating the three other constraints, Social, Economic, and Architecture and then the purpose of all those examples seemd much clearer to me. It provided me with a framework to frame a problem of regulating (or influencing) behavior in.
Supposing our goal in our community is to regulate behavior.
From the article we can list the constraints and how they act.
Constraints ------------ Act Through
1. Law ------------ Threat of punishment
2. Social ------------Stigmas, Norms
3. Market ------------Economic means
4. Architecture ------------ Physical boundaries
Now we have four ways to regulate the behavior.
Let's see the feasibility of each.
1. The law I presume is going to be pretty hard to change just for our community, and perhaps something not in our locus of control
2. Social norms - Perhaps something we can set and change for our site but again not very easy to change.
3. Market - Cost of things - This is perhaps much more in our control and easier to change, but still driven by market economics and the range of our prices will be dictated by the larger market.
4. Architecuture - for an online community - essentially the code and the interaction behavior. For online communities and web based ventures this is by far the easiest to control for the owners of the site and thus perhaps the best instrument they have to regulate behvior.
Therefore in most caeses it might be a good idea to try to design the architecture, code, and interaction of the community to regulate the behavior.
Some other takeaways from the reading which I found interesting:
Law can either act directly or it can act indirectly.
When acting directly it threatens through some form of punishment.
When acting indirectly it modifies one of the other structure of constraints.
Choosing which path to take is determined by the cost vs. benefits of each.
Indirectly influencing the other three constraints through law can be either good or bad for the community (good and bad of course might be different depending on what side you are, but the basic argument is indirect influence in itself isn't good or evil). However, indirect influence has some subtle consequences which we should watch out for, particularly if the agent redirecting could have directly affected the law.
Indirection Misdirects Responsibility:
If an authority can impose a law directly but it uses indirection, it is transferring responsibility, thus undermining transparency. If transparency is of something the society values then indirection muddles it. Further, this kind of misdirection can not only muddle responsibility but effect the entire meaning of things because it changes the agent who carries out the action.
We should worry about regimes that makes invisible regulation easier. Invisibility provides an incentive for bad regulation because responsibility can be muddled.
Better and Best Ways to Regulate?
Along with feasibility, I wonder if some methods are generally more desireable than others.
I would put laws at the bottom of the list - laws are builky, hard to adapt, hard to maintain, etc. Social norms, in comparison, seem like a much better alternative. They are light-weight because they exist within the shared organizational knowledge of the community. They are adaptive to community changes. They are enforced through the behavior of many, not the burden of one.
Architecture has a lot of front-loaded design work. It is also poorly adaptive. However, once its in place, regulation of the desired action should be automatic, because it is built into what is possible. If a violation is not possible, it can't be violated.
Regualtin'
I agree, you need to regulate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi7UUJ6cwLQ
nice job relating to online communities
I think you're right on with your assessment that market and especially architecture are the places where we can have an effect on regulating behavior in the online communities we make or manage.
I am similarly concerned about the indirect, invisible regulating that can happen. I much prefer transparency and I'm totally with you that we need to prevent it - the example about abortions bothered me because the gov't was practically telling people what to believe by abusing respect for doctors' authority. I think in that case it's a personal freedom that should not have been taken away from them to be able to talk about abortion. People often need to find a doctor who agrees with some of their fundamental beliefs in order to be served well, and in this case, that just couldn't happen.
We can use all 4 in online communities
I think you're taking Lessig too literally. Instead, draw analogies.
An online community can have its own legal system. But you have to analyze carefully who the authorities are, what actions they can monitor, and what punishments they have available.
Watch out for the regulators
Government has and will influence the cyberspace. Lessig gives examples of government implementing its agenda directly or indirectly. So far I think the government has stayed away from Internet. Perhaps Net neutrality will be the first acid test in government regulation in Internet.
