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CIVIC NETWORKS Building Community
on the Net
All sorts of reasons have been advanced in
recent years to explain the decline of community in America, from
the way we design our neighborhoods to the increased mobility of the
average American to such demographic shifts as the movement of women
into the labor force. But the onslaught of television and other
electronic technologies is usually cited as the main culprit. As
Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam observes, these technologies are
increasingly "privatizing our leisure time" and "undermining our
connections with one another and with our communities."[1]
In his essay "The Strange Disappearance of
Civic America," Putnam draws a direct parallel between the arrival
of television and the decline of what he calls "social capital" --
the social networks, trust, and norms of reciprocity that are the
essence of healthy communities. As he points out, a "massive change
in the way Americans spend their days and nights occurred precisely
during the years of generational civic disengagement."[2]
It follows that computers, VCRs, virtual reality and other
technologies that, like television, "cocoon" us from our neighbors
and communities exacerbate the loss of social capital.
With the advent of computer networks and
"virtual communities," however, some feel that electronic
technologies can actually be used to strengthen the bonds of
community and reverse America's declining social capital. Advocates
stress that electronic networks can help citizens build
organizations, provide local information, and develop bonds of civic
life and conviviality. While the claims are no doubt overstated in
many cases, as they always are when new technologies are involved,
there is growing evidence that this may be the case, particularly in
local community networks.
The social and political ramifications of
electronic networking has become a favorite topic of speculation in
recent years. Cover stories, conferences, books, Web sites, and
radio and television programs devoted to the subject have grown
exponentially. In looking over the burgeoning literature on the
political uses of the Net, I find that most of it falls into three
general categories: 1) questions of democratic culture and practice,
such as the pros and cons of direct democracy, issues of privacy and
social control, and the changing nature of public opinion; 2) how
on-line petitioning, electronic voting, information campaigning and
other forms of "netactivism" can promote politics more narrowly
defined; and 3) the implications of networking technologies for
communities. This paper leaves aside the first two categories[3]
and focuses specifically on the third: whether computer networks can
be used to strengthen and enhance the bonds of community.
A great deal of attention has been focused on
electronic or "virtual" communities that knit together individuals
who may be geographically dispersed but who share common interests.
While I take up some of the problems with this idea, my main focus
is on geophysical communities - - municipalities, counties, regional
areas, Indian nations, etc. -- and the ways they are using networks
to build healthier communities. As I hope to show, electronic
networks, especially when augmented by face-to-face networks, can
strengthen communities by serving as "free spaces," by fostering
dialogue and deliberation, and by enhancing the bonds of trust,
reciprocity and connectedness that make up social
capital.
Virtual Community
When Vice President Al Gore introduced the
idea of an "information superhighway" in a speech in 1992, it
conjured up all kinds of visions: videos on demand, electronic
voting, on-line shopping, instant access to government information.
But just as the metaphor of the information highway began to catch
on, a book called The Virtual Community appeared which
offered an altogether different vision of the digital revolution. As
Howard Rheingold saw it, people are not interested in interactive
entertainment and information so much as the opportunity to form
relationships and interact with other people. The real promise of
electronic networks, he said, is that they bring people together in
new ways.
Rheingold defined virtual communities as
groups of people linked not by geography but by their participation
in computer networks. They share many of the characteristics of
people in ordinary communities, he said, yet they have no
face-to-face contact, are not bound by the constraints of time or
place, and use computers to communicate with one another. Even
though communities can emerge from and exist within computer-linked
groups, he added, the "technical linkage of electronic personae is
not sufficient to create a community."[4]
Community includes more than merely the exchange of information; it
is usually characterized by "social contracts, reciprocity, and gift
economies."[5]
Moreover, it often includes many of the features that characterize
regular communities. As Rheingold pointed out, when "a group
accumulates a sufficient number of friendships and rivalries and
witnesses the births, marriages, and deaths that bond any other kind
of community, it takes on a definite and profound sense of place in
people's minds."[6]
Using anecdotes from the virtual community to
which he belonged -- the WELL -- Rheingold described computer
networking as decentralized, informal, eclectic, and essentially
self-governing. It is difficult to generalize, he noted, for "there
is no such thing as a single, monolithic, online subculture; it is
more like an ecosystem of subcultures, some frivolous, others
serious."[7]
Nevertheless, there is a distinctive quality about the sort of
discourse that takes place online, he said. It can be compared with
the conversation that arises in cafes, community centers, bars,
beauty parlors, and other public places. The virtual community, in
this sense, is analogous to the concept of the public
sphere.
