The only choice we have is to resuscitate our failed communities, to bring back Pinedale and Putnam Lake – to align ourselves with physical reality now, before it’s too late. The answer is not in a physical space. The answer is not virtual reality. Yet that is precisely the direction we’re headed.
The civic networking movement the world over is starting to do its networking in earnest now, and that’s terrific. Will it be Home Shopping Channel the whole planet wide? You can make the difference by getting involved right now.
Computer communications can be sorted through, and you can keep what you want and kill what you don’t. Increasingly, as your communication is channeled through computers, you will increase your control over it. It’s the dumb terminal, the phone, which is the model of the violation. It violates your time and attention because it’s dumb. If you have a really smart terminal that can sort through the communications and identify them, you can reject anything you don’t want.
How should we maintain the commons of the Internet, so that everyone can keep on benefiting from its openness? … Let’s imagine an organization called Network Watch whose purpose is to bring unfortunate network practices on the part of large organizations to the attention of the network community. This could include simple things, like advertising practices, but it could also include more sophisticated things, such as the diversion of personal information to purposes other than those for which it was collected. Obviously such a group would have to be cautious and encourage debate about what is and isn’t legitimate network activity, and it should keep reminding itself that its most important weapon is publicity, but it should also call for e-mail campaigns, boycotts, and other forms of pressure against particularly grievous or chronic offenders.
The Internet could fragment into a bunch of separate spheres, each with its own gatekeeper. It won’t happen right away, since most of the people who run Internet discussion lists and the like are still primarily interested in attracting people, not keeping them away … The net is providing people at the periphery of the global research system with ways of building a community for themselves by providing a useful public service. Let’s hope it stays that way.
What the Internet needs … is not rules and guidelines but a more fully functioning set of community standards. Although laws are certainly necessary for many sorts of things, community standards are better than laws because they are more flexible, more situational, cheaper, less dependent on supposedly objective authorities, and basically decentralized. Community standards are the best way to regulate a commons. And that’s what the Internet is – a commons. What does that mean? Well, we’re not talking about common ownership, since the Internet is owned by all sorts of organizations. Rather, we’re talking about a certain social system within the Internet, which includes, for example, the convention that discussion lists are open to all.
The net is full of people looking for business models these days, and several books and newsletters promise to explain how to advertise on the net. These people have caused much worry among net inhabitants who envision receiving floods of junk e-mail and the like. There are certainly things to worry about, but in my view this isn’t one of them. Internet folks have already suppressed numerous outbreaks of anti-social advertising through the simple method of flooding the offenders with flaming complaints. While ill-tempered flaming has its own costs, the basic method is an important one. Imagine if it were just as easy to complain to the people who send you *paper* junk mail.
Given how the net works, it happens that the most effective ways of networking, getting help, finding information, gathering people together, making friends, and so forth are also the most socially responsible ways of doing these things. Why is this? It’s because of the network’s tremendous capacity for cultural self-regulation.
Most Internet institutions are still remarkably open, in the sense that anybody can join and anybody can send messages at any time. Will this last? Will hordes of unacculturated beginners overwhelm it? Will advertising overwhelm it? Will cumbersome billing software overwhelm it? Will people start building walls around their network communities? Maybe not – if we understand and apply some principles for the maintenance of a commons.
What is the meaning of all this “information” transmitted so feverishly? What are the considerations for making sense of it and improving information quality? While there certainly has been an explosion of activity, traffic, servers, and data or “stuff” presented on the Web, an explosion of information leading to knowledge and wisdom, to significance, is still in its nascent stages. In an increasingly thin soup of redundant, poor quality, or incorrect information, even the smartest Web spiders won’t be very effective. A flood of information unfiltered by the critical and noise-reducing influences of collaboration and peer review can overwhelm users and obscure the value of the Web itself. The Web certainly needs solutions in information discovery and retrieval … These information-shaping abilities cannot be based on machine intelligence alone. Human wisdom, judgment, and aesthetics must play a part in improving the quality of Web information.