"The "Information Revolution" is inevitable. The likelihood that this will strengthen local communities is not." Barndt, 1995
"The power of virtual mobility is not quite the same as the power of accumulated capital." Kinney 1996
In 1974, Raymond Williams argued that the 'new televisual technologies' were the contemporary 'tools of the long revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy'. Today, had he been alive, he would probably be referring to the internet and other new communication technologies. A continuing preoccupation in most of Williams' writing is how we can have a democratic system of communications. The first essential in a democratic system of communications, he writes, is that communications is something that belongs to the whole of society, that it is something which depends, if it is to be healthy, on maximum participation by the individuals in the society:
"Since communication is the record of human growth, it has to be very varied. It has to get rid of the idea that communication is the business of a minority talking to, instructing, leading on, the majority. It has, finally, to get rid of the false ideology of people who are interested in communications only as a way of controlling people, or making money out of them" (Williams 1989, p.29).
Can ICT support the establishment of an effective "voice and vote" in the general public? Can technology support increased possibilities for influence? - democratic learning? - democratic dialogue? If so, which ICT-artifacts could support participatory processes in urban development?
Democracy aided by computers, and in particular, computer networks (e.g., the internet) is the subject of many current debates and discussions locally and globally. There are also many practical, mainly experimental initiatives in the field. In Rob Kling's (1995) words, a whole new form of computerization movement has emerged, or perhaps rather, a myriad of different movements, all sharing the computerization aspect, in various forms. Computerization is defined by Iacono and Kling (1995, p88) as "the process of developing, implementing, and using computer systems for activities such as teaching, accounting, writing, or designing circuits, for example." In other words, computerization can be understood as all human (social and cultural) processes where computers are involved. In sociological terms, it makes sense to talk about an ongoing computerization of society, or, in more popular terms, the coming of the information society. Kling's concept of computerization movements is helpful in this context, because it emphasizes the social aspects of computerization. The concept movement has to do with many different kinds of collective action, and is often seen in relation to "the rise of organised, insurgent action to displace or overcome the status quo and establish a new way of life" (ibid, p90). Movements are change agents. The womens movement, the environmental movement, the gay and lesbian movement, and many other social movements, differ in their goals ind interests, but they all share a focus on correcting some situation to which they object or changing the circumstances for a group that suffers some sort of social disadvantage (Gamson, 1975, in Kling p89). The social movements are in many ways advocates for a politics of difference, as discussed in chapter 2, some more than others perhaps. Most obvious examples are those movements working directly with differences and diversity, e.g. the gay and lesbian movement, or, to take a different example, the anti-immigration movement.
When dealing with computerization movements, there are similarities and differences in comparison to other social movements. Iacono and Kling (ibid., 89):
"...advocates of computerization focus on the creation of a new revolutionary, world order where people and organizations use state-of-the-art computing equipment and the physical limitations of time and space are overcome"
Computerization movements cover a wide spectre of ideas and ideals, but they are all change agents, and as for other social movements, they have as a primary resource their members, leaders, and communication networks (ibid. p101). The contemporary, general computerization movement finds stimulation and "guidance" from many sources, e.g. Daniel Bell's classical thesis on the post-industrial society, or its many more recent variants (1), in Howard Rheingold's thesis on virtual communities, or in the White House, for that matter, or in many others. Even though computerization movements is a relatively recent phenemenon, the diversity and differences among the various "sub-movements" makes it difficult to draw general conclusions on this matter. One has to take a closer look at the concrete social movements working for computerization in its various forms, if one wishes to draw conclusions about the strategies for and consequences of computerization.
Computerization (1) is one of the most important socio-economic processes in the world today. The computer industry is the fastests growing industry, and accounts for an ever increasing part of investments as well as sales. In the most "advanced", or "ambitious", countries, research and development in IT accounts for one third (2) of the total amount spent on research and development. Computers are popping up everywhere in our lives, at work, at home, in schools, at hospitals, in taxis, in lawnmowers, ... Intranet, the internal computer nets in companies, is transforming organsational life and structures in our worklives, and groupware facilities are transforming out work-related networks. Workers at the shop-floor in at North Swedish wood factory will soon exchange 3D-emails with the Japanese customer about how he wants the wood cut. Financial markets and stock exchanges disperse out on every desk, and so does many other markets. Intra- as well as inter-corporate communication will change fundamentally at all levels, from the CEOs office to the cleaning personnel.
There is no doubt about the importance of computer networking for the widening of the computerization movement, and its impact on society. Especially the internet has been effective in this process. Computer networks were "the province of serious scientists, nerds, hackers, and hobbyists" (Kling, ibid. p89) until a few years ago. But today, "everyone" uses the internet. The internet has become an important public media (especially the US) already today for local as well as global communications.
The history of the Internet begins in the 1960's cold war. Rand Corporation, America's foremost military think tank, was trying to figure out a way to deal with an important strategic problem: how could US authorities talk to each other in the aftermath of a nuclear attack? Communication networks of the day were chained point-to-point, with each place on the network dependent on the link before it. If one point in the network was nuked, the whole network would become useless. Paul Baran, one of the Rand thinkers on the project, conceived the idea for a new kind of communications network; one that was not organised point-to-point, but instead was set up more like a fishnet. He believed this structure could allow data to find its own path through the network even if a section, or node, had been destroyed. In 1962, the RAND Corporation begins research into robust, distributed communication networks for military command and control, and in 1969, under the leadership of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Association (ARPA), the first network grows from a paper architecture into a distributed network (ARPANET) intended to promote the sharing of super-computers amongst researchers at four universities in the United States, connecting Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. The ARPANET grew quickly, and in 1973 it goes international with connections to University College in London and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway. Internet was "born".
1979 saw the establishment of the first Usenet newsgroups. Usenet News is a global community bulletin board system for the internet. Users from all over the world started joining these discussion groups to talk about the net, politics, religion and thousands of other subjects. Usenet still exists, in fact, it is more popular than ever. Millions of people around the world read Usenet News daily. When someone posts an article to Usenet, that article is sent out worldwide to more than 200,000 servers which in turn supply messages to tens of millions of individual users. Over 250,000 articles are posted to Usenet each day; a full news-feed is 500MB/day. Usenet is organised into thousands of topic areas called newsgroups. There are 15,000 newsgroups. The groups are organised in a tree structure which has seven major categories:
Comp -- topics of interest to both computer professionals and hobbyists, including topics in computer science, software sources, and information on hardware and software systems.
Rec -- groups oriented towards hobbies and recreational activities.
Sci -- discussions marked by special knowledge relating to research in or application of the established sciences.
Soc -- groups primarily addressing social issues and socializing. Included are discussions related to many different world cultures.
Talk -- groups largely debate-oriented and tending to feature long discussions without resolution and without appreciable amounts of generally useful information.
News -- groups concerned with the news network, group maintenance, and software.
Misc -- group addressing themes not easily classified into any of the other headings or which incorporate themes from multiple categories. Subjects include fitness, job-hunting, law, and investments.
New groups in the "Big7" are created "democratically", by voting. There are dozens of other areas, top-domains, that are not part of these big seven; the most famous is the alt hierarchy, alt.*, (created by people who wanted to bypass the Usenet "cabal" who acclaimedly control the big seven groups), which is special in the way that anyone can start new groups. Other areas on Usenet are controlled by individual nations, organisations or corporations. Usenet provides an efficient forum for wide public discussions on topics of interest. The strength of Usenet has been its capability to rapidly deliver targeted information, news and announcements, organised by topic, directly to users throughout the world. Its weakness, some would say, is that these capabilities are used "in the wrong hands"; anyone can post anything anywhere, and they do ("spam", adverts, etc.).
