notification – Innoeduvation

In Comey Firing Trump Gets Notification Wrong Again

Any number of news outlets communicated a sense of outrage over the fact that James Comey apparently learned he’d been fired by looking up at news coverage on TV monitors while speaking before an audience in Los Angeles.

What these commentators were zeroing in on was the violation by Trump of what I call “notification norms.” One just doesn’t tell someone they are fired by telling someone else who then releases it to journalists so that one literally “hears about it on the news.”

Now, from a strictly utilitarian perspective, it might not matter much; you’re out of a job either way. But, we might say, how you find out can add insult to injury. But how, exactly, does that extra sting of shame happen? People felt it vicariously; as when the scalpel comes out on a medical show, one’s instinct is to turn away, though here it was not the integrity of skin that is violated, but the integrity of the self. One part of the self’s integrity requires that certain kinds of information breaches “just are not done.”

Every relationship comes with a set of informational expectations – things that a member of the relation knows she will be told in a certain way in a certain order. Your mother does not learn of your pregnancy from a casual acquaintance who heard it from a friend in the grocery store. One winces just thinking about such things. In professional settings, you learn where you are in the status order by which meetings you are invited to, which announcements are run by you before they are released, which things you learn about when others are asked to “give us the room.”

In the Comey affair, we experienced a gigantic collective wince as we saw someone of relatively high status – the director of the FBI on a ten year contract – socially demoted by a massive notification violation at the same time as we wince watching another high status actor, the president, wantonly disregard a notification norm. That’s the thing with norms – we feel it not just out of sympathy for the proximate victim of the violation; we feel the norm violation because it tells us all that we might not live in the kind of world we thought we lived in.

But the public discourse, especially in the media, about the inappropriateness of the notification does something to restore our sense of the world. What we saw last night, almost no matter what channel we tuned in to, were fellow citizens, not themselves victims of the breach of etiquette, calling it out. With each comment saying how inappropriate the manner of Trump’s notification of Comey was, we got a small step of the way back to being able to take for granted that certain information behaviors just aren’t done.

The Socially Competent Node

Consider the following deviant characters: loose cannons, blabbermouths, gossipers, and yentas, stool pigeons and canaries, tattlers and squealers, garblers, the nosy, the deaf to hints, talkers-out-of-school, missers-of-winks, leakers, spoilers of surprises, whistle blowers, betrayers, moles and turncoats, unreliable messengers, and friends who “didn’t realize you’d want to know” or forget to mention. In each case the deviance lies in the social handling of information.

Curiously, they can all be distinguished from the most well know information deviant, the liar, by the fact that they can be deviant while handling “the truth.” These characters are “deviant nodes” who fail at their duties in a social information networks. They do so by passing along what they should not, or by transmitting to the wrong people, or by notifying in the wrong manner, time, or sequence. They fail to discriminate. They introduce errors into the message. They do not distinguish relevant from irrelevant. They miss the real message, fail to appreciate urgency or delicateness. They let down those who trusted them to stay silent or to speak up.

The list above shows that we have lots of nouns to describe those who talk out of turn, but few for for those who fail as nodes by saying too little. Adjectives abound: “diffident”implies not speaking up when one could or should, and “reticent” means “to remain silent” and implies a hesitance to pass along information. And there are familiar utterances such as “What? Why didn’t you tell me?” or “I didn’t think you would want to know…” that are evocative of the node who falls down on the job, but the social types seem not sufficiently crystalized to have names the way the overzealous communicators do. We do have terms of approbation to describe those who positively exceed expectations of discretion and reticence: confidantes, bosom buddies, pals, and cronies are all characters with whom information is safe, but even these are not as general as the negative types, each being tied to specific others.

While the colorful terms above describe empirically unusual roles, the potential for each of the behaviors is high. The social networks of everyday interaction are full of opportunities for nodes to get it wrong or go rogue. Each of us walks around “recording” images and sounds and actions and utterances, we engage in conversations and we have random thoughts, all material that we could “post” to our (“real world”) social networks, pass along to the next person we run into. But mostly we do not.

