A Beginner's Guide to the Internet/INTERNET.ISO/text/guides/info/communit.pap

Internet Message Format | 1996-05-06 | 24.9 KB

Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 09:44:25 -0800
Subject: The Evolution of Community Networking


                  Old Freedoms and New Technologies:
                The Evolution of Community Networking

                              Jay Weston
                      [[e-mail]]

This paper, with only minor variations, was delivered as a talk at the
FREE SPEECH AND PRIVACY IN THE INFORMATION AGE Symposium,
University of Waterloo, Canada, November 26, 1994.

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Copyright: This text is released to the public domain.  No copyright
           restrictions apply.  J. Weston
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North American society  has had a lot to say on the distributed public
media that we call the Internet, or simply the Net.  And, in the past
year or so, we have started to have a lot to say about what we've been
saying.  However, we haven't quite heard what we've been saying.  We
haven't heard because we are inexperienced in listening to each other
this way.  We are listening to the wrong things.   Or, as Karl Popper
once put it, we have been "like my dog, staring at my finger when I
point to the door."(1)  But, we can be forgiven for our misplaced
attention to the Net.

Since it was first observed that there just was not enough available
bandwidth to let everybody send smoke signals or bang drums, we've
been organizing and reorganizing to determine who would, and who would
not, get their hands on the blankets and the drums -- and the presses,
the microphones, and the cameras.  As we moved through a few
millennia, successive public communication technologies either began
as, or very quickly were made to conform to, the extreme send:receive
imbalances that, somewhere along the line, we started calling the mass
media, or simply the media.

It would be pedantic in the extreme to do more than note that these
access restrictions now define all of the social relations of modern
societies.  Whole disciplines are organized around the understanding
that all public and private institutions, all local and external
spaces are bent by the constricted and compressed discourses of the
mass media.  Whether the analyses are celebratory or critical, whether
their mass media interdependencies are made explicit or not, all
analyses of modern society take the access constraints of the mass
media as immutable.  Public access to these media is simply not
problematical.  On the one hand, there are the media and, on the
other, there are their audiences, consumers, constituents, and
publics.

Until very recently, there was no reason to imagine that questions
would ever have to be asked about societies with abundant access to
the means of media production, exhibition, distribution, and
reproduction of cultural offerings.  Suddenly, it is time to start
imagining the questions.  That is what the Internet is about.

Some usually astute observers, among them Internet Society President
Vinton Cerf and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, are predicting that the
twenty million now on the Net is only the beginning.  Cerf predicts
100 million by 1998 (2) and Gates, in a recent interview, confided
that his big mistake so far had been in underestimating the importance
of the Internet (3).  If they are right, if the hordes are going to
start beating their drums in public, absolutely everything about the
existing social order is about to be challenged.  Not simply the mass
media institutions, but all institutions.  Everything is at stake.

[If they are wrong, if the Internet is only the latest gizmology, then
there is nothing to get intellectually excited about.  We've been
there before.  For, as exciting or as terrifying as the prospect of a
tiny 500 channel universe may be, it is just mass media business as
usual, albeit new and unusual business.]

Whether or not there will be 100 million or so people on the Internet
by 1998 or so, will depend first, upon whether they want to be there
and secondly, if they do, who will likely be trying to stop them, why
will they be trying to stop them, and how will they be trying to stop
them.

As to the question of whether they will want to be, the Internet
growth figures are familiar to us all.  Steeply up to the right and
getting steeper.  This should be more than enough evidence that, given
a chance, people are eager to be there.  Curiously, this inconceivable
growth has occurred despite the equally familiar observations that the
Internet is difficult to access, hard to use, slow to respond and,
what is mostly to be found there is banal or otherwise offensive, and
hopelessly disorganized.

This apparent contradiction of millions actively embracing cyberjunk
cannot be resolved within the vocabulary of the mass media with their
well-organized, familiar, marvellously honed content packages, that
are so quickly and effortlessly available.  Dismissive statements
about the potential of the Internet that are based on the quality and
delivery of content, cannot be resolved by debates about whether such
statements are accurate or inaccurate.  For some, judging the Internet
by its content, the quality of its information, and the accuracy of
its databases, is relevant and for others it is not.

For those for whom it is not, the Internet is less about information
or content, and more about relations.  For the mass media, it is
always just the opposite.  The mass media are almost pure content, the
relationship a rigidly frozen non-transaction, that insulates the few
content producers or information providers from their audiences. This
is how we experience and understand the mass media.  If it were not
so, we would not call them the mass media.  Five hundred or 5,000 more
unswitched, asymmetrical, "smart" channels will not change that.