So, many people choose not to use Usenet. Instead, they use mailingslists to communicate and collaborate through the net. Mailinglists (majordomo, listproc, listserv) are email distribution lists for people interested in a particular topic. People who sign up for (subscribe to) a mailing list have the messages delivered directly into their email box. Mailing lists are often more specific in topic than Usenet newsgroups. Mailing lists can be very small, perhaps only a dozen people or so, but also quite large, including thousands of people. In some cases, large mailing lists are connected to newsgroups, webboards, etc., so postings on a mailing list appear on a corresponding newsgroup, webboard, or whatever, and vice versa.
In 1993, in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee devised a way to organise the Internet-based information and resources he needed for his research. He dubbed his system the World Wide Web (also known as WWW, or the web). To connect individual pieces of information, he used "hypertext" (also "hypermedia"), a concept created in the early 1960s by Ted Nelson as part of the "Xanadu project". Hypertext is a document that includes names and pointers - addresses, or "links" - to other relevant items or documents. Berners-Lee employed an existing document markup language called SGML and adapted it to the Web through specifying a new Document Type Definition (DTD) called HTML, which became the de-facto standard for webpublishing. Berners-Lee is today involved with the W3 Consortium, an international, open (if you pay a hefty fee, that is) group of "market-leading" corporations and public institutions. Besides mark-up information like fonts, header levels, and formatting, people could now embed Internet addresses into their Web document. The browser - the program which is used to view these Web documents - displays the content, in text or icons associated with these embedded references. By clicking on a hypertext link, users tell their computer to "find the address associated with this link, and go there." Hyperlinks in Web documents - called URLs, Universal Resource Locators - point to things anywhere on the Internet. Using a web browser programme (e.g., Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Explorer), people can navigate the Web by simply selecting "links", or entering a few keystrokes to select a menu item or define a search string. The browser "follows the links", retrieves the specified files, and displays them as documents, graphics, sounds, video, and other multimedia information.
The development of the web, and the internet in general, is moving on so rapidly that it is no simple task to keep track of what is going on. New, more powerful than ever, applications and systems are brought to the web every day.
Webboards, or web forums, are a relatively new way to collaborate on the internet. A webboard is a centralised bulletin board system, navigated with a web browser. In the "pure" form of webboards, users must visit a particular website for each web forum to read messages from others and post their own. Some webboards offer advanced search and presentation possibilities. While no authoritative statistics are available, Reference.COM estimates more than 25,000 web forums are in operation today.
Note: Webforums, mailinglists, bulletinboards, virtual workplaces, net-groupware and other kinds of virtual tools for interactivity are all covered in details at my website.
While most governments have been active (not necessarily successfully though) on the Web for some time, governments have not until very recently used the Usenet system. Some governments, on the contrary, make strong efforts to limit the use by their citizens of certain newsgroups. The censorship debate about the internet has been, and still is, concerned mainly with Usenet newsgroups, even though the really offensive stuff, be it child pornography, be it neonazi death lists, most surely have other distributions sources than Usenet. Rumours are, that there are ten- or hundredfold more child pornography and "wares cracks" on IRC (chat) channels than on usenet.
In March 1997, at a time where Usenet to some extent is overshadowed by other cybertechnologies, mainly the web, the International GovNews Project sponsored by the U.S. Chief Financial Officers Council announced that they on Usenet had facilitated the creation of a special government category - called gov.* or GovNews, which "will facilitate the delivery of government information to your cyberspace doorstep." Official notices, news, announcements, reports and publications from government agencies will be sent to a beginning set of more than 200 new specialised newsgroups, most dedicated to US issues, but designed for world-wide coverage (already including G7 in the hierarchy).
From "GOVNEWS PROJECT TAKES DEMOCRACY INTO CYBERSPACE", NSF March 1997:
"The U.S. government is taking a leadership role in providing a technology that could change the face of democracy around the world," Vice President Al Gore.
"If the World Wide Web is the Internet's library, Usenet is its newspaper," said Preston Rich, NSF's FinanceNet Executive Director and leader of the International GovNews Project.
"The creation of this new category lays the groundwork for the wide, cost-effective electronic dissemination and discussion by topic of large amounts of public government information. ....
Through the Usenet system, GovNews is distributed through thousands of linked Internet servers throughout the world. Millions of people will now be able to follow and comment on government activity in selected areas of interest without extensive surfing on the Web. Schools, businesses and households, without powerful computers and high-speed connections, will now be able to use less complex systems to get rapid access to federal agency information through newsgroup servers located right in their own communities. ....
In addition to the efficient dissemination of government news by topic, GovNews also opens new opportunities for developing public participation and discussion of government news by topic, while providing for important citizen feedback to government administrators." (NSF 1997)
Surely, GovNews could "change the face of democracy". But will it? But even if governments, parliaments and official bodies make much of their archives and proceedings available electronically, then, who will have the time and resources to search through and who will use all of this information?
So you hearken to the siren song of digital politics. Someone conjures up a vision of electronic democracy: Vote from the comfort of your own home! Take as long as you like to make your decisions! Access readily-available candidate information and statements online! E-mail your congressperson! Sign that electronic petition! Form ad hoc interest groups and virtual political parties! Debate the issues! Fax your grievances to Boris Yeltsin! Chat with Al Gore on AOL!
Kinney, 1996, p.138.
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and USA's richest man, has written a book, "The Road Ahead". In this, he describes his visions for the future. The society Gates imagines, and actively tries to realise with his billions of dollars, is based on a principle he calls "Information at your fingertips". With tomorrows powerful information machines connected to the Information Superhighway a "content revolution" will take place, where anybody has access to "most of the information in the world", for example:
Is the bus late?Are there any accidents on my route to work?
Does anyone want to swap theatre tickets?
How is your kid doing in school?
What a good recipe for salmon?
Where in town, tomorrow morning, can you get the cheapest pulse-measuring wrist watch?
Does anyone want to pay me good for my old Mustang cabriolet?
Where were you last thursday at 9.09pm?
etc.
On the CD-ROM that follows the book, he presents three scenarios for the "time to come". Electronic efficiency is here illustrated by things like having the chance to watch the Oprah Winfrey Show at whichever time is suitable to you ... Gates calls his abstract utopia "Friction-Free Capitalism", a society of ideal markets made due by IT:
"When Adam Smith described the concept of markets in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he theorized that if every buyer knew every seller's price, and every seller knew what every buyer was willing to pay, everyone in the "market" would be able to make fully informed decisions and society's resources would be distributed efficiently. To date we haven't achieved Smith's ideal because would-be buyers and would-be sellers seldom have complete information about one another". Bill Gates
Gates is not particularly interesting as a writer on economic theory, but his business strategy is relevant in our context:
The trail blazed by the Internet will direct many elements of the highway. The Internet is a wonderful, critical development and a very clear element of the final system, but it will change significantly in the years ahead. The current Internet lacks security and needs a billing system. (my emphasis) (ibid)
The internet has in fact only been a commercial market for very few years, since the beginning of the 1990's. But already today, the internet plays a central role in not only Gates' Microsoft, but in the whole computer industry, and will probably play an even bigger role, as soon as electronic money (the billing system) is a reality (which is, technically, very soon). We can indeed safely say that the internet is rapidly becoming a fully commercial market.