What stops us from describing to colleagues the sounds a co-worker just made in the bathroom or what one’s spouse said last night? Why do we not worry that our kids will narrate for their friends the details of her parents’ recent fight or that our colleague will reveal the source of that tidbit about the boss we passed along? Even people who completely take to heart advice to “never put something in an email that you don’t want the world to see,” are far less guarded and vigilant in everyday life.

The relative worry that we put into Facebook privacy settings compared to the nonchalance with which we participate in everyday social networks suggests the phenomenally high levels of “privacy settings” we take for granted in the people around us. Most of the nodes in our everyday social networks, we seem to assume, know how to be socially competent nodes.

Before they are very old, before they’ve been friends for very long, before they have much experience on the job, they are masters of nuance and signaling, they understand the security clearance levels in within circles of friends and family, they understand what is for attribution and what is not, what is on the record, what is off; without being explicitly told they know what does not leave a room, what was not said by you, and what was never said at all;

But how do they get that way? How does one learn to be a (competent) node? That’s what this chapter is about.

Religion and Learning to be a Node

A short excerpt from zeroth draft of chapter “Learning to be a node”

The chapter is about how social networks depend on competent nodes and how competent nodes are made rather than born. I show how primary and secondary socialization help us learn what we can tell to whom when. Other sections in the chapter are about children as spies; discretion as a social achievement; humor, drama and the incompletely socialized node; the social organization of omniscience; and the social control of nodes in corporations and states.

For Jews and Christians, the most well known religious exhortation about information behavior is probably the commandment “thy shall not bear false witness” (Exodus 20:16, Deuteronomy 5:20), but sacred texts are rich in behavioral guidance for nodes in social networks. The admonitions are general guides for information behavior and suggest misgivings about humans as untutored nodes in community communication networks.

The most basic suggestion is to err on the side of silence. Imam Nawawi, the 13^th century Islamic commentator,[1]says

“It is obligatory for every sane adult to guard his tongue against talking, except when it contains a clear benefit. If talking and remaining silent are of equal benefit, it is sunnah(normative) to abstain, for permissible talking might lead to something undesirable or forbidden, as in fact is very often the case, and nothing matches safety.”

The book of Proverbs (21:23) suggests “Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble” and in Ecclesiastes (3:7) we are reminded that there is “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.” In the Christian New Testament, Saint Paul exhorts the Ephesians to “[l]et no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” (4:29). The Koran is on the same page: “He does not utter a [single] word, except that there is, with him, [an angel] ready and waiting [to record it]” (50:18).

The baseline recommendation, then, for nodes is mindfulness about what they transmit; in a word, nodes should not always be “on.” But all of these traditions go into greater specificity about what responsible and socially competent nodes should and should not “put on the network.”

Both Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions address gossip and “tale-telling” as a continuum of network behaviors that require regulation. Three levels are specified in the Torah: mere idle talk; negative truths about others; and negative falsehoods about others. The first, Avak lashon harah, follows from the suggestion to err on the side of silence, prohibiting rechilut or “peddling,” prattling on, repeating things for the sake of repeating them (Leviticus 19:16). A more serious network sin is for a node to be a conduit for negative information, even if it is true, unless it is specifically intended to improve a bad situation. Lashon harameans repeating negative truths. The most serious infraction is Hotzaat shem ra, slander or defamation through spreading untrue negative things about others.

This suggests an awareness that a community depends on actors to socially attenuate what gets through to the network, to apply generic content rules to what they do and do not transmit. And nodes are not only prohibited from sending gossip along, they are actually also enjoined from Mekabel lashon harah, accepting and believing gossip or slander (Pesachim 118a). This is, perhaps, a recognition that the temptation to pass gossip along is so strong that the only way to avoid it is to prevent the information’s arrival in the first place.

