Stazz's Stuff

On my hesitance to use "reticent" to mean "hesitant"

2013-01-19T12:28:00.000-05:00

Used under Creative Commons from here.

Whenever I'm listening to someone speak, especially a public figure or a television character, and I hear "reticent" used in place of "reluctant" or "hesitant," I think my eye begins to twitch a little. That usage is just wrong, right? Well, as a good postmodern, I've trained myself to stop and consider my potential absolutism whenever my brain renders a subconscious judgment.

You're all familiar, I'm sure, with the idea of language as a living entity, one that evolves and changes over time to properly reflect the current historical moment, society, beliefs, and culture. Terms become archaic (it's seldom that I ask my wife "Whence do you come?" or "Wither shall we go?"), they take on new meanings ("text me later, bro"), neologisms are created ("She IM'd me last night"), and even the use of articles changes (in American English, you rarely see constructions like "an historical moment" [unless someone is trying to be pretentious]). (This doesn't even touch on the evolution of syntax ("Hi, Chris" becomes the email salutation "Hi Chris," we don't say "What price bananas?" to the person stocking the supermarket in California.)

But I'm not sure that language can live in total postmodernism. For language to be a communicative—which, conveniently enough, is rooted in the same Latin "communis" or "common" as "community"—device, it must hold some common, shared meaning. I think language is most effective when all of the participants connect the same referent with the same referrer, i.e. a rose is a rose; a rose is not an apple.

It turns out that, just like the correct answer to what kind of bear is best, there are two schools of thought, and its unlikely that consensus will take shape.

These two schools are known as descriptivists and prescriptivists. The former, as the name implies, believes that the role of linguists is to watch how language is used and describe it in works such as the OED and Webster's. According to English professor Mark Bauerline, a turning point for descriptivists was the 1961 publishing of Webster's New International Dictionary, the first dictionary to embrace the idea of descriptvism.

Before that time, prescriptivists controlled a linguistic hegemony. This group, as you can likely foresee, believes that there should be an authoritative source (I cringe at the sound of that) on the proper use of language. Bauerline points out that in the Webster's that precedes the 1961 printing, the 1934 edition, some words received the loving categorizations "erroneous" or "illiterate"! (ibid)

I think my other eye just started twitching. It seems that if there is something worse than what seems to be an "incorrect" use of language, it could be a kind of sanctimonious, absolutist body that renders judgment about whether a particular person's use of language is "illiterate"! While the purpose of Bauerline's essay in The Public Discourse, a very conservative publication, is quite to the contrary of the way I'm using it here, it contains good evidence that is useful to this discussion, not the least of which is a quote from Harvard linguist Steven Pinker, who comments on how authoritative uses of language form:

"It begins when a self-anointed expert elevates one of his peeves or cockamamie theories into an authoritative pronouncement that some usage is incorrect, or better still, ignorant, barbaric, and vulgar."

For example, it seems that even John Dryden (of whom I'm a big fan) may be personally responsible for creating the "rule" that one can't end a sentence on a preposition (link found here). I'm not sure what he's going on about.

So that's a fine dilemma. Given all of that, is the person who's reticent to cross this busy street correct (danger of imminent crushage notwithstanding)? I think I'm even more torn than when I first started thinking about this. I really want that usage to be "wrong," but I really don't want there to be a wrong. Given the lesser of two evils situation here, I guess I will cast my vote against conservatism and absolutism. Use words to refer to whatever you want, and I will attempt to divine the referent by the context of the word's use.

When a click will do: A proposal for "liking" email

2013-01-13T10:11:00.000-05:00


Photo by: Owen Brown, Used under Creative Commons license http://www.flickr.com/photos/owenwbrown/4857593259/

As someone who loves writing, language, and the nuance that a command of the language can convey, I feel slightly self-conscious about making the proposal that I’m about to. OK, I’m just going to say it: they should add a “like” button to email services like Gmail. That doesn’t mean, as many have suggested, that it would function as “like” buttons on blogs, which send the item of your liking to Facebook. It means that there should be a quick way to acknowledge the receipt of a message or convey approval when a detailed text-based answer is unnecessary.

Here’s an anecdotal syllogism that could be idiosyncratic to me, but I suspect not:

Premise 1 — I get a ton of email everyday

Premise 2 — I feel that it’s good form to reply to almost every email to acknowledge it, even if the response is just “thanks!” or “ok”

Therefore — I respond to a ton of freaking email, many of these responses being a single word of acknowledgement/approval.

So what if, next to the buttons for reply, forward, etc, there were a simple “like” button. It would be a binary communication device that, when clicked, would instantly display to the sender that their message was understood.

Examples: “Great, I’ll be at your house tomorrow at 7pm.” Like. “I ran your budget report and put it in the shared drive for you.” Like. “Everything is going well with the project.” Like.

Of course, as on Facebook, you could opt to accompany this with a brief message/comment if you so chose, but you would have the option to nicely wrap up a conversation with a single click.

I think that I, like many, have become accustomed to processing large amounts of information in a scroll, click, and comment style of information filtering and interaction. In Facebook, I move quickly through my newsfeed, reading, liking, briefly commenting, and learning about what my friends are up to. In Twitter, I can read through the tweets of people I following and retweet with the click of a button. In Google Reader, I can move through hundreds of blog posts quickly, sharing with a single click. Why not email too?

Google Plus: First Impressions

2011-06-30T18:56:00.002-04:00

So I was fortunate enough to be an early user of Google Plus, Google's new answer to Facebook. And, so far, I would say that it's not bad, but it's unclear if it will offer anything that will overcome the inertia keeping most users bound to Facebook.

The biggest promise in Plus is a granular sharing experience, the ability to craft virtual relationships that mirror the nuance of real-life ties. One of the most significant problems with early implementations of Facebook was the homogenization of degrees of acquaintance (e.g. friends vs. closest friends vs. family, etc.) into the binary categorization of "friend." Clearly, this ersatz virtual construct didn't offer the necessary mirroring of real-space relationships, and caused worlds to collide, a la the social networking cautionary tale of the day. Facebook moved toward correcting this with the creation of lists, but Plus takes it a step further.

