This article sets forward a terrific vision and advances a number of ideas
on how to use cyberspace to create community rather than isolation. Dig
deeper into this topic by following the many useful and helpful links at
the end.
kelly
The Nation
June 21, 1999
THE NET THAT BINDS
USING CYBERSPACE TO CREATE REAL COMMUNITIES
by ANDREW L. SHAPIRO
See below for background and related information.
One of the curious things about living through a time of whirlwind
change is that it is often difficult to understand exactly what is
changing. In recent years, new technology has given us the ability
to transform basic aspects of our lives: the way we converse and
learn; the way we work, play and shop; even the way we participate
in political and social life. Dissidents around the world use the
Internet to evade censorship and get their message out.
Cyber-gossips send dispatches to thousands via e-mail. Musicians
bypass record companies and put their songs on the Web for fans to
download directly. Day traders roil the stock market, buying
securities online with the click of a mouse and selling minutes
later when the price jumps.
There is a common thread underlying such developments. It is not
just a change in how we compute or communicate. Rather, it is a
potentially radical shift in who is in control--of information,
experience and resources. The Internet is allowing individuals to
make decisions that once were made by governments, corporations and
the media. To an unprec-edented degree, we can decide what news and
entertainment we're exposed to and whom we socialize with. We can
earn a living in new ways; we can take more control of how goods
are distributed; and we can even exercise a new degree of political
power. The potential for personal growth and social progress seems
limitless. Yet what makes this shift in power--this control
revolution--so much more authentic than those revolutions described
by techno-utopian futurists is its volatility and lack of
preordained outcome.
Contrary to the claims of cyber-romantics, democratic empowerment
via technology is not inevitable. Institutional forces are
resisting, and will continue to resist, giving up control to
individuals. And some people may wield their new power carelessly,
denying themselves its benefits and imperiling democratic values.
Nowhere are the mixed blessings of the new individual control more
evident than in the relationship of the Internet to
communities--not just "virtual communities" of dispersed
individuals interacting online but real, geographically based
communities.
Masters of Our Own Domains
The Internet's impact on community has everything to do with a
digital phenomenon known as personalization, which is simply the
ability to shape one's experience more precisely--whether it's
social encounters, news, work or learning. Traditionally,
friendships and acquaintances have been structured by physical
proximity; we meet people because they are our neighbors,
classmates, co-workers or colleagues in some local organization.
Much of our information intake--newspapers and radio, for
example--also reflects locality, and we share these media
experiences and others (like national television) with those who
live around us. The global reach and interactivity of the Internet,
however, is challenging this. Individuals can spend more time
communicating and sharing experiences with others regardless of
where they live. As Internet pioneer J.C.R. Licklider wrote back in
the sixties, "Life will be happier for the on-line individual
because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be
selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by
accidents of proximity."
Virtual communities are perfect for hobbyists and others with
quirky or specialized interests--whether they're fans of swing
music, chemistry professors or asthma sufferers. Indeed, these
associations suggest the possibility of whole new forms of social
life and participation. Because individuals are judged online by
what they say, virtual communities would appear to soften social
barriers erected by age, race, gender and other fixed
characteristics. They can be particularly valuable for people who
might be reticent about face-to-face social interaction, like gay
and lesbian teenagers, political dissidents and the disabled.
("Long live the Internet," one autistic wrote in an online
discussion, where "people can see the real me, not just how I
interact superficially with other people.")
The Internet also gives individuals a new ability to personalize
their news, entertainment and other information. And studies of
Internet use show that users are doing so. Rather than having
editors and producers choose what they read, hear and watch--as
with newspapers or television--they are using the interactivity of
the Net to gather just the material they find interesting. This
may, among other things, be a winning strategy for dealing with the
torrent of information that is increasingly pushed at us.
There is, in fact, plenty to like about personalization. But if
we're not careful, customizing our lives to the hilt could
undermine the strength and cohesion of local communities, many of
which are already woefully weak. For all the uncertainty about what
"community" really means and what makes one work, shared experience
is an indisputably essential ingredient; without it there can be no
chance for mutual understanding, empathy and social cohesion. And
this is precisely what personalization threatens to delete. A lack
of common information would deprive individuals of a starting point
for democratic dialogue, or even fodder for the proverbial
water-cooler talk. For many decades, TV and radio have been fairly
criticized for drawing us away from direct interaction in our
communities. Yet despite this shortcoming (and many others), these
mass media at least provide "a kind of social glue, a common
cultural reference point in our polyglot, increasingly
multicultural society," as media critic David Shaw puts it.