It is, on the other hand, impossible to understand much about the
Internet's appeal by analyzing its content.  The Internet is mostly
about people finding their voice, speaking for themselves in a public
way, and the content that carries this new relationship is of
separate, even secondary, importance.  The Internet is about people
saying "Here I am and there you are." Even the expression of
disagreement and hostility, the "flames" as they are called, at least
says "You exist.  I may disagree with you, or even dislike you, but
you do exist."   Mass media do not confirm existence, and cannot.
The market audience exists, but the reader, listener or viewer does
not.(4)

This is not to argue that the content of the Internet is irrelevant.
The content defines the relationship.  People not only want to
represent themselves, they ordinarily want to present themselves as
well as they can.  It would be cynical in the extreme to devalue
these representations, the texts, the exhibited cultural products of
tens of millions.  It is rather to argue that the relational aspects
of the transactions qualify and define the content in ways that need
to be understood if the Internet it to be comprehended.

Whatever the reason for millions speaking publicly, this condition was
not part of the mass media problematic.  It is unreasonable to think
that merely tinkering with paradigms grounded in technologies of
restricted access will permit a rich interrogation of the range of
social relations provided for by technologies of unrestricted access.

This call for a vocabulary that directly addresses the centrality of
distributed public media is not a suggestion that paradigms that
centrally situate mass media are somehow of less importance than they
once were.  If anything, their questions of access, production and
representation are more critical, and even more challenging, than they
were before distributed media raised the complexity of social
relations.  However, an expanded universe of mass media discourse that
merely attempts to overlay distributed public networks upon the
structured relationships of a mass mediated society, will lead us to
misunderstand a society evolving with distributed public media.

It is well-understood that, all social institutions have their
relative certainties made possible by the centralizing power of the
technologies of mass communication.  The relative certainties that
accompany attenuated access to the means of symbolic production is
welded into the fabric of all institutional policies and practices.
Assuming, then, that access to the means of cultural expression will
be increasingly distributed, it follows that all of the institutions
of modern society will be threatened or at least inconvenienced by
this development.  While expressions like "public involvement", and
"participative democracy", are imbedded in our rhetorical traditions,
their unquestionable acceptability has always been conditional upon
their equally unquestionable non-attainability.  The technologies of
mass communication always ensured that involvement and participation
would not be overdone.

When the institutions that rose to power in the wake of the industrial
revolution began to speak of the "information revolution", they only
meant to digitize the modern industrial state.  This non-revolution
was Phase II of the old boys' operation, another remodeling of the
modern apparatus.  The "Information Highway" is the updated codeword
for the modern retrofit.  This was not supposed to be about a
technological adventure that would reconfigure social relations or
blur the well-constructed boundaries between the public and the
private ground.  This was supposed to be about a five hundred, not a
one hundred million channel universe.

The becoming Internet, this decentered polity, is an accident that
happens to expand the locus of direct, self-mediated, daily political
involvement.  Those who previously had to make themselves presentable
to the agencies of mass communication technologies in order to be
represented by the technologies, have begun to publicly represent
themselves.  What was previously local, domestic, idiosyncratic and
private can, for the first time, become external and public.  This is
an abrupt  reversal of the mass media's progressive appropriation of
the idiosyncratic and private for their own institutional purposes.

Since this reversal was unimaginable, no contingency plans had been
imagined for dealing with it.  But, to the extent that the expansion
of the public ground challenges become identified for any segment of
the established order, these challenges will be met.  It is axiomatic
that the Internet and, by extension, public community networks can
expect massive pressure to diminish or eliminate the identified
destabalizing influences that these distributed media exert.  If the
Internet, with its changed relations of production and related
exigencies, is signaling a coming Accidental Revolution, the contests
and the casualties will be enormous.

This symposium is about the skirmishes, battles and wars that have
already started.  All of these encounters are around the legitimacy of
public self-expression, assembly, examination and privacy.  These are
the problematic of distributed public media, not of the mass media.
Beyond our noting that they were lamentably unimportant, the concerns
relating to freedom of speech were not central to a mass mediated
society.  Our familiarity with freedom of speech was almost entirely
abstracted from the mass media accounts of their own experiences and
the performances of their own legal departments.  The mass media
tested the limits of those freedoms for the speechless public.

We are now in the beginning stages of defining the legitimacy of
self- expression for ourselves.  This represents a new set of
concerns about the circumstance and substance of distributed media
texts in all of their modes, the bases upon how it comes to happen
that people 'speak' publicly, and what it is that they 'say'.  The
idea of 'assembly' and how it will happen that groups come to
occupy territory and how they are distributed globally and locally
assumes original importance, as decisions get made about what
'virtual communities' will be, and where they will situate.  The
privacy puzzles about the availability and use of all those
sophisticated watching, listening, storing, sifting and intrusive
devices are a humbling reminder of just how much our reach has
exceeded our understanding of these technologies.  How these
matters are resolved will shape the distributed media and decide
their social relevance.