In Plus, you add people to "circles," arbitrary collections that you can use to replicate the nuance of real-world relationships. For example, you could create a group called "high school" and put all of your high school friends in it, a group for your coworkers, etc. They also state that the group names are private, so friends are unaware of the name of the group you place them in (though I still wouldn't recommend making a group called "enemies"!). Every time you share anything (a status, a picture, etc.), you make a conscious decision as to which circle(s) you share it with. In the experience I've had so far, this is much more controlled and conscious a process than Facebook sharing through lists.

Another feature I like is that Plus stays true to Google's ethos of "data liberation." That is to say, they make it very easy to get any data you put into Plus out. You can download, for example, any pictures that you upload back to your local machine. This, I think, is actually a big deal. One of the things that keeps people pretty locked into Facebook is the difficulty involved with getting data out of it. To the best of my knowledge, there is not way to download all of your data en masse. Correction in the comments--thanks, Chris L! I didn't realize that.

In terms of design aesthetic, Plus is very austere, in the minimalist tradition of Facebook (in what I think is reactionary to the carnival chic that was MySpace). Though, to me, the feel is bordering on insipid. From an interface perspective, it seems fairly intuitive and easy to use.

While the service does offer some interesting features (video chat, group IM discussions from mobile devices, etc.), I haven't seen anything that feels revolutionary. Unless Plus is able to capitalize on a youth-led exodus from Facebook (as a reaction to the mainstream/adult presence there), I doubt that it will, at this point, make much of a dent in Facebook's market share. But I do feel like it has a better chance of being successful than Buzz or Wave (though I do think Wave was misunderstood and a good product).

Would love to hear your opinions on this.

The Poetry of Space: Mise En Scene

2011-06-28T22:56:00.001-04:00

Don't ask how my tortuous reading/reference path lead me to reading Theater and Its Double by semi-crazy playwright Antonin Artaud, but it did. While Artaud lays the groundwork for his famous Theater of Cruelty concept, in between some fairly pretentious puffery, he takes a very interesting stance: that words and dialogue are the province of books--not theater. Huh.

Artaud refers to the theater as the "poetry of space," or a "language created for the senses." This is in opposition to written dialogue or text, which he considers to be the domain of the "mind." I thought that this concept was really cool, as it immediately made me think of all of the times I've seen my wife perform modern dance, and it really is the poetry of space.

To appreciate what he means by this dialogue-to-aesthetic dichotomy vis-a-vis theater, we have to consider his definition of "mise en scene." I say his definition because he explicitly points out his disdain for using the term to refer to props on the stage, the costumes, etc.--ornamental additions to the scene. When Artaud uses "mise en scene," he means the complete aesthetic experience: the unique interaction between music, lighting, props, movement, gestures, facial expression--everything but the spoken dialogue, save for its sonic properties, like intonation and cadence. "It is the mise en scene that is the theater," he asserts.

I thought this concept was fascinating. It makes a lot of sense, but I had never considered divorcing the language of theater from the rest of the aesthetics. In fact, the dialogue has always been central to me, and I read more plays than I get to see in person (alas).

But no intelligent point is complete without the devolution of a sound idea into a polemic! Artuad skillfully interleaves his distaste for the mise en scene living "under the exclusive dictatorship of speech" in Western theater:

"In any case, I hasten to say it at once, a theater which subordinates the mise en scene and production…to the text, is a theater of idiots, madmen, inverts, grammarians, grocers, antipoets, and positivists, i.e. Occidentals"

Yikes. Ad hominem at its best!

Socializing the book

2011-06-21T18:52:00.000-04:00

The discussion of creation through the juxtaposition of existing elements can take many forms. For example, Lawrence Lessig’s Remix puts forth the idea that mixing individually copyrighted elements, like overlaying a song on top of a series film clips, creates a new entity, the remix, that shouldn’t be subject to copyright constraints on each of its components. The argument is that the remixer has created something new, a new work of art born of the unique juxtaposition of existing works. In the course of reading a book lent to me by my good friend Warren today, I found myself intrigued by how his notes in the margins transformed the book into something else, a new work of sorts.

The book that Warren lent me (Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be, an excellent exploration of the social construction of reality [constructivism] vs. objectivism) stands on its own as a solid scholarly work. But I found my eyes constantly drawn to Warren’s scrawls in the margins. Pithy phrases like, “Descartes” and “Tower of Babel” either created a unique form of synthesis through a juxtaposition he made or pointed out the potential influences in the creation of an idea.

Of course, it’s not that interesting in and of itself to say that your eyes can be drawn to margin notes in a lent book. What I thought was interesting was the social aspect of the need I felt to respond in some cases. I wanted to, in places, say, “Yes, this is Cartesian in a way! I hadn’t considered that. It made me think of reality constructed through a Manichean lens, myself.” Perhaps he hadn’t thought of that (but he probably did). The point is that as he altered the work to create a new work through his notes, and I wanted to create yet another new work via my responses, we get toward a very social interaction with a long-form piece.

Consider the full-circle social implications of this:
• Warren lends me a book that he thinks, knowing me, that I will finding interesting or at least provoking

• He’s read this book and marked it up

• I read the book and add my own notes and respond to some of his • I give the book back

• He skims and looks for my responses. Unlike a traditional book group, we’ve just interacted with the work in serial. We didn’t have to remember specific ideas and discuss them. We marked all of them, and we could always discuss later.

It makes me wonder if a technology exists to do this. Or how hard it would be to create one. For example, Kindle books allow for social underlinings/highlights. But what if you could comment up an ebook and share those comments just with your friends. It would be a new way of interacting with the long-form via social networking technologies!

LibriVox.Org

2011-06-20T21:43:00.003-04:00

My dad sent me a link to this really cool site called LibriVox.org today. LibriVox is a site that provides completely free audio recordings of public domain works read aloud. I immediately searched their archive for my favorite authors—Christopher Marlowe first, of course, followed by Alexander Pope. I was thrilled to find a full recording of Marlowe’s "Hero and Leander," and one of Pope's "Essay on Man." Hearing the pieces read aloud by someone with knowledge of the works, I thought, was very similar to taking an English seminar and hearing a scholar read a work with the proper inflection and cadence. Except, in this case, there was an entire archive of scholars reading, all at my fingertips.

