Could The Digital Age Become A Threat To Democracy
moultano
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
in Discussions
<div class="IPBDescription">Modifying documents without trace</div> I'm the last person in the world to be a luddite. As soon as they can plug computers into my brain, I want one piping an interface into my optic nerve. I've never doubted that technology has an overwhelmingly positive effect on society, but this article really scared me.
<a href='http://eee.uci.edu/programs/comp/39c/google/hesketh.html' target='_blank'>http://eee.uci.edu/programs/comp/39c/google/hesketh.html</a>
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Rewriting History: The Dangers of Digitized Research
by Peg Hesketh
Like Mark Levine, I, too, have come to rely on Internet resources to supplement my classroom instruction. Indeed, in my WR 39C classroom ("Argument and Research"), I had begun to take these electronic teaching resources for granted until recently when I followed up an in-class discussion on the definition of problem, position, and supporting claims embedded in an assigned reading of the "Statement by Eight Alabama Clergymen." The statement, written in 1963, urges their neighbors to withdraw support from demonstrations of civil disobedience led by outsiders and trust instead ongoing negotiations between civic leaders to solve the longstanding problem of racial inequity in the city of Birmingham. In class, we discussed how we might strategically counter the clergy’s position based on evidence, definitions, and assumptions implicit in their claims. For homework, I asked my students to read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "Letter From Birmingham Jail" and to be prepared to discuss what he did to counter the eight clergymen’s argument. I told them I would send via our class discussion list the web address to a Duke University site (http://www.du.edu/~atinkler/Jail/birmingham_jail.html) compiled by Alex Irvine that provides the full text of Dr. King’s letter along with hypertext links explaining the rhetorical strategies and historical references he employs. The reading and discussion are designed to give students an exemplary model of argument and counterargument that they can apply to their own writing projects.
That evening two students emailed me that the address I’d sent "didn't work" and asked what to do. While I would normally try to "fix" the problem, this time I did not. After all, among the course objectives of WR39C is teaching students how to find and use credible research. In class the next day about half my students reported the same difficulty with the link, so I asked them what they did next. One student had found the "Letter" in a book of essays she owned; all the rest had found a copy through a Google search. This led to a discussion about how they might determine whether what they'd found was unabridged, the difference between .com, .gov, .org, and .edu sites, and which ones might be more or less likely to provide an unadulterated version of the text. Most admitted that it had never occurred to them that there might be any reason to doubt the accuracy of the version of King letter they had found online.
This segued into a discussion on the reliability of online sources. I then passed along an email that coincidentally had been forwarded to me by a colleague. The subject line of the original email was "What happened to the Bush Scowcroft article?" and it raised troubling questions about the alleged disappearance of an article from Time Magazine’s online archive and the table of contents for the issue in which the article originally appeared. The article, purportedly written by former President George Bush and his defense secretary, Brent Scowcroft, was entitled "Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam." In their article, Bush and Scowcroft were said to have explained why coalition forces chose not to occupy Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. According to the excerpt of the article quoted in the email, this occupation would have led to the U.S. "unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land" (qtd. in Hier).
The email provided the now defunct links to Time’s archive address and table of contents where the article was said to have been available until recently. It also drew connections between the purging of this article--which seems to have presciently pinpointed many of the difficulties the present Bush Administration is experiencing regarding its pursuit of a "regime change" in Iraq--and current Secretary of State Colin Powell’s connections to Time Magazine’s parent, AOL Time Warner, and the FCC, which has loosened restrictions on media consolidation under Powell’s son Michael’s directorship. Interesting allegations, my class conceded, especially in light of our earlier discussion on the assumed accuracy of online versions of previously published material such as Dr. King’s "Letter From Birmingham Jail." And so I challenged them in a second homework assignment to investigate the claims leveled in the email and to write a 300-500 word essay in which they were to assess the accuracy of these claims, evaluate the relevancy of these claims as they might relate to the current public policy controversy they were writing about in WR39C, form an opinion on the implications of their findings, and report the steps they took to come to the conclusions they reached.
The results of their research were both fascinating and frightening. Fascinating in that while they all took the assignment seriously, they all took very different approaches. Some investigated whether the links to Time’s archives were truly broken and others tried to determine whether such links ever truly existed, and if so, when they were broken. Still others looked to see whether Colin Powell’s purported influence over the FCC was plausible, based not only on his son’s stewardship of the agency, but also on his own stock holdings in the company. In fact, by piecing together the information they found, most came to the conclusion that the article had indeed been published in Time Magazine, that the links to the magazine’s online archive had been broken fairly recently, and that the Powell family may have had something to do with the removal of the piece from the online archive, though without more definitive information, no one was willing to ascribe ulteriour motives or certainty to any of their conclusions. What was frightening about their research, however, was that not a single student used any resource other than Google. No one bothered to go to the library to look up the original magazine.
I did, and what I found surprised even me. Just as the email had claimed, the article had been published in the March 2, 1998 issue of Time. And it also was referenced in the magazine’s table of contents for that date. What I was shocked to find was that the deletion of the article from Time’s online content page was not the only change.
