The Promise of the Computer Culture

1 The Promise of the Computer Culture Dr. Dennis M. Weiss Professor of Philosophy York College of Pennsylvania English and Humanities Department ©1999

I. The Promise of the Computer Culture A fairy tale for the information age. Slide 1 Once upon a time, a new and unusual form of technology appeared. It promised to make all fantasies become reality. Some called it the Information Superhighway. Others called it Cyberspace. It had lots of names. Slide 2 At first people didn't know what to make of it. And many were even confused by it. But there was a Wizard who understood this new technology was not as it appeared. He knew it was here to help people communicate in ways they never dreamed possible. So he got together with technology and created magical new products and services that everyone could use. Life in the kingdom became much easier. And much more enchanting. Herein lies a true story. Slide 3 While all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again, the Wizard and technology were able to find a solution to Mr. Dumpty's predicament. Slide 4 In the Computer Kingdom, Hansel and Gretel are never lured into the Witch's house. They use their Personal Intelligent Communicator to send an urgent message to their dad who in turn sends to Hansel and Gretel's

2 communicator an image of a map to guide his children home. No stale breadcrumbs in this high-tech fantasy. Slide 5 The Prince was able to use his Network Notes to locate that one piece of information that led him and the glass slipper back to Cinderella. Slide 6 The Wizard and all his magical products and services made it easier for people to embrace technology. So what once seemed unattractive became beautiful in the eyes of everyone. And they all communicated happily ever after. Slide 7 “Welcome to Cyberspace.” This series of advertisements appeared in a Time magazine special issue devoted to the issue of cyberspace, specifically in this case, the promise of cyberspace. These claims regarding the transformative powers of the computer, better living through information, are also common place in advertising. Consider, for instance, the claims made on behalf of America Online Slide 8 which promises to make us more capable, powerful, connected, knowledgeable, productive, properous, and happier, if we just insert this disk. The power of the computer to transform us personally is a regular theme of computer advertising. Slide 9 Visio tells us that we don’t need chrome underwear to be a superhero. All you need is Visio software which gives you the power to do things you never dreamed of doing. Slide 10

3 Captain Access endows the mild mannered office worker with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal LAN managers. Beyond transforming us personally, computers also promise to transform our world. Microsoft has been particularly adept at appropriating this theme in their ad campaigns. Following the unveiling of Windows 95, their theme was "Where do you want to go today?" Slide 11 Just start me up, Windows 95 proclaims, and you will be transported to a world without fences, a world where we can be kids again, running free through summer fields. Slide 12 "In here" Microsoft asserts, "revelations happen" Slide 13 and "you work miracles." Within the space defined by what appears to be a computer screen, the miraculous occurs. Slide 14 While life may be suffering, transient, and an illusion, Unity promises nirvana. Slide 15 Super stack promises us choice, freedom, empowerment, and growth. Slide 16 Slide 17 And Gateway laptops, draped in the colors of the American flag, echo Patrick Henry's call for liberty. The copy reads, "Don't be shackled with a substandard portable PC! All hail—the Liberty small notebook from Gateway 2000! It's the fastest portable PC from sea to shining sea!…Join the portable revolution and call Gateway 2000 today for the euphoric freedom of the Liberty.". Politically meaningful symbols are exploited for the purpose of marketing the computer revolution.

