Vox Populi, Online and Downtown

September 26, 2002 By AMY HARMON





ON a steamy afternoon last month, Dan Lenahan, a Battery Park City
resident, gestured with his cane on the elevated walkway overlooking the
World Trade Center site and told eight fellow New Yorkers why his
neighborhood needed to remain separated from tourist crowds by West Street,
a main artery that some people want to bury to make room for a memorial
promenade.

The meeting was remarkable not because any consensus emerged on how the
area should be rebuilt ("It's so elitist," a Greenwich Village resident
said of Mr. Lenahan's position), but because this physical gathering in
Lower Manhattan arose from a debate in cyberspace.

"We wanted to visualize it for ourselves," said Maria Grieco, a music
teacher from Queens who took part in the online discussion, organized by
the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York as part of its Listening to
the City initiative.

Known to one another only by online aliases and argument, the members of
the group - one of 26 in the program - stayed in touch by e-mail after
their two-week discussion ended in early August. And if consensus did not
emerge from their field trip, at least the perspective from Battery Park
was clarified.

"Maybe it doesn't have to be a physical reconnection," conceded Margaret
Duffy of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, who sympathized with Mr.
Lenahan's desire to be done with construction as the group watched dump
trucks negotiate the hole below. "Maybe it could be a visual reconnection."

A meeting at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in July at which 4,000
New Yorkers gathered to pass judgment on the original six plans for
rebuilding the World Trade Center has been cited as an exercise in the very
principles of participatory democracy, in which informed public discussion
leads to the best decisions.

Less chronicled is the experience of 800 people who could not make it to
the Javits Center that day but instead convened over the Internet over a
two-week period to discuss many of the same questions, at more length and
perhaps with more nuance.

The results of the online discussion were included with those of the Javits
Center meeting in a report that the Civic Alliance submitted this week to
the agencies responsible for the redevelopment, which have promised to
study them closely.

But the 10,000-odd messages produced by the online groups are also being
scrutinized as a model for civic engagement on local and national issues.
Some who have monitored the process suggest that online discussion may be a
more promising way to promote democratic debate than a Javits-style town
hall - in part because it is more practical.

"You don't have to buy people lunch on the Internet or get them a free pass
on the ferry to get there," said Robert D. Yaro, the president of the
Regional Plan Association, one of the organizers of the Javits Center event
and a member of the Civic Alliance. "And people could do this at 3 in the
morning if that's when they were free."

The Javits Center meeting cost about $2 million to produce; the online
discussions cost about $120,000. Although the online dialogue was skewed
toward computer users and involved fewer participants from ethnic
minorities, it attracted a significantly higher percentage of people under
34. More than half of the participants in online and offline groups said
that their opinions had shifted over the course of the discussions.

Some organizers who tracked both processes say that by prolonging its
discussions for two weeks, the online group allowed diverse points of view
to be more fully explored. Rapport often developed instantly in their
virtual communication, seemingly from the sense of safety people feel as
they type into the ether.

"At Javits, there was no bouncing of ideas: we just went around the circle
and each person had their say," said Cynthia Schmae, a consultant for Web
Lab, a nonprofit organization that specializes in online communication and
ran the Web discussions. "You didn't have time to get to know each other so
you don't have that flow."

The meetings in Lower Manhattan and in cyberspace were organized against a
civic backdrop in which Americans, particularly the young, are voting less,
volunteering less and paying less attention to public affairs than those
before them. Some advocates see the Internet as a potential lightning rod
to encourage more civic involvement.

"In a democracy you want people talking about public issues," said Michael
X. Delli Carpini, director of the public policy program at the Pew
Charitable Trusts, which is sponsoring an online discussion about
volunteering this fall for high school students. "There is a hope that the
Internet may be a tool that can allow people to talk in a structured way
about things that really matter to them and revive the impetus to say, `I
want to be involved.' "

If there is such potential, government agencies have not paid much
attention to it. Only 10 percent of government Web sites offer citizens a
way to comment online on issues, according to a study released this month
by the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University. Almost none
have sponsored online discussions.