And so, in a way, the project is very close to the PennSound poetry project, a project very dear to me that provides freely downloadable mp3s of poetry. PennSound gives the opportunity to hear a poet reading his or her own work, and in my favorite section, PennSound Classics, to hear Renaissance and Medieval scholars reading works the way they were meant to be read/performed (it was really awesome to be able to record David Wallace reading Chaucer).

I'm hoping to one day work on a project that will allow for a mixed multimedia presentation of the text of literary works and the audio of a reading of the work. This sort of project is usually called "alignment," and allows for awesome integration of textual presentation and multimedia presentation. For example, one could highlight lines of a poem and hear the author or a scholar read just the highlighted text. If the process could ever be automated well, imagine what could be done by bringing together an audio archive like LibriVox with a textual archive like Project Gutenberg!

Don't You Forget About Me: Super Autobiographical Memories, Funes the Memorious, and the Internet

2011-06-19T20:44:00.002-04:00

Just caught a portion of 60 Minutes where they were doing a story on people with "super autobiographical memory," a new scientific phenomenon where people can literally remember everything about their lives in stupefying detail. For example, they asked people what they were doing on random dates—"what did you do on July 7, 1990?"—and they could answer with little to no hesitation, including citing what day of the week it was! "That was a Saturday. I had a music recital in the morning, and then I went to dinner at this restaurant. I had the salmon." This triggered the thought, for me, of one of my favorite short stories, "Funes the Memorious," by Jorge Luis Borges.

In Funes, Borges encounters a boy that was thrown from a horse and subsequently could remember every detail of his life and his environment in excruciating detail. He can recall specific cloud formations from any minute of any walk he took, his exact emotional state and degree of thermal comfort (thanks for teaching me that term, Sara!) from every minute of every day. In fact, he goes so far as to reconstruct every second of a previous day in the current day, which obviously takes the entire day, as it happens in real time. He devises alternate counting systems of arbitrary symbols up to around the number 24,000, and remembers every symbol. The amount of information he absorbs eventually leads to horrible bouts of insomnia (he can’t stop cataloging things), and he mysteriously dies at the end of the story at around 19 years old.

I would often use Funes in my classes as a metaphor for the Internet. It was a cool juxtaposition of literature, technology, futurism, and humanism (not to mention constructivism). We would talk about the story during our discussions of the permanence of information on the Internet. The Internet, much like Funes, stores everything, from the most trivial bits of information ("me-formation," such as what your facebook friends had for lunch today) through our most crucial data. It never forgets; it just absorbs more information. And as search technologies improve, it can recall more of it more quickly and easily than ever before. It can lead to fond reminiscence or be the “cruel historian” it’s been called in the past.

Books Through Bars

2011-02-08T12:21:00.004-05:00

It would be stating the obvious to declare that volunteering one's time to help the less fortunate can be a perspective-altering, empathy-inspiring experience. But spending time at a recent Kelly Writers House volunteer event at Books Through Bars challenged several misconceptions that I had about prisoners in our correctional facilities.

Books Through Bars is a nonprofit that sends books to prisoners incarcerated in US correctional facilities. I wasn't previously aware of this, but most prisons will not accept books from any sources other than bookstores—Amazon, for example—or approved nonprofits. So BTB fills a crucial role: providing prisoners with literature at a time when budget constraints are forcing prisons to cut back on educational programs (as one of the BTB staffers said, "you can't cut back on food or heat, so education is the first thing to go").

I first became aware of BTB when a good friend of mine, Al Filreis, donated a book to them in my honor as a holiday present. It was a perfect present, really, as it involved two of my loves: education and literature. So when I saw a listserv message land in my inbox about volunteering at BTB, I jumped at the opportunity to help out with this phenomenal program. We planned to spend a Saturday morning/early afternoon reading letters from prisoners requesting books, selecting books accordingly for them, and packing those books for mailing.

The Philadelphia location of BTB, located in the A-Space in West Philadelphia, feels like a cross between an excellent used book store and grade school art class (and I mean that affectionately), with several tables covered in scissors, rolls of tape, and brown paper bags for packing books. The book selection, comprised completely of donated books, was amazing. There's an entire room on the first floor dedicated to fiction and reference books (dictionaries are the most requested books), and the basement looked like a full library, filled with stacks of shelves of categorized books. Most disciplines seemed to be represented.

After a few practice runs of packing up books that had already been picked out by staff members (an activity that exposed by ineptness with most processes in the physical world), we were able to select letters from prisoners, read them, and search for appropriate books amongst the stacks. The letters ranged from brief requests for anything in a specific genre through elaborate letters requesting specific works and authors. The letters themselves, all of them, even the most austerely written, served to provide a sense of humanity to an otherwise anonymous and alienated group, a kind of collective entity we may tend to think of as "criminals." The letters rendered all the more obvious that these are people, perhaps people who've made bad mistakes or harmed others, but people nonetheless.

Going into the event, I was operating under the assumption that most prisoners were undereducated, certainly not intellectuals. The first letter I opened served to disprove this misconception. The letter's author politely introduced himself and asked for works dealing with libertarianism, specifically those of Robert Heinlein. If those were not available, he asked for existentialist literature. I was floored--then thrilled. I quickly made my way to the fiction room, scurrying between others attempting to select the perfect book. While there was no Heinlein on the shelves, I was able to pack up some Camus and Kafka for him. We were given a form letter to put in with the packages (it stated regret that we could not write personalized letters), at the bottom of which I scrawled, "excellent choices! Hope you enjoy these!--BTB."

I drew another letter from the pile, hoping that it would be a request for another genre that I knew something about. This letter, written on a scrap of loose leaf paper, asked for Classical works, specifically philosophy. Ecstatic, I ran down the stairs to the philosophy section and pulled copies of Plato's Republic and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Perfect.

