This is an abridged version of a
paper given to the Communities Online conference in October 1995, and
published in Inventing the Future, Partnerships for Tomorrow, January
1996.
This paper begins by acknowledging some of the potential benefits of IT & telematics in the voluntary and community sector. I then explore three areas of concern around information in the community and voluntary sector, then a bit about virtual community and real reality. In case you are wondering, and if you are not now you will be by the end of this paper, I am not a technophobe, but an enthusiastic user of information technology in my professional role as researcher, networker and community developer, and in domestic life as I teach children to use computers at home and as a volunteer in our local nursery school. But all human life is not there on the Internet, and in many respects I am best described as a devout sceptic.
Of course there are potential
benefits for ordinary people and for local community groups if they
can find the time and resources to plug into the Information Society.
If information spells power, any success in shaping and/or liberating
information must be an empowering experience. Direct access by the
public to useful on-line databases could in theory help people
navigate in such impenetrable jungles as the social security or
health service bureaucracy. Email could give many people and grass
roots organisations fast cheap international and local written
communication, one to one or via mailshots. Complaints and campaigns
could be directed instantaneously to the top, with copies to
thousands of concerned people across the world; even now it is
allegedly possibly to send an Email message direct to Bill Clinton at
the White House and soon to Cherri Booth at 10 Downing Street. The
use of Bulletin boards, computer conferencing and other forms of
electronic publishing could help relatively marginal groups get their
message across. There could be other positive spin offs such as
training opportunities for unemployed people in IT, better
participation in the labour market for women and disabled people
unable easily to travel to work.
There is also the potential for better communication across sectors,
important in the context of partnerships for urban regeneration, and
between departments of local and national government. In theory there
is the potential for reducing the number of meetings and forests of
paper documentation which no one has time to read, and behind which
politicians often take cover, while accountability could be improved
by easy searching for relevant key words in such texts. It is also
the case that in some workplaces networked computing has led to the
erosion of hierarchies and the growth of teamwork, but we need to ask
whether power (any more than high salaries and share options) has
really shifted from the top levels of management. We also need to
note the growth of less socially responsible practices such as
contracting out and "down-sizing". Nonetheless we must concede that
IT could in some of these ways be a democratising force.
As IT proliferates information
overload will be an increasing problem/temptation to the non
discerning user. We technofreaks who regularly log in, know how easy
it is to waste hours just "surfing the Internet," being sprayed by
slightly interesting information and riding where the current takes
us. Will "knowledge" or "wisdom" increase along with this surfeit of
information? Is any, or all of the information found there up-to
date, relevant, accurate or (dare we use the word/) true? Already too
we are reaching the point where electronic junk mail could clog the
system or render it unattractive. Megabytes landing in your mailbox
mean that you either leave it unread or find you don't start
productive work till about midday.
Who needs all this information? Well no one of course needs it all.
But who needs potential access to it all? I think not the hard
pressed community activist or voluntary sector worker.. With a few
exceptions information is a commodity for managers and the powerful,
for governments and bureaucrats. Sometimes liberating key pieces of
secret information can be empowering for workers, unions or the
community. But more commonly their role will be as producers and
suppliers of information, talk to the voluntary sector staff who
spend half their time filling in forms or questionnaires or
evaluation reports, and about the pressure that puts them under and
the time it diverts from personcare, face to face contact, networking
and community development?
The Orwellian nightmares remain; Big brother and the panopticon
discussed by Foucault are already here in the surveillance of public
spaces by video camera and police helicopters. The potential horrors
of linked databases in the hands of a totalitarian state, or even
just an efficient bureaucracy, and the possibilities or rewriting
historical documents or parliamentary decisions with a few key
strokes are already available. And it does not take the imagination
of a science fiction writer to think through the possibilities of
organised fraud, economic sabotage, military incompetence or
malignity or simply a cataclysmic cock up, in a world that has become
utterly dependent on advanced global informational infrastructure.
Nick Leeson and the crash of Barings may be just the pioneer. Perhaps
the structures are more fragile than we think, since they in turn
dependent on supplies of raw materials from all over the world and on
a reliable and efficient system for the distribution and production
of electricity. The Internet maybe designed to survive a nuclear
attack, but can society survive an Internet attack?.