"Government planners have a service-deliver vision in which what they want
to do is let people do tax filing, order licenses, get business permits
online," said Darrell M. West, director of the center at Brown. "But
they're not really envisioning the Internet as a tool to alter the
relationship between citizens and officials."

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the Internet's power to
usher in a new era of Jeffersonian democracy. For now, the medium cannot
replicate the visceral thrill of being at the Javits Center as thousands of
people saw their votes tallied on a big screen and cheered or booed
accordingly. Such emotion may ultimately drive civic participation to a
degree that semi-anonymous interactions on a computer screen cannot.

Online forums are also notorious for destructive "flame" wars, a hostile
form of exchange rarely seen in face-to-face settings. Stable virtual
communities - Work-From-Home Moms at Ivillage.com or MSN.com's Seed
Swappers, for example - tend to focus on narrow areas of noncontroversial
interest. Web sites like CNN recently abandoned their political forums,
where genuine debate was rare and grandstanding was frequent.

"It is often said that online communities are good for discussing issues
but terrible at resolving them because no one ever concedes the last word,"
said Cliff Figallo, a former manager of The Well, one of the earliest and
longest-running online communities, which has had its share of blowups.

But Mr. Figallo, who helped Web Lab recruit about a dozen volunteer
moderators for the Listening to the City discussions, said that those
forums were far more cohesive and productive than others he has observed,
largely because they were "communities with a purpose."

The online version of the Listening to the City discussions was an
afterthought. Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer, the president of AmericaSpeaks, had
been planning the Javits Center meeting for months on behalf of the Civic
Alliance when she met Marc Weiss, the founder of Web Lab, at a conference.
Intrigued by the notion of an online meeting that could handle the overflow
from Javits - and by the Internet's potential for promoting the kind of
grass-roots participation that her group advocates - Ms. Lukensmeyer asked
Mr. Weiss if he could raise funds for an online dialogue.

Securing small grants from AOL Time Warner, the Surdna Foundation and the
family of one of his volunteers, Mr. Weiss began registering participants
in a matter of weeks. With virtually no advertising, the response was
impressive.

Based on personal information required for registration, the 26 online
groups were organized to be geographically and demographically diverse.
Anyone from New York City and the surrounding counties could take part.
Participants received an agenda item by e-mail every few days and responded
to polling questions on topics like whom a memorial should commemorate,
whether housing should be incorporated on the site and how much green space
should be included.

Many participants said they were motivated by a desire to find out what
others thought about a subject that they themselves felt strongly about.
Others said they hoped somehow to influence the decision on what was built.
A driving impulse to contribute almost as a sense of obligation surfaced in
many online comments.

"I wanted to participate in what's going to happen next," said Ellen
Datlow, 52, a science fiction editor who became the de facto leader of
Group 4, the one that met downtown. "This is all I can do - there is
nothing else I can do to make this happen. I'm not a government official.
I'm not someone with any say except a New Yorker who cares very much about
what happens to the city."

Whether people could be inspired to take part in online discussions on
issues that inspire less passionate feelings is unclear. Organizers also
wonder to what degree the sense of common purpose arising from the events
of Sept. 11 softened and civilized the online interaction.

But the discussion was certainly not bland. The groups, which had an
average of about 30 members, exhibited the gamut of online behavior. There
were members who never posted, showoffs who competed for the longest and
most articulate posts, and one flamethrower who was barred from his group
midway through the discussions for disruptive behavior, including posting
"Rebuild the towers exactly the way they were" over and over again.

Civic activists debate whether discussion in itself helps shore up
democratic ideals, or if influencing policymakers must be the goal. An
informal poll of several participants indicated that as much as they
enjoyed the back-and-forth, they would like their words to have an impact
rather than simply occupying cyberspace.

"Who am I?" said one, Vincent Pecoraro, a bank manager who works in Lower
Manhattan. "The Port Authority owns the land. Larry Silverstein owns the
lease. But there's a slim chance of hope that they're going to listen. That
will be wonderful if I could have been a part of that."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/26/technology/circuits/26DISC.html?ex=1034053
948&ei=1&en=d86b9fcf008912c8


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html