The Virtual Community became a
bestseller and almost singlehandedly changed the way we talk about
the on-line world. Today, networks are increasingly conceived in
human terms; not as digital highways but as communities of people.
Howard Frederick, who has written extensively about the new
technologies, observes that "what we call 'community' used to be
limited to face-to-face dialogue among people in the same physical
space, a dialogue that reflected mutual concerns and a common
culture. Today, neither community nor dialogue is restricted to a
geographical place. Modern media have expanded our sense of place by
reallocating space and time. In the past, personal relationships
relied on meeting at a cafe, signing a contract together, shaking
hands, or interacting in the village square. With the advent of the
fax machine, telephones, international publications, and computers,
personal and professional relationships can be maintained
irrespective of time and place. Today we are all members of
international 'non-place' communities."[8]
The trouble with virtual or "non-place"
communities is that they tend to exacerbate, rather than challenge,
the atomization and fragmentation of modern society. They give their
members a sense of belonging without any of the obligations of
old-fashioned communities. As a result, they foster a watered-down
notion of community that is convenient and virtually free of
commitment of any kind. When we virtualize human relations, as
naturalist David Ehrenfeld puts it, we are no longer in touch with
the essential ingredients of community, "for at the end of the day
when you in Vermont and your e-mail correspondent in western Texas
go to sleep, your climates will still be different, your soils will
still be different, your landscapes will still be different, your
local environmental problems will still be different, and -- most
importantly -- your neighbors will still be different, and while you
have been creating the global community with each other, you will
have been neglecting them."[9]
Virtual communities are, more often than not,
pseudocommunities. They lack many of the essential features of real
communities, such as face- to-face conversation, the unplanned
encounter -- the chance meetings between people that promote a sense
of neighborliness and familiarity -- and, perhaps most important,
the confrontation with people whose lifestyles and values differ
from yours. In this sense, virtual communities tend to be utopian --
they are communities of interest, education, tastes, beliefs, and
skills. The result, as Stephen Doheny- Farina writes in The Wired
Neighborhood, is that "much of the Net is a Byzantine
amalgamation of fragmented, isolating, solipsistic enclaves of
interest based on a collectivity of assent."[10]
Information is the currency of virtual
communities, like many other marketplace cultures. The way it is
shared and transmitted therefore has direct implications for the
overall identity of the group. It works better, as Howard Rheingold
writes, "when the community's conceptual model of itself is more
like barn-raising than horse- trading."[11]
That may be so, but a more fundamental question is whether the
exchange of information by itself is a sufficient criterion for
community. Langdon Winner, in an essay called "Mythinformation,"
attributes this idea to a certain "optimistic technophilia"
characteristic of on-line enthusiasts.[12]
Community requires public dialogue and deliberation, he says, not
information. Information is essential to public debate, to be sure,
but it is only meaningful when tied to purpose, and only the
community can give it purpose.
The metaphor of the information highway, while
inappropriate in many ways, accurately reflects what can happen to
communities when they are woven into a larger social fabric. Just as
the interstate highway system linked existing road structures and
allowed rapid movement between them, digital networks allow vast
amounts of information to pass between different locales almost
instantaneously. The danger of the information highway, as futurist
Robert Theobald points out, is that "we are building it before we
have a local knowledge system in place. We shall therefore reinforce
an already existing pathology of looking outside our own systems for
the ideas we need rather than finding competence within our own
communities."[13]
In this respect, the push toward globalization flattens not only
local economies and indigenous traditions, but also the knowledge
base of a community by urging its members to look outside the
community for answers.
