A letter to my Congressman regarding DOPA

May 12, 2006, 3:25 pm

[tags]DOPA, Congress, Web 2.0, Social software, technology ban[/tags]

I promised to draft a letter to my Congressman about the Deleting Online Predators Act (PDF). Here it is, and please leave suggestions for improvement in the comment section.
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Dear Rep. Buyer,

I am an associate professor in the Mathematics and Computing Department at Franklin College, an officer in the Indiana chapter of the Mathematical Association of America, and a constituent in your district. I am writing you today to voice my concern over the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), recently introduced to Congress by Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania. In practice, the bill will require public schools and libraries to block access by students to any internet site that could potentially be used to access “material that is harmful to minors”. While well-intentioned, this legislation would have a crippling effect on the ability of public schools to use a new generation of web-based software technology, effectively removing this technology from the hands of both teachers and students who could make good use of it.

The restrictions proposed by DOPA would involve blocking any internet site that allows users to create profiles or pages in which personal information is stored and which allows communication between users. The intended target of DOPA appears to be online chat rooms and social networking sites such as MySpace. But there are a wide variety of sites which would fall under the aegis of this legislation which not only do not pose threats of sexual predation to minors, but in fact have great potential for transforming the educational experiences of the students being “protected”. Such sites include:

Social bookmarking services, which allow users to create web-based lists (and research other users’ lists) of internet locations organized by subject;
Wikis, which are user-contributed knowledge bases on various subjects, the most prominent of which is the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia;
Weblogs, both those written by others as well as those written and maintained by the students themselves.

All of these instances of “social software” technology have the potential to effect a transformative change in the quality of education at the K-12 level. As a college professor, I am already utilizing this technology to enhance the classes I teach and encouraging my students to learn this technology themselves. I find it alarming, therefore, that there would be a move by Congress to keep this technology out of the hands of the students who could most benefit from it — the kids of the current “Net Generation”. We send dangerously mixed signals to these kids when we enact high standards and encourage excellence in math, science and technology on the one hand, and then ban the use of technology on the other.

While we all want to protect kids from online predators, banning the medium by which such behavior happens is a reactionary measure that has been shown time and again in the past to be of little or no effect. Banning the technology does not solve the problem; teaching the appropriate use of the technology does. I urge you and the other members of Congress to support a more effective means of protecting our kids, such as through the promotion of materials for parents about how to teach kids appropriate use of technology. There are many such materials already available online.

Thank you for your time, and please feel free to contact me at the provided address if you would like to discuss this issue further.

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http://rightwingnation.com rightwingprof

So did he respond? I’ve heard Steve is pretty good at replying to constituents.
http://www.castingoutnines.net Robert Talbert

I actually haven’t sent it yet; I posted this on Friday and have been pretty busy with finals. Probably Monday.

Steve is a very smart guy. I traded letters with him a year or so ago about the SCO vs. Linux lawsuit and I was surprised at the depth of the knowledge he had about it, and the fact that he responded within a week of my mailing the letter in the first place. I’m pretty proud to have somebody like him, and also Mike Pence, representing us here in Hoosierland.
http://www.mobilize.org/SOS Mobilize.org

Mobilize.org is launching a new campaign in response to Congress’ attempt to censor the communication of our generation. We have created the action alert below and built a website, http://www.mobilize.org/SOS. We are hoping to get as much grassroots action as possible around this important issue, especially from the online community.

Breaking News:

Legislation introduced this week will ban social networking, even sites used for educational and professional opportunities. What’s next? HR5319 will censor the communication of our generation and tell us who we can talk to, when and how. Tell Congress that social networking is a movement that we built, a movement that we are going to fight for.

Visit http://www.mobilize.org/SOS, take action, tell your friends and get mad.

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The bill blocks the use of these sites in public libraries, which is for many, the only access that they have to a computer. Our hope is to be able to amend the bill to take these facts into consideration. We agree that there need to be safeguards put in place for “sexual predators” and any of other crimes that might occur because of the accessibility of information on these sites, but to ban them in schools (including using school computers afterschool) and public libraries, is for many – banning social networking.
http://rightwingnation.com rightwingprof

I was in Baron Hill’s, then Mike Sodrel’s district. One thing I will say for Hill is he answered every letter I sent, and never with a form letter. Specter, OTOH, is even nasty in his responses to his constituents (having gotten a couple of very nasty replies from him since moving here).
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taramckinley

Fewer and less is one of my favorite (or least favorite?) grammar pet peeves…perhaps only to be pompous about correcting a mistake that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things but shows that one can in fact be pompous enough to linger on stupid details. Isn’t that really why anyone bothers to learn and mini-lecture friends about any useless topic?
marcleavitt

Many are called, but less are chosen.
jffoster

Thanks for the Merriam-Webster reference. Now we know where to go to read more about less.
charlesforrest

Ah, the care and feeding of pet peeves. I always ask myself, is the quantity discrete or continuous? So, fewer stones but less water.