In Sharia law, slander, gossip, and backbiting, or “ghiba” is regarded as a major sin, perhaps more serious than adultery <!–[if supportFields]> ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {“citationID”:”KXuXAich”,”properties”:{“formattedCitation”:”(Al-Ghazali 2008)”,”plainCitation”:”(Al-Ghazali 2008)”},”citationItems”:[{“id”:2547,”uris”:[“http://zotero.org/users/310308/items/S8B99UAG”%5D,”uri”:[“http://zotero.org/users/310308/items/S8B99UAG”%5D,”itemData”:{“id”:2547,”type”:”webpage”,”title”:”The Rules of Backbiting”,”container-title”:”Qibla – for The Islamic Sciences”,”URL”:”http://qa.sunnipath.com/issue_view.asp?ID=212″,”author”:[{“family”:”Al-Ghazali”,”given”:”Abu Hamid Muhammad”}],”issued”:{“date-parts”:[[“2008″]]},”accessed”:{“date-parts”:[[“2014″,2,5]]}}}],”schema”:”https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json”} <![endif]–>(Al-Ghazali 2008)<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–>:

“O you who believe! Avoid much suspicion, for some suspicions are a sin. Do not spy on one another, nor backbite one another. Would one of you love to eat the flesh of his dead brother? Nay, you would abhor it, [so similarly, avoid backbiting]. And fear Allah. Indeed, Allah is Most Forgiving, Most Merciful.” (Qur’an, [49:12])

The excessive attention given in these traditions to the regulation of gossip suggests a keen awareness of the deleterious effects of unregulated communication networks. In the book of Proverbs the transmission of gossip is connected to social conflict: “Without wood a fire goes out; without gossip a quarrel dies down” (26:20) and the destruction of relationships: “He who covers over an offense promotes love, but whoever repeats the matter separates close friends” (Proverbs 17:9). These traditions are also aware of the non-linear effects of deviant information transmission; in the epistle of James we read “The tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell” (James 3:5-6).

Too, nodes are admonished to eschew second hand information: “And do not follow that of which you do not have knowledge. Indeed, the hearing, the sight and the heart – [you] will be asked about all of those” (Qur’an, [17:36]).

In these sources we even find attention being paid to the micro-sociological aspects of nodal behavior. Rashi, the medieval Torah commentator, notes that winking is a behavior common among those who would traffic in gossip. “To eat the food of winking” was understood as a way of sealing the deal – you spread gossip and your willingness to break break proves your sincerity but the winking part means that some folks are in on it and know it is gossip while those unsuspecting hearers take it as reportable truth. [2]

The counsel to prefer silence is not an absolute that would shut networks down. Believers are reminded that even as they are enjoined from spreading malicious gossip, nodes still have obligations upon receiving certain kinds of information:

If you hear it said about one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you to live in that wicked men have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods you have not known), then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. Deuteronomy 13:12-15

Another aspect of being a competent node is to wisely pick the nodes to which you are connected. The Book of Proverbs suggests that gossip reveals meta-information about the gossiping node:

With his mouth the godless destroys his neighbor, but through knowledge the righteous escape… A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy man keeps a secret (Proverbs 11: 9;13).

and

A gossip betrays a confidence; so avoid a man who talks too much (Proverbs 20:19).