In the magazine as originally published, the article was part of a special report on the Clinton presidency, which had been the top feature listing in the contents page. In the online version, this special report was one of the last listings.
Also of note were numerous changes in the wording of the headlines and story descriptions. A story headlined "Clinton’s Crisis: How Not to Sell a War" in the original publication was touted as "Selling the War Badly" in the online version. Another article originally titled "Starr Wars: The Hidden Conflict" became "Going After Starr’s Camp" on the online content page. And a story originally described as "A peek at the harrowing closed door battles of the legal team’s of the President and the independent counsel" had been changed to "Clinton’s defenders are getting personal in covert attacks on Starr’s team, and it’s making him mad" in the online version. And then there was this switch from "Iraq: A Visit to Baghdad" to "Parade of Dead Babies" when the headlines were converted from print to electronic files. Now to be fair, several other headlines were altered slightly throughout the rest of the content pages, as well. An education story entitled "On the Laptop of Luxury", for example, became "Learning by Laptop." However, none experienced quite the shift in tone exhibited in the Clinton Special Report.
Even students who had previously argued that the loss of an isolated article from Time’s online archive was nothing significant were taken aback by the clear difference between the print and online version of what they all had taken to be a respected American publication. "They’re rewriting history," one student observed. So it seems.
Like all WR39C instructors, I stress the importance of evaluating the credibility of all research material, and for this reason I have always expected my students to limit the bulk of their online research to previously published material. Now I’m not so sure even that is much of a safeguard. I do know that this exercise convinced my students of the importance of going to original print sources whenever possible since the online "equivalent" of a print source many not be equivalent after all. It also makes a good case for libraries to continue to serve as a repository for good old-fashioned books, journals, and all other forms original print material. As Cathy Palmer, head of education and outreach, UC-Irvine Libraries, observed, "[This is] an excellent argument for the role of libraries to retain hardcopies of materials, even when electronic is available. It is much more difficult (read-we hope it is impossible) to excise information from thousands of copies of print and microfilm than it is to alter the electronic version."<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<a href='http://eee.uci.edu/programs/comp/39c/google/hesketh.html' target='_blank'>http://eee.uci.edu/programs/comp/39c/google/hesketh.html</a>
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Rewriting History: The Dangers of Digitized Research
by Peg Hesketh
Like Mark Levine, I, too, have come to rely on Internet resources to supplement my classroom instruction. Indeed, in my WR 39C classroom ("Argument and Research"), I had begun to take these electronic teaching resources for granted until recently when I followed up an in-class discussion on the definition of problem, position, and supporting claims embedded in an assigned reading of the "Statement by Eight Alabama Clergymen." The statement, written in 1963, urges their neighbors to withdraw support from demonstrations of civil disobedience led by outsiders and trust instead ongoing negotiations between civic leaders to solve the longstanding problem of racial inequity in the city of Birmingham. In class, we discussed how we might strategically counter the clergy’s position based on evidence, definitions, and assumptions implicit in their claims. For homework, I asked my students to read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "Letter From Birmingham Jail" and to be prepared to discuss what he did to counter the eight clergymen’s argument. I told them I would send via our class discussion list the web address to a Duke University site (http://www.du.edu/~atinkler/Jail/birmingham_jail.html) compiled by Alex Irvine that provides the full text of Dr. King’s letter along with hypertext links explaining the rhetorical strategies and historical references he employs. The reading and discussion are designed to give students an exemplary model of argument and counterargument that they can apply to their own writing projects.
That evening two students emailed me that the address I’d sent "didn't work" and asked what to do. While I would normally try to "fix" the problem, this time I did not. After all, among the course objectives of WR39C is teaching students how to find and use credible research. In class the next day about half my students reported the same difficulty with the link, so I asked them what they did next. One student had found the "Letter" in a book of essays she owned; all the rest had found a copy through a Google search. This led to a discussion about how they might determine whether what they'd found was unabridged, the difference between .com, .gov, .org, and .edu sites, and which ones might be more or less likely to provide an unadulterated version of the text. Most admitted that it had never occurred to them that there might be any reason to doubt the accuracy of the version of King letter they had found online.
This segued into a discussion on the reliability of online sources. I then passed along an email that coincidentally had been forwarded to me by a colleague. The subject line of the original email was "What happened to the Bush Scowcroft article?" and it raised troubling questions about the alleged disappearance of an article from Time Magazine’s online archive and the table of contents for the issue in which the article originally appeared. The article, purportedly written by former President George Bush and his defense secretary, Brent Scowcroft, was entitled "Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam." In their article, Bush and Scowcroft were said to have explained why coalition forces chose not to occupy Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. According to the excerpt of the article quoted in the email, this occupation would have led to the U.S. "unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land" (qtd. in Hier).