The Networked Community
In his popular book Being Digital,
Nicholas Negroponte observes that the digital revolution has removed
many of the limitations of geography. "Digital living," he says,
"will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific
place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will
start to become possible."[14]
Howard Rheingold acknowledges this possibility, but the virtual
community, as he sees it, actually does require some ties to
physical community. Most of the stories he tells in The Virtual
Community involve people who live and work in the San Francisco
Bay Area. When I asked Rheingold about this, he said that a sense of
community first began to develop on the WELL after members of the
group met face-to-face. "Different [on-line] conferences had
different get-togethers," he recalled. "The parenting conference
decided to have a softball game and picnic in the summer. We all met
each other and the kids we had been bragging about to each other,
and a lot of solidarity came out of that. Other groups had bridge
games or poker games or went for Chinese food at different
restaurants every Sunday." As a result of these face-to-face
gatherings, he said, "we started to become part of each other's
lives and a real community began growing up."[15]
Rheingold's experiences confirm the view that
electronic networks are best understood not as separate worlds in
cyberspace but as "nervous systems for the physical world," as
long-time Internet observer Phil Agre puts it. "Face-to-face
meetings will always be indispensable for cementing relationships
and sharing worldviews, but the Internet is valuable before and
after those meetings."[16]
This point is echoed by Francis Fukuyama in his work on trust and
social capital. The advantages of technology, he says, are not in
creating new communities but in strengthening already existing
social networks.[17]
This premise is at the heart of a burgeoning
movement sometimes referred to as "civic networking" which is using
computer-based communication to create new forms of citizens-based,
geographically delimited community information systems. These
systems, variously known as civic networks, Free-Nets, community
computing centers, or public access networks, are proliferating
around the world today. In his book New Community Networks,
Douglas Schuler estimates that more than 500,000 people are regular
users of the hundreds of community networks currently in existence
in the United States and abroad.[18]
They usually bring together a variety of local institutions, such as
schools and universities, local government agencies, libraries, and
nonprofit organizations into a single community resource that then
serves a variety of functions, from allowing people to communicate
with each other via e-mail to encouraging involvement in local
decision-making to developing economic opportunities in
disadvantaged communities.
The rationale for civic networking is that
community information systems can knit together the diverse elements
of a community, provide access to and information about local
government, stimulate public education, promote socioeconomic
development and equality, foster lateral communication among and
between citizens, and enhance civic participation. Mario Morino, in
an oft-cited 1994 paper, defined civic networking as a "process,
facilitated by the tools of electronic communications and
information, that improves and magnifies human communication and
interaction in a community." It does this in a number of
ways:
- By bringing together members of a community
and promoting debate, deliberation and resolution of shared
issues.
- By organizing communication and information
relevant to the communities' needs and problems on a timely
basis.
- By engaging and involving the participation
of a broad base of citizens, including community activists,
leaders, sponsors, and service providers, on an ongoing
basis.
- By striving to include all members of the
community, especially those in low-income neighborhoods and those
with disabilities or limited mobility.
- By making basic services available at fair
and reasonable costs, or free.
- And, most importantly, by represent local
culture, local relevance, local pride, and a strong sense of
community ownership [19]
The prototypical example of a community
network is the Cleveland Free- Net, which began as an experiment in
making medical information publicly accessible over an electronic
bulletin board system. Today it has evolved into a sophisticated
network serving over 160,000 registered users in the greater
Cleveland area. Cleveland Free-Net founder, Tom Grundner, captured
the spirit of the civic networking philosophy when he
observed, America's progress toward an
equitable Information Age will not be measured by the number of
people we can make dependent upon the Internet. Rather, it is the
reverse. It will be measured by the number of local systems we can
build, using local resources, to meet local needs. Our progress ...
will not be measured by the number of people who can access the card
catalog at the University of Paris, but by the number of people who
can find out what's going on at their kids' school, or get
information about the latest flu bug which is going around their
community.[20]
A great deal has been written about community
networks as tools for promoting civil society and they have been the
focus of intensive study in recent years. Nevertheless, much of the
literature is still of an advocacy genre and empirical evidence is
difficult to come by. How, then, do we measure the effectiveness of
on-line networks in fostering stronger communities? In what follows,
I outline three qualities vital to healthy communities -- public
space, deliberation, and social capital -- and examine the extent to
which networks can support and enhance these qualities.
