Rights and Responsibilities of Participants in Networked Communities (1994) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 17-30
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From page 17... ...
6 RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES IN NETWORKED COMMUNITIES goods and services become available over networks and methods of making and receiving electronic payments securely are implemented. This metaphor emphasizes the actions that people take using the new communications medium, and not just the inert information that flows through the networks or the communities that form around common interests.
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From page 18... ...
2 Networks and Sociely The glamour of network technologies is impressive, but it should not blind us to the social and intellectual challenges posed by new media. The real challenges are much more likely to arise from the people using networks for communication and information exchange than from the development of the technology to move large amounts of electronic information very rapidly from one place to another, though technology itself may enable new ways of meeting these challenges.
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From page 19... ...
Many networked communities believe strongly in the desirability of unfettered communication. At the same time, many (especially those that reside on the Internet)
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Networked communities exist because networks enable individuals with shared interests or affinities to affiliate electronically. As with physical communities, network cultures are not homogeneous, and the participants in networked communities often have conflicting values.
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Under these circumstances, it is perhaps understandable that different networked communities might have different values. Many universities govern their electronic networks through campus policies that are substantially the same as the policies governing other pieces of university infrastructure.
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A third example illustrates the problem of even defining the boundaries of an electronic community. In July 1994, a California couple was convicted by a Tennessee jury of transmitting obscene images through interstate telephone lines through their bulletin board system,5 thus raising the question of whether it is the community standards of California or Tennessee that are relevant to the Supreme Court's position that community standards should define what does or does not constitute "obscenity." In short, people who use electronic networks subscribe to a range of values that is highly diverse.
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From page 23... ...
Sara Kiesler, a professor of social sciences and social psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, noted that a user's attitudes may change because "this same person in a different situation has a very different view of the rights that he has." ENFORCEMENT OF BEHAVIORAL NORMS IN NETWORKED COMMUNITIES The means for enforcing behavioral norms in networked communities are as diverse as user values. For example, commercial providers have contractual agreements with users.
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Network enforcers basically have three options: disconnect rule breakers, employ peer or social pressures, or apply the law. Although making rules for electronic networks is challenging, enforcing the rules may be even more problematic, he noted, because of technological and economic
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have new kinds of intermediaries that are very important." Anne Wells Branscomb, a communications lawyer with the Center for Information Policy Research at Harvard University, said electronic networks "are a new environment with which we have not had enough legal experience to know exactly what rules apply. So I think we have a whole new legal world to worry about." The emergence of cultural norms is often crystallized by some kind of dramatic event or crisis that underscores the need for new
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From page 26... ...
For a variety of reasons, some deny that a consensus exists, or even that a consensus can exist, and they do not recognize the value in consulting existing legal regimes for guidance. For example, David Hughes, of Old Colorado City Communications, claimed at the February 1993 forum that human behavior on electronic networks exists outside of Office of the White House Press Secretary, "The Clipper Chip," August 16, 1993; Office of the White House Press Secretary, document describing implementation of recommendations of the interagency review of encryption policy, February 4, 1994.
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From page 27... ...
With most commercial network service providers, a condition of use to which all users must agree is that users will abide by a certain set of rules about acceptable behavior; violators can be punished by the provider's discontinuing their access to the system. Contractual l10n the other hand, a legal regime does exist for space today, as does one for the sea.
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From page 28... ...
The playing field is arguably more even because most bulletin board operators are relatively small in scale, and thus potential individual users have relatively more clout and greater freedom of choice.l3 Many universities have codes of acceptable network behavior as well. For example, EDUCOM has promulgated a bill of rights and responsibilities for users in the academic community that it urges its members to respect.
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He further suggested that a sense of personal responsibility has been difficult to develop or enforce on electronic networks because of conflicting desires to both authenticate and conceal identities. Governance of electronic network communities poses special challenges and opportunities.
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From page 30... ...
He further suggested that laws regulating behavior on electronic networks might well and fruitfully be based on the expectations of reasonable 16David Hughes argued that the founding fathers would have used computer bulletin boards to correspond. This may be true; Benjamin Franklin was the originator of the system of surface transport of written information called the U.S.
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