This same observation also shows up in a Spanish proverb, “Quienquiera chismea a ti chismeará sobre ti”<!–[if supportFields]> ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {“citationID”:”V9z823Zw”,”properties”:{“formattedCitation”:”(best-quotes-poems.com. 2007)”,”plainCitation”:”(best-quotes-poems.com. 2007)”},”citationItems”:[{“id”:2543,”uris”:[“http://zotero.org/users/310308/items/8CQT389V”%5D,”uri”:[“http://zotero.org/users/310308/items/8CQT389V”%5D,”itemData”:{“id”:2543,”type”:”webpage”,”title”:”cotizaciones y refranes del chisme”,”URL”:”http://www.best-quotes-poems.com/espanol/cotizaciones-del-chisme.html”,”author”:[{“family”:”best-quotes-poems.com.”,”given”:””}],”issued”:{“date-parts”:[[“2007″]]},”accessed”:{“date-parts”:[[“2014″,2,5]]}}}],”schema”:”https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json”} <![endif]–>(best-quotes-poems.com. 2007)<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–>: Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you. <!–[if supportFields]> ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {“citationID”:”OUhPymkh”,”properties”:{“formattedCitation”:”(worldofquotes.com 2013)”,”plainCitation”:”(worldofquotes.com 2013)”},”citationItems”:[{“id”:2539,”uris”:[“http://zotero.org/users/310308/items/QVE5XD3A”%5D,”uri”:[“http://zotero.org/users/310308/items/QVE5XD3A”%5D,”itemData”:{“id”:2539,”type”:”webpage”,”title”:”gossip Quotes”,”container-title”:”WorldofQuotes”,”abstract”:”View, share, rate, and discuss gossip Quotes at WorldofQuotes.com”,”URL”:”http://www.worldofquotes.com/topic/gossip/1/index.html”,”author”:[{“family”:”worldofquotes.com”,”given”:””}],”issued”:{“date-parts”:[[“2013″]]},”accessed”:{“date-parts”:[[“2014″,2,5]]}}}],”schema”:”https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json”} <![endif]–>(worldofquotes.com 2013)<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–>. Publilius Syrus, a first century BC wit also counseled picking friends on the basis of their nodal competence: “Count not him among your friends who will retail your privacies to the world” <!–[if supportFields]> ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {“citationID”:”p0iqy0Md”,”properties”:{“formattedCitation”:”(worldofquotes.com 2013)”,”plainCitation”:”(worldofquotes.com 2013)”},”citationItems”:[{“id”:2539,”uris”:[“http://zotero.org/users/310308/items/QVE5XD3A”%5D,”uri”:[“http://zotero.org/users/310308/items/QVE5XD3A”%5D,”itemData”:{“id”:2539,”type”:”webpage”,”title”:”gossip Quotes”,”container-title”:”WorldofQuotes”,”abstract”:”View, share, rate, and discuss gossip Quotes at WorldofQuotes.com”,”URL”:”http://www.worldofquotes.com/topic/gossip/1/index.html”,”author”:[{“family”:”worldofquotes.com”,”given”:””}],”issued”:{“date-parts”:[[“2013″]]},”accessed”:{“date-parts”:[[“2014″,2,5]]}}}],”schema”:”https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json”} <![endif]–>(worldofquotes.com 2013)<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–><!–[if supportFields]>ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {“citationID”:”k9tmXKbX”,”properties”:{“formattedCitation”:”(Wikipedia Editors 2013)”,”plainCitation”:”(Wikipedia Editors 2013)”},”citationItems”:[{“id”:2544,”uris”:[“http://zotero.org/users/310308/items/ZP6VWVV7″%5D,”uri”:[“http://zotero.org/users/310308/items/ZP6VWVV7″%5D,”itemData”:{“id”:2544,”type”:”entry-encyclopedia”,”title”:”Publilius Syrus”,”container-title”:”Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”,”source”:”Wikipedia”,”abstract”:”Publilius Syrus, a Latin writer of maxims, flourished in the 1st century BC. He was a Syrian who was brought as a slave to Italy, but by his wit and talent he won the favour of his master, who freed and educated him. Publilius’ name, due to early medieval palatalization of ‘l’ between two ‘i’, is often presented by manuscripts (and some printed editions) in corrupt form as ‘Publius’.”,”URL”:”http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Publilius_Syrus&oldid=590466060″,”note”:”Page Version ID: 590466060″,”language”:”en”,”author”:[{“family”:”Wikipedia Editors”,”given”:””}],”issued”:{“date-parts”:[[“2013″]]},”accessed”:{“date-parts”:[[“2014″,2,5]]}}}],”schema”:”https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json”} <![endif]–>(Wikipedia Editors 2013)<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–>. Horace (65BCE-8BCE) gives similar advice: “Percunctatorem fugito, nam garrulus idem est; / Nec retinent patulæ commissa fideliter aures” : Avoid an inquisitive person, for he is sure to be a gossip; ears always open to hear will not keep faithfully what is intrusted to them <!–[if supportFields]> ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {“citationID”:”Sb43BYGZ”,”properties”:{“formattedCitation”:”(Wood 1899)”,”plainCitation”:”(Wood 1899)”},”citationItems”:[{“id”:2546,”uris”:[“http://zotero.org/users/310308/items/TSW7VEQN”%5D,”uri”:[“http://zotero.org/users/310308/items/TSW7VEQN”%5D,”itemData”:{“id”:2546,”type”:”book”,”title”:”Dictionary of Quotations From Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources”,”publisher”:”Frederick Warne & Co”,”publisher-place”:”London, New York”,”event-place”:”London, New York”,”abstract”:”www.bartleby.com/345/247.html#371″,”URL”:”http://www.bartleby.com/345/”,”note”:”Bartleby.com, 2012″,”author”:[{“family”:”Wood”,”given”:”James”}],”issued”:{“date-parts”:[[“1899″]]},”accessed”:{“date-parts”:[[“2014″,2,5]]}}}],”schema”:”https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json”} <![endif]–>(Wood 1899)<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–>.

