social constraints on communication technology use

Variations in average telephone use have been relatively small across more than a century of telephone use. From 1893 to 1913, the number of telephones in many countries around the world increased by more than a factor of ten. The average number of intra-urban telephone conversations per subscriber telephone changed little. For example, the number of subscriber phones in Austria increased from 14 thousand to 146 thousand from 1893 to 1913.  The average number of conversations per phone fell from 7.3 per phone per day in 1893 to 6.6 per phone per day in 1913. For the countries for which data are available in both 1893 and 1913, the median country-average conversations per phone per day fell from 4.6 to 4.1.  These figures are similar for telephone use in the U.S. across the twentieth century.

Because communication is fundamentally related to social life, social structure significantly constrains communications technology use.  Persons who want to have a lot of telephone conversations have to find someone else likewise interested. But the social issue goes much deeper than common interest: forms and frequencies of communication are tightly bound up in social relations.  For example, talking frequently with someone usually signals an intimate personal relationship. It also values that relationship relative to other personal relationships.  Similarly, struggling with what to say or to write usually doesn’t arise from a lack of possible content.  The concern is with what is interesting, relevant, and appropriate.

Media technology changes quickly.  Social relations change slowly.

at the portrait museum

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Data: Telephones and intra-urban (local) telephone calls by country, 1893-1929 (Excel version).

regulating theater in eighteenth-century Paris

In pre-Revolutionary France, the French king awarded theater-process patents to particular theater companies.  The Académie d’Opéra, founded in 1669, received letters patent giving it exclusive rights to present to the public works with texts that were sung or danced.  The Comédie-Française, which incorporated Molière’s acting company, received the exclusive right to present drama in verse.  The Comédie-Italienne, a troupe of Italian actors, held rights to Italian comic opera and the commedia dell’arte. Of course, just like U.S. communications companies argue over the boundaries between telecommunications and information services, Old-Regime French theater companies argued over the types of singing and dancing each had the legal right to do.

These three major Parisian theater companies found common ground in seeking to suppress theatrical entrepreneurs that built theatrical businesses within the annual Parisian trade fairs.  These trade fairs occurred at the St-Germain abbey in the Latin Quarter (late winter and early spring) and at the St-Laurent abbey on the right bank of the Seine (late summer and early fall).  The trade fairs were special trade zones within which many normal guild regulations and commercial privileges did not apply.  Trade-fair theaters developed performances that served popular tastes and were quite successful.  Concerned in part about audience losses, the major theater companies asserted their privileges over the trade-fair theaters.  The trade-fair theaters responded with a variety of jurisdictional arguments and clever legal forum-shopping.  These tactics gained the trade-fair theaters years of business, but ultimately the superior legal-political power of the major theaters prevailed.

The trade-fair theaters also responded with successful business innovations.  For example, Parlement in 1707  forbid the performance of any “play, colloquy, or dialogue” in French at the fairs.  The order did not explicitly forbid monologues, interpreted as having only one speaking actor on the stage at a time. Hence fair performances had actors alternately run on and off the stage to speak their lines, or had one actor on stage and another actor speaking from off stage. When the actors were forbidden to sing, stage assistants held up placards with written verse.  With the aid of these prompts, actors planted in the audience got the audience to sing the songs that accompanied the performance. To skirt the category of play, some fair theaters offered productions with three acts rather than the classically inspired standard of five acts.

More dramatic freedom came with the French Revolution.  The Théâtre des Délassements-Comiques, founded in 1785, was soon restricted to performing pantomimes, with no more than three actors on stage, and a gauze curtain hung between the stage and the audience so that the audience could see the stage action only obscurely.  In 1789, after the fall of the Bastille, the theater director Plancher-Valcour reportedly tore down the veil and declared, “Long Live Liberty!”

Liberty lives long only with politically engaged citizens, good law, and innovative persons and organizations.

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Sources:

Isherwood, Robert M. 1986. Farce and fantasy: popular entertainment in eighteenth-century Paris. New York: Oxford University Press (Ch. 4).

Ravel, Jeffrey S. 1999.  The contested parterre: public theater and French political culture, 1680-1791. Ithaca: Cornell University Press (Ch. 3).

Hemmings, Frederick William John. 1994. Theatre and State in France: 1760-1905. Cambridge: Cambridge university press (Ch. 4).

rationality in public discourse

In my post on real-world public reasoning, I discussed the reception of Brian Kalt’s law review articles on prosecuting murder and other crimes in the fifty-square-mile Idaho portion of Yellowstone National Park.  Prof. Kalt responded with an email to me.  Since this was before my email and telephone policy statement, I will not post his email, which was gracious and intellectually substantive.  I responded with the email below. He in turn responded with further discussion of the issues.  He noted, “Now that I understand what you were saying more, I am satisfied that all the response I could reasonably ask for is contained in the one comment already posted by Mr. Havens.”  He also wrote, “I guess I prefer the ‘nothing’ approach, but not because I feel unfairly treated.”