The third letter I selected felt thicker than the rest. Inside, there was a letter from a prisoner being held in a Central-PA prison. His visage was photocopied in the upper-right corner of a typed letter. He explained that this was the second time that he had written to BTB, and that the first books had been excellent and influential on the art he creates. He asked for books on modern art, specifically by Jackson Pollock, and works that might help him develop some landscapes he was hoping to complete this year. He also included a photocopy of a short story that he wrote, which was published in a magazine, along with photocopy of some thumbnails of his paintings. (Unfortunately, my expertise in the humanities lies mainly in printed works, so I had to get a consult on which books to select for him.)

And while it's certainly true that not all of the requests were asked for advanced literary material, every single letter was polite and well written—and provided insight into a human life. I came away from the experience with a new outlook and a new compassion for those imprisoned in our correctional facilities. Given that I think that empathy is the most crucial skill for any human to possess, I think that more people should spend a day volunteering at BTB.

Everything BTB does, from providing the hope that literature bestows upon us, through rehabilitating through knowledge, is essential. I've decided to go on my own to volunteer as much as possible. I highly recommend that you check them out and consider getting involved.

Tor in the Times

2010-12-18T10:39:00.003-05:00

There was a good piece in yesterday's New York Times about Tor, the software that makes Internet communications nearly impossible to trace; in fact, it's the software at the heart of the WikiLeaks document-submission process.

The piece focused on an interview with a Tor "evangelist," a Tor developer who travels the globe trying to inform people—mostly non-technical people—about what Tor is and why it's important. The interview was conducted by Virginia Heffernan, who admits to have difficulty understanding how Tor works, even after being provided with a series of analogies and metaphors. But I think that she does a fairly competent job of explicating the concept of Tor, at a high level, for a general audience. There is, however, definitely a kind of irony at the center of this piece: it illustrates a person whose job it is to communicate technical concepts to laymen having extreme difficulty in crafting an analogy comprehensible to the interviewer.

Irony aside, I think it's worth reading if you're at all interested in Internet anonymity.

Expanding the Definition of SLAPP Suits

2010-12-15T19:20:00.000-05:00

The pernicious effects of SLAPP suits are further exacerbated when catalyzed by the Internet. The New York Times recently reported on the story of Justin Kurtz, a college student from Michigan, who wrote critical remarks about a towing company, T&J Towing, that wrongfully towed his car. Kurtz went on to form a Facebook page titled “Kalamazoo Residents Against T&J Towing,” in an effort to make others aware of what he saw as unethical actions on the part of T&J. Unbeknownst to Kurtz when he created the group, it would soon gather attention at a viral pace. After the group acquired 800 followers, many of whom had similar stories of T&J wrongfully removing their vehicles, the towing company filed a $750,000 lawsuit against Kurtz for defamation (Frosch, 2010).

The parallel to traditional SLAPP suits becomes immediately apparent: just like our hypothetical example of the cell company suing us at the zoning board meeting for opposing their interests, T&J files this suit against Kurtz in the hopes of silencing him and dissuading others from speaking out against them. But it also illustrates an important distinction between modern interpretations of SLAPPs and traditional SLAPP suits: while Pring & Canan’s original definition of SLAPP suits was narrowly focused on matters pertaining to the Petition Clause of the First Amendment, citizens’ right to petition government for redress of grievances, the modern definition engages with a broader type of free speech – citizens’ right to speak freely on a matter of public concern, a right granted by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.

Pring & Canan state that one of the reasons that they limited the scope of their study to cases relating to the Petition Clause was to “provide a neutral, manageable, easily applied definition whereby even opponents can agree on whether a case is a SLAPP or not” (9). So it stands to reason that there exist cases that are outside of the scope of Pring & Canan’s definition, yet still carry out the deleterious effects discovered in the original study. These broader interpretations of the definition of a SLAPP suit were first addressed in the drafting of California’s anti-SLAPP legislation.

Winners Are Losers Too: The Paradox of the “Successful” SLAPP Defense

2010-11-20T10:41:00.001-05:00

In discussing my research with colleagues and students, the first the first question I’m often asked is whether the filer can actually win in such a flagrant misuse of the legal system. After all, if the target is exercising a constitutionally protected right, how is there even a case to be made? The answer, unbeknownst to the asker expecting a simple “yes” or “no,” is complicated and hinges upon the definition of the word “win.”

Indeed, as we’ve seen in the section about the transformations that occur in a SLAPP suit, the target or his attorney must recognize the case as a SLAPP suit and file a motion to dismiss. Doing so is the closest one can get to “winning” a SLAPP case – not counting states that have “SLAPP-back” legislation, where the target can actually recover “reasonable attorney’s fees” and the filer can be fined.

Should the target not file a motion to dismiss the case on the basis of it being a violation of the First Amendment, however, the case can proceed to court and be fought on the technicalities of the injury claim. The longer the case drags on, the more damage – financial and emotional – is done to the target. Most filers, in fact, do not expect to win in the end (Pring & Canan, 1996); they hope to win a war of attrition where the target will cease her protests and be silenced before the case even comes to a conclusion. In fact, it’s been shown that 83% of targets win in cases where the dispute is seen through to a ruling (Schwarz, 2007, p. 72). But, regardless of success in court, targets have noted that financial and emotional stresses of being exposed to a protracted legal proceeding have been contributing factors to divorces and bankruptcies. Thus, even if the case is seen through to the end and the court finds in favor in the target, can we actually say that she has won?

And while harm to the target is certainly the most obvious malady attributable to a SLAPP suit, it’s possible that the most insidious harm is not done to those directly involved with the case, but to those who witness the case from a distance and are intimidated into political silence for the rest of their lives. In the case of a Denver real estate developer filing a SLAPP suit against residents who protested a city council’s decision to zone 92 acres of land for new homes, the target, Betty Johnson certainly did feel the deleterious effects of being “SLAPPed” firsthand, but the comments of other members of the community are sobering of the wide radius of the SLAPP’s shockwave. One resident confessed, after the case, “I won’t circulate another petition, and my husband wants me to get out of [community issues]” (Pring & Canan, 1996). Another resident noted that, while he might participate anonymously in policy issues, he would be loath to ever put “his name on anything” again after witnessing Johnson’s struggles (Id.). One might argue that this blow to democracy cost more than any strife felt by the target herself.