Online experiences rarely provide this glue. Yes, we can share good
times with others online who enjoy the same passions as we do. We
can educate ourselves and even organize for political change. But
ultimately, online associations tend to splinter into narrower and
narrower factions. They also don't have the sticking power of
physical communities. One important reason for this is the absence
of consequences for offensive behavior online; another is the ease
of exit for those who are offended. In physical communities, people
are inextricably bound by the simple difficulty of picking up and
leaving. On the Net, it's always "where do you want to go today?"
Are you bored? Ticked off? Then move on! For many, this makes the
virtual life an attractive alternative to the hard and often
tiresome work of local community building.
Some might think that the weakness of online affiliations would
prevent them from posing any real challenge to physical
communities. But the ability to meander from one virtual gathering
to the next, exploring and changing habitats on a whim, is exactly
the problem. The fluidity of these social networks means that we
may form weak bonds with others faraway at the expense of strong
ties with those who live near us.
Few people, of course, intend to use the Internet in ways that will
cause them to be distracted from local commitments. But technology
always has unintended consequences, and social science research is
beginning to show how this may be true for the Internet.
Researchers who conducted one of the first longitudinal studies of
the Internet's social impact, the HomeNet study, were surprised
when their data suggested that Internet use increases feelings of
isolation, loneliness and depression. Contrary to their starting
hypotheses, they observed that regular users communicated less with
family members, experienced a decline in their contacts with nearby
social acquaintances and felt more stress. Although the authors
noted the limitations of their findings, the study's methodology
has been widely criticized. Until more conclusive results are
available, however, what's important is that we take seriously the
hazards outlined in the HomeNet study and attempt to prevent them
from becoming worse or taking root in the first place.
And how should we do that? Neo-Luddites would likely recommend
rejecting technology and returning to our bucolic roots. A more
balanced and realistic response, however, calls for a reconciling
of personal desire and communal obligations in a digital world. On
the one hand, this means acknowledging the sometimes exhilarating
adventure of indulging oneself online. No one can deny the value of
being able to form relationships with far-flung others based solely
on common interests. At the same time, it means not having
illusions about the durability of those bonds or their ability to
satisfy fully our deepest needs.
We must recognize, for selfish and societal reasons alike, the
importance of focusing on the local. This is where we will find a
true sense of belonging; shared experience, even if not ideal,
creates a sense of commitment. This is where democracy and social
justice must first be achieved; getting our own house in order is
always the first priority. The Net must therefore be a vehicle not
just for occasional escapism but for enhanced local
engagement--online and off.
Community Networks
Efforts to employ technology to strengthen local communities are
not new. They have been tried since the dawn of cable television in
the seventies and, for more than sixty years, via community radio
programming. Those technologies, though, are one-to-many. What
makes the Net so promising as a tool of localism is its capacity
for interactivity, as well as its nearly unlimited capacity.
Many early Internet enthusiasts have been strong supporters of
"community networking," an approach that encourages locally based
online communication, often at no charge to users. Community
networking has its origins in services such as the Free-Nets, which
emerged in the eighties and early nineties to offer online access,
sometimes along with local news and information. Most Free-Nets
were noncommercial, with no advertising and no subscription
charges. Often, they were text-based bulletin board systems run
voluntarily by computer enthusiasts. And often they were not easy
for novices to use.
A good share of these early services, in addition, were not so much
about local affairs as they were a way for residents to get online
for free. As a result, Free-Nets and other community networks
suffered as America Online and other inexpensive (and more
alluring) gateways to the Net became available. By the late
nineties, many had gone out of business, as did the National Public
Telecommunications Network, an umbrella group of Free-Nets that was
founded in 1986. Still, more than a hundred Internet-based
community networks in the United States have continued to thrive,
such as Charlotte's Web in Charlotte, North Carolina; Liberty Net
in Philadelphia; the Seattle Community Network; and Blacksburg
Electronic Village in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Arising from a project that began in 1984, Blacksburg Electronic
Village appears to be one of the more successful of these
endeavors. It counts a majority of Blacksburg's 36,000 residents as
participants. Senior citizens chat with their neighbors online.
Parents keep abreast of what their kids are doing in school and
exchange e-mail with teachers. Citizens use Web-based surveys to
communicate with their municipal government about spending
priorities. A key feature of successful community networks, in
fact, is the opportunity they provide citizens to talk--with civic
leaders and one another. Users don't just want information fed to
them; they want to generate conversation themselves.