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II. Computers, Community, and Democracy The theme of freedom and the liberating potential of computers has become commonplace in computer advertisements, beginning perhaps with Apple's 1984 Superbowl halftime ad which featured the face of Big Brother glowering down from a monumental television screen, haranguing a pathetic mass of uninformed minions. Suddenly from the ranks of Big Brother's cowering audience, a rebellious spirit emerges. It is a muscular young woman who rushes forward and flings a Thor-sized hammer at the screen. It shatters. The enslaved millions are free. Apple, the force of defiance, liberation, and revolution, frees the masses, saves us from Big Brother Computers are cast in a similar drama today, though now it is cyberspace and the networked computers of the Internet that hold out the promise of democracy and community. The democratizing power of the Internet is a common theme in works by Howard Rheingold, John Perry Barlow, George Gilder, Alvin Toffler and others. In a piece appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Richard Detweiler argues that the Internet re-creates the street corner of 1776, “with almost everybody having the opportunity to express ideas, provide information and services, or discuss crucial issues of the day.” The Internet, he argues, is the ultimate tool of democracy, making speech and ideas freely available. As Gingrich reminds us, in defense of his proposal to give the poor a tax credit for laptops, "There has to be a missionary spirit that says to the poorest child in America, 'Internet's for you'" (Newsweek, 55). From the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue comes equally fervent missionary zeal. Speaking before the International Telecommunications Union in Buenos Aires in 1994, Vice-President Gore extolled the changes that a Global Information Infrastructure would bring to "all members of the human family": early warning of natural catastrophes, improved health care, better education, resolution of environmental problems, economic competitiveness, the spread of democracy. Indeed, Gore suggests that the Global Information Infrastructure will be a metaphor for democracy itself, with each citizen of the world acting as a self-contained processor of information and having the power to control his or her own life. Said Gore, "I see a new Athenian Age of democracy forged in the fora the Global Information Infrastructure will create."

5 Similar promises are made on behalf on community and the Internet. Today it is very common to hear of virtual or computer communities. Cyberspace is often portrayed as the last place you can find small town America. Essays such as John Coates’ “Innkeeping in Cyberspace: Building Online Community,” Cliff Figallo’s “The WELL: Small Town on the Internet Highway System,” and Rheingold’s book The Virtual Community make the case for seeing cyberspace as a small town community. All draw on the work of Ray Oldenburg. In The Great Good Place Oldenburg argues for the significance of cafes, coffee shops, community centers, bars, and other hangouts. These are “third places,” informal places where people can gather, putting aside the concerns of work and home, and hang out simply for the pleasures of good company and lively conversation. These third places, Oldenburg argues, are the heart of a community’s social vitality, the grassroots of democracy. Unfortunately, the rise of the typical suburban neighborhood has led to the loss of many of these traditional third places. Rheingold argues that the communities one finds on the Internet are just such third places. Rheingold argues that one of the explanations for the phenomenon of virtual communities is "the hunger for community that grows in the breasts of people around the world as more and more informal public spaces disappear from our real lives" (6). He repeatedly describes electronic bulletin boards, computer conferences, muds and moos, and other computer mediated communities as small towns, coffee shops, pubs, and cafes, suggesting their essential identity to Oldenburg's third places. Writing about one of the earliest computer communities, the WELL, or Whole Earth Lectronic Link, Rheingold notes, "It might not be the same kind of place Oldenburg had in mind, but so many of his descriptions of third places could also describe the WELL. Perhaps cyberspace is one of the informal public places where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall" (26). Barlow concurs, suggesting that the WELL is an example “of the lastest thing in frontier villages, the computer bulletin board. In this kind of small town, Main Street is a central minicomputer to which…microcomputers may be connected…” The idea of the third place is explicitly evoked in the design of many muds and moos. Perhaps the most popular moo, Lambdamoo, is set up as a

6 large sprawling home where virtual residents sit around virtual living rooms, kitchens, and hot tubs chatting and socializing. The parallel that Rheingold sees between real life and virtual third places is clearly exploited in the construction and advertising of online and Internet services whose ads promise to provide the connection to the world and to others that many people are sorely missing. Internet providers and computer networks focus on the nostalgia for small towns and villages and the yearning for community that Oldenburg and others remind us is disappearing in the real world. The headline for a recent advertisment for CyberTimes, the electronic version of The New York Times, reads “If the Web is a community, think of this as its town square.” The copy suggests that CyberTimes is part newspaper, part gathering place. “It’s like a town square for the globally connected to share information, and for anyone else interested in discovering intelligent life on-line.…In a world as complex as the Web, it’s reassuring to know there is, in fact, a town square.” When logging into most community freenets you are presented with a menu-equivalent of the town square, with choices ranging from the library, medical center, community center, and the city hall. Slide 18 Compuserve's information highway includes visitor centers, shopping malls, town squares, and world travelers. Slide 19 Visually, these ads treat us to a world full of people, all out, walking among the town's squares, seeing and being seen. While our suburban communities may be virtual ghost towns, our virtual communities and streets are well populated. Slide 20 Similar images were used to sell Apple Computer's now defunct on-line communication and information service, e-world, described as an engaging electronic community. The copy reads, "From your first bird's-eye view of