In the optimistic vision there is no
consideration of the place of the excluded, and many people because
of poverty, lack of education or simply lack of access to computers
and cables will never be able to participate. The first hurdle is the
initial cost of hardware and software. Even with the drop in prices
of recent years private individuals need to have crossed the
threshold of affluence before they can afford to purchase a personal
computer. Two Thirds of the world's people are unlikely to be that
rich in the foreseeable future, as their struggles are about food,
land, housing, clean water and drains, even before they get round to
looking for an electricity supply. In Europe and North America at
least 20% of the population are in poverty, dependent on welfare
benefits or in low paid irregular work. Who in this privatised world
will invest in the common ownership, or community use of the means of
information?
The second barrier is of course the education, training and culture
gap between the information rich and the information poor. IT first
of all demands high standards of literacy, in English (or one of the
other main world languages). Beyond that comes computer literacy, a
series of skills which exclude many people, notably the old, the
immigrant and refugee, and to a large extent women who are directed
by education and culture towards "softer" more human spheres of
activity. It needn't necessarily be so and there are signs of change
yet so far women's involvement in the information society has to this
point tended to be limited to the mass production of components and
hardware on the assembly lines of Asia, or to the routine production
and retrieval of data on the VDU consoles of the west, in short to
alienating work with attendant health hazards.
At the third level comes exclusion from information handling skills.
Anyone who has begun to "surf the Internet" will recognise how
difficult the process of learning to connect up, let alone to
navigate through the information jungle can be, especially if you do
not have access to expensive training packages or at least a friendly
and patient "native" tourist guide. And because of the huge
complexity for everyone (in the words of the good book) "Our
knowledge now is partial". Like Local government finance, or European
agricultural policy there is no one who understands it all. Of course
there is no intrinsic reason to prevent a large programme of
investment by government and industry in education and training, on
an equal opportunities basis. Over a twenty year period a major
impact could be made, although with the rapid pace of technological
change, regular retraining and upgrading of skills would need to be
built in. However, long term investment is notably lacking in the
priorities of a government and private sector entranced by the short
termism of the market economy.
As the usefulness of the technology
increases the commodification of information has set it. Even now
on-line costs to really useful information services are prohibitive
to all but high profit companies and privileged sectors of
government; with the massive capital investment needed to make the
"superhighway" a reality, true costs are likely to soar, subsidised
access is likely to disappear, almost every service will be expected
to make a financial return, and accountants are likely to restrict
usage to those who can generate income. The copyrighting and
protection of information sources by improved cybersecurity will
undoubtedly grow. Ominously information once freely in the public
domain, such as small area census data, is now only available to
people or organisations who can pay large sums of money, and the
liberation of information ("hacking") is in many countries a criminal
offence.
As long as IT is dominated by the market any benefit to ordinary
private individuals or grass roots community groups will be crumbs
under the table. As far as the general public is concerned the main
functions of the superhighway will be distribution of entertainment
(58 channels of American trash movies, and zappit games improving
each year in their search for virtual reality). While there will be a
surface appearance of a cornucopia of cultural choices the products
available will inevitably be constrained within the limited choices
of the dominant Western mass culture. There are dangers too that all
cultural and sporting activity will become spectator oriented rather
than participatory, spelling danger to physical and mental health as
the only exercise of the channel hopping couch potato will be to
press a zapper, on average every 45 seconds.
Interactive TV and similar technologies are advocated as enabling
more participation in democracy. You could register your vote from
home, local and national referenda would be easy and cheap to
organise. However this is far from informed participation in
community affairs, and is more likely to reduce politics to the level
of soap opera as fact and fiction become even more
blurred.
IT and telematics brings
contradictory forces to bear on the whole concept of community.
Globalisation of the market economy, and the spread of a global
culture through the diffusion of information and entertainment by the
electronic media is the major force imposing a shared experience on
increasing proportions of the world's population. Yet at the same
time the technology brings diversity, fragmentation, invidualisation,
and privatisation, especially as channels and interactive networks
proliferate. But such networks are less tied to geography and
neighbourhood and more tied to communities of interest. It will be
easier to establish world-wide networks, but harder to bring people
together for local face to face interaction. Information technology
and telecommuting may have some potential for countering the growth
of oil fired transportation, possibly bringing some environmental
benefits in its wake.
From the direction, of cyberspace, comes an extremely optimistic view
of the potential for community in postmodern society. In an article
appearing (on-line) as foreword to the Dummy's guide to the Internet
Mitch Kapor<mkapor@eff.org> Co-founder, Electronic Frontier
Foundation makes these claims.
New communities are being built today. You cannot see. You cannot
visit hem, except through your keyboard. Their highways are wires and
optical fibres; their language a series of ones and zeros.