Contemporary policy makers are turning more and more towards the idea of market mediation and market-led development. For example, at the European level, where the perhaps most "true confession" of this standpoint came in 1994 with the so-called Bangemann report on "Europe and the global information society"
(link)
"The market will drive ... the prime task of government is to safeguard competitive forces....".
The Information Society Forum, a "think tank" set up by the European Commission, challenges the Bangemann standpoint in their "Networks for People and their Communities - Making the Most of the Information Society in the European Union", First Annual Report to the European Commission, published in June 1996:
"Our democracies are faced with new opportunities and risks: we can revitalise them by bringing people into decision-making and enabling them to exercise a closer scrutiny over the acts of government. Or we can allow the Information Society to become the "Snooping Society" and suffer a loss of individual liberties by failing to safeguard such basic rights as privacy and freedom from intrusion"
The IS Forum writes that "the new technologies could have extraordinarily positive implications for our democracies and individual rights", and suggests they (the ICTs, that is) could:
"The Global Short-Circuit and the Explosion of Information"
"A revolution is in progress; a global short-circuit of time, space, people and processes. At the same time we witness an explosion in the amount and exchange of information. The instrument is modern information technology (IT), and the result is the profound change in work and communication processes throughout society."
These words come from the best selling official report ever published in Denmark. In March 1994 the Danish Government appointed a two-member Committee on the "Information Society by the year 2000". The members were Lone Dybkjær and Søren Christensen, who were commissioned to draft a proposal for a comprehensive project, which "will tie public institutions and companies together by means of modern information technology and create new possibilities for citizens". The proposal should:
line up the possibilities for the Danes in a future Information Society, formulate an overall Danish policy for information technology, and identify specific target areas for the next few years, and where necessary identify the needs for law reforms.
The aim was to prepare an "outline for a strategy and proposals for an agenda of future initiatives". To this end the Committee presented a number of specific proposals, which "should be ready for decision-taking and implementation". Public administration at both central and local level must, they argue, be connected by an electronic service network, which "should provide better service for both citizens and companies as well as more efficient administration". The establishment of such service network "means that information which has already been given to one public institution by citizens or companies should not be requested by another agency". For citizens and companies it "should be possible to send letters and information to public authorities by electronic means - and receive answers the same way".
The components of the imagined service network include the following:
On the initiative of the Danish Minister of Research and Informations Technology, and on behalf of the Danish Government, a follow-up proposal came in March 1995:
"From Vision to Action: Info-Society 2000", Statement to Parliament on "Info-Society 2000" and IT Political Action Plan 1995. Here, the government's aim is that Denmark should make a conscious choice:
"We either leave important decisions entirely to the market forces and to the policies so far pursued in the various areas; or we formulate a coherent strategy which will make the Danes well prepared to meet the challenge of reorganisation in the wake of the Info-Society".
The argument is that information technology "correctly used" may be a source of economic development, growing employment, improved quality of life and a cleaner environment due to the use of less polluting technologies. The so-called Jacques Delors-method: -
* High ambitions - realistic aims and schedules,
* Focus on key problems, e.g. infrastructure expansion, law revision or standardisation,
* A broad approach - synergy effects and critical mass,
- is suggested, and used to formulate the action plan. In this, a set of priciples is pointed out, such as:
" Principle 25:For a forceful strategy of the information society to work it demands the widespread increase in awareness throughout society and a debate on possibilities and problems, and on the political level the information society must be put on the top of the agenda."
Alas, principles are just principles ... the politicians agenda became filled with many other issues, and to put it mildly, the political strategical planning on the information society has been rather weak, administered by a rather power- and money-less ministry, the Ministry of Research, www.fsk.dk. The political state of Denmark as such is still not present on the web - the Parliaments webserver has again been postponed. While some interesting initiatives are indeed occuring at the national level, there are few, if any, public authorities at regional and municipal level, whose web-resources are worth mentioning. The city of Copenhagen, for example, offers very poor public information resources, for example the Københavnerbase at www.kk.dk - extensive perhaps, but uninnovative and unuserfriendly, and basically a misunderstanding of the media.
Appearently, however, the public authorities (at national level) in Denmark are learning. A new Information Political Committee has been set up (www.ipu.dk). Their commission is to evaluate the public service and information resources. Hopefully, this committee can start off some debates about the relationship between public service, information resources, and the information society.
"Dialogue of the Deaf" is a term used by John Harvey-Jones to typify the lack of mutual comprehension between "those who use and therefore understand techniques such as email discussion and those whose understanding is based on second hand reports" (Rappaport, 1997). I suppose all new technologies create such gaps between - and within - practitioners and non-practitioners, users and non-users. But the email discussion techniques, in general, the on-line communication techniques, seem to inflict what Rappaport (1997) calls "an excess of emotion, driven on one side by messianic vision and on the other by fear of the unknown."
People are flocking to computer networks not for a more convenient way to find stock quotes and movie reviews, but to send email to friends and relatives, to participate in discussions of issues, to express who they are on home pages. People come to the net to participate and create, not to receive information passively. "The Information Superhighway" is a misnomer. It's not about information; it's about community, participation, and creation. Bruckman (1996) (my emphasis)
"Forget about the Super Information Highway, what's important is that people are now communicating again!!" -- said Howard Rheingold at a conference in Tokyo, in front of 400 Japanese businessmen and researchers. Paradoxically, one might say, he said this just minutes after the conference chair had announced that this conference was "a step further in the development of the Super Information Highway", since it was the first ever to have live online video-conferences between three continents; both Stanford and INSEAD were, virtually, participating in the conference, named "The Virtual Society". Clearly, the whole conference were set up as a "boost" of the information highway's ramps in Japan. It was arranged by TEPIA, a new institution set up to promote the advance of Japanese Information Society, by arranging exhibitions, playgrounds, and conferences for Japanese people and businesses. At the time of the conference, one could visit an exhibition called "The New Digital Age Multimedia: Today and Tomorrow", where one can try out some of the most recent technological gadgets, for example, virtual skiing, a virtual pet, and so on.
The present as well as the future society can be described through various scenarios. One of them is the information society variant, and it could be called Technotopia (c.f. Selstad, 1989). Whether we associate Technotopia with Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Gibson's Neuromancer, or films like Blade Runner, Robocop, and many other science fiction versions of Technotopia, the basic content of these are more often than not presented as a Dystopia instead of an Utopia. But in other contexts, perhaps especially in urban planning, the picture is different. In Japan, for example, the dominant pattern in urban development - "for the 21st Century" - is visions of Technotopias, often expressed in very literary terms, such as the Tokyo Teleport City, the Minato Mirai 21 "High-Tech City" in Yokohama, or the Makuhari "Futuristic Information City" in Chiba. Anderson et al must love these places, some of them already being build, because they are true incarnations of K-cities. Also the vast majority of planners in Japan are very fond of these, although there has been an increase in the sceptics after the "Bubble Explosion" in the early 1990s.
