Space, Collaboration, and the Credible City: Academic Work in the Virtual University

The universal “we” has lost a sense of rhythm, and is in danger of unbalancing the thought and action cycle that drives creative human behavior … Where traveling through space physically once buffered periods of mental activity, we are squeezing out the inherent rest cycle associated with going to libraries, face-to-face meetings, and going from home to work … The added convenience of telecommunication-based collaboration, the umbrella reason that new technologies are adopted within organizations, carries with it this hidden cost of a loss of pace as it throws us into the vacuum of electronic space.

Ethical Issues in Computer Networking: Academic Freedom, Usenet, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech

Emerging ethical issues in computer networking include freedom of speech, censorship, privacy, anonymity, harassment, and the carriage of offensive material (including hate literature, defamatory material, and sexually explicit material, usually considered to be of a pornographic nature). Despite the often fevered pitch of concern and urgency surrounding these issues, which touch upon contemporary free speech and censorship debates, they have yet to be adequately addressed by computer ethicists … What constitutes electronic free speech or harassment or slander? What is the line between public and private information, and between rights and misappropriation? … How have contemporary debates over pornography, censorship, and free speech impacted upon the debates on academic freedom, censorship, and computers? How are new legal remedies for computer networking being framed in light of current legal and regulatory mechanisms for other communication technologies?

What Are We Doing On-line? A Debate on the Social Consequences of Online Communications

Maybe it’s because I’m not on-line, but it seems to me, as an adult human being living in 1995, that the signal is getting weaker. I find that more and more I navigate my days within this kind of strange landscape. People have drawn into their houses, and the shades are down. You go into a store and the clerk isn’t looking at you, he’s busy running bar codes. And you multiply that a thousandfold: mediation, mediation, mediation. I want an end to mediation. And I don’t think I can break the membrane by going on-line.

What Are We Doing On-line? A Debate on the Social Consequences of Online Communications

I live in a world that I find to be increasingly attenuated, distracted, fanned-out, disembodied. Growing up in the ’50s, I felt I was living in a very real place. The terms of human interchange were ones I could navigate. I could get an aura buzz from living. I can still get it, but it’s harder to find. More and more of the interchanges that are being forced on me as a member of contemporary society involve me having to deal with other people through various layers of scrim, which leaves me feeling disembodied.

What Are We Doing On-line? A Debate on the Social Consequences of Online Communications

[The virtual world is] going to be an auxiliary space. There will be lots of things that will be similar to the physical world, and there will be lots of things that will be different. But it’s going to be a space that’s going to have a lot of the attributes that we like in reality – a richness, a sense of place, a place to be silent, a place to go deep.

What Are We Doing On-line? A Debate on the Social Consequences of Online Communications

My point is not that you can’t find compassion and communitarian values on the net. You can. But you can find them just as well, and better, in a real community. One phenomenon I encountered on the Internet was that people would put words like “grin” or “smile” or “hug” in parentheses in a note. It’s a code meaning cyberhugs, cybersmiles, cyberkisses. But at bottom, that cyberkiss is not the same thing as a real kiss. At bottom, that cyberhug is not going to do the same thing. There’s a big difference.

What Are We Doing On-line? A Debate on the Social Consequences of Online Communications

In order to feel the greatest sense of communication, to realize the most experience, as opposed to information, I want to be able to completely interact with the consciousness that’s trying to communicate with mine. Rapidly. And in the sense that we are now creating a space in which the people of the planet can have that kind of communication relationship, I think we’re moving away from information – through information, actually – and back toward experience.

What Are We Doing On-line? A Debate on the Social Consequences of Online Communications

Computers are over. All the effects that we can imagine coming from stand-alone computers have already happened. What we’re talking about now is not a computer revolution, it’s a communications revolution. And communication is, of course, the basis of culture itself. The idea that this world we are building is somehow diminishing communication is all wrong. In fact, it’s enhancing communication. It is allowing all kinds of new language.

What Are We Doing On-line? A Debate on the Social Consequences of Online Communications

What I see happening … is our wholesale wiring. And what the wires carry is not the stuff of the soul. I might feel differently if that was what they were transmitting. But it’s not. It is data … When everyone is wired and humming, most of what will be going through those wires is that sort of information. If it were soul-data, that might be a different thing, but soul-data doesn’t travel through the wires.

What Are We Doing On-line? A Debate on the Social Consequences of Online Communications

Information, as it has been applied primarily by broadcast media, and to a great extent by large institutions, has separated human beings from the kind of interaction that we are having here … I finally concluded … that there were so many forces afoot that were in opposition to that way of life that the only way around technology was through it. I took faith in the idea that, on the other side of this info-desert we all seemed to be crossing, technology might restore what it was destroying É If we’re going to get back into an experiential world that has substance and form and meaning, we’re going to have to go through information to get there.