I have an argument against government becoming a major influencer. I think we are moving from a nation based society to a corporation based society. Today some of the biggest commercial entities are commercial companies. They fund politicians campaign. So they indirectly influence the policy making of the government. Google is not opening a office in DC to sell lava lamps!
Community owners can use indirect means to implement their agenda. Default settings is a classic example. Most users don't change the default settings in products/services, so the default settings like wallpaper, search engine matter a lot. This could be a design alternative to implement the code of conduct in the community.
Code and other regulation
This chapter discusses four tools to regular individuals’ behaviors which includes laws, norms, market and architecture. Several examples are listed to illustrate their different functions to support regulation. One important claim is that “the same constraint can be achieved through different means, and the different means are differently costly”. Therefore, the efficiency about achieving the same goal using different methods is also articulated with different cases. As a background chapter, it provides a broad basement for the regularity of Internet.
As code is one important tool to regulate Internet, I have a specific question about the relationship between programmer and web designer, how do they communicate with each other? Are their goals always consistent with each other?
What things regulate
Lessig provides a frame of regulating behaviors, and catches some interactions between different constraints. The main design clam of this reading could be: in order to regulate a subject or behavior, there are four main ways to achieve the goal (regulation), including laws, norms, markets, and architecture. For example, if car radio theft is a problem, you may regulate it by
Law: increase the penalty for car radio theft
Architecture: make the radio no longer effective once stolen.
Market: Decrease the price of the radio. If it’s not valuable, no one will steal it.
Norms: Educate children not to steal. (Indirectly influenced by law)
Also, law can regulate misbehavior not only directly but also indirectly, that is, law can aim to change other constrains to achieve the regulator’s goal. However, I would say law could be changed by other constrains as well, such as norms. In addition, he points out by regulating code writing, the government (site owner) may make invisible regulation easier.
I like this reading a lot. While Kim talks about creating ground rules, this reading reminds me to think about any other effect the rules might cause. I can’t help thinking of new requirements for obtaining a Michigan driver's license and wonder what other consequences of this are.
Law & code
Here is what I get out of Lessig's reading. From the perspective of someone who is regulated ot constrained -- whom he referred to as a dot -- Lessig restated the importance of a built environment of social life. Several constraints are mentioned as important, which are legal, norms, market and technology related. Lessig illustrated his points over these constraints through the smoking example, which does make a lot of sense. And the ultimate point then is induced that any change in any one of the above mentioned constraints may have more or less effect on the whole. These constraints are not independent and each can support or oppose the others.
He then continued to talk about the role of law -- the key takeaway in this chapter I guess. An interested example has been presented at this point and by reading througth the whole example of car radio theft, he explicitly explained his ideas that same constraints can be achieved through different means and in terms of the decision process, cost benefit analysis will be the proper approach.
Another point I noticed is that Lessig mentioned that law can change several things, such as social norm, architecture and etc. In addition, it does not always play a positive role and it can be either direct or indirect. groups of examples help to understand better the idea.
Information Architecture and Social Ends
Fascinating article, with much in the form of practical constructs and best practices for designing transparent and indirect regulatory systems. Even though Lessig's four constraints are certainly applicable to online communities, he didn't provide too many examples. In the same spirit of his examples that denote ways architecture was changed to further collective or social ends, I would like to explore two examples that explore ways information architecture was changed to further collective or social ends in online communities.
1) Facebook just announced that next week, applications that generate positive responses from news feed alerts will be permitted to increase the volume of notifications, while applications that generate less excitement will have their volume of notifications restricted. This serves two collective ends for the Facebook community: a) With the number of applications and application installs ever increasing, news feed alerts are increasingly overwhelmed by newsfeed notices. This information architecture redesign will make the volume of communication regarding application activity manageable. b) In any open software development platform, application quality will obviously vary. By abstracting news feed announcements of applications that generate activity (clickthroughs, installs, etc.), Facebook is taking steps to encourage the cream rises to the top.