Community networks are contributing a broader distribution of voices
as these puzzles begin to get worked out on the distributed media
themselves, rather than only in the exclusive enclaves of special
interests.  This must continue and expand or the awakening of self-
representation will be short lived.  It would be wise to assume that
there are not yet any 'rights', or that the old freedoms that were
often hard won by the mass media, are now enshrined and will
automatically transfer to distributed public media.


Situating Community Networks


If, as Bruce Sterling observed in the Afterward to his earlier work
The Hacker Crackdown, "Three years in cyberspace is like thirty years
anyplace real" (5) and, as events from thirty years past are often
dimmed or forgotten, I hope you can forgive me for reminding
you this morning that way back in November, 1991 the Canadian public
had no access to the Internet.  Moreover, there were no signs that the
public would have any access.

The steepness, even then, of that now overly familiar Internet growth
curve was entirely attributable to new users from within their
formal institutional settings.  The universities, research institutes
of the telecommunication giants, and a few government departments had
the Internet as their private preserve and tightly controlled access
to it, often denying entry to even their own (6).  This control
existed, even although the administration of these institutions were
still marvellously unaware of what was going on in their basements.
Though unintentional, the Internet was still a well-kept secret, its
threat to the status quo still largely unrecognized.

The commercial online services were busily avoiding the Internet,
still building the firewalls around their own proprietary
networks.  Their fees were so high, and their services so meagre,
that they were providing little incentive for the general public
to even begin to experiment with their narrow networking
offerings.

The recurring telco dream of local metered service was a constant
reminder that the Canadian public might never experience the Internet.
Failure of poorly conceived commercial network services like Bell
Canada's "Alex" and Australia Telecom's "Discovery" had convinced the
telcos that not even the business community was ready for network
services.

The Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and
Education (CANARIE), as its name implied, betrayed no awareness that
there might be people in this country.  Even by the end of 1992 when
CANARIE released its business and marketing plans, the hundreds of
written pages devoted to its vision made almost no reference to the
Internet, and carefully avoided the 'public' as serious participants
in what the partners had in mind for the country.(7)

These are but a few isolated examples of the evidence that the
Internet had either not yet penetrated the collective institutional
consciousness or was enjoying a brief period of benign neglect.  For
those who had experienced the Internet and begun to internalize even a
small amount of what was happening, the general inattention seemed
amazing, even eerie.

One thing was very clear.  With no public or private restrictive
policies in place, if there was ever a brief moment when it might be
possible to unleash the Internet in Canada, to really unconditionally
distribute this distributed capability to the Canadian public, it was
1991.  (The National Capital FreeNet and the Victoria Free-Net were
not actually unleashed until late 1992, but the idea was developing in
the autumn of 1991.)(8)

The full stories of how the first Canadian community networks managed
to uncage the Internet should probably be told some day.  These
stories need to be told to fill in the historical record, and to
preempt any misconceptions that the development was simply blind
luck or simply technology running its inevitable course.  For now, it
is enough to say that the freenet initiative in Canada was understood
and intended from the very beginning as political action.  At least,
it was in the instance of the National Capital FreeNet, the community
network where I live and, about which I am best able to speak.

It was understood from the first, for instance, that the relatively
narrow and concrete act of having electronic mail and Usenet
newsgroups available, and at their real cost to the community, would
ensure widespread acceptance, and that the acceptance rate would be
stunning.  It was also understood that once these were made freely
available, it would be difficult to take global electronic mail away,
or to introduce it at the leisurely rate and higher tariffs that are
customary with market driven services.

More importantly, it was understood that the inclusionary ideals and
vocabulary of the Freenet would both protect and sustain the
initiative after the private sector realized that a public market for
networked services was being created for them.

The National Capital FreeNet was an imagined public space, a dumb
platform where all individuals, groups and organizations could
represent themselves, where conflict and controversy could occur
as the manifestation of conflict and controversy already occurring
within the community.  As a public space, no one, and certainly no
group or istitution, would be held responsible for another's
ideology, moral standards, expectations or motivations.  On the
other hand, each person or organization would be accountable for
themselves.  Such a space could be constructed only by the
community acting as a community, and not by any public or private
organization acting on behalf of the community.  At least that was
the idea in 1991.

Just three years later, the Net situation has changed dramatically.
Although still unreasonably expensive, commercial Internet access is
fairly readily available, and very shortly community networks like the
National Capital FreeNet will not be needed, or even wanted, as
Internet access points.  FreeNets will have to become the vital, local
public spaces they originally promised to be.

Just calling the facility a community network does not make it
one.  The label does not ensure an unconditional public terrain
where the whole community can celebrate its commonalities and
diversities, and work through its differences.  In 1991, there was
not much urgency to focus on these ideals.  Access to the existing
and emerging Internet services, and at no involuntary cost, was
enough to ensure a community network's success.  It was not then
understood by the community networks that this powerful Internet
access lever would slip away so quickly.