References

Al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad. 2008. “TheRules of Backbiting.” Qibla – for The Islamic Sciences.
Best-quotes-poems.com. 2007. “Cotizaciones y Refranes Del Chisme.”
Wikipedia Editors. 2013. “Publilius Syrus.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
Wood, James. 1899. Dictionary of Quotations From Ancient and Modern, English andForeign Sources. London, New York: Frederick Warne & Co. .
Worldofquotes.com. 2013. “Gossip Quotes.” WorldofQuotes.

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[1]Nawawi (1234–1277 CE) wrote about Fiqh, an expansion of conduct rules found in the Quran,

and hadithwhich are reports of the sayings of the prophet.

[2]See Vayikra – Leviticus – Chapter 19. Note emphasis there on spying on your neighbors so you could talk about them. This relates directly to the material on children as spies.

Scoops in Journalism and Everyday Life

Jay Rosen has a post today titled “Four Types of Scoops” that will surely make it into my sociology of information book. The four types are the “enterprise scoop” where the reporter who gets the scoop gets it by doing the “finding out.” The information may be deliberately hidden or obscured by routine practice, but it would not have become known to the public without the work of the reporter. Then there is its opposite, the the “ego scoop”: the news would have come out anyway, but the scooper gets (or provokes) a tip or equivalent. The third type Rosen calls the “trader’s” scoop where early info has instrumental value — as in a stock tip. Finally there is the “thought scoop.” This is when the writer puts two and two together or otherwise “connects the dots” to, as he says, “apprehend–name and frame–something that’s happening out there before anyone else recognizes it.”

The information order of everyday life is conditioned by information exchanges that might be similarly categorized. But even before that we’d notice a distinction between exchanges that are NOT experiences as scoops — I think there are two extremes: information passed on bucket-brigade style with no claim at all to having generated it or deserving any credit for its content or transmission. “Hey, they’ve run out of eggs, pass it on, eh?” and statements of a truly personal nature: “I’m not feeling well today” that do not reflect one’s position or location or worth in the world.

Between these there are all manner of instances in which people play the scoop game in everyday interaction. The difference between an ordinary person and a reporter in this regard is that the reporter’s scoop is vis a vis “the rest of the media” while the scoopness of the person’s scoop is centered in the information ecology of the recipient. We have all met the inveterate ego scooper who moves from other to other to other trying to stay one step ahead of the diffusing information so that s/he can deliver the “scoop” over and over. And the enterprising gossip who pries information loose from friends and acquaintances and is always ready with the latest tidbit. In everyday interaction the wielder of the traders’ scoop often generates the necessary arbitrage because others are willing to “pay” for information they can use as ego scoops. Alas, as in the media, the thought scoop is probably the rarest form in everyday life too. It’s probably less self-conscious in everyday interaction and too more ephemeral which is too bad. Those conversational insights are probably more often lost than their counterparts in “print.”