I have decided to post my own email regarding this matter because I don’t believe that doing so is unfair to Prof. Kalt and because I believe in the importance of courteous public discussion of scholarly issues.

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Prof. Kalt,

Thanks for taking the time to respond.  On your sixth point, I do not think that all your work, or all the work of law professors generally, is useless.  In particular, your article “The Exclusion of Felons from Jury Service” strikes me as intellectual impressive, publicly important, and quite useful for anyone thinking about public position of ex-prisoners.  I wish “The Exclusion of Felons from Jury Service” had attracted as much attention as “The Perfect Crime.”

Both “The Perfect Crime” and “Tabloid Constitutional” were fun to read.  I’m in favor of having fun and even manage occasionally to have some fun in writing.  See, e.g. https://www.purplemotes.net/2008/08/17/televisions-moving-into-the-toilet/ Having fun makes the world a better place.  I wish more law professors would have fun doing legal work and would share their fun with the world. In this sense,  you’re a great leader for your profession.

My post sought to analyze both attention to the legal issue you discovered and attention to your work concerning that issue.  You put forward a lesson, with a tone of righteous earnestness, about the marketplace of ideas.  I think the lesson you claimed to have learned misses key points of how the marketplace of ideas actually works.

But the point of this correspondence is fairness, not differing analysis or arguments about those issues.  I’ll briefly try to convince you that what you feel is unfair really isn’t unfair.  I hope to dissipate your feelings of unfairness. If you decide that I’ve failed, I would be happy to post on my blog the response you sent me, or a revised response if you want to create one, followed by my response.  Alternatively, if you would prefer not to have any public evidence that you noticed my comments (this seems to be a favored approach among persons who consider a commenter to be someone not relevant to their professional standing or beneath them), I’m willing to add to the original post an addendum that might lessen your feelings of unfairness without documenting that you expressed such feelings.

Your points four and five raise issues of fairness.  With regard to point four, you state that you were sincerely concerned that your law journal article could cause someone to be killed.  You also state that you attempted to avoid that bad outcome by notifying the authorities several months before it was published.  As you now recognize, your response to your concern was totally ineffectual.  I credited you with discovering a formal basis for making a sensational claim rather than accused you of extremely poor practical judgment.  I hope that you consider my choice to be fair.

You also state that you did not seek the attention that arose after you posted your paper on SSRN and that my extrapolation that you were competing for attention is unfair.  Please recognize that I am a communications industry economist.  Seeking attention and competing for attention are general, normal types of behavior in communication fields.  Competition for attention is an important economic structure in the legal academy.  To the extant that you want to acknowledge participating in it, competing for attention is not a personal failing for you as a law professor.  I have some sense that academics prefer not to acknowledge among themselves certain obvious aspects of their profession.  But I hope you consider it fair for a communications industry economist to recognize competition for attention.

With regard to point five, you state that it was “a bit unfair” for me to have written, “But surely for a law professor, the crowning moment must have been having a second article concerning the Yellowstone-Idaho crime problem accepted for publication in the Georgetown Law Journal.”  That sentence followed quotation of your statement, “The crowning moment, though, was the article in the /National Enquirer/.”  I interpreted your statement as having been written with some genial irony.  I see no reason that you cannot,  with a big smile, tell your fellow law profs that you had two articles on the Yellowstone-Idaho crime problem published in the Georgetown Law Journal.  Just as with mention in the National Enquirer, your fellow profs might laugh and be secretly envious.  I think it’s fair for you to do that.  Isn’t it fair for me to have written it?

If the above hasn’t dissipated your feelings of unfairness, feel free to send me some statement that you would like to have posted on my blog. I will not edit your statement without your permission and your approval of any editing.  Alternatively, I would be happy to add an addendum to the original post.  The addendum would make these points:  1) “The Perfect Crime” and “Tabloid Constitutionalism” are fun to read, having fun is good, and that the author should be commended for adding to the world’s fun; 2) The article “The Exclusion of Felons from Jury Service” is intellectually impressive, useful work, and, together with the author’s other articles, demonstrates the value of a variety of ways of doing legal scholarship, 3) Texts are often designed to attract the attention of readers.  While such a design may be difficult to discern in many law journal articles, law professors generally seek to attract attention to their work.  Seeking attention and competing for attention is not a personal moral failing of any particular law professor, and nothing in the above post should be construed to imply such therewith.

Please let me know if any of the above possibilities satisfy you.  Doing absolutely nothing is also another possibility.  I’m familiar with that approach, and I also would be happy to adopt it in these circumstances.

Sincerely,
Douglas Galbi

[email sent on Aug. 27, 2008; I have added embedded hyperlinks to Andy Haven’s comment and to Prof. Kalt’s papers.]