Yet these communities of cyberspace are as real and vibrant as any
you could find on a globe or in an atlas. Those are real people on
the other sides of those monitors. And freed from physical
limitations, these people are developing new types of cohesive and
effective communities - ones which are defined more by common
interest and purpose than by an accident of geography, ones on which
what really counts is what you say and think and feel, not how you
look or talk or how old you are.
As such, the types of social relations and communities which can be
built on these media share these characteristics. Computer networks
encourage the active participation of individuals rather than the
passive non-participation induced by television narcosis.
The new forums atop computer networks are the great levellers and
reducers of organizational hierarchy. Each user has, at least in
theory, access to every other user, and an equal chance to be heard.
Given these characteristics, networks hold tremendous potential to
enrich our collective cultural, political, and social lives and
enhance democratic values everywhere.
Switching from the concerns of modernity, such as rational science,
individual autonomy, and democracy but in keeping with the spirit of
post modernity and the New Age the article ends with a quotation from
the Buddha.
"As a net is made up of a series of ties, so everything in this world
is connected by a series of ties. If anyone thinks that the mesh of a
net is an independent, isolated thing, he is mistaken. It is called a
net because it is made up of a series of interconnected meshes, and
each mesh has its place and responsibility in relation to other
meshes."
Similar views have been expressed in the C4 TV Programme, "Visions of
Heaven & Hell" on 7/2/95 and in a book by Rheingold entitled "The
Virtual Community".
It seems to me that this is an naively over-optimistic view of the
development of communities.
The possibilities of global networking by telematics push to an
extreme one of the fundamental questions about the nature of
community. Is it possible to have a sense of community without a
sense of place, without anchoring it in locality and/or personal face
to face interaction?
Rheingold relates the now famous story of the father who used the
WELL bulletin board when his daughter contracted leukaemia. He
searched everywhere for information about the best treatments, and
was inundated with both useful advice and messages of what could best
be described as "prayer support". Happily the girl got quality
treatment recovered. That's great, although one might need to ask
other questions about the availability or rationing of such
treatments in the NHS in the U.K.
In contrast last month my two year old daughter had to be admitted to
our local hospital as an emergency at 11 o'clock at night. In the end
it was nothing too serious but a wise precaution and after two days
she was fine again. But that was not the time to use the Internet.
Instead, we had our next door neighbour, Jenny. She had already been
with us two hours while we waited for the GP to visit. Then without
being asked she took in our son for the night while we went to
hospital. We know we are privileged as a family to be part of a local
community network where such behaviour is normal. It is of course
built out of thousands of daily acts of mutual co-operation and
reciprocity, formal and informal childminding arrangements, sharing
cars for supermarket trips, looking after cats and rabbits when
families are on holiday, going to boring parties and school meetings
and tolerating through thin walls the incompatible musical tastes of
one's neighbours. But such community is possible even in the
fragmented society of East London and at times is vital for sanity
and survival. And it can't yet be found on the internet.
There's a down side too. Kapor glosses over the tendency of
communities, indeed their function, to build boundaries and barriers.
A totally open network will always find it hard to develop internal
solidarity, since so much of this depends upon building a distinct
identity by comparison with other groups, even by conflict with a
common enemy. In East London we struggle with that at all the levels
of racism. That is why traditional community (Gemeinschaft) was
strongest in working class neighbourhoods of mining villages, and
single industry towns, where engagement in class struggle and
collaboration in ameliorating poverty bred deep solidarity,(as well
as arguably less desirable features such as rejection of incomers,
conservatism, male dominance and rigid informal social control).
In the Information society while relationships of communication will
grow in number, they are almost certainly going to remain at the
level of network association(Gessellschaft), transitory and
instrumental, only in some cases such as interactive bulletin boards
and cyberconferences developing into communities of interest, clubs
or organisations. Anonymity and pseudonyms on many bulletin boards
and chat lines, not to mention the dungeons of fantasy games are the
extreme case. Inherently they are incapable of building "real"
community (Gemeinschaft), which(like "real ale") is largely the
construct of our nostalgia, though equally pleasant and intoxicating.
Kapor's "vibrant real (but virtual) communities" are little more than
occasional linkages between narcissistic individuals, tinged with
nostalgia for the hippy communes of the late 1960's. Indeed a key
factor in traditional community was that what an individual "thinks
and feels" is subordinate to "how you look, how you talk, how old you
are" and to where you work and who are your kin.
It is of course an contested question as to whether the replacement
of gemeinschaft by gesselschaft (or the changing balance between
them) is a good or bad thing>) That is the heart of the political
debates between communitarians on the one hand and liberal or radical
individualists on the other.