7 this inviting communication and information village, you discover a distinctly different kind of on-line service." Its desk top icons are explicitly designed to invoke the village-life for which we all seemingly long. Slide 21 NetCity directs us to their exit off the information superhighway, where we can find a convention center, a shopping mall, a transportation corridor, and presumably avoid the urban hassles of crime, congestion, and parking. Slide 22 ImagiNation's desktop, The ImagiNation map, evokes a rather rustic, perhaps western scene, a town square with a shop, post office, inn, and casino. It is the kind of town we would all like to visit, a third place for the imagination, an imaginary nation to replace the one we've lost in real life. These virtual analogues of real life are becoming increasingly popular on the World Wide Web with a number of towns and cities setting up electronic villages and towns that mirror their real life town or city. Perhaps the most wired city in America is Blacksburg, Virginia which, through its close ties with Virginia Tech has set up the Blacksburg Electronic Village on the Web. Roughly 40% of the residents of Blacksburg has access to the Electronic Village and 62% have electronic mail. Says Andrew Cohill, the head of the BEV project, "We're giving people a new way to communicate with friends, family, neighbors and local businesses. It's making a stronger community." Cohill adds, “We’re providing an analogue of the old general store front porch.” BEV has attracted world wide attention, including the attention of a number of television producers. I would like to play for you a short clip on the Blacksburg experience that demonstrates the potential of virtual communities. Video Clip 1 As Cortney Vargo, the information manager of BEV, noted, "People want a home on the Internet. They want a place they can sort of call their own."

8 Why does the promise of the computer culture resonate so much with us? They respond to a need that is also being addressed by other phenomena in our culture: • the absence of third places in our real lives • Martha Stewart and similar home shows (recreating your personal space), • the proliferation of sitcoms defined by a strong sense of place and their use of third places • Nickelodeon’s success with TV-Land and their 1960s rebroadcasts. • the growth of coffee bars and malls designed to look like living rooms (BUT: the problems of being all alone together) III. Interrogating the Promise: Questions for the Computer Culture 1. Is it the same old song, just a different chorus? The rhetoric identifying computers with renewed community and strong democracy is reminiscent of a similar rhetoric surrounding previous technological innovations. There is an almost eerie pattern to the promises that accompanied the introduction of electricity, radio, television, cable television, and computers and computer networks. In 1922, for instance, the magazine Radio Broadcast was predicting that the new technology of radio would make Government more responsive to citizens and improve our schools. “The Government will be a living thing to its citizens instead of an abstract and unseen force.…Elected representatives will not be able to evade their responsibility to those who them in office.” James Carey has shown how the electrification of the country was accompanied by promises of freedom, decentralization, ecological harmony, and democratic community. Similar promises have been made on behalf of these other forms of technology as well. The failures of the past technologies to live up to their promises does not bode well for the present technology. 2. Are computers creating the technological panopticon? The narrative that is featured in many accounts of the history of hackers, computers, and cyberspace is one that focuses on the capacity of the technology to revitalize community and democracy. But this is not the only story that can be told. Equally relevant to a discussion of the role of computers in democracy and community is a narrative that focuses on the

9 connection between computers and computer networks to power, control, and surveillance by both government and industry. This alternative narrative is persuasively told in works such as: • Soshana Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine, • Mark Poster’s Mode of Information, and • Paul Edwards’ The Closed World. A dominant metaphor in these accounts is not the computer as democratic system but the computer as panopticon. These narratives challenge the almost a priori connection to freedom, democracy, and community thought to be found in computers. • Typical of these works is Theodore Roszak’s The Cult of Information. Roszak warns, for instance, that computers lend themselves to the subversion of democratic values. As he points out, “The ongoing military-industrial drive toward rationalizing, disciplining, and ultimately dehumanizing the workplace is among the foundation stones of information technology.” 3. What happens with the information have-nots? • The New York Times news service reported that a recently released study by the Census Bureau has confirmed what black people in the computer industry long suspected: that many blacks, even those who can afford to buy personal computers, are not embracing them as necessary tools. This finding has many worried in the information industry that AfricanAmericans may be left out of the electronic loop. Based on a survey of 55,000 households in 1993, the Census Bureau estimated that 37.5% of whites were using computers at home, at work or in places like public libraries—compared with 25% of blacks, and 22% of Hispanic people. Moreover, it estimated that 26.9% of white adults had personal computers at home, compared with 13.8% of black adults and 12.9% of Hispanic adults. • The Panos Institute, a non-governmental organization funded largely by Scandanavian countries, warns that “information poverty” threatens the developing world. The report notes that about 70% of computers linked to the