2) Mixx, a social news site for private groups, just rolled out a private messaging feature that lets any member message any other member. While private communication in social communities may harm the greater good by depriving users of access to the breadth of activity, it’s entirely possible (just harder) to subvert these blocked avenues and find ways to communicate externally using e-mail or IM. By rolling out this information architecture redesign, Mixx will capture member communication within its boundaries and thus foster more community loyalty by enhancing the formation of one-on-one relationships. However, moderation may become a problem of impossible scope. This creates an underground avenue for behavior that may oppose what Mixx owners have in mind for their brand.
Great examples
Jon, I think these are great examples to illustrate Lessig's concepts. This article has also caused me to think about the effects of rules and laws, and what their intended purposes are.
The Facebook example is very interesting, because it shows that Facebook has realized a problem with its application architecture: too many spammy requests, and people stop paying attention to them altogether. So, they choose to change the architecture of the system (the code being the architecture in this case), with the hope of changing social norms as an effect. They hope that norms will change so that people will accept and respond to requests. It's good in this case that Facebook is being transparent about these changes; it helps to make people aware of the upcoming changes and be more likely to accept them.
It will be interesting to see if user behavior with requests does in fact change as a result of this action. And, will there be any unforseen consequences to this? One I can think of is that this will make it even harder for new applications, which are already at a disadvantage, to become popular.
market forces?
This example looks like one where FB is trying to put market forces to work. Application owners now have an incentive to target their posts more effectively.
So, it's a change in architecture that generates market forces to regulate behavior.
Thoughts
I just want to add a few thoughts to what has already been said so well by others.
What I got most out of Lessig's article was the lesson about direct vs. indirect manipulation. Indirection is marked by a lack of transparency - it removes the regulator from responsibility and gets an effect without political cost. The big question is, should nontransparent means be allowed when transparent means are available? Lessig goes on in the rest of the book to argue how indirectly, by regulating code writing, the government is able to regulate the Internet in this way. This lack of transparency makes it hard for us to resist bad legislation, because we're not thinking about how it is affecting us.
Lessig in this article focuses on code, specifically, when he's talking about the Internet, but his arguments can certainly be applied to online communities. I think the biggest things to think about, as community designers, would be how to regulate your online community effectively by choosing the best possible means to create the change. The big difference is that online architecture, a.k.a. code, is much easier to change than is physical archictecture like roads, bridges, etc. This means that changing the code also can easily be done transparently - just a few edited lines of code, and voila, regulation can be achieved. The question is - is it ethical, and is it right to make big changes without notifying the community?
Typically, if a change is big enough, it will be noticeable, so this isn't normally an issue. Case in point: Digg recently made a big change to its algorithm of how submissions are promoted to the front page. The catch - they didn't inform the community about the changes or their intended results, and because of this, there has been an uproar by top Digg users. These 'top Diggers' believe that this change was made with the goal of making it harder for them to get their stories promoted - something they view as unfair and wrong for the community. Would this currently be such an issue if Digg had explained their reasoning for the changes first? I don't know, but it certainly is an interesting issue.
Reference: http://valleywag.com/348338/new-digg-algorithm-angers-the-social-masses
Regulating anonymous snipes
Design claim: Requiring registration as members before able to post comment, will support the goal of preventing "careless" comments in the forum, in the context of an open community.
Design alternative: The comment form can be designed to hint that the owners "know" who the commenters are (eg by displaying IP address), to show they are not anonymous. Or the form just doesnt appear without logging in (which requires registration). A realspace code.
Going through the three other regulators according to Lessig, we can institute a law/policy to require registration of users, but the effect maybe that the site will be ignored anyway. So law may not be the best route for regulation. In such a situation, indirection in the form of market can be done - by making those posting "careless" comments suffer (ban, gag, delete, etc) - or could that be law? Through norm, other members can post the offending user on a special list (ignore list?) or vote the offender out (permanently, or for a limited time).
Code and Unintended Consequences
This was supposed to be its own comment but I inadvertently added it as a reply. My apologies.