With electronic relationships being impersonal and at a distance it
will be hard (though not necessarily impossible)to establish shared
cultural norms of behaviour. Already the internet suffers from
"flaming" where angry obscenities are traded across the world. Mutual
social control is indeed one universal feature of face to face
communities and the self regulation possible on the internet is weak
in comparison. Within limits it is no bad thing, and certainly
preferable to centralised coercion or censorship. Although the
prophets of cyberspace argue that the internet has a "life force" of
its own which is intrinsically democratic and liberating there is in
fact always a possibility for a small group of powerful interests to
achieve near monopoly control, or at least blocking mechanisms within
cyberspace technology. The origins of the Internet in the US military
industrial complex, and the bid for software standardisation by such
multinationals as MicroSoft should make us suspicious of the
exaggerated claims of cyber anarchists.
Whatever benefits may be found in the information society, revival of
"community" is not one of them. At least not community as the
traditional nostalgic, and incontrovertibly good product of our
imaginations. However the production and dissemination of such
images, is a notable feature of our age and is linked with the
development of IT, especially interactive multimedia and Virtual
Reality. Interestingly we are already seeing the marketing by the
leisure industry of "virtual community" in the shape of theme parks,
industrial museums and the like, where customers are sold for the
duration of their visit, environments that evoke nostalgia, and
vicarious and temporary Gemeinschaft. In the slate caverns of North
Wales, in the Jorvik Centre at York, in the Ragged School Museum in
East London, the visitor from post modern times can step back to any
number of pretend worlds, and in them participate to greater or
lesser degree in the life of the community. Many such places are the
relics of disappeared industries, ex-miners, ex-fishermen and ex-mill
girls have been retrained as tourist guides.
Even in the science fiction (becoming fact!) world of virtual
reality, where it may soon be possible to send 3D visual images, a
hug, and even engage in virtual (hardly virtuous!) sex over the
information superhighway, it is likely that people will still need
to, and prefer to meet, not to mention make love, in the flesh (sic).
Even if teleworking, teleshopping, teleleisure (in homes surrounded
by video cameras and security fences and patrolled by rottweilers)
become the norm, it is inevitable that for the foreseeable future
people will live, play and be educated, go to pubs and churches and
go for walks in neighbourhoods. It will be harder but still not
impossible to distinguish real life from the fantasy of "pretend
land". Inevitably people living in urban neighbourhoods, small towns
or village centres will meet neighbours face to face, talk with them,
discover common interests and some sense of local community will
persist. It will of course happen most to those who can tear
themselves away from the VDU and abandon the use of the motor car.
That of course is a matter of choice and values. One of the common
laments of rural teleworkers is that they no longer interact with
real people, although there is a certain irony that their flight from
the city was motivated by images of the supposed harmony and mutual
support of rural gemeinschaft. Yet they find they have neither the
time, the social skills or geographical proximity to build strong
relationships with their neighbours.
In the not so foreseeable future who knows whether the technology
will lose its glamour, the socio-economic system supporting the
cyberworld will collapse or a cataclysm will end the world as we know
it? The present and the future could be very fragile
indeed.
Telematics and the information
society is here to stay. In themselves the technologies are neither
wholly evil or wholly good. What matters is how, and on whose behalf
they are used. They like all technologies are the subject of ethical
decisions, and susceptible to political control. It is vital
therefore to have strong, informed and value based policies by which
we can help shape the future.
The rapid changes brought about by information technology present a
crisis which is both a challenge and an opportunity in the
inter-related worlds of community work and politics. Fundamentally
the information society and postmodernism are about privatisation,
individualism, fragmentation, and a culture without history that
recognises no values or truth beyond money. "In an age of consumerism
God has been replaced by the supermarket" writes Ferrarotti. In
contrast religion, community work and politics is about building a
common life, about integrating people into a body, about
collaboration and concern between neighbours and about enduring
values of justice and truth.
In real communities in real reality what is needed? I would suggest
that there are at least two things that local communities, socially
excluded groups and the voluntary sector need more than IT. On the
one hand we need social and economic justice, which implies a massive
redistribution of resources. Secondly we need empowerment through a
new culture of community responsibility, participation and local
control. We have to be pessimistic about the first, given the
overwhelming dominance of global capitalism, and a change of
government or improved IT is not going to make that much difference.
There is perhaps more hope for the latter in the political climate of
the times and some possibilities for IT to help. But I expect it will
be marginal at best and that there is more hope to be found in the
emergence of off line communities of resistance, where people ignore
the internet and get on with the business of real life.