While Japan is perhaps the most extreme example one could find, there is a pattern that seems to be more or less world-wide: media, politicians and many researchers do not hesitate in telling us that we already are situated in the midst of Technotopia. To me this seems as somewhat of an exaggeration, but there is definitely something about the talk. The increasing diffusion of modern information technologies of various kinds - networks, multimedia, satellites, and telecommunication systems, just to mention a few of the important ones - has bit by bit (!) reached a level where all areas and arenas of society is influenced. In urban theories, people like Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen have, in different ways, shown how there is a strong tendency for city-oriented businesses to stake much on these new technologies, stakes that involves basic changes in the designs and lives of cities. Indeed, the "super-information-highway", or cyberspace as it is called in literature (c.f. Gibson's Neuromancer) seems to be of greater importance to cities than the traditional highways ever were.
"Click, click through cyberspace; this is the new architectural promenade..... The network is the urban site before us, an invitation to design and construct the City of Bits (capital of the twenty-first century), just as, so long ago, a narrow peninsula beside the Maeander became the place for Miletos. But this new settlement will turn classical categories inside out and will reconstruct the discourse in which architects have engaged from classical times until now..... This will be a city unrooted to any definite spot on the surface of the earth, shaped by connectivity and bandwidth constraints rather than by accessibility and land values, largely asynchronous in its operation, and inhabited by disembodied and fragmented subjects who exist as collections of aliases and agents. Its places will be constructed virtually by software instead of physically from stones and timbers, and they will be connected by logical linkages rather than by doors, passageways, and streets."
(Mitchell, 1995)
Although this might sound as American/Californian futuristic hype, it is my conviction that the Net, or cyberspace, has some very important implications for our understanding of future cities and the design hereof. One of the most important ones is about public spaces and places, and about citizenship and participation. Over the part decades, there has been a decrease in the eagerness of the public, the citizens, to participate in politics and planning in general. There are many good reasons for this, of course. But the situation for the Net is quite different: here, an overwhelming amount of people are very eager to participate, and it is perhaps the fastest growing public interest field ever seen. As it is now, anyone has - in principle - a right to join the Net, and when they have done so, they have - again in principle - the possibility to show up anywhere they wish; no matter from which entry point they choose, the Net is free of geographical restrictions.
The ease of accessibility makes cyberspace a challenge to our understanding of the meaning of public space, and essentially the meaning of urbanity. In an interview with the Danish philosopher Arno Victor Nielsen (Politiken, 6.11.94), Richard Sennett argues that this new technology is not only interesting because it is new and popular, but also because it has the potential for the unfolding of a new form of urbanity, if not downright being a new form of urbanity. In Sennett's view, urbanity is a social condition for being together view strangers (see also Sennett, 1976, 1990), and as a media for such sociality the new technology has an enormous potential.
For this potential to unfold, some conditions must be met. One of the most important ones is concerned with the public-private-relationship. Urban public space is not merely un-private - what's left over when everyone walls off their private domains. A space is genuinely public, as Kevin Lynch (1981) has pointed out, only to the extent that it really is openly accessible and welcoming to members of the community that it serves. It must also allow users considerable freedom of assembly and action, and there must be some kind of public control of its use and its transformation over time. The same goes for public cyberspace, so
"creators and maintainers of public, semipublic, and pseudopublic parts of the online world - like the makers of city squares, public parks, office building lobbies, shopping mall atriums, and Disneyland Main Streets - must consider who gets in and who gets excluded, what can and cannot be done there, whose norms are enforced, and who exerts control" (Mitchell, 1995).
These questions, like the complementary ones of privacy and encryption, have become the foci of crucial policy debates, especially on the Net itself, where the highest rated sites (according to Netscape's "What's Hot?") in June 1995 were the ones having petitions about keeping the Net open and uncontrolled, signed by more that 300.000 net-users worldwide already then. As of February 18, 1997, GNN's Internet search index, WebCrawler, ranked EFF's Blue Ribbon Campaign page the 4th most-linked-to web page in the world
The Internet has to date provided only semipublic cyberspace (Michell, 1995), since it is widely but not universally accessible; you have to belong to a subscribing organisation or have to pay to get in. Furthermore, you have to be familiar with computers. This "begs the question of how truly public cyberspace - the equivalent, say, of the Piazza San Marco in Venice - might be constructed" (Michell). The American community networks that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s - Santa Monica Public Electronic Network, Blacksburg Electronic Village, Telluride InfoZone, Smart Valley, and Cambridge Civic Network, for example - all sought answers by trying to make network access openly available to entire communities in the same way that city hall and the local public parks traditionally have been.
In many of these community networks, also called free-nets, a "city" metaphor is often explicitly used to structure information access: you go to the appropriate "building" to find information or services. Thus the "welcome" screen of the Cleveland Free-Net (one of the oldest and largest, with more than 35,000 registered users and over 10,000 log-ins per day) presents the following quotidian directory:
1. The Administration Building
2. The Post Office
3. Public Square
4. The Courthouse and Government Center
5. The Arts Building
6. Science and Technology Center
7. The Medical Arts Building
8. The Schoolhouse (Academy One)
9. The Community Center and Recreation Area
10. The Business and Industrial Park
11. The Library
12. University Circle
13. The Teleport
14. The Communications Center
15. NPTN/USA Today Headline News
(telnet:://freenet-in-a.cwru.edu)
In the community network model, the new, virtual city becomes a kind of electronic shadow of the existing physical one. In some of the contemporary showcases and experiments, advanced computer technologies are applied in the design, and the virtual reality technologies, simulation technologies, and graphic design systems all meet in the virtual city.
Examples of the type of information and services that are offered on these systems are bus schedules, life long learning class schedules, job opportunities, city or county legislation and regulations, calendar of events, school lunch menus, homework help lines, advice from local professionals and tradespeople such as auto mechanics, lawyers, librarians, and law enforcement personnel, electronic catalogs for libraries, restaurant listings, tourist attractions, drafts of strategic plans, motor vehicle renewals, energy conservation aids, health information, index to local newspapers, reports from members of Congress who represent the area. (Cisler, 1993, <ftp://ftp.apple.com/alug/communet/ComNet6.93.txt>).
In her thesis, "Communities On-Line: Community-Based Computer Networks", MIT-candidate Anne Beamish (1995) makes a clear distinction between community networks and the similarly named "on-line communities" or "virtual communities", in that community networks are based in a physical place - "what participants have in common are their cities and neighborhoods" - whereas
"virtual or on-line communities refer to groups of people who congregate (electronically) to discuss specific topics which range from academic research to hobbies. They are linked by a common interest or profession. There are no geographic boundaries to on-line communities and participants anywhere in the world can participate" (Chapter 1, note 1, Beamish, 1995).
The community networks have three major features, she argues:
1. Local. The most distinguishing characteristic of community networks is their focus on local issues. They emphasize local culture, local relevance, local pride, and community ownership (Morino 1994).
2. Access. The second feature that distinguishes community networks from commercial networks and bulletin boards is their concern and effort to ensure that the network reflect and include all members of the community and not just traditional computer and telecommunication users. This means that community networks are frequently involved in placing computer equipment in publicly accessible places such as community centers and libraries.
3. Social Change/Community Development. Community networks' third characteristic is the belief that the system with its communication and information can strengthen and vitalise existing communities. Their organisers regards the network as a tool - not very different from tools such as printers, photocopiers, telephones, radio or television, or whatever communication technology hitherto have been used for community organising. It is believed that community networks can be used by the local community to find and build solutions to their problems (FreeSpace 1994b; Guthrie et al. 1990; Morino 1994).