On the difference between I and me, I suggest taking out everyone else as a test: “He drove Tom, Henry and I to the store” versus “He drove I to the store”.

anon1972

That’s how my grandmother taught me! ”Who made it? *I* made it. Daddy and *I* made it.” (To which I of course responded “But you didn’t make it. Daddy and ME made it.” I was a smart aleck at age 6. But I got the point.) If only more people were blessed with grandmothers like mine…..

jffoster

But the piece missing here in the logic is the unstated assumption that conjunction cannot trigger case assignment. In standard literary English it does not but in quite a number of languages, including Modern Standard French, conjunction is in fact relevant to case, as it is in several nonstandard American English dialects. So people who say ‘Me and Daddy made it.’ and get “corrected” are apt to learn, not that conjunction is irrelevant, but that conjunction requires the nominative case and that’s how we get the “between you and I” hypercorrection dialect.

jffoster

Mr forrest,
as to your continuous v discreet, this is why ’12 items or less’ at the grocery store actually makes a certain amount of sense. If it’s taken to be a collection, a whole group, then ‘less’ actually fits.
Some Latin nouns had alternate plurals, one in -i for distrubuted plural and the other in -a for collectives. These include locus v loci / loca, focus, and some others. Occasionally I get “corrected” for ‘loca’ or ‘foca’ in the collective use by people who don’t know nearly as much about it as they think they do.

As to your “difference between I and me”, see my note to Anon1972 below.

mbelvadi

This is funny: I was just about to post a response to charlesforrest pointing out that most people don’t seem to know the difference between discrete and discreet much less continuous vs discrete, and here you are making exactly that error. I know, the fact that the noun version of discreet is discretion rather than discreetion is probably the cause, but hey, we’re in the Lingua Franca blog!

jffoster

Thank you. In my case above, as the discussion would seem to render fairly clear, it was an unintended mispelling, and prudence or things of that ilk is not what I was talking about.

Henry_Smith

I believe the latest thinking on the between I and me problem is that where coordination is involved — where there is an x and y construction the grammar rule is not the same as the pronoun on its own. So leaving out everyone else is not a valid test. (See “The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language”.)

anon1972

I think it was in the UK chain Boots that I saw this problem ingeniously solved: their “express lane” checkout sign reads: UP TO TEN ITEMS. Brilliant!
fr_olby

Conversation at our dinner table:
Billy: Hey! Me and Phil went to the game.
Dad: (scornfully): “Me and Phil went to the game”?
Billy: Dad, you went too?
11182967

Architecture: Fewer is more? Personal: I like her fewer and fewer (better now that she’s lost weight?). Speaking of store signs, one in the paint department at the local Lowe’s used to say “Drop Clothes.”
betterschool

Fun! Thanks for the break. As an analytic philosopher, I hate to see the few/less distinction evaporate because of its denotative power in ambiguous situations. A lost cause, I suspect.

jffoster

Yep, it’s probably lost. Old fogies like me continue with the distinction, though there are ambiguous cases, like the grocery express lanes, where, as I pointed out above, either ‘less’ or ‘fewer’ makes sense. The problem with the ‘less’ / ‘fewer’ distinction is first, that it has no reinforcing counterpart in ‘more than’, and second, that it is highly irregular and suppletive. That is, the words ‘fewer’ and ‘less’ are not morphologically related. The difference then is entirely idiosyncratic and has to be memorized. But they aren’t used enough to protect their highly idiosyncratic forms, in contradistinction for instance to the various forms of the copula BE, whose constant use reinforces and tends to protect it from regularization.

http://twitter.com/SkyOverEvrythng Bob Bacardi

Can’t say I care very many for the dismissal of the distinction between discrete & continuous things. I guess those of us that do care are less every year. Much thanks for putting me in my place.
janesdaughter

So, am I just kidding myself when I try to use the faster, “Up to 10 items” lane, by pretending that the “2 for 1″ specials in my basket should count as 1, not 2?