10 Internet are in the U.S. and only 10% in Africa. (Reported in the Toronto Globe and Mail, 10/17/95) • According to an Advertising Age survey, only about 9.6% of Hispanic households own a personal computer while the figure for all homes and small businesses is over 30% (2/93). The Tomas Rivera Center asks in its policy brief on Hispanics and the Internet: “How many Hispanics—29.3 percent of whom are below the poverty level—will be able to afford computers, modems, software, and the online connections to information without some sort of subsidy?” • A 1994 U.S. Department of Commerce survey of computer ownership reveals the following: Asian or Pacific Islander: White: American Indian: Hispanic: Black: 4. Is cyberspace “English-only”? It is often claimed that the Internet will produce the Global Village, bringing together peoples from diverse cultures. The Internet is multicultural because anyone can get on the information superhighway and form a community. And indeed, this has been the case. The Internet does allow a people scattered around the world to form virtual groups to share their common cultural and ethnic experience. On the other hand, a number of commentators have begun to notice the hegemony of English and the United States on this supposed global network. Writing in the New York Times, Michael Specter has argued that the Internet and World Wide Web really only work as great unifiers if you speak English. “…for now if you want to take advantage of the Internet there is only one real way to do it: learn English, which has more than ever become America’s greatest and most effective export (carrying with it immense cultural power).” 5. Will the Internet change everything? Together with the claim that computers will foster community and democracy is the equally common claim that computers will change 39.1% 28.6% 20.7% 13.1% 11.1%

11 everything. This is illustrated in a photospread from a recent Newsweek special edition on technology. The photos as well as the message are provocative. Slide 23 Slide 24 This changes everything, Newsweek seems to warn us. • As Newt Gingrich puts it, “you’re talking about transformations on such a scale that everything changes.” • From the other side of the political spectrum, Gore remarks, “There is no longer any doubt that [computers] will reshape human civilization even more quickly and more thoroughly than did the printing press.” • Mark Poster suggests: “The solid institutional routines that have characterized modern society for some two hundred years are being shaken by the earthquake of electronically mediated communication and recomposed into new routines whose outlines are as yet by no means clear.” • Marshall McLuhan has argued that the introduction of new media reshapes and restructures every aspect of our personal lives. “All media work us over completely,” he writes. “They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral. ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.” • A number of commentators on the computer culture from Kenneth Gergen to Sherry Turkle and Rosanne Stone have argued that computers and computer mediated communication are causally implicated in the shift from a modernist society of stable identities to a postmodern world of flexible, shifting identities. If it is true that the introduction of electronic media and the so-called computer revolution is responsible for such massive shifts in social patterns, it seems unlikely that computers will also be responsible for producing communities and democracies in any form like we have known them.

12 And if we take seriously the claims of the digital pundits that we are living through a computer revolution that will ulitmately change everything, then it is clear that the desire for small town that cyberspace purportedly represents must remain unfulfilled. In the digital era, you can’t go home again. • Kenneth Gergen, in The Saturated Self, argues that electronic media has fundamentally altered our sense of self and community. Technological drift, he suggests, does not favor strong and enduring communities of the traditional variety. “The technology of social saturation,” he writes, “works toward the dissolution of homogeneous, face-to-face communities, and toward the creation of a polymorphous perversity in social pattern. Both the character and the potentials of the community are transformed in substantial ways.” Given these substantial transformations, the representation of cyberspace as small town seems to suggest first a kind of escape from where we are today and secondly a model that is increasingly out of touch for polymorphously perverse social patterns. Cyberspace as small town does not represent the saving grace of community and democracy. Rather, it fosters a way of thinking about community and a hope for community that is no longer appropriate. The digital third place is not appropriate to our placeless, digital, nonhierarchical culture. 6. What happens when the self becomes completely malleable? The computer culture is premised on a belief in the inherent malleability of human nature and the human self. This message is presented in a striking photo spread from Wired magazine. Slide 25 It reads, “No ambition, however extravagant, no fantasy, however outlandish, can any longer be dismissed as crazy or impossible. This is the age when you can finally do it all. Slide 26