In more theoretical terms, one can argue that community networks are more gemeinschaftlich than gesellschaftlich.
On many community networks, government participation is interpreted to mean providing city information such as bus schedules and telephone numbers, which, though useful, does not even begin to approach meaningful communication or participation. As a result, access to or active participation by politicians and government officials is rare on most networks (3).
In a Swedish community information network project, the
Målet är att göra Tyresö till en framstående kommun på IT-området, där Internet används för t.ex. internationellt utbyte, lokala och globala diskussionsforum, föreningsverksamhet, stärkt tillgång till offentliga handlingar och annan information, politisk debatt, undervisning, telependling, marknadsföring och försäljning, nyhetsförmedling m.m. Framväxten av Internet är en samhällsrevolution som i betydelse kan jämföras med spridningen av boktryckarkonsten, och vi vill att Tyresö skall gå bland de främsta i vårt land i denna revolution.
(link)
During the project, the
Problem nummer ett med detta forum är att det är svårt att få respons från politiker. Dom flesta av våra politiker har nog fortfarande lite dimmiga uppfattningar om vad Internet är. Det har hänt att folk ställt direkta frågor, som jag har vidarebefordrat per fax till kommunen, fått svar på på papper, och sedan knappat in dessa här.
[Newsgroup tyreso.politik: Subject: Re: Funkar detta diskussionsforum? Date: 19 Sep 1996 21:52:08 GMT From: Tomas Andreason <tomas@sisshammar.se>]
Min erfarenhet av den hittills har varit att de inlägg som skrivs har genomgående varit intressanta, men att alltför få har deltagit i debatten. Speciellt saknar jag kommunpolitikernas deltagande.
[Newsgroup tyreso.politik: Subject: Re: Funkar detta diskussionsforum? Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 22:31:21 - From: Pär Forslund <perfor@canit.se>]
Schuler (1994) points to three areas in which participation of the citizens is central:
(link)
Network Design and Development
The community network organisation must develop "a shared vision, a shared plan, and a shared voice," and establish how work will be organized, assigned, evaluated, and sanctioned. To this end, the SCN Project established five committees - hardware/software, policy, outreach, services, staff and facilities - and a steering committee. "Communication approaches that are informative and inclusive are needed to support both internal development and community outreach." Developing basic documents is another important responsibility.
The On-Line Community
"Participation in the on-line community can take two forms. Basic participation means participating in forums, including those specifically devoted to discussing the system and how well it meets community needs. Extended use means modifying services, developing new services, or hosting forums."
Network Governance
"Opportunities for participation extend to roles and responsibilities that transcend using the system. These will include (paid) staff roles, board members, advisory board members, and volunteers. Areas of responsibilities include users services such as training and documentation development; system administration, including user accounts and software installation; outreach including publicity, fund-raising, and communication; and executive, including strategic planning, evaluating, and co-designing."
Communities are regarded by Schuler as a rich and complex network of social relationships. Regardless of whether the nature of these relationships is economic, legal, political, or something else, he argues that communication and information are "essential to the formulation and the maintenence of the social web that we call community"
(link).
Unlike commercial systems whose primary aim is to make a profit, the primary aim of community networks is to support the local community, to strengthen what Schuler calls the "Community Core Values" (including "conviviality and culture; education; strong democracy; health and well-being; economic equity, opportunity, and sustainability; and information and communication") (ibid). These are essential to the life of the community, and somehow juxtaposed. But for Schuler, the sixth category is different, and can be seen as a kind of meta-category. He writes:
"Community information is critical to community networks and information that supports the core values is especially valuable. Although the possibilities are nearly endless, some examples include information on arts and crafts fairs and classes, writing workshops, local dance and theater events, (culture and conviviality) homework hotlines, "Ask Mr. Science" forums, parent's forums, on-line curricula and lesson plans (education) e-mail to local government agencies, city council agenda and public meeting schedules, forums on local issues, legal documents on-line (strong democracy) social services information, environmental information (health and social welfare) job listings, forums for unemployed workers (economic equity and opportunity) library catalogs on-line, ethnic and alternative newspapers, letters to the editors of newspapers, and civic journalism projects (information and communication)." (link)
Now the question of "talk," of meeting face-to-face, of "public" discourse is confused and complicated by the electronic form of exchange of symbols, Mark Poster argues. If "public" discourse exists as pixels on screens generated at remote locations by people one has never and probably will never meet, in "chat rooms", "virtual communities," "electronic cafés," bulletin boards, e-mail conferences, CoolTalk/NetMeeting conferencing, etc., then how is it to be distinguished from the traditional public discourse?
For too long critical theory has insisted on a public sphere, bemoaning the fact of media "interference," the static of first radio's then of television's role in politics. But Poster's point is that political discourse has already long been mediated by electronic machines: the issue now, he argues, is that the machines enable new forms of "decentralized dialogue" and create new combinations of "human-machine assemblages", new individual and collective "voices," "specters," "interactivities" which are the new building blocks of political formations and groupings.
He refers to Paul Virilio who writes,
"What remains of the notion of things 'public' when public images (in real time) are more important than public space?"
And continues,
"If the technological basis of the media has habitually been viewed as a threat to democracy, how can theory account for the turn toward a construction of technology (the Internet) which appears to promote a decentralization of discourse if not democracy itself and appears to threaten the state (unmonitorable conversations), mock at private property (the infinite reproducibility of information) and flaunt moral propriety (the dissemination of images of unclothed people often in awkward positions)?"
Howard Rheingold terms the social network of relations that comes into existence on the internet "virtual communities":
"I can attest that I and thousands of other cybernauts know that what we are looking for, and finding in some surprising ways, is not just information and but instant access to ongoing relationships with a large number of other people."
Many have seen a correlation between the success of "virtual communities" and the fact that "real" communities are in decline. Internet provides an alternative to the real thing, is the argument, and for some, the practice (the film "The Net", featuring a person who had only a social identity in cyberspace, illustrates this, of course in an extreme and futuristic manner); there are in fact people today whose most important, if not only, social and public life is "virtual" ("life on the screeen", Turkle). As many others, Poster finds that the opposition "virtual" and "real" community contains serious difficulties, and writes:
In the case of the nation, generally regarded as the strongest group identification in the modern period and thus perhaps the most "real" community of this era, the role of the imaginary has been fundamental. Pre-electronic media like the newspaper were instrumental in disseminating the sign of the nation and interpellating the subject in relation to it. In even earlier types of community, such as the village, kinship and residence were salient factors of determination.
Identification of an individual or family with a specific group was never automatic, natural or given, Poster contends. It is instead seen as "always turning", refering to Jean-Luc Nancy who argues on the production of an "essence" which reduces multiplicity into fixity, obscuring the political process in which "community" is constructed:
"...the thinking of community as essence ... is in effect the closure of the political. ... How can we be receptive to the meaning of our multiple, dispersed, mortally fragmented existences, which nonetheless only make sense by existing in common?" (p. xl, in Poster)
Nancy's critique of community in "the older" sense is by Poster seen as crucial to the understanding of the construction of self in the Internet. Nancy himself denies the significance of new communications technologies, as well as new subaltern subject positions in his understanding of community:
"The emergence and our increasing consciousness of decolonized communities has not profoundly modified [the givens of community], nor has to day's growth of unprecedented forms of being-in-common through channels of information as well as through what is called the "multiracial society" triggered any genuine renewal of the question of community." (p. 22, in Poster)
Poster is instead drawing a line between a postmodern constitution of the subject and bidirectional communications media. He tries to specify "the historical emergence of the decentered subject" and explore its links with new communications situations:
His argument is that virtual communities derive some of their verisimilitude from being treated as if they were plain communities, allowing members to experience communications in cyberspace as if they were embodied social interactions. Just as virtual communities are understood as having the attributes of "real" communities, so "real" communities can be seen to depend on the imaginary: what makes a community vital to its members is their treatment of the communications as meaningful and important. Virtual and real communities mirror each other in chiasmic juxtaposition.