Public Space
In his seminal work on the public sphere, the
German philosopher Jurgen Habermas defined public space as "a domain
of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be
formed."[21]
Public space can take many forms, from parks and playgrounds to
pubs, libraries, cafes and neighborhood centers. The important thing
is that they provide settings for informal public life, places where
citizens can gather spontaneously to interact and discuss issues of
common concern. To Lewis Mumford, these places are "civic nuclei."
Benjamin Barber calls them "talk shops." And in his book The
Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg describes them as "third places"
-- neutral grounds away from home and work where citizens can
establish a connection with other members of their community and
begin to develop a collective identity.[22]
One of today's most pressing concerns is what
to do about disappearing public spaces. Across the United States,
parks, schools, playgrounds, libraries, and even streets are being
privatized at an unprecedented rate. One reason is the drive on the
part of many Americans for increased security, "security not only
from crime but also from any unwanted interaction with one's fellow
citizens," as one journalist put it.[23]
This is especially evident in many of the nation's newer suburbs
which separate people not only physically but also on the basis of
age, income, and sets of interests.
It would be a stretch to call on-line networks
"public spaces." They are, in most cases, neither public (since
network providers are often private, for-profit enterprises) nor
spaces, at least in the conventional sense. Still, networks can
serve some of the functions of more traditional public spaces. Some
software developers, in fact, have actually gone to great lengths to
stimulate the kind of informal, serendipitous conversation that
takes place on the street corner, in the university hallway, or at
the office coffee machine. In her essay "Networlds: Networks as
Social Space," Linda Harasim likens computer conferences to
meetings, learning circles, and cafes. They transform "inhospitable
message systems into a vibrant social community," she writes. "There
is a purpose, a place, and a population."[24]
Electronic public spaces obviously differ in
important ways from conventional spaces. They are usually
text-based, for one thing, which means that many of the traditional
features of social interaction -- physical cues, voice intonation,
eye-to-eye contact -- are missing. Computer-mediated communication
therefore tends to be blind to hierarchy in social relationships. It
also benefits people who may not typically have a voice in
face-to-face situations because of gender, ethnicity, race, age,
appearance, etc. These important differences notwithstanding,
on-line venues such as "chat rooms," mailing lists, and newsgroups
can go a long way toward disseminating new information and ideas,
naming and framing collective issues, and promoting broad- based
discussion.
In his important book Strong Democracy,
Benjamin Barber identifies nine functions of democratic
talk:
- The articulation of interests; bargaining
and exchange
- Persuasion
- Agenda-setting
- Exploring mutuality
- Affiliation and affection
- Maintaining autonomy
- Witness and self-expression
- Reformulation and
reconceptualization
- Community-building as the creation of
public interests, common goods, and active citizens[25]
Whether the sort of discourse that takes place
on-line satisfies all of these functions depends to a large extent
on the participants in the conversation. A freewheeling newsgroup on
the Internet, with contributors from around the globe, will probably
not be able to satisfy more than the first two criteria, while a
small group of individuals in a networked organization or
neighborhood may well be able to satisfy all nine standards on
Barber's list. But in either case, the virtual environment -- the
"free space" -- enables the conversation.
Deliberation
The difference between conversation and
deliberation is the difference between what William Gamson in
Talking Politics calls "sociable" and "serious" discourse.[26]
The one is more spontaneous, uninformed and unreflective, while the
other is based on a deeper consideration of various alternatives in
addressing a specific issue. Deliberation is an essential feature of
a democratic society because unless citizens have the opportunity to
explore, question, and engage each other in a substantive exchange
about pressing issues, they will be unable to resolve those issues
together without outside help. The rationale for deliberation is
embodied in the phrase: If the problem is ours, the solution must be
ours.[27]
Are electronic environments conducive to
deliberation? In most cases, no. Stephen Bates, a fellow at
Annenberg's Washington Program, sums up what seems to be the general
perception regarding computer-based communication: It prompts more knee-jerk reactions than deliberative
responses. It gives people a way to respond instantly and often
angrily and aggressively without taking the time to mull something
over. And when there is more interesting discourse, you can tell
it's people who just love to hear the sound of their own voices.
