Subject: Closing Burn
Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2000 12:07:53 -0400
From: [A Communications Professor]
To: commtalk@weber.ucsd.edu

Dear Faculty and Graduates,

As the faculty member who has been most directly concerned with the Burn web site, I am disturbed that the site was closed without first contacting me. I was not informed about the notices which were sent to and from various UC administrators. This is a site which was initiated by students who were working with me and has been continued by students with whom I have been working for several years. For many people around the world, Burn has been a model of alternative communication. Most mainstream discussion of new technology centers on business uses: on e-commerce and initiatives by for-profit companies. However, there is a community of internet researchers who study the uses of the internet by activists, by community groups and by individuals for whom the web offers a unique space for international exchange. In this community, the Burn web site is seen as an important model.

It is well known as pioneering in a unique form of interactive posting and transparent discourse. During the past year I have been in contact with web producers and internet journalists from all over the world. I attended an international congress in Amsterdam entitled The Next Five Minutes which centered on the use of the web as a tool for activism and as a window on international grass roots activities. The Burn web site was brought up at the Amsterdam conference as a unique site which has influenced web use around the globe. In Toronto the "tao" site was formed using Burn as a model. This site has been an important center for grassroots communication in Canada and around the world. At the present time I am on sabbatical working on a project which is a direct continuation of the pioneering work of Burn. The indymedia.org site which was initiated in Seattle during the WTO protests has had several million visitors and serves as a discussion board for environmentalists, union members and activists.

On June 17, I will be presenting a paper at a public media conference at the University of Maine about this sort of web activism. The Burn site is an integral part of this research. Burn has provided an important outlet for breaking news (during the various crises of Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bosnia, East Timor etc), for political art (the archive of posters from the Spanish Civil War ), for environmental information and for community exchange. Among the special features of its archive were perhaps the most comprehensive collection on line of graphics and texts from May 68 in Paris. These graphics were used recently by Paper Tiger in the design of some refrigerator magnets! (See www.papertiger.org where on the front page, one of the graphics was updated to address Guilliani's New York City).

Although a site which has not flinched from radical political issues, one of the interesting aspects of Burn has been its non-sectarian nature: it has posted anarchist archives, Marxist-Leninist manifestos, and Situationist texts. It has been a uniquely open site for a variety of political perspectives. I realize that this sort of access to a variety of political views and news will often provoke reaction and dissention, but I hope that in the interest of supporting open communication, our department can speak up for open dialogue and free speech. This has been an important source of global dialogue. It is also a key aspect to my intellectual research. I am requesting that the server be immediately reinstalled.

Sincerely,
XXXXXXXXX

We couldn't find the date for this letter, however it is also worth reading:

Dear Professor Miller,

I have been quite distressed with the situation vis a vis the student server which has been housed in the Communication Department, the so-called Burn web site. I am writing to you because there is an emergency concerning this server. Carol is away for another week or so and I am contacting you to see if you could help. I would rather discuss this with you via phone. I am on sabbatical at (###) ###-#### if you could give me a call.

Meanwhile I will try to give you some background. This server has been an on-going project of numerous students over the years, many of whom have worked with me. I have met on several occasions with various chairs of our department concerning this or that problem that has come up, and I hope that I was able to serve as a useful liason between the students and the department in those cases. In the recent case, I understand that there was some sort of threatening messages sent to various administrators. No one from the department notified me of this situation, although I have been in regular contact with the department almost daily. (I have several students who are doing independent study videos with me this term, even though I am technically away.)

I understand that no one notifed xxxxxx xxxxxxxx who is the official student representative of this site. Nor did department faculty or staff write to the email address which was on the site about the situation. Rather than have any sort of procedure and rational discussion with those who have been most involved, the site was closed. For a site which is visited by several thousand international visitors each day, this sort of perfunctory closing is nothing short of a disaster. I am sure that the incidents of threats (if that is what they were) warrent discussing and reevaluation of the situation vis a vis the department and the students. However, to close the site without even a forwarding address or an explanation is a real curtailment of free speech in a brutal and arbitrary fashion.

While the closing will be confusing and inconvenient for the users here in the industrialized world, the problems associated with this sort of shutting down is most acutely felt in developing countries. For many people in the third world, access to a computer and a modem is often quite an arduous task. Some have to pay fees to access computers, and often use is metered and the modems are very slow. In addition there are the tenuous line and switchng connections in poor countries: and service which might be cut off for various political reasons. When a familiar web sit, with daily information that is used in the volume that Burn was, is cut off it can cause a great deal of frustration and expense, as people try to log on again and again, to no avail. That is why we need to have immediately a forward and/or some sort of explanation posted so that the users don't just fall into an information void. The students have posted some explanatory messages on the groundwork server. The address is

http://groundwork.ucsd.edu/~cwheelma

They have contacted me and asked that the burn address be reinstated with a forward to this site, so that the thousands of daily visitors can have some idea of what is happening.

I am forwarding to you a letter which I sent to the department which outlines my own use of the site for research. I know of many art historians, Latin American scholars, grass roots community groups who have found the site not only useful, but quite necessary to their work. This is an historic use of the world wide web. Many around the world from East Timor to Argentina, from Bosnia to South Africa have been regular visitors to this important information node. The abrupt closing, without even a forward or an explanation puts the university in quite a bad light in regards to free speech. I have received many inquiries from journalists in regards to the closing. The magazine Wired and several on-line news sites want to do articles on it. I have deferred discussing the situation with national press until I have a chance to see if there will be a reconsideration. I understand that the students are organizing a meeting this week. When Carol returns, hopefully there can be a fuller discussion of the entire situation.

In the meanwhile, it is quite important that, at the very least, a forward to the informational site be posted, so that those around the world who rely on this information base can be made aware of the situation. There has been much talk about the need for the university to reach beyond the ivory tower, to interact with the world. This is a case in which student initiative has created a viable open and interactive information center that has been used not only around the world, but by theUS security apparatus (judging from the many brousers with a gov. or mil. address. That it ruffles some feathers only demonstrates that the information posted there is current and important. To react with censorship is against the interests of the faculty and students of this institution, and against the principles of freedom of speech, so central to our democracy.

Sincerely,
XXXXXXXXXXX