13 Suddenly technology has given us powers with which we can manipulate not only external reality—the physical world—but also, and much more portentously, ourselves. You can become whatever you want to be.” Within the computer culture, the human being becomes a plug and play entity, composed of various parts that can be updated with the simple flip of a switch or the insertion of a new line of code. Indeed, a common feature of many virtual communities is the ability of participants to remain anonymous and create new identities if desired. As one commentator notes, "almost every aspect of an individual's character—everything from description to gender to messages to possessions—can be controlled, altered, and customized to the personal needs, interests, or whims of the player." The malleability of the self and the ease with which we might change our nature is nowhere more evident than in discussions of the phenomenon of mudding. Muds are networked, multiparticipant, text-based virtual reality systems found on the Internet. Howard Rheingold characterizes muds as places where identity is fluid. “The grammar of CMC media,” he writes, “involves a syntax of identity play: new identities, false identities, multiple identities, exploratory identities, are available in different manifestations of the medium.” Freed from the control and strictures that govern identity in this life, our playing with identity on computer networks gives rise to a new image of the self in terms of multiplicity, hetereogeneity, flexibility, and fragmention. Our identities become a reflection of the windows on our computer desktop. We are split, our attention divided into multiple tasks. We are a multitasking self. Sherry Turkle, in an analysis of online identity, argues that people will come to experience identity as a set of roles that can be mixed and matched and through which we can rapidly cycle depending on interest. But the self which is characteristic of the computer culture has been freed from any commitments or connections to this world. It is defined as pure autonomy, completely unencumbered because it is not embedded in any social, cultural, or institutional contexts except those defined by the self's own choices, choices which are the product of ever shifting desires, feelings, and whims. Such a self is not rooted in any world other than the shifting, ephemeral world of cyberspace. Robert Bellah argues that this empty self is a characteristic of a radical individualism that lacks any moderating influence from social and communal ties. This unencumbered and improvisational self obscures personal reality, social reality, and particularly the moral reality that links person and society (80). Rather than holding out the promise of community, the computer culture fosters a radical individualism that tells us we can be whoever or whatever we want. We can free ourselves from our

14 past, our family, our community and define ourselves in this new space of multiple, shifting, virtual identities. 7. Can communities be based on “like-mindedness”? There are several issues that are interconnected within this point: (i) virtual communities as self-selected Virtual communities, it is often suggested, offer you a substantial amount of control over where you go and who you associate with. • J. C. R. Licklider predicted in 1968 that in the future, life would be happier for the on-line individual “because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.” • Amy Bruckman and Mitchel Resnick comment that virtual communities are made up of a self-selected population; everyone who is there wants to be there. "The population of third places are selfselected—people go to a cafe because they want to and not because they must. From this self-selection process emerges a group of people with some degree of common interests and values. Traditional third places draw people from the local geographic area. On the Internet [virtual communities] draw people with common interests from all around the world.…It is a strength of the medium that the community is self-selected—everyone who is there wants to be there." • Coates argues that an online community is one of the easiest and lowest risk ways to meet new people. Rheingold points out, “in a virtual community we can go directly to the place where our favorite subjects are being discussed, then get acquainted with people who share our passions.” • A virtue of cyberspace, Esther Dyson suggests, is that you can bypass a place on the net much easier than avoiding walking past an unsavory block of stores on your way to the local 7-11. “What’s likely to happen in cyberspace,” Dyson writes, “is the formation of new communities, free of the constraints that cause conflict on earth.…We’ll have invented another world of self contained communities that cater to their

