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Editor Login
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Recent Comments
- Re: Following the e-mail trail in the US Attorneys controversy
By: Allan Friedman
Date: Mar 26, 2007 10:35 AM
Notification
« Sharing knowledge about vacations | Main | The International Working Group on Online Consultation and Public Policy Making »
25 March 2007
Following the e-mail trail in the US Attorneys controversy
To any social network scholars out there, I will feature any decent network pictures that you come up with from the e-mail data released by the DOJ on the Netgov blog.
One of the notable points (to a social network scholar) of the controversy over the firing of the 8 US attorneys are the DOJ e-mails that have been released .
This episode illustrates the siren call of e-mail. Here is a set of people who have an enormous incentive to keep their interactions untraceable, and yet so much of their communication is via e-mail. It’s just too convenient. I am sure that truly sensitive issues are much more likely to be conducted via face to face or phone, but it is hard to anticipate what will become sensitive. Thus, for example, one e-mail highlights the AG’s presence at a meeting about the firings, contradicting some of his later statements. It would have been hard to anticipate that this would be an issue when the e-mail was sent.
Our lives, in short, are becoming increasingly recorded by the (nonhuman) network—via e-mail, via mass transit cards, via phone records. What are the implications for social science? As I have discussed before, and will focus on in a series of entries in a month or so, the implications are potentially revolutionary for our understandings of collective human behavior. Whether the academy is poised to seize the day is another story (something else I will be examining).
Posted by David Lazer at March 25, 2007 9:16 PM
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Comments
I am sure that truly sensitive issues are much more likely to be conducted via face to face or phone, but it is hard to anticipate what will become sensitive.
This raises an interesting point. ICT, and email in particular, has certainly had an effect on the functional structure of organizations. It can enable centralization of control by a specific strategist who merely needs to be kept in the loop. But if this produces a trail that leads to the strategist, there are strong incentives to find some other information flow pattern. In gray areas, will more effort be spent keeping things off line? What are the emergent structural features of this kind of communication pattern?
Or perhaps it already exists: Chief of Staff is the new fall guy...
Posted by: Allan Friedman at March 26, 2007 10:35 AM