We should not mistake a desire for communities of interest with a hope for a more just and egalitarian society … virtual communities can foster anomie … because virtual communities are likely to be private communities of interest, they will not readily or serendipitously be exposed to differing views that will help them and the larger society grow and adapt to a changing world.
The people who will make up the virtual communities will be the better educated, the financially endowed and those with time to commit to communication tasks. That presents a rather limited version of opportunities for building community in any real sense. It also places limits on the potential for virtual communities to represent anything new within the multiplicity of publics that comprise the American collectivity.
The boundary that has traditionally been drawn by the edge of the computer screen will be eroded … You will be able to immerse yourself in simulated environments instead of just looking at them through a small rectangular window. This is a crucial difference: you become an inhabitant, a participant, not merely a spectator.
Network pimps will offer ways to do something sordid (but safe) with lubriciously programmed telehookers. (This is an obvious extrapolation of the telephone’s transformation of the whorehouse into the call-girl operation.) Telemolesters will lurk. Telethugs will reach out and punch someone.
Today’s rudimentary, narrowband video games will evolve into physically engaging telesports: remote arm wrestling, teleping-pong, virtual skiing and rock climbing.
An individual can use the Net to multiply its effectiveness by forming a virtual lobbying group that can join in the public policy debate and be part of the political process.
By lessening the obstacles to education, the Internet will create a community of informed, interacting, and tolerant world citizens.
In cyberspace we lose weight immediately; but there is a gravity of choice that is not yet fully understood. Certainly there will be a shifting from the sense of territory, of being an inhabitant of an earthly system of values that includes roots, walls, and possessions, toward a radical adventure that blasts it all.
Networking is subversive, and that’s why the Chinese don’t like it.
Compared with the uncoordinated, small-scale use of facsimile machines by dissidents in China and the former Soviet Union, the rapidly growing Internet holds the promise of great speed and scope.