To: CLS Participants (Web only; e-mail alert)

From: Nicholas Johnson

Re: CLS/Reading Assignments for March 1, 2000

Note: Time flies when you're having a good time. The semester is half over. By now you have a fairly good sense of some of the specifics of cyber life and law. It is a somewhat bizarre and constantly changing challenge and mix of technology, human behavior, law and policy. We've seen it in the context of our old concepts of privacy, torts, national security, defamation, and most recently copyright.

So I thought it might be useful at this point in the semester to take an evening to reflect a bit on the big picture. What sense can we make of all this?

There will be the usual quiz -- but only over the items marked with "***." Other readings are equally important and for the most part are sufficiently interesting and relevant to your personal and professional lives that you will want to read them.

As lawyers, words are all we have. We listen, read, talk and write. And yet we are little more focused on the words that make up the verbal environment in which we live -- and shape our, and others', actions -- than fish are conscious of the waters in which they live.

General semantics offers us tools of great personal and professional value. It is a discipline, a way of looking at human behavior, a body of literature, and a number of organizations with "members" and journals.

General semantics has something to offer every profession from advertising to zoo keeping -- but most of all to those wordsmiths called lawyers.

Fifty years ago you would have been exposed to these tools in junior high or high school. General semantics courses were taught by charismatic professors who made the subject one of the most popular of all electives at colleges and universities. Today most of those early personalities have died, and other educational trends have squeezed out their courses.

Properly presented, general semantics would be a three-hour, one-semester course. We're only going to give it an hour or so. Therefore, most of what you will get from the evening is what you bring to it -- from having done the reading and then reflecting upon it.

Do you know the story of "the six blind men and the elephant"? As they touched it one thought it was a tree, another a rope, and so forth. Well, that's kind of how you all are about to approach general semantics.

I've suggested a number of readings. Each is short and a quick read. But they come at the subject from different perspectives. The more you can examine the better your understanding will be.

Like to begin with definitions? See what dozens of folks have said when they tried to describe general semantics? Check out the home page for the International Society for General Semantics. You ought to visit that site anyway. Once there, click on "Selected Articles from ETC." and scroll down to the link to Bob Wanderer's "General Semantics: A Compendium of Definitions." (It's more to be sampled than "read," but sample from each of his sections.)

*** Wendell Johnson, Chapter Seven, "Seeing What Stares Us in the Face," from his book, Your Most Enchanted Listener. The excerpt from the book includes preliminary material and also Chapter One (delightful, but not assigned). So scroll on down, on my screen it's about half to two-thirds of the way, to find the beginning of Chapter Seven (page breaks indicated; pp. 49-56 in the book).

*** Wendell Johnson, "The Communication Process and General Semantic Principles," from Wilbur Schramm's Mass Communications (page breaks indicated; pp. 301-315).

There is also an Institute of General Semantics with its own Web site and publications. Its introductory brochure (only a page or two) is another quick way into another's perspective of the field.

What does general semantics have to offer policy analysis? Two of general semantics' most useful tools are the simple questions "What do you mean?" and "How do you know?" (As a young child I found them incredibly empowering when dealing with adults!)  Here's how I brought them to bear in a keynote talk on "Governing America" presented at the Herbert Hoover Library to a National Issues Forum. It's a speech text, so there are no numbered pages on the Web page. Read through the Rush Limbaugh discussion (about the first half of the speech -- though, of course, you're not forbidden to look at all of it).

"Searching for the Right Word: The Semantics of Heterosexual Relationships" is a piece I wrote for the journal of the International Society for General Semantics called ETC. Ever had difficulty explaining to your folks "just exactly who is" your new companion? Here's how general semantics can help with that one. (There are no page breaks but it ran pp. 6-15 in that issue.)

Feeling a little low? "Verbal Cocoons," chapter one from People in Quandaries, suggests you may be suffering from the "IFD disease." General semantics may help you cure the blues. There's preliminary material; to find the beginning of chapter one scroll down about one-fourth the way. (It's pp. 3-20 in the current edition of the book.)

By now you will often have encountered the name Alfred Korzybski. This Polish count is credited as the father of general semantics by virtue of his book, Science and Sanity. The Institute of General Semantics sponsors an "Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture" every year. I was asked to give it in 1995. I titled the lecture "General Semantics: The Next Generation."  (Much of the beginning of it -- which is not assigned -- is nostalgic recall of times and persons known to many in the audience that evening. So it's a quick read and insight to what it was like for me growing up in the home of a general semanticist -- why, for example, we were forbidden to have food dislikes.)

Page breaks in this hardcopy-published version are indicated. Scroll down about one-fourth the way to p. 27 and the heading, "The Next, Next Generation: Media Distortions of Perception." Read from there to the heading "Media Merger Mania" on p. 32.

Consider the portions selected as a segue to the next two assigned pieces:

Copyright: Its Future on the Internet

8. Read John Perry Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas," Wired 2.03, March 1994. (This is the Pinedale, Wyoming, cattle rancher who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead and helped found the eff (electronic frontier foundation) with Lotus developer Mitch Kapor. A mind stretching piece with which we begin our consideration of the role of copyright as cyberspace law. 16 pages.)

9. If you have time (it won't be part of the quiz, but will be discussed and part of the quiz next week if we don't get to it February 16 -- so you won't be wasting your time to read it now) read *** Eric Schlachter, "The Intellectual Property Renaissance in Cyberspace: Why Copyright Law Could be Unimportant on the Internet," 12 Berkeley Tech. L. J. 15. The text and endnotes are at two different locations. The link I've provided takes you to a page where you can click on text.html and note.html to get you to both. (18 pages text; 10 pages notes.)