The email provided the now defunct links to Time’s archive address and table of contents where the article was said to have been available until recently. It also drew connections between the purging of this article--which seems to have presciently pinpointed many of the difficulties the present Bush Administration is experiencing regarding its pursuit of a "regime change" in Iraq--and current Secretary of State Colin Powell’s connections to Time Magazine’s parent, AOL Time Warner, and the FCC, which has loosened restrictions on media consolidation under Powell’s son Michael’s directorship. Interesting allegations, my class conceded, especially in light of our earlier discussion on the assumed accuracy of online versions of previously published material such as Dr. King’s "Letter From Birmingham Jail." And so I challenged them in a second homework assignment to investigate the claims leveled in the email and to write a 300-500 word essay in which they were to assess the accuracy of these claims, evaluate the relevancy of these claims as they might relate to the current public policy controversy they were writing about in WR39C, form an opinion on the implications of their findings, and report the steps they took to come to the conclusions they reached.
The results of their research were both fascinating and frightening. Fascinating in that while they all took the assignment seriously, they all took very different approaches. Some investigated whether the links to Time’s archives were truly broken and others tried to determine whether such links ever truly existed, and if so, when they were broken. Still others looked to see whether Colin Powell’s purported influence over the FCC was plausible, based not only on his son’s stewardship of the agency, but also on his own stock holdings in the company. In fact, by piecing together the information they found, most came to the conclusion that the article had indeed been published in Time Magazine, that the links to the magazine’s online archive had been broken fairly recently, and that the Powell family may have had something to do with the removal of the piece from the online archive, though without more definitive information, no one was willing to ascribe ulteriour motives or certainty to any of their conclusions. What was frightening about their research, however, was that not a single student used any resource other than Google. No one bothered to go to the library to look up the original magazine.
I did, and what I found surprised even me. Just as the email had claimed, the article had been published in the March 2, 1998 issue of Time. And it also was referenced in the magazine’s table of contents for that date. What I was shocked to find was that the deletion of the article from Time’s online content page was not the only change.
In the magazine as originally published, the article was part of a special report on the Clinton presidency, which had been the top feature listing in the contents page. In the online version, this special report was one of the last listings.
Also of note were numerous changes in the wording of the headlines and story descriptions. A story headlined "Clinton’s Crisis: How Not to Sell a War" in the original publication was touted as "Selling the War Badly" in the online version. Another article originally titled "Starr Wars: The Hidden Conflict" became "Going After Starr’s Camp" on the online content page. And a story originally described as "A peek at the harrowing closed door battles of the legal team’s of the President and the independent counsel" had been changed to "Clinton’s defenders are getting personal in covert attacks on Starr’s team, and it’s making him mad" in the online version. And then there was this switch from "Iraq: A Visit to Baghdad" to "Parade of Dead Babies" when the headlines were converted from print to electronic files. Now to be fair, several other headlines were altered slightly throughout the rest of the content pages, as well. An education story entitled "On the Laptop of Luxury", for example, became "Learning by Laptop." However, none experienced quite the shift in tone exhibited in the Clinton Special Report.
Even students who had previously argued that the loss of an isolated article from Time’s online archive was nothing significant were taken aback by the clear difference between the print and online version of what they all had taken to be a respected American publication. "They’re rewriting history," one student observed. So it seems.
Like all WR39C instructors, I stress the importance of evaluating the credibility of all research material, and for this reason I have always expected my students to limit the bulk of their online research to previously published material. Now I’m not so sure even that is much of a safeguard. I do know that this exercise convinced my students of the importance of going to original print sources whenever possible since the online "equivalent" of a print source many not be equivalent after all. It also makes a good case for libraries to continue to serve as a repository for good old-fashioned books, journals, and all other forms original print material. As Cathy Palmer, head of education and outreach, UC-Irvine Libraries, observed, "[This is] an excellent argument for the role of libraries to retain hardcopies of materials, even when electronic is available. It is much more difficult (read-we hope it is impossible) to excise information from thousands of copies of print and microfilm than it is to alter the electronic version."<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Comments
There will be safeguards, there will be measures taken so that people can't change an important document without a trace.
Blah blah blah end of the world hax0rz.
No.
What the hell is that article saying? I can barely follow it.
Is he just whining about people changing online resources basically? I mean, if you have access the original, who cares about the online resource. This only effects students taking the kind of extraneous courses that force you to research historical facts. Just about everyone else really doesn't have to care. The people who need the article for something other than writing stupid essays can actually take the time to get the original magazine issue at a library.
No, seriously. Anyone concerned about digital content "disappearing" can just get involved in archiving it. archive.org is a very public example, though their web archive respects robots.txt retroactively which reduces the long-term value (private archives would not normally do this). If you went down to the Time offices and asked for a copy of their magazine they could give you a censored one, but the copy of your own in your closet is not going to change. See the parallel?
The idea that people are willing to take results generated by a web search as fact without further correlation always baffles me. Mind you, the number of mistakes in encyclopedias over the years produces a similar question there. It is nice to see someone actually forcing students to think about reliability.
And this issue, folks, is why properly citing sources is important. Most citation formats for online resources include the date at which it was viewed, and making a local copy is always a good idea in case of argument later.
I am actually looking forward to the point where more organizations are willing to digitally sign their content. Of course that makes it easier to prove that a particular organization originally published a story, which is not always in their best interest.