Should Your Company Tell You Your Secrets

Nice sociology of info two-fer in Forbes article about Target being able to detect pregnancy based on purchases (see also “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”in NYT). The first connection is obvious: data mining lets company detect information “given off” by ordinary behavior. Second is the notification question. In the article the “story” is that Target outs young woman to her dad by sending targeted circular for maternity supplies.

So now we are in the situation where data mining companies have to interrogate their notification obligations just like doctors, lawyers, and spouses. I will work up an analysis in subsequent post. I anticipate insights about how corporate-ness of knower figures into the notification norm calculation.

Bloomberg Contra Notification Norms

Consider a recent NYT article by Mosi Secret and Michael Barbaro about the controversy over New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s failure to inform the public about the actual reason — an arrest in Washington, D.C. for domestic violence* — deputy mayor Stephen Goldsmith resigned this summer.

According to the article, Bloomberg “rejected the notion that he had an obligation to tell the public of the arrest.” He is quote saying, “I always assumed it would come out, but it’s not my responsibility.”

It’s a first rate example of notification in the public sphere and of how overlapping relational circles can suggest contradictory notification rules.

It turns out that it’s not just a notification issue, though. Initially the mayor said the resignation was to pursue other opportunities — in other words, he was pretty explicitly misleading not just failing to reveal.

But back to notification. Bloomberg, apparently, takes the line is that his first obligation was instrumental, making sure “he no longer works for the city.” And then his next obligation is to treat Goldsmith and his family with respect. His critics suggest that his first obligation is to the public, although the one quoted in the article, Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, sticks with the instrumental saying Bloomberg has responsibility to “protect the public, not to protect a staff member” according to the article. But nobody really seems to be saying that there was any instrumental damage done by the non-notification and it’s a bit disingenuous to say that getting Goldsmith off the city payroll was facilitated by non-notification.

The issue, then, is how the various relational imperatives governing who ought to tell whom what when and how interact. New York City law, as it happens, has something to say: “the city’s Department of Investigation must be notified” if an official is arrested in the city (not clear by whom), but this did not come into play here since arrest was in DC. The article reports a debate within the mayor’s team about the matter with the mayor saying that Goldsmith should get to decide how much to reveal. And after the fact Goldsmith, who took some heat for not indicating in his resignation announcement what the reason was, has “admitted” that HE had a responsibility to be more forthcoming at the time, though he added that he thought that immediacy of his resignation “mooted the need for further explanation.”

So, does the mayor’s official role and its informational obligations trump the social obligation to allow another “ownership” of his own announcement? Does the consequential outcome — resignation — obviate the obligation to notify (for the record, Goldsmith says he was wrong on that count). If there is public outrage based only/mainly on the relational expectation of “we should have been told,” does it support sanctions? Does Bloomberg’s citation of a norm that certain personal situations are one’s own to disclose get him off the hook? Does affirmatively suggesting other reasons rather than simply failing to disclose the actual ones cross another line entirely?

Bottom line: in many locations within the social, institutional, moral orders, the import of information behaviors goes far beyond the instrumental, consequential, substantive realm.

* The case is not being pursued as Mr. Goldsmith’s wife dropped the complaint.

It’s Never About the Content

Breaking News Alert The New York Times Saturday, February 28, 2009 -- 6:09 PM ET ----- Obama Is Said to Pick Kansas Governor for Health Post

President Obama asked Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas to become his nominee for secretary of health and human services on Saturday.

Ms. Sebelius accepted the president’s invitation and will be introduced by Mr. Obama at the White House on Monday, said an administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid upstaging the formal announcement.

So, if we knew the source’s name it would upstage the announcement, but knowing ahead of time the content of the announcement does not. Oh, OK, I think I get it.