The virtual and the real may provide different things, Sherry Turkle (1996) remarks. Why then, do so many make them compete? The difficulty in this, she finds, is that virtuality tends to skew our experience of the real in several ways. Virtuality makes denatured and artificial experiences seem real - Turkle calls it the Disneyland effect. Turkle spent much time studying Dred's Bar, "a watering hole on the MUD LambdaMOO". MUDs, which originally stood for "multi-user dungeons," are destinations on the internet where players who have logged in from computers around the world participate in an on-line virtual community. Through typed commands, they can converse privately or in large groups, creating and playing characters interacting with other charaters, and even earning and spending imaginary funds in the MUD's virtual economy. The traditional MUD was text-based only, so the imaginary powers had to be set lose in the minds and heads of the participants, each sitting by him or herself and looking into a screen. Dred's Bar is one such place. It is described as having a "castle decor" and a polished oak dance floor. Turkle describes how she (as character or persona "ST") visited Dred's Bar with Tony, a persona she had met on another MUD. After passing the bouncer, they encountered a man asking for a $5 cover charge, and once paid, hands stamped, they enter the bar ...
The crowd opens up momentarily to reveal one corner of the club. A couple is there, making out madly. Friendly place . . .
You sit down at the table. The waitress sees you and indicates that she will be there in a minute.
[The waitress here is a bot--short for robot--that is, a computer program that presents itself as a personality.]
The waitress comes up to the table, "Can I get anyone anything from the bar?" she says as she puts down a few cocktail napkins.
Tony says, "When the waitress comes up, type order name of drink."
Abigail [a character at the bar] dries off a spot where some drink spilled on her dress.
The waitress nods to Tony and writes on her notepad.
[I type "order margarita," following Tony's directions.]
You order a margarita.
The waitress nods to ST and writes on her notepad.
Tony sprinkles some salt on the back of his hand.
Tony remembers he ordered a margarita, not tequila, and brushes the salt off.
You say, "I like salt on my margarita too."
The DJ makes a smooth transition from The Cure into a song by 10,000 Maniacs.
The drinks arrive. You say, "L'chaim."
Tony says, "Excuse me?"
After some explanations, Tony says, "Ah, . . ." smiles, and introduces me to several of his friends. Tony and I take briefly to the dance floor to try out some MUD features that allow us to waltz and tango, then we go to a private booth to continue our conversation.
Dred's Bar is not just a computer programme; it is one of the many neutral places for civic public discussions the computer networks offer. Here, communities are "build" and a "genuine" social life is taking place. These places, and in general the whole computer mediated communication structure that is being developed and used by millions already today, will influence the way we regard our democracies.
Does technologies have effects on societies, or is it the other way round? Does "appropriate technology" lead to democracy, or is it democracy in action that shapes appropriate technology?
I think Richard Sclove's argument on these matters is very good and substantial in his book "Democracy and Technology", from which I think the concept of polypotency is particularly relevant here. Technologies are polypotent - they manifest both focal and nonfocal functions, effects, and meanings (p.22). Polypotency means "potent in many ways", and can be contrasted with "omnipotence" ("potent in all ways"). So when someone asks: <<Can telematics reduce social exclusion, or will it increase social exclusion?>> - I think Sclove's answer would be "perhaps"! ;-) In his book, he writes: (quoted from (link))
Telecommunications enthusiasts, such as contemporary boosters of a national information superhighway, sometimes respond that should a mismatch arise between bonds of social affiliation, which could increasingly become nonterritorial, versus current political jurisdictions, "political systems can change." However, that answer provides none of the necessary specifics. It also fails, for example, to grapple with the U.S. Constitution's requirement that amendments garner the support of a majority of elected federal or state legislators. How readily do legislators normally accede to voting away their own offices? In short, at a minimum one would confront a profound transition dilemma.
Regarding democracy and technology in terms of dilemmas, perhaps even ambiguities, seems to be a much more feasible way of dealing with this complex relationship, and he calls for caution, but not just in a negative sense:
If the prospect of telecommunity replacing spatially localized community ought to evoke skepticism or opposition, one can nevertheless remain open to the possibility of democratically managing the evolution of telecommunications systems in ways that instead supplement more traditional forms of democratic community. Caution is in order. However, the benefits can potentially include combatting local parochialism; helping to establish individual memberships in a diverse range of communities, associations, and social movements; empowering isolated or marginalized groups; and facilitating transcommunity and intersocietal understanding, coordination, and accountability.
Complexity gets no less when taking into consideration the way systems are socially shaped:
Systems designed to support such uses - especially without subverting local community - are unlikely to emerge without concerted democratic struggle. For instance, one transnational corporation first supported, then clandestinely monitored, and finally terminated a successful, productivity-enhancing internal computer conferencing system. Senior managers had discovered that subordinates, including women executives previously isolated from one another, were spending coffee-break time on the system discussing and criticizing company policy. Moreover, even seemingly benign systems require ongoing scrutiny for social effects that may only emerge gradually as a system evolves....
Indeed, the new telematics and in general ICTs can be used in - or against - the service of democracy. But just as all - or rather, many - other technologies, ICTs have potency for democratic as well as undemocratic practice. Unlike many other technologies, however, the potency of ICTs are today "applied" at full strenght for both concerted democratic struggles and concerted undemocratic struggles. Unfortunately, the latter form has been given much more attention than it deserves (e.g., not only nazi-networks a.s.o., but also general usernet-newsgropus, for example (5) etc.) in the popular media, and - sadly - also in some general interest newsgroups on the Internet
Perhaps Internet-newsgroups are not the place to look for democratic practice? Or are they? The newsgropus are basically the only 100% public place in virtual societies - the only place "everyone" can access without prior subscription (thus excluding BBSs, on-line provider chat groups, mailinglists, and WWW conferences (due to lack of access). Of course, even newsgroup provide far from universal access - not even in California everyone use the net. In Denmark, only one in twenty persons have net-access, although it is said that Denmark is the country with most computers pr. capita (roughly one-third of all homes have a PC as of spring 1996, by the end of 1997, it is expected to be 50%).
The issue of accessibility is crucial to the democratisation of the net. Access to the net per se, however, does not mean social inclusion - nor does non-access mean social exclusion. There are still many top-managers and politicians who never touch a computer - and there are, I hear, homeless people in USA who have email-addresses. Accessibility is perhaps most of all a question of readiness and motivation? If it is so, why should people then bother? At the end of the day, I often wonder, why people (including myself) spend so much time on-line - and it is much time, WWW = World Wide WAIT. Just as I catch myself wondering why we watch so much television, by the way. But the net is different from television, and in terms of democracy, it has some potentials that TV does not.
