I wrote this piece in 1998.
Why We Must Support Civic Networking
"Communities across the nation are being undermined and destroyed by a variety of forces," writes Stephen Doheny-Farina in The Wired Neighborhood. Social scientists have pointed to a series of destructive forces--the break-up of families, loss of roots and connections, too much mobility, the loss of spiritual values, increases in crime and alienation, and "the privatization of entertainment."
Instead of gathering in parks, churches and at social centers in the evenings and on weekends, many Americans commute from city to suburb alone in their automobiles, rush to throw together a meal, then later in the evening plop down in passive isolation at the alter of their televisions.
Many Americans have found a new sense of companionship on the Internet. E-mailing friends and relatives, participating in "chat rooms" or posting messages in communities of interest, they aren't as lonely as they once were. The Internet also enables many workers to telecommute to work--by the year 2000, the number of telecommuters is estimated to reach 25 million--and to enroll in ultra-accessible online courses through virtual schools and colleges. Theoretically, it allows people to spend more time at home with their families and stay closer to their geographical communities.
But unless we are careful, the Internet may do more to harm a sense of real community than to recreate it. Doheny-Farina says the virtual communities of the Internet can be alluring and dazzling, but they aren't real communities. "They individuate us. They encourage us to ignore, forget or become blind to our sense of geographic place and community," he writes, "and they direct our focus toward the self in relation to the mythologies and promises of virtual communities."
The Internet, he writes, "seduces us and further removes us from our localities-- unless we take charge of it with specific, community-based, local agendas." He strongly endorses the civic networking movement, which he describes as "limited, focused, carefully applied efforts that attempt not to move us into cyberspace but to use communication technologies to help reintegrate people within their placed communities."
In the civic networking movement, the Internet is seen as a tool to foster and nurture community activism. Neighbors might use the Internet to organize neighborhood patrols, mobilize for a park clean-up, document and preserve local history, to sound off and offer opinions on real estate development or traffic control, or to share their memories of "town characters" or local history. In short, the civic networking movement supports the concept that people live in a unique communities, with a strong sense of geographical place.
"If we do not, as communities, as a society, support this movement," Doheny- Farina argues, "we risk the further disappearance of local communities within globalized virtual collectives of alienated and entertained individuals."
Flaming--firing off an angry e-mail, saying horrible things one would never say in person--"is merely a symptom of the lack of real community" on the Internet. In virtual communities where people are not accountable for their words, anything goes. "In this cacophony, issues are cheap, opinions are cheap, and strong reasons and evidence are hidden or compromised by the sheer amount of information," he writes.
America Online, billed as the world's largest "virtual community" by its chief executive officer Steve Case, is not really a community at all, Doheny-Farina writes, but a series of "lifestyle enclaves" where people gather and share only part of their private lives. These enclaves are based on the "narcissism of similarity." People share only what they wish to share, and the risks of real vulnerability are low.
In contrast, a true community, "is a collective (evolving and dynamic) in which the public and the private lives of its members are moving toward interdependency regardless of the significant differences among those members.
"A community is bound by place, which always includes complex social and environmental necessities. It is not something you can easily join. You can't subscribe to a community as you subscribe to a discussion group on the net. It must be lived. It is entwined, contradictory, and involves all our senses. It involves the 'continuing, unplanned interactions between the same people for a long period of time.'"
A danger of the Internet, he maintains, is that it will reinforce the American tendency to place the rights of individuals far above the rights of the collective. The collective, the democracy, can thrive only so long as individuals subscribe to a set of social mores, what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the "habits of the heart" that ensure the survival of society. The Internet could foster a kind of radical individualism, in which citizens look inward, feel they owe nothing to no one, expect nothing from anyone, forget their histories and ignore their communities. A sense of community dies when people forget their ancestors, have a clouded view of their descendants, and are isolated from their contemporaries. The Internet "is a seductive electronic specter," he warns. "Take part in it not to connect to the world but to connect to your city, your town, your neighborhood."
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