The picture gets darker if we consider the societal inequities highlighted by these suits that are predicated on the filer having more funds available (by several orders of magnitude) than the average target. It’s one thing for a person of means to be SLAPPed, but it’s another when we consider the “unequal distribution of legal services between the upper and lower classes” (Schwarz, 2007). This concept, in general, was highlighted by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 when he said that “90% of lawyers serve 10% of the people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented” (Schwarz). If these cases can bankrupt an upper-middle-class person, what hope do those of lower socioeconomic classes hope of gaining fair access to legal defense against SLAPP suits?

So, can a person “win” a SLAPP suit that goes to court? Well his case will be successful about 83% of the time. That is, he will be successful in avoiding the average injury claim of $9-million dollars (Id.). But the great paradox here is that, even in these cases, the target – or anyone who witnesses the case – is also the loser. The equation changes, however, when we consider the fact that states can enact anti-SLAPP or SLAPP-back legislation to dissuade companies from filing SLAPP suits. In the coming section, we’ll look at this legislation and how it has helped to broaden and redefine SLAPP suits from Pring & Canan’s original classification.

Metamorphoses: The Mechanics of Traditional SLAPP Suits

2010-11-16T07:40:00.000-05:00

Given that the motivation of many SLAPP suits is to stem reputational damage resulting from public speech, it makes sense for the “filer” – the title Pring and Canan bestow upon the plaintiffs in SLAPP suits – to try to take the discussion with the “target” – the defendant – out of the public sphere, where it can be subjected to reason and scrutiny. Thus, the mechanics of the SLAPP suit serve to create this transformation: moving a case from a public, political discussion to a private, judicial dispute over technicalities (Pring & Canan, 1996, p. 10).

Traditional SLAPP suits, those that seek to curtail citizens’ rights to petition government, by definition, start out being public and political. A citizen will request governmental consideration on an issue of public interest and, in the process, come into opposition with another party’s interests (ibid). Let’s consider our cell tower example. At the zoning board meeting, you publicly asked your municipality to deny the wireless provider the permit to build its cell phone tower. Your desire – for the tower not to be built – is in direct opposition with the provider’s – for the tower to be constructed. It’s the township’s role to come to a decision. To this point, the system is functioning properly.

But when the wireless provider decided that it would be more efficacious and efficient to file the defamation suit against you, thereby attempting to interfere with your right to petition government, initiating the SLAPP suit, it also caused a number of metamorphoses to the nature of the dispute (ibid):

1) dispute transformation - the dispute changed from being political to being legal. This is achieved by “characterizing the targets’ conduct as some technical, legalistic injury (such as libel, business interference, or conspiracy)” (ibid).

2) forum transformation – moved the dispute from the public view, where it can be seen through to resolution, to a “private judicial one (where only technicalities can be addressed)” (ibid).

3) issue transformation – changed the basis of the case from potential injuries to the target (e.g. whether or not the cell tower is constructed) to harms done to filer (defamation, business interference, etc.) (ibid).

All of these changes are purely advantageous to the filer because, in addition to the intimidation caused by the SLAPP suit, the discussion as to what should be done vis-à-vis the matter in contention is put aside in favor of analyzing how the target may have harmed the filer.

The final stage of the SLAPP lifecycle is the most crucial. Should the target’s attorney recognize the case as an attempt to stifle constitutionally protected speech, the case will typically be dismissed (ibid). In these cases the target’s attorney has successfully retransformed the case from its private, judicial state back to its public, political existence. If the target, however, does not recognize that he is embroiled in a case meant to unconstitutionally curtail his free speech, and proceeds to engage on “the merits” of the case, he will likely “lose” – we’ll cover the definitions of “win” and “lose” vis-à-vis SLAPP suits later. In these cases, the target, by not being sensitive to the fact that a SLAPP was occurring, failed to retransform the case, and will likely pay dearly for it.

As we can see, one’s success in fending off SLAPP suits is contingent upon her recognized that she is, in fact being SLAPPed. If that doesn’t happen, the case can and will go to court, where the parties will engage on the particulars of the defamation claim. In discussing my research with friends and colleagues, the most common question about SLAPP suits is whether the filer can “win,” or if they’re ever “successful.” In the coming section, we’ll consider how the answer to this question is complicated, how a win can actually be a loss, at both the case level and at the macro level.

SLAPP Suits: Origin of the Term

2010-11-13T10:56:00.002-05:00

Here's the first chunk of reasoning for my paper. If you have any comments, please do feel free to send!

Even though SLAPP suits, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, in the American judicial system can be traced back as far as 1802 (Harris v. Huntington), just after the American Revolution, these cases were not formally identified as discrete entities until 1983, when lawyer George Pring and sociologist Penelope Canan began a groundbreaking study that culminated in their work, SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out (1996).

While the definition of SLAPP suits has been broadened by subsequent legislation, the types of suits of that Pring and Canan identified in their original study have a very narrow scope. They noticed a particularly insidious subset of suits within a larger set of “intimidation suits” and tactical lawsuits. These cases, often filed by businesses against individuals or groups, attempted to use the intimidating qualities of lawsuits – cost, emotional distress, time commitment – to dissuade citizens from exercising their right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” a liberty guaranteed by the Petition Clause of the First Amendment. Further defining the scope of their study, Pring and Canan (1996) trace the evolution of a suit they would deem to be a SLAPP: “[These suits] (1) involve communications made to influence a government action or outcome, (2) which result in civil lawsuits (complaints, counterclaims, or cross-claims) (3) filed against non-governmental individuals or groups (4) on a substantive issue of some public interest or social significance” (209).