They're not really listening to other people.[28]
Benjamin Barber suggests that the speed of the
technology is inimical to the deliberative process -- a process
which, he says, is "steeped in slowness." The increased use of
graphical images on the Net is also an impediment to deliberation.
Deliberation is "rooted in words," Barber points out, and yet in our
high-tech age words are increasingly trumped by visual rhetoric and
flashy graphics -- not just on television, but now on the World Wide
Web as well.[29]
Bruce Bimber, a political scientist at the University of California
at Santa Barbara, agrees. Despite the general difficulties in
measuring deliberation, he says, a number of cases and examples
suggests that there is little to indicate that the Net will be more
deliberative than other forms of electronic communication.[30]
It should be noted, however, that much of the
research on this question and many of the standard observations
about the lack of deliberation on-line are based on situations in
which the discussants are largely anonymous, where they have no
bonds of affiliation beyond their participation in an on-line forum.
But what happens when preestablished social or professional groups
are electronically linked? Can deliberation occur between
geographically dispersed authors collaborating on a book, say, or
between networked members of a committee negotiating points of
agreement and adopting a decision? [31]
In these instances, the electronic medium may
actually facilitate deliberation. One advantage of computer-based
communication is that it is asynchronous -- that is, it transcends
time zones and personal schedules, often allowing time for
reflection and deeper consideration of the issues involved. In the
early days of the Internet, for example, scholars and researchers
routinely posted RFCs, or requests for comments, in the hope of
stimulating dialogue, defining the right questions, and mapping the
range of alternatives on specific questions. These were, according
to some Net veterans, highly deliberative exchanges among
colleagues. The essential point is that deliberative dialogues of
this sort require that discussants have some connection to each
other that extends beyond their participation in a computer network.
The closer these ties, and the smaller the group, the more likely it
is that the medium will support deliberation.
Social
Capital
The term "social capital" has been getting a
lot of play in recent years thanks, in large part, to the work of
Robert Putnam. He describes social capital as the stocks of social
trust, norms and networks that people can draw upon to solve common
problems. His research documents that networks of civic engagement,
such as sports leagues, women's groups, and parent-teacher
associations, are an essential form of social capital, and the
denser these networks, the more likely that members of a community
will cooperate for mutual benefit.
As Putnam points out in his influential 1995
essay "Bowling Alone," civic engagement has been on a steady decline
in the United States over the last 20 to 30 years. The most
"whimsical yet discomfiting bit of evidence of social disengagement
in contemporary America," Putnam writes, is the fact that while
bowling is more popular than ever today, bowling in organized
leagues has dropped sharply over the last decade. The rise of solo
bowling, he says, "illustrate[s] yet another vanishing form of
social capital."[32]
One of the most pressing questions for the
future, in Putnam's view, is how to reverse America's declining
social capital and restore civic engagement and trust. It's a
pressing question, he says, because stocks of social capital tend to
be self-reinforcing and cumulative. As he wrote in Making
Democracy Work, "virtuous circles result in social equilibria
with high levels of cooperation, trust, reciprocity, civic
engagement, and collective well-being." But the reverse is also
true: "the absence of these traits in uncivic community is
also self-reinforcing. Defection, distrust, shirking, exploitation,
isolation, disorder, and stagnation intensify one another in a
suffocating miasma of vicious circles."[33]
The effects of the electronic revolution have
been especially pernicious, according to Putnam, because "technology
is privatizing our lives" to an ever greater extent.[34]
Furthermore, "Americans are in the midst of a transformation that is
privileging nonplace-based connections over place-based
connections," he says.[35]
Technologies like the Internet mean that our connections with people
around the country and around the world are getting closer, while
our ties to our neighbors across the street are
weakening.
In spite of Putnam's dour assessment of the
new technologies, a number of studies have been done that suggest
that electronic networks, especially when grafted onto already
existing social networks, can in fact enhance social capital. One of
the most well-documented and far- reaching of these was a RAND
Corporation study of five community networks:
- The Public Electronic Network (PEN), Santa
Monica, CA
- The Seattle Community Network (SCN),
Seattle, WA
- The Playing to Win Network (PTW), Boston,
MA
- LatinoNet, San Francisco, CA
- The Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV),
Blacksburg, VA.
