Re: (event 8/17) panel on the Net:Privacy, Security, and Parental Control

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 04:10 PM 8/14/95 -0700, you wrote:
>Perhaps some of us should be here to keep things in perspective.

Thanks; it was an interesting panel.  I missed the first half hour,
since traffic was appalling :-), but got to the rest; maybe an hour of
panel discussion and 15 minutes of organized q&a, then wine&cheese.  
Just about everybody was concerned about pornography on the net, and thought
that the government had no clue what they were doing and shouldn't be
regulating it;
most thought that the whole issue was really a smokescreen for the government
wanting to regulate the nets and especially interstate commerce 
("Hmm, we tried scaring everybody about terrorists on the net, that fizzled,
let's scare them about porn and their kids - that always works!").  
About half the panel had kids between 4 and 15.

Lots of concern about media concentration and how this is
currently the only widely accessible medium for 1:N communications
so it's a target.  Some interesting discussions about changes in society
and our relationships with other people that come from net-style communications
and artificiality - Mark Slouka was mainly taking the side of "this is different
and I'm not sure I like it, and the fact that people are desperately seeking
community through this virtual stuff says our communities out in the real world
are probably having some real crises", with interesting thought behind it.

PGN brought in some RISKS stuff, including the how-rumors-spread dynamics;
he also talked a bit about cryptography (he's on that national policy review),
somewhat from the perspective of "it's an international problem and trying
to do things within national borders is ineffective" - I'm not sure he's
on our side here though he's at least clueful.

Dan Gillmor had some good perspectives on objectivity in reporting -
the news business knows it's not objective, and he's at least concerned
with trying to be fair and balanced and as quick as possible about
correcting mistakes, but then he edits the SJMerc business page so it's a
lot clearer what "mistakes" are than in, say, political reporting.

>>    * George Baldwin, California State University, Monterey Bay
George Baldwin is involved with the IndianNet project, putting things like
Native American artwork on the Web, including for sale.  He brought up some
cultural perspectives - a lot of people have been viewing it, but Native
Americans
don't actually _buy_ much of it because they tend to view artwork as personal
and want to know the artist and what it means to him/her, and the net doesn't
do that very well.  If you haven't heard of CSU Monterey Bay, it's opening RSN.

>>    * Bill Bauriedel,Stanford University
He's on an inter-university study to address things like how to do
on-line registration while preserving privacy (doesn't like export
laws at all.)
>>    * Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News
>>    * Richard Gingras, Apple
Manages E-World and some network things.
>>    * Peter Neumann, SRI
>>    * Craig Newmark, Digital Threads
Used to wear plastic pocket protectors when he was younger :-)
Consults to big companies that need clues.
>>    * Mark Slouka, University of California, San Diego
One of the liberal arts types on the panel.  Either he or George Baldwin 
was talking about college students learning creative writing on MUDs and MOOs.
#---
#                                Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
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