Pring and Canan provide a wide array of examples of their conception of SLAPP suits, but I might offer a more modern example. Consider being invited to a meeting of your township’s zoning board to discuss variances to zoning policies requested by individuals and businesses in the area. One case on the docket is that of a cellular phone service provider seeking to install a prominently visible cell tower near your residence. The members of the board open the meeting up to concerns by those attending, and you vehemently exercise your right to protest the construction of the tower. Shortly after the meeting, you are served with a lawsuit, initiated by the cellular provider, accusing you of “libel” and “business interference” – the suit seeks damages of $500,000. While you’ve merely exercised your right to petition government on a matter of public interest, you will now have to shoulder the cost and inconvenience to defend that right. And while this case may sound largely hypothetical, thousands like it have occurred since the resurgence of SLAPP suits in the 1970s (Pring & Canan, 1996, xi).

Even if you were to “win” this suit, most SLAPP suits amount to “Pyrrhic victories” (Gordon v. Marrone, 1992) that result in people “who have witnessed such suits…choos[ing] in the future to stay silent” (ibid). J. Nicholas Colabella, a New York judge, has perhaps the most cogent quote on the matter of SLAPP suits: “Short of a gun to the head, a greater threat to First Amendment expression can hardly be imagined” (ibid).

Thanks to Pring and Canan these suits have been identified and can be dealt with accordingly, as unconstitutional attempts to curtail free speech, rather than as merited defamation suits. As we’ll come to see, the definition of these suits seems to have been broadened since their initial discovery and identification.

Research Intention

2010-11-11T07:05:00.003-05:00

First, a statement of research intention: I became interested in SLAPP suits tangentially, while studying cases where corporations initiated litigation against Internet posters who wrote negative reviews of their businesses. The companies claimed injuries such as libel, and sought exorbitant damages from the cases' "targets." The goal was clearly to limit the business's reputational damage, and to deter others from writing similar reviews in the future. In the course of the research, I learned that similar tactical lawsuits have been around for a long time, significantly predating the Internet.

So, for this paper, I've decided to trace the history of the SLAPP suit, to learn how it evolved from its pre-Internet state to its current manifestation on the Web, and to try to understand how its uses may change over time as the use of technology increases. I'll also look at some suggested remedies for SLAPP suits in the "physical" world and consider whether they might work when applied to Internet-based cases.

Blogging my research

2010-11-10T21:30:00.003-05:00

So I have a bad habit of abandoning my blog for semi-long periods of time randomly - sorry for this! But, as I've claimed many times in the past, only to disappoint you time and time again: I've changed. I'm a new blogger. I will not walk out on you again, if you'll consider taking me back.

Great! Now that we're back together, I'd like to tell you about something I'm working on. I'm working on some research about SLAPP suits - you maybe remember that I've written about them before. But this time I'm working on a scholarly piece.

As I do my research, I'm going to try to blog everyday about what I'm reading and what I'm learning. Indeed, I'm going to try to write my paper in chunks, in blog posts that I can later cohere into something, hopefully, usable.

I would love it if you would comment on the posts: any questions you may have, any blatant logical fallacies I've indulged in, or anything you think I got wrong. This would be immensely helpful to me, and I would welcome the discussion!

Thanks for working through this paper with me, and I hope to hear from you!

A super sappy story on my love of writing

2010-08-18T19:25:00.004-04:00

I just got off the phone with my aunt, my mother's older sister, who is the embodiment of quiet, unconditional love. A strong presence throughout my life that, while not always in direct sight (she still lives in NY, and I moved to Philadelphia), has always been felt. Our phone conversation made me recall one of the earliest gifts I can remember receiving (yes, even before my NES!): a mechanical typewriter that she bought for me. I hypothesize that this gift was one of the pivotal points in my life, perhaps the precise moment I considered my love of writing.

We reminisced on the phone, and I told her a story that I don't think I had ever told her. I recounted memories of writing short stories on loose-leaf paper in my room as a young child. Some were plays, some were Homeric epics, others were Pynchon-esque, Gravity's Rainbow-length (scaled to a 4-year-old, so like 1.75-page) works. But I always wrote them in pencil first; after all, who creates an immutable first draft? After carefully considering the burgeoning masterpiece on the parchment, I would write my second draft in pen. This lent more of a sense of permanence to the draft. It was in pen, so it had to be pretty good -- it was indelible.

BUT...but...when the work had fully taken shape, gone from a tremulous glob of clay on a potter's wheel to a beautiful vase (pronounced "vaaaaaaas"), it had to be published; this meant typing it out on pristine 8 1/2 x 11 paper on the mechanical typewriter. Percussive notes of metal on metal, barbaric, gutteral screams when horrid typos occurred, crumpling of paper from a neophyte's paper-loading job, and there it was -- a limited-edition, privately published, hand-bound, collectible Mustazza.

Were I making a feelgood family film, I might draw the camera back to a split-screen of the house, my father alone downstairs at the kitchen table working on his scholarly research for his own publications and me alone in my room crafting the fantastic. I guess I was more of an MFA-type.

Thanks, Aunt Nella. Your gift had a bigger impact than you know.

FourSquare Stalking?

2010-07-28T17:46:00.002-04:00

While having a stranger stalk you online, call the maitre d’ of the restaurant where you’re dining with friends, and request to speak with you to ask you out on a date may sound like another vapid plot of a Hollywood popcorn-chomper, apparently it actually happened to a Foursquare user.

For those unfamiliar, Foursquare is a service that allows you to publish your current location (“Chris is at Starbucks @ 34th & Walnut”) to the Web. One can accrue various titles of nobility (“mayor”) for locations he visits frequently or accumulate digital objets d’art (“badges”) for accomplishing tasks, such as going to multiple bars in a single night . The basic idea is that you can affiliate yourself with the establishments you frequent, and locate friends who happen to be at the same place at the same time. I’ve used it before, and it’s really nothing remarkable. For one, who needs another location-aware, Twitter progeny? And, at the risk of sounding like an another privacy alarmist, the app is really nothing more than a shallow diversion while your personal information is being harvested and used for ad research – Farmville, anyone? (“throw this sheep at someone while we access your profile.”).

That said, if we were going to argue the privacy concerns of Foursquare, I would call Staw Man given the story above as evidence for FS' dangers to privacy. I would be way more worried about location information being subpoenaed without proper authorization than I would about being stalked by Alicia Silverstone a la The Crush (OK, showing my age there).