The report suggests that local community
networks "have the ability to support interpersonal relationships,
local community-building, and social integration." It went on to say
that "concerns that boundary-spanning networks might facilitate a
reduction in community affiliation, or disinterest in local affairs,
appear unfounded."[36]
Another study by Andrea Kavanaugh and Scott
Patterson, scholars at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University, produced similar findings. In their research on the
Blacksburg Electronic Village network in Blacksburg, Virginia, they
found that "the community network is clearly capable of building
social networks and information exchange needed to achieve
collective action." Moreover, users of the network reported a sense
of being closer to the community. These findings "point to a kind of
capacity building with the potential for increasing social capital,"
according to Kavanaugh and Patterson.[37]
These findings confirm what Howard Rheingold
observed from his long- time participation on the WELL, namely that
"the community-building power comes from the living database that
the participants create and use together informally as they help
each other solve problems, one to one and many to many. The web of
human relationships that can grow along with the database is where
the potential for cultural and political change can be found."[38]
The important thing is that the electronic
linkage reinforce already existing networks within the community,
not attempt to recreate them. To do this, community networks must be
"woven into the fabric of community -- not patched or pieced," as
Douglas Schuler points out. "Community networks need to work
strongly and strategically with other community institutions and
organizations."[39]
Steve Cisler recommends that "any community network that is being
designed or already exists, not only include face-to-face meetings
of the board and technical staff but also regular meetings or social
events to involve the users and the community that it serves."[40]
Conclusion
The trouble with the virtual community
metaphor is that it implies that technology itself can create
community. Usually its effect is the very opposite: it hastens the
breakdown of traditional community. Still, electronic networks can
play a role in strengthening communities if they are used to augment
social networks that are already in place. In addition to their
obvious benefits as text-based information systems, networks can
serve as public spaces for informal citizen-to-citizen interaction,
they can support rational dialogue and, in some cases, deliberation,
and they can promote the social connectedness, trust, and
cooperation that constitute social capital.
* * *
NOTES
1. Robert Putnam, "The Strange
Disappearance of Civic America," The American Prospect,
No. 24 (Winter 1996).
2. Putnam, "The Strange
Disappearance of Civic America."
3. For more on the first
category, see my papers "Electronic
Democracy: A Literature Survey" (February 1993) and "Teledemocracy
vs. Deliberative Democracy" (November 1994). For more on the
second category, see, for instance, Electronic Democracy: Using
the Internet to Influence American Politics by Graeme Browning
(Wilton, CT: Pemberton Press, 1996) and Net Activism: How
Citizens Use the Internet by Ed Schwartz (O'Reilly and
Associates, 1996).
4. Howard Rheingold, "A
Slice of Life in My Virtual Community," in Global Networks:
Computers and International Communication. Linda M. Harasim,
editor. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 64.
5. Rheingold, "A Slice
of Life in My Virtual Community," p. 64.
6. Rheingold, "A Slice
of Life in My Virtual Community," p. 64.
7. Howard Rheingold,
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic
Frontier (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993), p. 3.
8. Howard H. Frederick,
Global Communication and International Relations (Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth, 1993), p. 7.
9. David Ehrenfeld,
"Pseudocommunities," Orion, Autumn 1993, pp. 5-6. Cited in
Stephen Doheny-Farina, The Wired Neighborhood (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 83-84.
10. Stephen
Doheny-Farina, The Wired Neighborhood, p. 55.
11. Rheingold, "A Slice
of Life in My Virtual Community," p. 69.
12. Langdon Winner,
The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High
Technology (University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp.
98-117.
13. Robert Theobald,
"The Information
Superhighway: Opportunities and Problems."
14. Nicholas
Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Afred A. Knopf, 1995),
p. 165.
15. Scott London, "Life
on the Electronic Frontier," Insight & Outlook,
KCBX Public Radio, December 23, 1996 [Original
broadcast].
16. Phil Agre, "Some
Thoughts About Political Activity on the Internet." August
1996.
