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First Monday Interviews Sandra Braman (With Ed Valauskas)

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First Monday Interviews Sandra Braman (With Ed Valauskas) Valauskas http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/1773... First Monday, Volume 12, Number 4 — 2 April 2007 Sandra Braman has been studying the effects of new information technologies on policy for several decades. Recent work includes Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power (2006, MIT Press) and the edited volumes Communication Researchers and Policy–making (2003, MIT Press), The Emergent Global Information Policy Regime (2004, Palgrave Macmillan) and Biotechnology and Communication: The Meta–technologies of Information (2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Braman has been working with the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Open Society Institute to map the contemporary legal environment, identify emergent policy issues, and try to bring the research and policy communities more closely together. She has published about 70 scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and books; served as book review editor of the Journal of Communication; is former Chair of the Communication Law & Policy Division of the International Communication Association; and sits on the editorial boards of nine scholarly journals in four countries. Currently Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Braman previously served as Reese Phifer Professor of Telecommunication at the University of Alabama, Research Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois — Urbana, Henry Rutgers Research Fellow at Rutgers University, and Silha Fellow of Media Law and Ethics at the University of Minnesota. She earned her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1988. During 1997–98 Braman designed and launched the first postgraduate programme in telecommunications and information policy on the African continent, as Visiting Professor and Director at the University of South Africa, and in 1 of 9 7/28/15, 3:52 PM Valauskas http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/1773... 2008 she will be the Freedom of Expression Professor at the University of Bergen in Norway. Sandra has been a significant contributor to First Monday for a number of years. Her papers in First Monday — “Posthuman Law: Information Policy and the Machinic World” (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_12/braman/) and “Tactical Memory: The Politics of Openness in the Construction of Memory” (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_7 /braman/) — are important contributions. With Thomas M. Malaby, she organized a special issue of First Monday in 2006 — “Command Lines: The Emergence of Governance in Global Cyberspace” (http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_9/) — based their conference in April, 2005 at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Sandra was also the keynote speaker at the second First Monday Conference, FM10 Openness: Code, Science, and Content, in Chicago on 15 May 2006. This interview was conducted by First Monday’s Chief Editor Ed Valauskas, stimulated in part by Change of State. First Monday (FM): Is there some point in time that we can identify as the beginning of information becoming vital to the functioning of the state? Or has information always been part of the bureaucracy of an efficient government? Sandra Braman (SB): Of course information has always been important to governments — this is the stuff of many of the earliest examples of writing that we have. There is some wonderful work on what Roman leaders knew about people’s homes, room by room, and they even travelled with the equivalent of file cabinets. There are two reasons why things are different today. First, Engels’ law applies. This is the idea that quantitative change yields qualitative change. It explains why we can say we live in an information society — the number of information technologies upon which we depend, and the number of ways in which we depend upon them, have so multiplied in number that there is qualitative change in the nature of society. Engels’ law also applies to the effects of the uses of information, and of information technologies, by the state. ... we have many ways of using information as a tool of power that were not available in the past. Second, digital technologies — we can call them informational meta–technologies — themselves have characteristics that are very different from those of the industrial technologies and preindustrial tools of the past. As a result, we have many ways of using information as a tool of power that were not available in the past. This has changed the way we exercise very old forms of power; “smart” guns, for example, have information–rich targetting systems that can send bullets around corners. It also allows us to do things we were never able to do before — data mining massive amounts of diverse types of information for patterns was not possible when you were working with file cabinets. FM: Information and identity, how are they linked? SB: That’s a huge topic. Even narrowing the question to how laws dealing with information affect individual identity reveals multiple links. Information policy can influence our sense of ourselves, for example; libel law affects how others perceive you, and privacy law affects how you feel about yourself. Laws determining which language you can use in particular settings regulate your identity vis–à–vis the diverse communities with which you are involved. Rules about citizenship shape your identity as a political actor. Some statistical representations of you (such as those of the census) determine the types of resources available to you, while other statistical representations (such as those that result from data mining by the Department of Homeland Security) affect the types of constraints and additional scrutiny you may experience. 2 of 9 7/28/15, 3:52 PM Valauskas http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/1773... The state has an identity, too, which depends upon its historical knowledge of itself and current scientific data about everything from resources to the weather to migration, in addition to any stories those in government may be telling about who they would like us to believe we are. Information policy affects the identity of the state as well as of individuals. FM: In many states, there is a minister of information. Why not the equivalent in the United States? SB: It’s hard to choose the right tone for answering this question — ironic? Sardonic? Didactic? Orgiastic? There were actually some interesting ways in which a variety of tasks involving information have been joined in single federal government jobs in the past. The first U.S. efforts to collect germplasm from around the world, in support of experimentation with what we now call biotechnology, were undertaken in the nineteenth century by the Post Office (because it moved information around) and the Navy (because it was seeking information about other places around the globe). Most countries long had a single person at the head of a “PTT” (postal, telephone, and telegraph agency), but those positions have disappeared as government control over broadcasting and telecommunications has given way to privatization. This was a spot the U.S. never had because all telecommunications and broadcasting have (almost) always been in the private sector in this country. Positions such as the Librarian of Congress and the Archivist of the United States (head of the National Archives and Records Administration) involve specific ritual and administrative responsibilities, but neither has an over–arching portfolio. Where one loses confidence about tone is if by this question you mean a government official who controls all information about citizens. Certainly there have been repeated efforts on the part of various agencies — for a long time the National Security Agency, and today the Department of Homeland Security — to bring all databases about U.S. citizens under a single analytical lens. To the extent to which this takes place, the head of such an agency could be called a de facto Minister of Information, if not de jure. What we don’t know as citizens is the level of such activity currently underway, given that it may be either publicly known or secret, legal or not, undertaken formally or informally, and accomplished by the government or by groups in the private sector. Nor do we know as managers or researchers the extent to which such efforts will actually be successful technologically or organizationally. FM: In the 1990s, the Clinton Administration embraced the first wave of Web technologies, encouraging federal agencies to use the Internet and the Web to deliver information to their constituencies. There was no organized plan — each agency it seemed did “its own thing” with the Web. Was this an appropriate use of new information technologies? SB: Since you use both the words “Internet” and “Web,” your question itself describes the period you’re referring to as a critical turning point — these were the years in which the Internet was first thrown open for use by anyone for any purpose (instead of being restricted to researchers) and hyperlinking and visuals became available. In 1993 the U.S. government stopped providing direct financial support for the Internet — but by encouraging government experimentation with the Internet as a means of delivering services and information, the Clinton Administration continued to support its development in another way. Doing so was in accord with a couple of decades of thinking that technological innovation and the development of new uses of technologies were most likely to take place if folks were simply free to experiment. So in my view the answer to your question would be “yes.” The amount of some types of government information now generally and easily available is much more 3 of 9 7/28/15, 3:52 PM Valauskas http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/1773... vast than was historically the case. But there is another story here as well — a tale about how adapting the law to the Internet environment can have consequences at the most fundamental level.
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