A First-Draft Proposal for a Plan for the Plato Lecture Series

We have $5,000 all together to spend. This year, the series has offered
people $350 as an honorarium; plane tickets from far away are $400-500,
motel is another $50. In short, we don't have enough money to bring
everybody in from afar. (We probably should set aside $300 or so for for
posters and advertising too.) So we need to plan to do some of the
lectures ourselves, or to find people who are close to do some of them. 

Time-line:

I think we need to have a plan and a list of potential speakers by early
this summer in order to be able to get things scheduled reasonably. Since
I'm going to be gone for most of the time between now and then (and won't
be on the network), I thought I'd try to get the discussion started and
get my two cents in early. 

Here's a possible plan by weeks and topics. Essentially it's a very quick
try at sketching out what I might try to cover if I were going to do ten
lectures myself. I've collected a pile of stuff about who's talking at the
current conferences about these issues, but I don't have much sense of
how to decide who to invite. It would be really nice if we could find a
couple of people who attend these things and get advice from people who
have heard these people. It doesn't seem as if we can send them whatever
we'd like them to cover and say "Please cover this". Perhaps we should
think about having two lectures a week - one by the visitor and one by one
of us. (Each of us would have to do a couple during the quarter.) The
visitor does his or her specialized in terest. We do the framework and
background stuff. Of course, we might get a set of readings to do the
background - but I don't know anything short that does most of the
following packages I just dreamed up well - though they may be out there. 

Week 1 - Introduction to the series
	Media History/Upcoming Digital Revolution??

	A talk about the orality/literacy watershed in fifth century
Greece/ printing and the Reformation/ radio and TV and digitization. What
are the claims about the transformative power of communications media
historically, how are they related to the social arrangements for those
media, what do people claim that digitization and the Internet might lead
to, and what does the history suggest, if anything, about how to approach
those claims...
	(Sarah or me or Charlie Teske?)

Week 2 - Economics and politics of the Network

It's free to users - right now... What does it actually cost, how's it
paid for (some comparative figures, a little institutional history).
Current proposals and complications about network structures. Telephone
and cable deregulation, recent history and current legislation. Pricing
proposals.
	(York)

Week 3 - Intellectual property

What is property, anyway? Brief history of copyright and patent law.
Rationales. Pressure on copyright from technological developments - xerox,
cassette tapes, video tape, software. Recent extensions of patent
protection to software; cross-licensing as a solution; the difficulties
that poses for beginning companies. Third world refusals to honor first
world patents; biological patents; recent economic pressure for third
world compliance.  Proposals for reworking the intellectual property
system. 


Week 4 - Sociology of the network

Reingold on virtual communities. Slater on communities vs. networks - The
Pursuit of Loneliness. Hiltz, Turoff et al on the dynamics of network
interactions - class, race and gender issues re the network from
equalization effects to digital cross-dressing
.
	(Anita Borg - founder of Systers mailing list for women in computing?)

Week 5 - Access Issues

User interface design to make the network more easily usable by all sorts
of people. (Class, culture and gender issues re computer use and
interfaces with respect to networks). Free-nets. Public library access.
	(Rivkah Sass - used to work for WLN, now runs a big Maryland
library system, but her family is still here, so she's back in town from
time to time - was in the NYTimes this year because of big fight over her
work to provide free network access to library patrons.)

Week 6 - First Amendment Issues

Recent court cases and the legal issues they raise. (Somebody from the
Electronic Frontier Foundation? They have a lawyer in SF doing the
Scientology libel seizure case - brief write-up in print folder)

Week 7 - Privacy and Encryptation

Pretty Good Privacy (Philip Zimmerman), medical records, public access to
public records, the Clipper Chip controversy, export controls, future of
encryptation. 

Week 8 - Upcoming Technical Developments

Introduction to network topology, protocols and compression. ISDN,
wireless networks, interactive cable and telephony, fiber networks, ATM,
ISDN, JPEG, MPEG...  How much bandwidth is there going to be? How cheap
will it get? What would vast amounts of ban dwidth make possible? 

Week 9 - 

Publishing and libraries

Ownership versus access for libraries. Ginsparg's crusade to eliminate
academic publishing houses through direct publishing on the net by
academics - his success with the particle physics pre-press server
project. The Internet Underground Music Archive, s tarted by a couple of
Santa Cruz students, now distributes digital recordings by four hundred
groups. 

OR

Digital money
Levy's Wired article on Chaum's project.

OR Education Do some particular project - the University of Virginia
Digital Humanities Project? Some project in schools, like the National
Geographic's acid rain data collection project? An international key-pal
project? 

OR
Maybe we need two quarters...

Week 10 - Visions of the future

Some kind of synthesizing activity... Take-home test with e-mail
discussion groups? A panel with us? A novelist like Tom or somebody else
on the process of trying to imagine what might be coming on the basis of
what we can see coming now? Or an historian of technology on the poor
record of our attempts to do that...