[originally appeared in edited form as a Tomorrow's Technology column in
Computer Reseller News, 12/24/1990]
Tools to create electronic community are held forward by some as the salvation
of our fragmented society, but they may be a fundamental part of the problem
instead.
No one is denying that our society is in trouble. Community has broken down,
and with it has gone neighborly feelings like trust and responsibility. Eligible
voters gripe that the politicians are looking out for themselves rather than
their constituents, then they stay home at election time and let them get
reelected anyway.
The fragmentation of society may be the inevitable result of our technological
age, with its focuses on mass production, specialization and optimization.
But some people, rather than thinking in terms of lessening these effects
and returning to simpler ways, are looking to technology as the way out of
the problems it has created.
These thinkers, with their roots in the likes of Stewart Brand of Whole
Earth Catalog fame, believe that we can create a new kind of community that
is free from the ties of physical proximity. With personal computers, interactive
televisions and video teleconferencing, they see a future where people can
be in the middle of a hostile city or an apathetic suburb and still be a part
of a community.
There are serious flaws in this argument, however. For one, it assumes you
can remove physical contact without significantly reducing the quality of
the exchange. University studies have examined the fact that people interact
differently depending on the level of sensual exchange, from full-body, to
head and arms only, to head only, to a head on a television screen, to printed
words on a computer screen. At each level, as people lose the visual, aural,
and olfactory parts of the message, there is less communicating going on even
though the same words are being exchanged. Every good presenter knows this:
The more interaction with an audience, the more effective the talk. They get
out from behind the podium so that people can see all of their body movements.
People have already sacrificed much of the human contact that they once
had. Many of us now use electronic tellers even when the banks are open. When
we do encounter people behind counters, we often exchange nothing more than
money.
But throwing more technology at the problem may be overlooking the fact
that not only technology, but electronic community itself is part of the problem.
Radio and then television were the first steps down the road to disconnecting
human contact from reality. Computers may add interactivity, but they still
don’t bring back the real thing.
Put simply, you cannot compare a Vermont town meeting or a visit with a
neighbor with a bulletin board forum. On the bulletin board, personalities
and motivations are hidden. And there may be regular participants, but they
are not as familiar as a neighbor’s face, no matter how much you have shared
bits and bytes.
Perhaps most importantly, in a real local community you are forced to deal
with every member of the community. You have to find the common ground or
there will be problems for your entire life. The focus (in good communities
anyway) is on respect for diversity. In contrast, most of these contrived
electronic communities are actually affinity groups: people who have come
together at their convenience specifically because they have everything in
common. There is nothing wrong with affinity groups but they are not the same
thing as community, despite the warm fuzzy feelings the folks at Compuserve
and Prodigy try to create with phrases like community bulletin board and electronic
cottage.
Electronic community is reminiscent of an idea from the earliest days of
computers: computer dating. The idea was simple. Community has fallen apart.
People don’t meet and talk and get to know each other the way they used to.
Computers can solve the problem, and maybe even do it better than before by
matching people up scientifically. But people come together because of both
similarities and differences. By learning to live together, both partners
grow dramatically.
This is the choice before us once again: a safe, synthetic community that
we can quickly escape from if it gets unpleasant, where we therefore rarely
grow; or a vibrant, diverse and sometimes unpleasant mix of situations that
challenges us daily to be better people — in other words, real community.