15 own members’ inclinations without interfering with anyone else’s.” And of course we can do all this from the safety of our own rooms, while masking our identity, and logging out whenever we desire. In respect to its security, control, and homogeneity, cyberspace as small town isn’t about forming community in this world. It’s about fleeing the problems of a diverse society making too many demands on limited resources, freeing us from the constraints that cause conflict on earth, not dealing with those constraints and conflicts. In Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues argue that what passes for community in contemporary America are actually enclaves defined by one’s individual lifestyle choices. Bellah writes, “Whereas a community attempts to be an inclusive whole, celebrating the interdependence of public and private life and of the different callings of all, lifestyle is fundamentally segmental and celebrates the narcissism of similarity. It usually explicitly involves a contrast with others who do not share one's lifestyle. For this reason, we speak not of lifestyle communities, though they are often called such in contemporary usage, but of lifestyle enclaves"(72).The substitution of suburbs and subdivisions for neighborhoods are emblematic of Bellah's lifestyle enclaves, communities that include only those with a common lifestyle. Bellah points out, "The different, those with other lifestyles, are not necessarily despised. they may be willingly tolerated. But they are irrelevant or even invisible in terms of one's own lifestyle enclave" (72). We want to be surrounded by people who share our lifestyles, and often this translates into being surrounded by people like us. Our communities become enclaves in which we surround ourselves with people just like us. And this is what computer networks promise: the capacity to surround ourselves with people just like us. We want to be surrounded by people who share our lifestyles and so we transform our communities into enclaves of like-minded individuals. Increasingly, though, it is more difficult to maintain the homogeneous communities of the past. Our workplaces and neighborhoods are becoming more ethnically diverse. The tensions that this growing diversity gives rise to in our society are indicated by the anger and invective surrounding such issues as immigration, welfare, and affirmative action. It is also indicated, I think, by the nostalgia for the now mythic small town. Cyberspace represents the virtual fulfillment of that desire. We are fleeing from the world of difference into well constructed worlds where we only have to hang out with people similar to ourselves. These online enclaves do not represent the saving of community and democracy. They simply represent the fulfillment of the same trends that are producing the walled community and the stratified

16 society. The New York times reports that the fastest-growing residential communities in the nation are private and usually gated. As they report: “A big portion of middle-class families, in non-retirement, largely white areas of the country, have chosen to wall themselves off, opting for private government, shools, and police.” Our virtual communities are in reality the virtual analogue of self-contained, self-selected communities where we need only encounter like-minded people. Our society is increasingly characterized as fragmented and polarized, both threats to strong community and democracy. In its emphasis on small towns of like-minded individuals, though, cyberspace does not run counter to that development. (ii) narrowcasting information We can relate these comments to the issue of using software agents to narrowcast information to us, thereby serving to further fragment our already fragmented nation. This is one of the major themes of Nicholas Negroponte’s recent book Being Digital. Negroponte looks forward to the day in which we will all have software agents that will be able to filter, sort, prioritize, and manage multimedia on our behalf — “computers that read newspapers and look at television for us, and act as editors when we ask them to do so” (20). Negroponte’s vision is a necessary one given the supposed flood of information that will deluge us in the future. We might wonder, though, to what extent this narrowcasting of information, tailored to each individual, will produce a fragmented society in which there is no longer a common experience of national events and taken-for-granted experience. (iii) virtual communities as “communities of mind” This aspect of virtual communities is further underscored by the fact that virtual communities are often described as "communities of the mind" in which looks, gender, race, and ethnicity don't matter. • As John Coates, one of the founders of the WELL, writes "The great equalizing factor is that nobody can see each other online so ideas are what really matter. You can't discern age, race, complexion, hair color, body shape, vocal tone, or any of the other attributes that we all incorporate into our impressions of people." But Wes Cooper, in an essay on virtual communities, unwittingly points to a subtle subtext present in this feature of computer communities. He