To the issue of social ex- or inclusion then: what is the role of the media - be it the old "house altar" (TV) or the new (the PC)? The case is obviously not a simple matter of access. Perhaps looking closer at the notion of social exclusion would help. It is definately a difficult concept, but also important in the democratic debate. Horace Mitchell (1996) challenges the idea that social exclusion means "people who are outside the mainstream mechanisms of society", and adds some more bricks to the puzzle of democracy. So does Robert Putnam, who adds to the complexity by looking at the past decades in USA, Putnam finds that there has been occuring a growing social disengagement and erosion of social capital. In other words, a growing social exclusion. Many others have said the same, but Putnam goes further, in that he finds - and documents - that social connectedness and civic engagement are coherently correlated across individuals. (link).
If I understand him right, this is the real issue we face. Diminishing and fragmented communities, the growth of TV watching as only means of "participation" in social life, and the decrease in political participation (voting, party membership, etc.) are all in "mysterious" ways connected to this correlation. The thing is not merely to consider how technology is privatizing our lives--if, as it also seems to me, it is - but "to ask whether we like the result, and if not, what we might do about it. Those are questions we should, of course, be asking together, not alone." (link)
Together, not alone. Yes. So how does the net fit in? If it is "TV for the 21st century", will it reinforce social disengagement and social capital erosion, or will it turn the "curves"? Douglas Schuler writes about the democratic use of electronic networks, and puts forward some very good thoughts in his new book, New Community Networks - Wired for Change. He writes:
New computer-networking technology currently has many attributes that could undergird communication and technology that is truly democratic. Since it supports "many-to-many" communication, community, regional, national, and even international "conversations" on any topic are possible. This new media is unlike traditional media like newspapers and television that are "one-to-many" (broadcast) or telephones, and letter writing that are usually "one-to-one." These new systems can also dispense with traditional gatekeepers both corporate (who naturally and reflexively prioritize profit-making over the public good) or governmental (who may decide to supersede freedom of speech and expression for "national security," "decency," or a number of other ostensibly good reasons). (link)
The concept "many-to-many" communication has become a signifier for democratic use of the net. It is also used by Howard Rheingold (http://www.rheingold.com/):
"Every node on the network has the power to broadcast words, sounds, images, software, to every other node: Many to many communications....Every desktop computer connected to the Internet is a printing press, broadcasting station, place of assembly, with world wide reach.....technically ubiquitous, global, many-to-many communications, is even more momentous than the preceding technologies. The Net of the future will be newspapers, radios, and televisions and banks all combined in one box. Will this new medium, like literacy, be a tool of democracy? Or will it be tamed, censored, controlled, by those who fear the loss of their power to control others, and the loss of the money that flows to that power? " (link)
The meliorist stance, as taken by Schuler in his book (p. x), is also by me preferred to a more fatalist stance, as taken by many others with regard to the net. For those who don't know what meliorism is: it assumes that "[t]hings can get better, but only if people act to ensure that outcome" (ibid.).
A provocative yet stimulating input to the discussion is brought up in "Wired Words: Utopia, Revolution and the History of Electronic Highways" by Mark Surman (link):
Here is a piece of advice -- beware of self-styled, wired revolutionaries bearing gifts. .... They'll be carrying all sorts of shiny parcels with words like democracy, plenitude, equity and knowledge emblazoned across the wrapping in big, fluorescent orange letters. They'll hand you the gifts of Christmas future while promising a return to the idyllic, utopian days of centuries past. They'll promptly inform you that all these gifts can be yours, free for the asking. All you have to do is believe that the 'information highway' can magically cure the social ills that have plagued humanity for millennia. All you have to do is have faith! ....Faith, revolution and the wired world -- this is a combination that rules our popular mind in the mid-1990's. ... there is a sense of consensus about the revolutionality of our technological times. Although we can't quite agree on what it is, we all seem to be convinced that 'the information highway' will somehow transform our society into a better place. .... we're all talking about the same thing -- revolution. And talking about revolution feels real good.
Well, where are we then? Is the "revolutionality of our technological times" something we can act upon? Or do I sense a touch of fatalism here? What exactly is revolutionalising? Anyway, I basically agree that "while it is important to envision a renewed public sphere, believing that we can fix the problem by magically waving a wire or a modem at it is ridiculous."
I guess I should be one to know about these things - or perhaps exactly not one; I think I am one of these "self-styled, wired revolutionaries bearing gifts". Being based at a technical university, with a lot of computers, I have access to more net-resources than most companies dream of, and I have been wired for several years, and use the net a lot. In contradiction to most of my collegues, I use the resources! Not without difficulties though - and I am not even here getting at the gifts nor the "concerted democratic struggles" mentioned above, but at more down-to-earth technical and administrative matters. Yes, think globally, act locally - the struggle begins locally. The very-nitty-gritty "micropolitic"/ "local revolution" - from getting another 10 Mbytes of webspace on the server to fighting the local censorship-war - is of course also an experience, and perhaps much more so, when you think about it ....
I have been "waving wires" at a wide range of people during the past years - from my university collegues at my insitute and university in general, over my PhD-related electronic community network participants (community activists, citizens) in "Wired Amager", to the citizens and protesters in Serbia in my recent initiative CyberSerbia (all linked to at my homepage, http://www.gotzespace.dk/).
Sclove (p. 9) writes:
In short, the "nuts and bolts of democracy"--ordinarily a metaphor denoting concern with the nitty-gritty of democratic politics--must grow to encompass a literal concern with nuts and bolts. Currently, there are few institutions through which citizens can become critically engaged with choosing or designing technologies. Should we commit ourselves to evolving such institutions and to adopting only those technologies that are compatible with democracy? Until we do, I shall argue, there can be no democracy worthy of the name. (quote from the book - the webpage version has what _could_ be a Freudian error/lapsus linguae; says "themselves", not "ourselves"; very unfortunate typo, I hope -- commiting "them", hmmmm...see Sclove's response here (link))
A "literal concern with nuts and bolts" is really not an option, but a requirement, when taking theory into practice. Designing participatively the "social systems" is a process so much related to technology, that "there can be no democracy worthy of the name" if the technology is not designed participatively.
There is today a plethora of practical experiences, from numerous projects (especially if we include Participatory Design, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and Human-Computer Interaction) in the participatory reasearch traditions of the computerization movement.
Designing participatively the social "systems" is a process so much related to technology, that "there can be no democracy worthy of the name" if the technology is not designed participatively. But "user participation in systems design" is not all. As Michael Macpherson, my cyber-collegue from Berlin, argues
"... there is a need for a thorough inquiry and public debate about how democracies, as they now exist and function, should or can be improved. This inquiry should address democratic systems in their entirety and not be limited only to the present or possibly expanded role of computers. I am particularly interested in changes which allow citizens to participate more fully and more effectively in political decision making." (DiA)
With or without computers, the abstract utopia is to increase the responsible, "deliberated" participation of citizens in decision making in local, national and international systems:
- to fill in social and global space with people's creative discourse,
- to move towards better expression of citizen-will in public decisions, and in deciding and administering public policy,
- to seek ways to learn to make better public decisions, to exemplify and demonstrate better public debate; deliberation on public issues; decision-making,
- decentralised, as far as posssible autonomous forms of citizens' communication and organisation.
