the promise of the computer culture

7/28/2019 The Promise of the Computer Culture

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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. Itpromised 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


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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 dont 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


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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, echoPatrick Henry's call for liberty. The copy reads, "Don't be shackled with a

substandard portable PC! All hailthe 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 thepromise 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 InformationInfrastructure 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."


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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 Figallos The WELL: Small Town on the Internet

Highway System, and Rheingolds bookThe 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 communitys social

vitality, the grassroots of democracy. Unfortunately, the rise of the typicalsuburban 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 thelastest thing in frontier villages, the computer bulletin board. In this kind of

small town, Main Street is a central minicomputer to whichmicrocomputers

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


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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. Its like a town square for the globallyconnected to share information, and for anyone else interested in discovering

intelligent life on-line.In a world as complex as the Web, its 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


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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 theimagination, 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, Were 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."


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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

Nickelodeons 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 Broadcastwas 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


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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 ZuboffsIn the Age of the Smart Machine,

Mark PostersMode 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 Roszaks The Cult of

Information. Roszak warns, for instance, that computers lendthemselves 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 African-

Americans 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 librariescompared 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% ofHispanic 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


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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 Hispanics29.3

percent of whom are below the poverty levelwill 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: 39.1%White: 28.6%

American Indian: 20.7%

Hispanic: 13.1%

Black: 11.1%

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 Americas greatest and mosteffective 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


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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, youre 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.


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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 cant 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 theage when you can finally do it all.

Slide 26


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Suddenly technology has given us powers with which we can

manipulate not only external realitythe physical worldbut 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 charactereverything from description to gender to

messages to possessionscan 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 asplaces 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 acharacteristic 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


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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 ofinterests 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 self-

selectedpeople 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-selectedeveryone 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. Whats likely to happen

in cyberspace, Dyson writes, is the formation of new communities,

free of the constraints that cause conflict on earth.Well have

invented another world of self contained communities that cater to their


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own members inclinations without interfering with anyone elses.

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 isnt about forming community in this world. Its 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 ones 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 contrastwith 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, Ithink, 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


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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 alreadyfragmented nation. This is one of the major themes of Nicholas Negropontes

recent bookBeing 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).

Negropontes 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 arewhat 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


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writes, "The complete or partial masking of identity in many [virtual

communities] is one reason why members of visible minorities are well-

represented 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 takento 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 like-

minded 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


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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, wealthin the form of physical resourceshas

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.Were 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 whereproblems need not be faced because they can be programmed right out of

existence.

Video Clip 2


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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: Wouldnt 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 ofcommunity 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 whatcomputers 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.

the promise of the computer culture

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