mbelvadi

Huh! And here I pondered whether I should count the two bundles of cilantro that I stuck into a single produce bag as 2 or 1 for the purposes of that aisle! I finally decided that the “spirit of the law” dictated that I should count barcodes/ringups since the point is to be quick and the per-item time is in the barcode-reading/swiping. So yes, you are kidding yourself, since the two items require two barcode-swipes. What do other people think?

cwinton

Less still reigns supreme in mathematics, where the awkward distinctions “less than” and “less than or equal to” are employed (fewer being the loser), and symbols are used to eliminate semantic ambiguity. For what it’s worth, “greater than” and “greater than or equal to” are used rather than more (i.e., more is the counterpart to fewer rather than less). And speaking of “or”, since it may be inclusive (e.g., “pick peppers that are red or green”), the awkward construction “exclusive or” is employed, although sometimes the even more awkward “one or the other, but not both” is used (either doesn’t serve very well, either).
dank48

The “countable vs. discrete” distinction works pretty well, actually, except for money, where it breaks down completely. We count our money, or think we do; actually we count the bills and coins that stand for buying power. The money itself is measured, not counted. We don’t ask how many dollars and how many cents something costs; we ask how much it costs. There’s a physical difference between ten one-dollar bills and one ten-dollar bill, but there’s no difference in value (collector’s rarities aside, of course).

Twenty years, and it won’t matter any more than the “convince”/”persuade” distinction does now.

Henry_Smith

Doesn’t it break down in a few other situations: 25 words or less, 20 years or less, for example?

http://www.facebook.com/people/Bryna-Hellmann/1257914906 Bryna Hellmann

Would you like to comment on what someone has called a catastrophe of apostrophes? Having finally given up cringing at the misuse of it’s and its (and the addition of its’), the apostrophe has now become the way to make plurals and 3rd person singular nouns (viewer’s of Fox, she consider’s).
There’s more fun to be found in the misuse of homophones such as ‘launched on site, he peaked my interest, so we must reign in Congress, tow the line, wave the contract or make a mute point’.
About fewer/less: one’s easier to say than the other, so why have both, is, I think also why there is little distinction now between number and amount. Even a BBC announcer will say ‘the amount of cars on the road’. It’s hard to know what to insist our pupils and students learn, but we keep trying.
dpmccain

I remember reading (one day I will find the book on my shelves), that whom should always be preceded by (with?) to, with, for, or by. If not, then “who” should be used. I remember having one of those “ah ha” moments. The difficulty is, when one wants to appear educated, some drag out “whom” in any conversation. I recall someone of higher (but not greater) authority on the corporate hierarchy saying, “Whom are you talking at?” I still jump in disbelief at the recollection.

We could spend days debating language, and I am always fighting with tech folks many of whom (see?) use the incorrect homophone, and then justify it by saying, “You know what I mean, what’s the big deal?”

And what’s with the use of affect and effect (particulary when folks reverse the pronunciation?).

I wonder if it really does matter, all things considered. I would like to think so.
Brian Abel Ragen

I have always liked this maxim: “A gentleman is never rude by accident.” In the same way, a careful writer never annoys the reader by accident. Not getting the less / fewer distinction annoys some readers, so the careful writer will try to get it right, just he will not refer to the a being of unknown gender as “he” instead of “he or she” unless he is trying to annoy (at least a few) of his readers.

jffoster

Indeteerminate gender _they_ has long been used in the singular for just such instances in many dialects of English and that’s what I use. I’m damned if I’m going to say or write ‘he or she’ . And in anticipation of complaints tha ‘they’ is plural and if you use it as a singular with a plural verb, you “violating” number agreement, then you should stop using ‘you’ as a singular with a plural verb and say ‘they is’ and ‘you is’.

jffoster

Better yet, ‘They is’ and ‘You art’ . Or worse yet.

copy_preditor

Thank you, Allan, for maintaining the initial cap with a complete sentence following a colon in running text (“I’m tempted to argue: If it’s so important to distinguish between less and fewer, …”). Contrary to the current “CMOS” ruling of lowercasing in this instance, I still appreciate the use — and reading of — a colon as a verbal equal sign, indicating that the second part of the statement is as deserving of an initial cap as the first. Sorry, “CMOS” editors, but I’ve never heard anyone complain that the appearance of the second cap is “distracting.” I’m glad to see such a distinguished writer agree with me on this point.
ulyssesmsu

Less and fewer has nothing to do with grammar. It’s a usage opinion. I wonder if that primer also says that it’s incorrect to put a preposition at the end of a sentence.

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