Those who see the future of information professionals as one in which atomized individuals earn their living as infomercenaries working for deconstructed organizations should reexamine their predictions. Organizations are not machines. Organizations are organic systems … Information systems work is a means for an organization to achieve cooperation, integration, coherence, and uniqueness. I do not think that infomercenaries can deliver that.
The technologies themselves offer ambiguous promises. It doesn’t mean Big Brother has arrived. But it doesn’t offer a democratic panacea either.
The coming revolution in information systems is going to change life for everyone – including the multitude who, by circumstance or choice, never use computers. It is imperative to develop mechanisms for involving all segments of our society in designing, evaluating and governing these new systems.
To help reduce adverse social impact, the federal government should mandate evaluated social trials of alternative electronic services … We should conserve cultural space for face-to-face social engagement, traditional forms of community life, off-screen leisure activities and time spent in nature. How about a modest tax on electronic home shopping and consumer services, rebating the revenue to support compensatory, local community-building initiatives? … [We should include] lay people in technology decision-making.
The asphalt highways – and the society around them – are a reflection of successful lobbying by powerful business interests and external compulsion, not simply the free choices of consumers. There is no guarantee that the process of wiring consumers and employees into the electronic highway system will be different.
Comparing the electronic and asphalt highways is useful – but mostly as a cautionary tale. Building the new information infrastructure will not entail the degree of immediate, physical disruption caused by the interstate highway system, but sweeping geographic relocations and accompanying social transformations seem probable.
Can everyday folks play a constructive role in complex decisions involving science and technology? … With variants of the consensus conference model now diffusing in Europe, I suspect that the question is not whether the model will eventually be tried in the U.S., but when and where.
Electronic town meetings, “virtual community,” and deliberative opinion polling … sacrifice intimacy, diminish the sense of face-to-face confrontation, and increase the dangers of elite manipulation.
Procedures and institutions need to be developed, Sclove argues, through which citizens can participate in exploring the pros and cons of new technologies as well as overseeing and, if necessary, regulating, their development.
The benefits of telecommunities can potentially include combatting local parochialism; helping to establish individual memberships in a diverse range of communities, associations, and social movements; empowering isolated or marginalized groups; and facilitating transcommunity and intersocietal understanding, coordination, and accountability. Systems designed to support such uses – especially without subverting local community – are unlikely to emerge without concerted democratic struggle.