17 writes, "The complete or partial masking of identity in many [virtual communities] is one reason why members of visible minorities are wellrepresented in cyberspace: they aren't visible. The tolerance and understanding this teaches is a welcome counterpoint to the increasing splintering of North American society into socio-economic, racial, sexual, and religious enclaves." The ideology driving people to virtual communities is suggested in this contradictory passage on visible minorities that are invisible. Visible minorities are well represented in cyberspace, Cooper suggests, precisely because they remain invisible. One wonders how you could even know that minorities are present in cyberspace given the masking of their identity, their invisibility. Indeed, some estimates have suggested that more than 80% of those online are young, white males. “The State of Disunion,” a Gallup survey commissioned by the Postmodernity Project and conducted from January to April of 1996, found that the most disaffected group in the country is the white middle class, precisely that group which has most taken to living life online. Bellah points out that in our lifestyle enclaves, "the different, those with other lifestyles, are not necessarily despised. They may be willingly tolerated. But they are irrelevant or even invisible in terms of one's own lifestyle enclave" (72). Virtual communities have carried this invisibility to its logical extreme, finding a way to make minorities truely invisible. If issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and affirmative action trouble us in this world and threaten to disrupt our carefully self-constructed communities, our virtual world at least holds out the promise of a carefully crafted community of likeminded citizens. Our virtual worlds are worlds of sameness where we have excised any disruptive influences. These points I think ultimately undermine the claim that cyberspace will lead to renewed communities and revitalized democracies. By reducing the other to a “thing of words alone” we effectively neutralize and void the difficult conflicts that make a community and a democracy hard to maintain. The same forces that drove people to the suburbs is now driving them into cyberspace. And if we failed to find community in the suburbs, that failure seems even more likely in virtual suburbia. 8. Does cyberspace represent our flight from the material world? Cyberspace is not about solving the problems of this, the material world, but is about another space, another realm. William Gibson, who first coined the term cyberspace, refered to it as a consensual hallucination. "A

18 graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data." In this space of hallucination, this nonspace of the mind, the problems of this world are easily forgotten. Consider two founding political documents of cyberspace. • In “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age”, Esther Dyson, Alvin Toffler, George Keyworth and George Gilder argue that the central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. As they put it, “In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth—in the form of physical resources—has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.” We are witnessing, they argue, a shift from a mass-production, mass-media, mass-culture civilization to a demassified civilization. Matter no longer matters. We’re moving from the world of atoms to the world of bits. The knowledge age is about mind and consciousness and information. • In his "Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace" John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the influential Electronic Frontier Foundation, declares: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us." Barlow's Declaration and the Magna Carta set up an opposition between the weary world of flesh and matter, the world of the past and the future world of cyberspace and mind. Cyberspace is the place where we can escape from the problems of this world, becoming pure mind not hindered by the failings of the body or the material lack of the real world. Rather than a response to the real world, the flight to cyberspace represents a fleeing from the real world and the problems of living and forging community in a material world. The community of cyberspace is a community in an imaginary if not mythic realm where problems need not be faced because they can be programmed right out of existence. Video Clip 2

19 In a recent advertisement for Packard Bell computers, the city is portrayed as “paradise lost,” a gritty, dirty, crowded, completely dystopian urban nightmare. As the camera pans through these dark and dirty vistas, it suddenly swings upward and away from the city to a suburban dreamland with emerald green hills, sunny skies with fluffy clouds, and a gingerbread house. In the sunny, open spaces of the house sits a Packard Bell computer. The narrator intones: “Wouldn’t you rather be at home?” The message seems clear: the computer and cyberspace save the middle-class suburbanite from having to enter the dystopian city. Cyberspace guarantees that we will never have to leave our suburban dreamlands and risk encounter with the other. IV. Conclusion Ultimately, I think that virtual communities and the computer culture are completely consistent with the forces that have led to the decline of community and the disruption of our sense of place. They represent a fleeing from the embedded and encumbered lives that are characteristic of community. We turn to the computer and the computer culture in response to the problems of place and community in our lives. We seek to try to reinvigorate and reestablish the communities and the sense of home that we can no longer find in this world. And, in truth, computers do offer us some respite from the problems of this world. We are able to reach out and forge new connections. The computer holds out the promise of liberation from the problems of this life. But it also holds out the promise of liberation from this material world. It promises to free us from the having to face the Other. It promises to free us from the limits and controls that are placed on us in this world. We can voluntarily associate with whoever we want. We can be whoever we want. Our very identities are freed from the limitations of this world. But this form of liberation has the potential to obscure that it is in this world that we must live and negotiate our lives and forge our communities. To be part of a community is to be embedded in a world that is not entirely of my making, to risk myself in the presence of others, to define myself in terms of a communities commitments, traditions, and ideals. As we approach the next millenium we have the opportunity to benefit greatly from what computers and virtual communities make possible. We also face the potential of perhaps cutting ourselves off from what defines our humanity and community. We must be vigilant in how we appropriate technology and how it appropriates us.