But that’s not to say that the story isn’t horrifying. In fact, the reason I’m posting it is because of the emotion reading the piece elicited. Ms. Sylvia does an excellent job of drawing the reader into her place – especially with details like her looking around the restaurant to see if anyone is holding a cell phone as she stammers on the phone with her stalker. The fact this it’s a true story and no suspension of disbelief is necessary to appreciate it, makes it all the more fascinating. While I'm sorry that this happened to her, the piece is definitely worth a read for literary value.

Perhaps I’ll use this piece in my class in the fall. I’ll be interested to see if the students would call this account a reason to avoid location-aware technologies.

SMTP Filtering on ISPs

2010-06-17T14:51:00.002-04:00

I've fielded a number of questions about this over the past couple of weeks, so I thought it would be worth writing about. While I generally prefer to write about policy issues these days, I'm not above a good nerd piece.

If you experienced an abrupt disruption in your ability to send email from home, it's likely that you're the victim of SMTP filtering by your home ISP. Verizon, Comcast, and other ISPs implement SMTP filtering to stop spammers from taking over computers on their networks and using them to send SPAM. If you find that you can no longer send mail from home because of this, there are a couple of solutions.

1) Use an alternate port, if your server supports it -- the default port for SMTP (sending mail) is 25. ISPs block messages by filtering out any traffic bound for port 25. Many mail servers also support ports 587 and 465 for sending mail. Try going into your SMTP settings and changing your port to 587; see if that fixes it. If not, try 465.

2) Use your ISP's SMTP server. Most ISPs will provide you with an email account (which you may or may not use), which is useful in bypassing this issue, as ISPs will not filter their own servers. Properly configured, you'll be able to send mail using their servers and have your mail appear to come from your usual email address.

Also see my previous post on port 587 -- the most popular post on the site, according to Google Analytics.

Hope this helps!

--Chris

Ohio Facilitating SLAPP Suits

2010-06-12T00:30:00.003-04:00

On the heels of my recent praise of many states for attempting to contain SLAPP suits, I came across this beauty of a story on PogoWasRight, one of my favorite blogs. To summarize, the state of Ohio is trying to make it such that "people no longer have safe haven to smear Ohio businesses online from other states." In other words, it is trying to remove jurisdictional boundaries to aid Ohio businesses in suing out-of-state citizens who "defame" them.

Aside from the rhetoric in the article being pretty biased -- the author seems to espouse the beliefs of the Ohio Supreme Court from the quote above and his presentation of the article's supporting anecdote -- it is one-sided. I was under the impression that good journalism told both sides of the story. What about the damage this ruling has on free speech? How about the fact that making it easier to sue outside of jurisdictional boundaries could lead to more tactical suits to silence valid claims?

Anyway, article aside, I don't think the legislative system should be looking for more ways to chill free speech on the Internet. Justice Hugo Black is probably rolling over in his grave about this ruling.

Shakespeare App

2010-06-10T19:20:00.002-04:00

I just want to take a moment to promote one of my favorite iPad applications, the Shakespeare app. It's a product of http://playshakespeare.com/and a required app for anyone who loves language, poetry, or literature. The app contains the collected works -- all of his poems, plays, and sonnets -- beautifully formatted.

Nice formatting is not always a given with ebooks. If you're familiar with other free public-domain ebooks, you know what I'm talking about. For example, when I downloaded the free Kindle copy of Alexander Pope's translation of The Odyssey, it was a trainwreck; Pope's translation is done in rhyming couplets, and the line breaks didn't line up! So, staring at a dense block of seeming prose, I had to keep track of the meter in my head. This is not the case with the Shakespeare app -- characters are clearly labeled, the text is spaced well, etc.

While the Pro verion of the app is a little pricey at $20, I intend to purchase it just to support this wonderful project. Definitely worth checking out. Now, if only someone would build me a Christopher Marlowe app...

SLAPP Suits

2010-06-10T18:39:00.002-04:00

One of the coolest things that has ever happened to me was when I was invited to be part of the Yelp Elite Squad, an invitation-only group of restaurant reviewers on the restaurant-review site Yelp. To date, I have written reviews of about 100 restaurants (nothing compared to some of my peers). I've doled out high praise to establishments worthy of the praise, in addition to stinging critiques of subpar gastronomical experiences. My experiences, the feelings manifested by visiting the restaurants, belong to me; I am free to document them; I am free to exercise my First Amendment rights. But what if one or more of these restaurants attempted to use the legal system to silence me -- to squelch my right to speak my mind? Unfortunately, some businesses are starting to walk this path. I recently came across a great article in the NY Times about SLAPP suits, tactical lawsuits designed to silence critics through intimidation or insurmountable legal fees.

Tactical lawsuits are nothing new -- businesses and individuals have filed suits against each other without any intention of winning since dinosaurs roamed the Earth (see Stegosaurus v. Australopithecus); likewise, SLAPP suits predate the Internet. The confluence of factors at the root of this particular problem, however, stems from the melding of the egalitarian ethos of the Internet (that anyone has the ability to comment on anything) and the permanence of this information (while spoken comments are but locally-concentrated ephemera). As such, we can understand why some businesses, especially small businesses, might want to quash someone's ability to permanently etch damaging information into the annals of the Internet.

Of course, these suits are gross misuses of the legal system. They're just one of the many ways that well-intentioned legal devices (in this case defamation torts) are being misapplied in order to stop people from speaking their minds. The article mentions another such instance where doctors ask their patients to sign release forms when they become patients at a practice; these forms prevent patients from reviewing their doctors online by having the patient sign over copyright for their opinions about the doctors. That's right: they use the DMCA, designed to protect artists' royalties from copyright infringement (at least ostensibly) to silence their patients.

Free speech is the greatest of our rights, and we're living in an era when it's at its strongest, yet under perpetual attack. Luckily, some states are putting laws in place to prevent SLAPP suits. We can only hope they they move quickly and that all states follow suit (no pun intended).

iPad App List

2010-06-04T10:14:00.002-04:00

Here is a list of the apps that I'm currently running on my iPad. I have no doubt this list will be somewhat volatile, so I will try to update this page with any changes until I get bored doing so.