In a community network in Amsterdam, for example, citizens talk
about keeping the city's largest park in shape, they argue about
Amsterdam's proposed transformation from city to province and they
bombard politicians with questions about Holland's abstruse tax
laws. Similar results were apparent even in a short-term case study
involving a group of London neighbors. Microsoft gave them
computers, Internet access and a way to communicate with one
another online. Participants used the technology to exchange
information about local services. Kids asked questions about
homework. There was a debate about a proposed change in local
parking rules, and some members even organized to do something
about disruptive vibrations from a nearby railroad. The dialogue,
moreover, appeared to translate into stronger ties among neighbors.
"I used to know maybe five or six people in the street; now I know
at least forty of them quite well, and some very closely," one
participant said.
Even some early online services that didn't start as community
networks appear to have succeeded precisely because members were
located mostly in one geographic area. The Well, a pioneering
online community based in San Francisco (and recently bought by
Salon, the Internet-magazine-turned-portal), was never intended to
be about the Bay Area or just for people from there, yet its
founders knew from the start that a sense of local culture would be
an important component of the online community. Most interestingly,
perhaps, they recognized the value that regular face-to-face
contact would have for members. Monthly Well parties were therefore
instituted in the San Francisco area and became an important
element of the online community's identity. Similarly, Echo, a
prominent New York-based online community, offers regular events
such as readings, a film series, bar gatherings and softball games.
As Echo's mission statement says, "We know that the best online
communities are never strictly virtual." Contrary to the utopian
notion that the Internet will lift us above the confines of
geography, then, the history of online communities suggests that
people want to convene with their geographic neighbors, both online
and in person.
Local Gateways
Given this fact and the success of some community networks, it
might seem that little needs to be done to achieve balance between
our desire to surf globally and our need to network locally. Yet as
the Internet presents the possibility of a more alluring universe
of distractions and greater social isolation, emphasis on localism
must become stronger and more explicit. We need to build
high-quality, Web-based local networks that are ubiquitous,
accessible and interesting enough so that all Internet users will
want to use them, at least some of the time. This would insure a
degree of involvement with community issues and engagement with
actual neighbors. These networks should not be final destinations,
though. Instead, reflecting a local/global balance, they should be
thought of as local gateways to the global Net--and to offline
interaction, as well.
Like entry ramps, these gateways should allow users to go anywhere.
Yet, learning from the successes and failures of predecessors, they
must provide stimulating content about local issues and an
opportunity for users to talk with one another. There should be
resources and discussion about issues that people really care
about: recreation and entertainment, sports teams, politics,
schools, shopping and consumer assistance, and crime and safety.
This alone should entice people to visit. And as local gateways
facilitate dialogue among community members, eventually empathy,
interdependence and cooperative action will follow.
For users without Internet access, the local gateway could be the
service they call to get online--for free. (The goals of universal
access and localism could therefore be intertwined.) Following the
lead of existing community networks, Internet terminals could be
put in schools and libraries, churches, public housing projects and
recreation centers. For those who already have online access, the
local gateway could be used as a portal site on the Web.
The architecture of the local gateway is crucial. Its blueprint
should be influenced not just by a local/global balance but by
other democratic values. For example, citizens should be able to
speak freely and be heard (even if they can't pay for prominent
positioning on the site), privacy should be protected and
public-interest resources should be readily available and easy to
use. This online "commons" must be a worthy complement to the
physical public commons--not a substitute, but an extension. It
should thus have all the quirks and flavor of the geographic
community for which it is a digital annex, and it should be
accountable to the members of that community.
In terms of content and design, there are two models for the kind
of local gateway I am proposing. One is existing community
networks, which are generally superb examples because they
emphasize localism and citizen dialogue. Sometimes, though,
community networks are an end in themselves, instead of an entrance
to the whole Net. To draw a larger audience, the gateway format is
better, because it becomes a routine starting place for users,
while not confining them. The opposition by some community networks
to partnering with business may also be counterproductive.
Blacksburg Electronic Village, for one, claims to have benefited
greatly from the fact that it began as a partnership among
government (the town of Blacksburg), academia (Virginia Tech, which
provided most of the funding) and industry (Bell Atlantic, the
local phone company, which recently pulled out after four and a
half years). More than two-thirds of local businesses are on the
Blacksburg network, which makes it convenient for users. It also
gives a boost to local vendors who might otherwise lose substantial
business to huge Internet companies based outside the community--a
trend that technology critic Richard Sclove aptly calls the
"cybernetic Wal-Mart effect."