Community networks must now understood that they must be community
networks.  This means that they cannot be financed or run for the
community by one or another institution.  Although networks run by
such organizations as universities, hospitals, telephone
companies, or governments, often do not charge a fee, and always
provide an array of valuable services, these are not the criteria
by which community network can be usefully defined.

Community networks run by other organizations are always
conditionally invested with the values, missions, mandates,
policies and procedures and other constraints necessarily imposed
by the host institutions and, therefore, cannot ever provide a
public terrain.  No institution has a primary mandate to provide a
public space where public opinion can be under construction.  When
freedom of expression is a secondary add-on, it is just that, and
will be encouraged only so long as it is not in conflict with what
the institution is primarily about.

Today's youthful community networks, are better than they have any
right to be this soon and are still our best hope, maybe our only
hope, for a more participative, more self-representative democracy.
It is too bad that they will have to mature so quickly if they are to
reach adulthood.  While they are still critical Internet access
points, still the bridge between the vast diversity of the Internet
and the more homogeneous organic community, they must take that
opportunity to learn how to celebrate the vast diversity that is
also the local community.  The local community is where people live
their social and political lives and that is where differences must be
publicly worked through.  This is most important where the differences
are the most acute and where the latitudes of tolerance are the
narrowest.  Community networks must be up to letting everyone speak,
as painful as this will be for some, some of the time.

Children, and others unequipped to make safe judgments when
encountering the most extreme clashes of values, opinions and
advocacy, must be protected from these conflicts, but the community
network cannot be their guardian.  The family, the school, the place
of worship and other societal structures are their guardians.

Finally, and most importantly, the part-time, short-term stewards of
the community networks, usually called the 'board', must understand
that the public terrain is not their institution, and not their moral
preserve.  The construction of Public Sphere, Inc. is a betrayal of
the promise community networks have for becoming a public terrain.  As
community networks develop and mature, they are becoming more
exclusionary, more restrictive, more like any other organization.
They begin to see themselves as providing something for the community,
rather than as caretakers of a space created by the community.  This
needs to be reversed.  A commitment to defending and expanding this
public ground will determine whether community networks will survive
more than a few more year and, what is more, whether their survival
will be a matter of importance.



Endnotes

(1) Popper made the statement at a public lecture at Michigan State
    University in the mid-sixties.  Ironically, he was arguing that
    the then popular social science translations of the electrical
    engineering 'information theory' model were misguided attempts
    to understand social communication by what he termed 'bucket
    theories', where the transactions are comprehended only as buckets
    of content, devoid of any human consideration.

(2) Written testimony to United States House of Representatives,
    Committee on Science, Space and Technology, March 23, 1993.

    When asked what he thought about the reliability of Cerf's
    estimate of 100 million Internet users by 1998, Gerry Miller,
    Chairman of CA*net, the non-profit company that manages and
    operates the Canadian Internet backbone network, responded wryly
    "Try 100 million hosts."  While Miller might not have meant that
    literally, it was clear that he felt Cerf's earlier estimate to
    now be a significant underestimate of expected Internet growth.
    Private conversation, Ottawa, November, 1994.

(3) PC Magazine, "Bill Gates Ponders the Internet" by Michael Miller,
    October 11, Volume 13, Number 17, 1994 p79.

(4) An explication of framing human communication as the inevitable
    interplay of content and relational components of symbolic
    transaction was provided by Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin and Don
    Jackson in PRAGMATICS OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION.  This 1967 monograph
    has attracted little attention from media scholars and other
    social theorists, probably because the unidirectional
    producer/consumer relationship between the mass media and their
    audiences is fixed, thereby eliminating or greatly inhibiting the
    metacommunication interplay.

(5) Bruce Sterling, "Afterwards: The Hacker Crackdown Three Years
    Later", January 1, 1994.  Found on the WELLgopher
    URL: gopher://gopher.well.sf.ca.us:70/11/Publications/authors/
         Sterling

(6) For example, undergraduate students in most programs at most
    Canadian universities could not get computer accounts in 1991.
    Also, many of the first cohort of National Capital FreeNet
    subscribers were federal civil servants from departments and
    ministries where Internet access was available, but only to a
    selected few.

(7) CANARIE Associates, "CANARIE Business Plan" and "CANARIE Marketing
    Plan", July 15, 1992.

(8) The National Capital FreeNet was inspired by the Cleveland
    Free-Net, founded in 1986 by Tom Grundner at Case Western Reserve
    University.  "Free-Net" is a registered servicemark of the
    National Public Telecomputing Network.


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Jay Weston           [e-mail]
Carleton U           [e-mail]

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