17. Francis Fukuyama,
"Now Listen, Net Freaks, It's Not Who You Know, But Who You Trust,"
Forbes, Vol. 156, No. 13 (December 4, 1995), p. S80.
18. Douglas Schuler,
New Community Networks: Wired for Change (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1996), p. 25.
19. Mario Morino, "Assessment and Evolution
of Community Networking." Paper presented at "The Ties that
Bind" conference on building community computing networks,
Cupertino, California, May 1994.
20. Tom Grundner,
"Seizing the Infosphere: Toward the Formation of a Corporation for
Public Cybercasting." Paper presented at DIAC '94 conference of the
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1994. Cited in Doheny-Farina, The Wired
Neighborhood, p. 125.
21. Cited in Rheingold,
The Virtual Community, p. 282.
22. Ray Oldenburg,
The Great Good Place: Caf–s, Coffee Shops, Community Centers,
Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You
Through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989).
23. Robert Gerloff,
"Public Space Minus the Public," Utne
Reader, No. 55 (January/February 1993), pp. 46, 48.
24. Linda M. Harasim,
"Networlds: Networks as Social Space" in Global Networks:
Computers and International Communication. Linda M. Harasim,
editor. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 29.
25. Benjamin Barber,
Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age
(Bekeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). Cited in
Schuler, New Community Networks, p. 117.
26. William Gamson,
Talking Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.
20.
27. For more on the
theory and practice of deliberation, see, for instance,
Deliberation in Education and Society, J.T. Dillon, editor
(Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1994); Joseph M. Bessette, "Deliberative
Democracy: The Majority Principle in Republican Government" in
How Democratic Is the Constitution? Robert A. Goldwin and
William A. Schambra, editors (Washington DC: American Enterprise
Institute, 1980); John Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics,
Policy, and Political Science (Cambridge University Press,
1991); Bernard Manin, "On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation,"
Political Theory, Aug. 1987, pp. 338-368; and David Miller,
"Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice" Political Studies,
1992 Special Issue, pp. 54-67.
28. James M.
Pethokoukis, "Will Internet Change Politics," Investor's Business
Daily, November 15, 1995, p. A1.
29. Benjamin Barber,
keynote address at DIAC '94 conference of the Computer Professionals
for Social Responsibility, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994. Cited in
Doheny-Farina, The Wired Neighborhood, p. 79.
30. Bruce Bimber, "The Internet
and Political Transformation," December 1996.
31. See, for instance,
Linda M. Harasim and Jan Walls, "The Global Authoring Network," and
Jan Walls, "Global Networking for Local Development," both in
Global Networks: Computers and International Communication.
Linda M. Harasim, editor. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1993).
32. Robert Putnam, "Bowling
Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of
Democracy, Vol. 6, No. 1 (January 1995), p. 70.
33. Robert Putnam,
Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy
(Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 89.
34. Putnam, "The
Strange Disappearance of Civic America."
35. Russ Edgerton, "Bowling
Alone: An Interview with Robert Putnam About America's Collapsing
Civic Life," AAHE Bulletin, September 1995.
36. Robert H. Anderson,
Tora K. Bikson, Sally Ann Law, and Bridger M. Mitchell, "Universal Access to
E-Mail: Feasibility and Societal Implications" (Santa Monica,
CA: RAND Corporation, 1995).
37. Andrea L. Kavanaugh
and Scott J. Patterson, "Building Social Capital in a Community
Network: A Test Case." Paper presented at the International
Conference on Information Systems, December 1996.
38. Rheingold, The
Virtual Community, p. 249.
39. Schuler, New
Community Networks, p. 346.
40. Steve Cisler, "Community
Computer Networks: Building Electronic Greenbelts." June
1993.
CREDITS:
Thanks to Bruce Bimber, Barbara Heuer,
Margaret Holt, Andrea Kavanaugh, Doug Schuler, and Jill
Swenson
PREFERRED CITATION:
Scott London, "Civic Networks:
Building Community on the Net." Paper prepared for the Kettering
Foundation. March 1997.
http:/www.scottlondon.com/reports/networks.html
Copyright 1997-2001
by Scott London. All
rights reserved. |