At the same time, local gateways should not be overly
commercialized. In particular, citizens should shun attempts by
corporations to fabricate communities just so they can use members
as a target audience for sales and advertising. It's a practice
that has been tried on the Web, though fortunately with little
success so far. Businesses would be better off working in
cooperation with community groups and local governments. And
citizens should welcome their participation, so long as they have a
local presence and maintain a civic-minded spirit. In fact, the
cybernetic Wal-Mart effect could be offset, to a degree, by the
ability of community members to patronize online versions of their
favorite neighborhood stores, thus supporting their community's tax
base, employment and conviviality.
An unlikely boost for local gateways might also come from
city-oriented commercial Web services such as those provided by
CitySearch, Yahoo, Microsoft's Sidewalk and AOL's Digital Cities.
Some American cities have as many as a half-dozen of these sites
competing for the public's attention. With their collection of
local news, weather and services such as free e-mail, these sites
provide a second model for local gateways. Community networking
activists have traditionally seen them as the enemy because of
their commercialism and the fact that they attract individuals away
from nonprofit sites. Yet under the right circumstances, these
sites could help anchor individuals in their communities. They
could become partners in the formation of local gateways. (Austin
Free-Net, for example, has worked closely with the for-profit
Austin CitySearch.)
For this to happen, citizens need to leverage the power that
interactive technology gives them. We need to organize and tell
these city-based portals that to win our attention they must give
something back to our communities. They must, for example, donate
substantial online resources--such as free Web site hosting and
design, chat forums, dial-up access and hardware--to tenant groups,
parent-teacher associations, charitable entities, activist groups
and other community-based organizations. They must offer Internet
authoring tools that anyone can use to create a dialogue forum. And
they must find people to lead moderated discussions and otherwise
work to strengthen communal conversation. (If city-based portals
are unresponsive to citizen action, activists should investigate
the possibility of government regulation to achieve at least some
of these aims.)
Finally, local gateways should not be seen as a panacea for
community activism. They must instead be part of a larger strategy
of face-to-face local engagement--which may nonetheless be more
effective and more enjoyable thanks to local online interaction, as
for example in the London experiment.
Steam and rail gave us the opportunity to flee far from our places
of birth; telegraph and telephone allowed us to conduct our
business and social lives from a distance; television insulated us
further even as it sometimes gave us common experiences. The goal
of the Internet revolution, if it can be said to have one, should
not be to replicate the world we know, but to improve it. As we
explore the farthest reaches of our new World Wide Web, we must
also use technology to fortify the local webs in which we dwell.
______________________________________________________________
Andrew L. Shapiro, a Nation contributing editor, is a fellow at the
Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School and
director of the Aspen Institute Internet Policy Project. This
article is adapted from his new book about the politics of the
Internet, The Control Revolution (PublicAffairs/Century
Foundation). For more information visit www.controlrevolution.com
and www.thenation.com.
______________________________________________________________
Background and Related Information
American Psychological Association
American Psychologist published the "HomeNet study" on Internet
use (September 1998), titled "Internet Paradox: A Social
Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological
Well-Being?"
http://www.apa.org/journals/amp/amp5391017.html
Salon Magazine
Salon published a critique of the HomeNet study by Scott
Rosenberg (September 3, 1998).
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/rose/1998/09/03straight.html
Association for Community Networking
ACN has links to many local community networks.
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/afcn
Center for Civic Networking
CCN is a non-profit organization dedicated to applying
information infrastructure to the broad public
good--particularly by improving access to information that
people need to function as informed citizens.
http://civic.net/ccn.html
Neighborhoods Online
Neighborhoods Online is a resource center for people working to
build strong communities throughout the United States. It aims
to provide fast access to information and ideas covering all
aspects of neighborhood revitalization, as well as to create a
national network of activists working on problems that affect
us where we live.
http://www.libertynet.org/nol/natl.html
Blacksburg Electronic Village
This is an Internet community open to anyone online who lives
or works in Blacksburg or Montgomery County, Virginia.
http://www.bev.net
The WELL
The WELL is "an online gathering place like no
other--remarkably uninhibited, intelligent, and iconoclastic,"
"a literate watering hole for thinkers from all walks of life,
be they artists, journalists, programmers, educators or
activists."
http://www.well.com
Communications of the ACM
Features a piece by Douglas Schuler titled "Community Networks:
Building a New Participatory Medium" (January 1994).
http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/cpn/sections/topics/networking/c
ivic_perspectives/comm_networks.html
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