Notification and the Life Course

We’ve become so aware of our embeddedness in networks that it’s easy to forget that you have to learn how to be a node. Competent execution of one’s responsibilities as a part of social information networks is a learned skill. A lot of early childhood socialization is informational; kids need to learn what needs to be reported to whom. What kinds of things you tell everybody and what kinds of things you say only at home? Which things need to be reported to adults immediately and which not? They learn that it’s not nice to tattle, never to cry wolf, always to tell the truth, etc. And such informational socialization is a life-long process.

Perhaps the network in which we all spend the greatest share of our social time is the family. It turns out that there’s a neat evolution of notification expectations and practices across the life course. First we teach kids to notify us if they feel sick, see something dangerous, get approached by strangers, etc. Then they have to learn that some things are not disclosed to people outside the family, that it’s not nice to tattle, and that they should never cry wolf. As our roles in the family change, it is a continuing challenge to “get notification right.”

For several pre-adolescent years kids are pretty much informational open books. Parents are either in on or let in on much if not almost everything that happens in their lives.

Then, as the teenage years approach, parents have to ask and prod and they start receiving “none of your business” type responses. As kids get the use of the car and gain other access to spatial independence, parents become more and more dependent on what the child elects to notify them about. They have to invest more and more in notificational oversight: “call me when you get there,” “tell me who you are with,” “let us know when you are leaving.” This is notificational socialization round three, training the kid in the notificational expectations that attach to their new status as semi-autonomous semi-adult. Rules and norms are called on to replace more direct information channels previously supplied by first-hand surveillance.

A big source of emotional conflict around notification at this stage is the growing contradiction of informational asymmetry experienced by the teenager. They know the parent can ask “where, when, with who, how long,” and they know well that they have no hope of extracting similar information from the parent.

But then the kids go off to college and their entire life is suddenly out of view. We switch to phone calls and emails and spend out time exhorting them to call or write more often and to have more to say when they do.

And around this time, we see emerging an interesting conflict between parents as one forgets to mention right away, news received in a phone call or email. You know the response when in the company of friends one parent says “Our oldest just the other day said she was having an interesting time in her math class” and the other parent thinks “Hmmmm, that’s news to me….” The classic notificational rebuke will follow: you should have told me that sooner!

Those same parents have parents of their own, of course, and will soon experience the notificational conflicts that go on between older adults and adult children. They get a phone call from mom describing a medical or financial emergency that occured a week or two before: “Ma! I can’t believe you are just telling me this now!” It’s quite possibly a vain attempt at late life socialization, but the adult children will work this angle just the same. The comeback is standard: “We didn’t want to worry you.”

The adult child is robbed of the ultimate informational comfort: no news is good news. They have to worry all the time and they say this makes them feel like they are dealing with a child. And it does, of course. But it’s different too. Parents often withhold information from kids because they are too young to be told or because they don’t need to worry about something. As older adults with adult children, there are vestiges of these sentiments – our adult problems are ours – and to yield to their adult children’s “you should tell me right away” is to give up some of the relational adultness they have earned. And for the adult children to demand it is, in a way, an attempt, innocent as it may be, at replacing the adult-adult relationship by adopting the adult role and tilting their informational relationship with their adult parents toward notificational asymmetry.

Notification and Disclosure

Sooner or later, the analysis of notification leads to a consideration of disclosure. The two terms blend into one another in dictionary and thesaurus but we can make a useful distinction (useful, that is, for sociology of information purposes).

To notify is to inform or make known to a particular notifyee (it can be a large number of people — even “the public”). To disclose, though, is to release information without a target recipient. Again, the point here is not whether this distinction covers all the empirical usages of these words; rather, the point is to zero in on a useful distinction. For us, that distinction is whether the teller is telling because of a specific relational obligation to an identifiable other or whether the telling is more a revelation for all to see.

A further analysis of this will come up in a still to be written chapter on notification and the public sphere. I was motivated to think about it today, though, while reading an article in the paper about a new disclosure law (“Note to Civic-Minded – Prepare to Reveal Riches” by Alison Leigh Cowan) being discussed in New York by the city’s Conflict of Interest Board. At issue is whether volunteer members of civic boards should be required to disclose financial interests and the like.