Although citizens may choose to increase their participation, their self-determination and self-government by means of argument and discourse, by peaceful protest and struggle, or by violence, it cannot be denied that those at present in positions of power may influence if, and at what rate, the right and ability to participate be increased or indeed decreased.
Macpherson,1997 http://www.snafu.de/~mjm/CP/sec2.html
"Those at present in positions of power" are here seen as, on one hand, as already mentioned, the corporate sector, "capital", and on the other hand, governments, public authorities at all levels, from the community level to inter- or multinational associations of governments and public authorities. Governments may be "open" and take into account the opinions of citizens. The may also not be so. The governments around the world have approached the issue in many various ways, working outside and in-side of cyberspace, some making "freedom of information" laws, "government on-line" systems and intensive public opinion polling, others implementing censorship, surveillance systems and rationalisation strategies. To increase government "openness", it would help to build a system of political information for the different levels of government. The type of information should be designed to help citizens become better informed about facts and processes of government, and since openness and transparence of government are demanded in truly democratic societies, the system would need to offer possibilities to explore what is behind the various steps in law and decision-making. Influences on decision-making and both private and public interests involved should be revealed.
THE OPEN FORUM: CITIZENS RESOLVE
- Based on proposal by Michael Macpherson, 1997
Possible structure is suggested to look like the following:
DEBATES/BLACKBOARDS
(to be set up as electronic fora/announcement boards etc.)
THEMES (examples follow)
| work | gender issues | environment | education | industry | agriculture | social affairs | health | conflict avoidance | culture | national affairs | HOT ISSUES
(each thematic debate will be linked to information about the structure and activities of the relevant parliament, of administrative and government departments, to background material, educational material, news, experts etc.)
WORK
| apprentices | re-training | job-creation | employers | unions | health and work | self-help | government role | employment agencies | jobs (links) | economics |
CULTURE
| Art | Community culture | subcultures | cultural networks | local history | places | associations | schools | jobs | government role
HEALTH
| First Aid | Hospitals | Doctors | Medicine | Food | Technology | Welfare | Organisations
HOT ISSUES could be for instance:
| unemployment | threatened plant closures | violence | substance abuse | public memorials | interest conflicts |
A Big7-Usenet-type voting method could be used to decide on new themes for debates (i.e. in order to set up a new electronic forum), although the voting process is not unproblematic to implement democratically within a Usenet-structure.
I would use this forum to organise public off/on-line debates among active citizens and the responsible politicians/officials/entrepreneurs. In this, many various ideas could be used, for example:
Organise electronic town meetings - ETMs - from time to time, encouraging all citizens in the issue-relevant region to join in (maybe try some "representative sample" ETMs, juries, issue-panels etc.). There are various possible forms (some already tried) of "town meeting" where (prepared) issues are discussed and (maybe in a later stage of innovation) decisions are made by citizens voting or reaching consensus.
Aim to re-organise "town halls" for citizens, not only for officials. Improve availability of information - regarding all plans and activities of government and administration, local, regional/state, central (and committees, quangos/public organisations etc.). Town halls may be partly electronic, eg. with free terminals in public places - libraries, schools, department stores. This means that citizens can see, read about, all steps of decision-making in advance.
Enable net access for anyone who wishes to take part in the process of self-education, information, debate and politics. (e.g. by computer-sharing, public access points)
Acknowledging that net connectivity and acceptance are low, allow participation in debates by other means, e.g provide print-outs of e-debates on request, print key documents as brochures etc., supply bibliographies to political information and guides through administrative jungles etc.
Citizens can communicate "laterally" among themselves as well as with representatives and bureaucrats. The framework for this already exists in the Internet (Web-Chat, Internet Relay Chat etc.) and there are older methods too(!) With aid of computer networking's possibilities for "on-line real-time interactivity", long term problems, options for medium-term decision-making, even threatening crises can be discussed publicly, more effectively than ever before.
Seek to improve and innovate in local media (e.g. citizens' radio, local t.v). Get the local media involved in the net activities! Broadcasting live signals via the internet is already today possible, also for others than microsoft or Sony. Techniques like RealAudio (now called RealMedia, because of the development of RealVideo (6)) are making it possible for local radio stations (and soon also TV-stations) to broadcast world-wide. As the Belgrade radio station B92 showed, broadcasting on the internet can even be done in totalitarian regimes exercising media control.
Get involved in advanced multimedia and telecommunication projects on developmental and experimental real-life activities; collaborate with sponsors on specific sub-projects; take part in international networks and consortia, and go for public research and development funds (e.g. EU-projects).
Electronic networking and also more traditional methods e.g. meetings, local or national mass media, can be used to find collaborators for real, improved debate and opinion-building and also as "rehearsal" for more direct (citizen) democracy. Various forms of "deliberation techniques" can be used, e.g. citizen study groups and panels (invite experts, debate, decide, on selected issues) (c.f. Fishkin, Jefferson centre, a.o.); and computerised and real consensus conferences.
I hope I have here established an argument for a constructive, democracy enhancing and citizen empowering use of ICT. In particular, I find the possibilities offered by the Internet interesting. I will look further on these in the following chapters.
Notes
Note for the printed version of the thesis (added October 1997): As mentioned in this chapter, the current development on the web, and internet in general, moves forward extremely rapidly. Since March, when I finished this chapter, some interesting developments related to the participation and democracy issues have taken place, and are taking place. On my website (http://www.gotzespace.dk/) I have presented several documents (articles, resource-databases, guides, and more) which I would like to invite the interested reader to look at. Also, I am currently, in my job at the Swedish Agency for Administrative Development (http://www.statskontoret.se/), involved in creating a Government Online and Democracy White Paper organised as a G7 Initiative, which will be published (electronically, at the above mentioned website) later this year, and which will include an extensive bibliography on these issues, not merely from a governmental perspective, but also including research- and citizens-based activities and initiatives. I can also refer people who are interested in the current developments to check out the new initiative called Democracies Online (http://www.e-democracy.org/do/).
1. Bell's view on the information society is an early version of the contemporary idea of an information society. See Bell, D (1979).
2. I use the American English spelling of the word on purpose, due to the strong influence on the development that part of the world has had, and still has, growingly.
3. Japan 35,5%; Sweden 32,2%; UK 30,0%, Holland 29,5%; Germany 28,8%; (Denmark 11,0%). Source: IT i Tal 1996, Forskningsministeriet.
4. Understandably, government officials may be reluctant because of the potential for increased work for themselves and their staff, and/or the simple lack of e-mail in their offices, but if community networks are serious about increasing communication, they will have to look much harder at this issue.
5. More than half, often more, of the current messages in the Danish newsgroup dk.politik is concerned with nazi propaganda, extreme xenophobia, nationalism, etc. Whole party programmes for "white supremacy", "national-socialists in Denmark", and several other extreme right groups have been posted there. dk.politik is, I emphasise, the only Danish newsgroup on general politics. Of course, there has been several reactions against the nazi stuff in the newsgroup - but mostly from a few angry young "autonomous" (militant anti-fascists) throwing virtual paving stones at the nazis. The only response from the established political organisations has so far been from the youth-section of the "Progress Party", the far right group in Parliament.
6. See http://www.real.com. "RealVideo is the first full featured, cross platform video solution, supported by leading industry tools companies and content providers and built on the industry standard protocol for streaming media, RTSP. The availability of these technologies breaks through the barriers that have prevented widespread use of video on the Internet and Intranets." (RealVideo Technical White Paper)