1. IM+ Lite -- great IM aggregator app. I'm using it for AIM and Gtalk, but I think it can do Facebook chat, Yahoo, and others. Provision for push notifications so you can get IMs when you're in other programs. Free.

2. Facebook -- iPhone app, so renders small on the screen, but works well enough. free.

3. NPR -- can listen to most stories and read all. free.

4. Kindle -- of course. free.

5. Dictionary.com -- everyone should have a dictionary handy all the time. This app is a fantastic implementation that works offline. With an Internet connection, you can play phonetic pronunciations of the words -- great for people like me, who grow vocabulary by reading rather than hearing the words spoken. free.

6. Penultimate -- the only app I have paid for. Notebook app that allows for drawing with fingers. Great for meetings and diagraming ideas. Can email images. $2.99

7. AccuWeather -- beautiful app that provides weather quickly and unobtrusively. free.

8. NY Times Editors' Choice -- nice summary of the times in a paper-like layout. free.

9. Netflix -- killer. I can watch any of the "Watch Instantly" content on the device. Looks great. free.

10. OpenTable -- make restaurant reservations on the go. iPhone app. feee.

11. Shakespeare -- collected works, beautifully formatted, unlike some public-domain Kindle works. free or $20 pro version. I may buy the latter just to support the project.

12. Popplet Lite -- good for memory maps and diagraming thoughts. free.

13. Shazam -- IDs songs that are currently playing using the built-in mic. free.

14. Wikipanion -- Nice Wikipedia app. free.

15. Blackboard Mobile -- so I can access my course site on the go. free.

And, of course, I use the built-in apps: Mail, Safari, iPod, Notes (I like this a lot), etc.

iPad: Initial Reactions

2010-06-02T13:31:00.003-04:00

iPad: What's Need Got To Do with It?

You know, it's pretty easy to fall into making conjectural evaluations of technologies that you don't own. When the blogosphere goes ablaze with legions of tech pundits bandying about whether or not you "need" something, it's tempting to jump in on the conversation by providing an intuitively-reasoned/anecdotal analysis: "The iPad looks cool, but why should I buy one if I will still need to own a laptop?," "It seems like just another device to carry around," etc. Well, while all of these arguments, vis-a-vis the iPad, make sense on paper, I refute them with this: it's freaking awesome, and it's place in your tech arsenal will become apparent once you own one.

As with many new technologies, I was skeptical of the iPad at first -- I can sometimes be a Luddite stuck in a technologist's body. "Yeah, but do you really need this thing? I mean, we have laptops; we have smart phones; what's the point?" Well, the opportunity to acquire one arose, and I pushed "need" aside. The result: awesomeness. After 2 weeks owing the device, I have to admit that I am now one of the multitude of educators teeming at the intersection of pedagogy and technology, salivating to use the device to enhance my course.

Things I like:

- multitouch interface and gestures -- not owning an iPhone, I wasn't previously familiar with the OS. It's extremely intuitive, though, and I love the swipes to turn pages and the pinch ins/outs to zoom.

- screen resolution -- high-res screen makes reading lengthy texts easier than traditional monitors

- app selection - of course (though there are still a few apps that are only available in iPhone format)

Things I don't like:

- looking like a fanboy with my Macbook Pro AND iPad (I don't have the iPhone)

- the screen gets really smudged with fingerprints

- not great for multitasking (OS doesn't yet lend itself to this)

- little bit heavier than the Kindle

- iPhone apps, by default, only fill an iPhone-sized portion of the screen -- it's possible to zoom to 2x, but then they get a little grainy

Uses I've found:

- I bring my iPad to meetings instead of my laptop -- it's great for taking notes and very portable. Lacking of multitasking ability helps to preserve focus, too. :)

- reading -- I read a lot, a whole lot, and having the Kindle app installed has been awesome. I also downloaded an app that contains the collected works for Shakespeare (plays, poems, sonnets).

- writing lengthier emails than I can on my Blackberry on the go

- keeping up to date on news

- catching up on the readings for my class so that I can prepare for course discussions

- getting walking directions with Google Maps/Streetview when I get lost

So, do you NEED the iPad? Well, who am I to determine need, but you should get one!

Evil

2010-05-27T20:42:00.005-04:00

There are as many Facebook groups lamenting the death/loss/explosion of a phone as there are words in Cryptonomicon. If you have a Facebook account, you're no doubt familiar with someone noting that their phone was destroyed by Telsa's ray gun, or perhaps by a more quotidian incident (e.g. dropped in toilet). Said victim is desperately in need of his friends' phone numbers, and fate has smitten his sole copy of his address book. So he does what any reasonable person would do: he sends a group request to all of his 1,000 Facebook friends requesting that they join a group (titled something grammatically immaculate, with judicious use of exclamation points) and post their phone numbers to the group. Except when Jove robbed him of his phone, he also rendered his common sense inert, so he makes the group public. "Public" in the Facebook vernacular means visible to anyone on the Internet, regardless of whether they have a FB account.

Enter Evil.

Evil is a proof-of-concept site -- it does something shocking to prove to how easy it is for someone with truly malicious intent to perform the same action. In this case, the software searches for public groups that serve the purpose described above and harvests the names, pictures, and phone numbers of everyone in the groups. In English: it shows how easy it is to collect people's private phone numbers from Facebook groups. Given that this site is just meant to teach, it redacts the last digits of the phone numbers, but if you'd like to get a clearer picture of what we're talking about, check this out. Scary, huh?

I shudder to think of what will happen when marketers figure this out -- text-message SPAM, anyone?

Follow-up on sending messages through Google searches

2010-05-13T18:24:00.004-04:00

So remember when I said that my students had a lot of fun sending the message "Chris Mustazza is a jerk" to me via my Google Analytics logs? Well, I checked my Analytics account today and saw this query logged:

"chris mustazza is certainly not a jerk and is an awesome professor...who ga[v]e me an a"

Well played, sir or madam!