The case brings up a lot of interesting sociology of information issues. The whole thing falls under the “information order” category as it concerns the social regulation of who gets to know what. The arguments for and against the measure (and the articles (perhaps even more interestingly) which boards will be subject to the regulation and which ones not) will be fascinating. What does the public deserve to know? What do (wealthy) people get to hide? What do we make of the way engaging with “the system” changes one’s informational environment (the same thing has come up recently in discussions about the private lives and backgrounds of politicians in connection with Governor Palin’s nomination)? How do we think differently about legislated disclosure and media snooping? How do privacy and a public “right to know” intersect? Etc.

The article suggests that “Albany passed the law because of a sense that public authorities…were operating off the radar screen.” We note in passing that it’s interesting that information about members was seen as a way to improve oversight of what boards DO. Another source added “What they’re saying here is you got to fill out disclosure forms if you’re an alter ego for government.” This resonates with something Gillian Hadfield and I have written about under the heading “democracy and the information order”: a part of our experience of the generic equality we are promised in a democracy is the expectation that under certain circumstances you don’t get to say to me “I don’t have to tell you.” The regulations ARE designed to ferret out actual material conflicts of interest, but to the degree that they “feel right” it would seem to be a manifestation of the principle that of those who are, or would be, public servants can be more powerful and wealthier than the average Joe but they don’t get to say “I’m not telling you.”

Somewhat predictably, this is exactly the sticking point. The city council is considering toning down the regulation so it requires only a short form that demands only limited information. The article quotes a former public board member who had experience filling out the current 32 page disclosure form:

“It takes a long time to complete and do a careful job, and it is a complete undressing,” he said. “I can tell you,” he said, referring to the slew of billionaires who sit on the Central Park board, “the members of that board would jump out of their skins if forced to file those forms.”

I think this suggests something interesting about social stratification and the sociology of information. Stay tuned.

The Theory of Notification

As you might know, I’m on sabbatical this year working on a book on the sociology of notification (alas, along with two other projects and a few projectlets). It’s time to move on to the first-drafting (the second version since I start with a “zeroth” draft) of my “theory” chapters. Chapter four examines how notification varies as a behavior — who we tell, how we tell, when we tell — and how these are dependent on the information content and our understanding of the relational ecology in which we find ourselves. As a first approximation who, how, and when can be seen as dependent variables while content and relationships are independent variables. Notification norms link these together: when we acquire a particular bit of information they tell us whom to tell and how and when to do it given the relationships we think we are in (or, see next paragraph, want to be in).

That’s the hyper-simplified version. The first complication is that, in fact, the process goes both ways: we can manipulate relationships and the meaning of the content based on our notification choices. We share inside information with close friends, but we also draw others close by sharing inside information.

I still haven’t quite settled on what the “punch” of chapter 4 will be. In its current form, I think that what it does is demonstrate the many dimensions along which notification behavior can vary (and which matter in practice — it’s key that senders and receivers are not indifferent about them), thereby making the argument that the norms that direct the system are really accomplishing something pretty amazing. That’s not as gripping as I’d like. I think what I want to do here is get the reader pretty jazzed up about how much relational work she is doing all the time.

The following chapter, working title “The Micro-sociology of Notification,” is where I get all phenomenological and social psychological. Will it be of any interest at all to the general reader? Hard to say. The main framework here is the self-world axis; to have a self is to have a world and vice versa (I’m primarily channeling Alfred Schutz here). The challenge of being in the world with others is to keep our worlds aligned (I coin the not-as-mellifluous-as-I’d-like term syncosmize for this). We do this, in part, by selectively disseminating what we know (take) to be the case. The last chapter described how we do that. This one pushes a bit more and asks how the competent node accomplishes the task. In addition to relatively passive knowledge of the rules/norms of notification, she needs to keep track of who would want to know what, who already knows what, etc. Ultimately, this means maintaining a model of the other’s world and of the local epistemological ecology. This chapter describes how we do this.

Tag: notification