I've read most of Code before this class and I think Lessig has a tremendous ability to make a strong case for the things he advocates. The ubiquity of Creative Commons as an alternative to draconian copyright law is a testament to his vision of seeing the potential problems by having a copyright law with too many onerous restrictions. This foresight seems to indicate he understands the "law of unintended consequences" but I didn't feel like he made as strong of a case as he could have when talking about the regulatory constraints that act upon the "pathetic dot."
What he does well: Lessig goes beyond what we might expect to be normal regulatory forces upon the pathetic dot. I think market, law, and norms are relatively self-evident. However, the architecture, or code, constraint seems to be where Lessig is bringing his unique perspective to the issues. Normally, we might try to lump what Lessig defines as "architecture" in one of the other constraints, but he makes a strong case for why it should be its own entity.
Where it gets problematic: Lessig mentions how law can act upon archtecture to bring about change. As an example he mentions ADA (Americans with Disability Act). He describes how the law forces builders to change the way buildings are architected to make them accessible to people that are disabled e.g. a person in a wheelchair. I was reminded of a recent Freakonomics blog entry at the New York Time by Dubner and Levitt, titled "Unintended Consequences." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/magazine/20wwln-freak-t.html?fta=y
Dubner and Levitt actually use the case of ADA to illustrate how sometimes the laws we enact to create different behavior in the code backfire or misfire. I won't recap the whole article but their basic argument is the law is supposed to help people with disabilities – their example is a woman who is deaf trying to see a medical specialist – but sometimes it ends up hurting those it is supposed to help. In fact, two economists Acemoglu and Angrist found that ADA cause employment among disabled to drop after the law was enacted.
These unintended consequences are important considerations when we are looking at changing the archtectural/code constraint. Lessig obviously understands this, based on his work with the creative commons. And he certainly has the capability to make a strong case for his arguments. I'm just not sure he made a rock-solid case in this chapter.
Revenge Effect!
That's an interesting observation. This would probably be an example of what Tenner calls a "revenge effect (http://www.amazon.com/Why-Things-Bite-Back-Consequences/dp/0679747567) !
I wonder if this revenge effects such as this are more likely to happen when we try to indirectly influence things because there may be other indirect consequences that happen simultaneously.
I think what Lessig is doing
I think what Lessig is doing for deregulation of copyright,
and IP (i.e open source “anything”) is great.
I don’t think the problem is in regulation but in the aftermath- mainly
bureaucracy and corruption which is what he is supposedly doing quite a bit of
research on.
His books are all on the web for free (one such book is the
future of ideas which I have provided a
link to) under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial
(which he championed through his company Creative Commons)
http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/download/
I agree 100% with him in believing that we should be worried
about a regime that makes it easier to regulate. This goes back to my other post on GSA(govt.
state apparatuses)
Countercode
Lessig's four: law, norms, market, architecture
I still think norms underly all of his four mechanisms:
* law: obeying the law is a norm
* "architeture": accepting physical constraints involves norms
* market: how to behave in the market is a norm (and highly culturally contingent)
Lessig's take is great but he completely misses the concept of counterforce:
The hackers credo:
A closed door is an insult; a locked door is an invitation.
In other words, the presence of influencing constraints immediately provokes an attempt at circumvention. Just as culture (norms) produces counterculture, force produces counterforce, and code produces countercode.
Re: code making invisible regulation easier
Countercode creates an alternative. For example, the primary factor in China's decision to adopt Linux was the transparency of the code, i.e. it is precisely the concern over invisible elements in non-transparent code that led them to the decision.
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PHartzog@umich.edu
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser
Good point!
I think the four elements, law, norms, market and architecture, are woven together. I don't quite agree with Lessig that there is a uni-direction effect from law to the other three elements. Architecture might affect the law too. For example, in China where ordinary citizens are not involved in legislation, people can use the internet and make pressure to the government to pass certain laws.