Technology and Community

What effects is technology having on community? The answer depends on what one means by community. Here are some relevant definitions given by Webster’s on-line dictionary:

· A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government. The district or locality in which such a group lives.

· A group of people having common interests

· A group viewed as forming a distinct segment of society

· Similarity or identity: a community of interests.

· Sharing, participation, and fellowship.

Why on-line communities are good

When technological optimists like Howard Rheingold talk about the internet increasing people’s opportunity for community in their lives, those optimists mean that on-line forums allow people with common interests to find and interact with one another without any barriers of distance. Thus “virtual” on-line communities of common interest or culture can be formed.

For example, Imagine you are a teenager who has some very left-leaning and anti-racist political views. Now imagine you live in a part of rural Idaho where many people have very conservative views and racist views about minorities are common and strong. If you were deeply committed to your beliefs, talking with the people from your small Idaho town could be highly frustrating, even if you felt safe in expressing your true feelings when what people say offends you (It’s possible you might not). Finally, If you were such a teenager, you also would not have the option of simply moving away. You’re stuck there until you are old enough to go out on your own and support yourself or attend college.

This gives a good example of the need for some people to form vitally important connections with other people, connections they cannot get from the people around them for some reason. Cancer patients too sick to travel to a support group might be another good example. Similarly, cancer patients wanting to be in a group discussing only their rare cancer when they are the only person in 200 miles who has it might be yet another beneficiary of on-line communities.

Using the internet would allow our hypothetical teenager to communicate on a daily basis with people who share far more of that teenager’s view of the world. Communicating with them would make the teenage feel less alone and would help the teenager deepen their understanding of their beliefs. This would very likely make that teenager’s life a happier one. The teenager may become very engaged in the debates and social interactions within that on-line community, and come to care about some of the other people he knows through it.

Perhaps the teenager might even form friendships with other people on-line that turn into in-person friendships when the teenager later moves away from Idaho.

That is an example of what is good about technology and its effect on community. It gives an opportunity for people who would feel alienated and alone without the aid of the technology to find a community to be a part of by using the technology.

Why on-line communities are bad

Now with that said, it is important to note that such cases are not really typical. Most people don’t live in places that are as alienating as the place our hypothetical teenager lives. In addition, most people could find other people near them who share enough of their beliefs if they would make the effort to find where those sorts of people meet and go there. Meeting non-local people on-line is just more convenient.

Most people also use the internet for things which do not involve making the important kinds of connections with other people that our hypothetical teenager makes.

Many on-line communities consist of people talking about their hobbies with people who share that hobby (music, movies, sports, games, computers, etc.). Other on-line places where people interact are built on flirting/sex, or the playing of team games or massively-multiplayer games.

The sorts of connections people form with one another are incidental, what is really going on is the satisfaction of people’s desires. What is really being met are people’s desires to talk about what interests them, satisfy their sex drive, or, in the case on online games enjoy the excitement, mental challenges, competition, or fantasy aspects of the game. The connections with people in these sorts of on-line communities is far narrower, they are about a commonality of interests and fulfillment of desire rather than building relationships with other people.

Technology permits contacts with more people from farther away.

However there is another side to that coin.

Forming mostly on-line connections with people can mean that one’s connections with other people are weaker and shallower than traditional face-to-face connections with people.

At the same time, face-to-face connections may be sacrificed in favor of on-line connections. Easy and pleasurable contact with others on-line can, ironically, socially isolate people. This is because people such people can fail to form deep connections with other people. This makes their life less satisfying and meaningful. It also puts such people at risk if they should one day need to have developed some of those face-to-face relationships. This is something suggested by the movie “The Net”.

Some critics of interaction of other people on-line point out that there is relatively little sharing and fellowship. People who live next to one another have a lot in common: The same schools, air, water, local economy, crime problems, property values, etc. The problem is that many people in the U.S. don’t know their neighbors, talk to them about these things, and work together to solve local problems. People sinking their scarce leisure time into on-line communities, which are unrelated to the physical community they live in, is likely to aggravate this lack of involvement in one’s physical community.

Similarly the Amish decision to ban the use of telephones in the home originated in the community deciding that the availability of phones in the home encouraged gossiping with/about neighbors and encouraged the person using a phone to ignore one’s family members while on the phone. Since communities and families that care about and respect one another are important to the Amish, they banned telephones in the home, and probably will eventually ban cell phones kept at home.

Communication Technology and Trust

There are also inevitable trust problems with on-line interactions with other people that one doesn’t have in face-to-face relationships with other people. Every time you buy/or sell something on-line and you pay/send first you are trusting the other party not to take your money or object and give you nothing back. When dealing with very large businesses that won’t just disappear or when buying using a credit card or paypal that provides fraud protection this danger is reduced (because credit cards and paypal first demand identity information from the seller). But outside of those contexts, there is a real danger of the person who pays/sends first becoming a victim of fraud.

Even the user ratings system on Ebay that reflects past performance on transactions can’t always be trusted. There is a new twist on the crime of identity theft where traditionally con artists would borrow money or buy things on credit while using another person’s identity. In the new type identity theft, a con-artist has hacked into another person’s Ebay account with a high rating and pretends to be that person selling something cheaply in order to defraud people, getting them to wire-transfer money to a fake escrow agency that really just goes into a quickly emptied and closed foreign bank account. See the following link if you are curious to learn more:

http://news.com.com/2100-1017_3-940427.html?tag=st_rn

In a real physical community where you have known all the people for years, con-artists develop bad reputations and can’t use hacking to conceal their true identity when trying to get others to trust them. This is why fraud disappears in such communities. Perhaps the Amish goal of living apart from others and living close to one another is an example of an effective low-tech solution to the problem of not knowing who to trust.

Community and transportation technology

There’s a scene in the movie Fight Club where the narrator talks about the people he talks to on airplanes while flying all over the country for his job. He sarcastically calls these people “single-serving friends”. This phrase conveys how he is unsatisfied with his interaction with all those people he meets briefly on planes and then never sees again. He wants something different, and he does something about it.

Aside: I highly recommend Fight Club as a movie about the ways contemporary technological society can make people feel disconnected, alienated, not part of any community other than the community of consumers. It is also a movie about what sort of reactions those feelings might provoke in people.

There is a reason that the Amish don’t use cars. It isn’t just about the fact that the Amish value human life and more people die in accidents when cars are used instead of horse and buggy. Though that is important. The significant thing is that cars, which make it convenient to travel further because they travel faster, have too many negative effects.

Being able to travel further means that there are a greater variety of attractive or useful destinations one could now travel to.

This in turn means that such people are likely to spend more of their time traveling to destinations, despite covering more miles per hour.

Time spent traveling is time not spent with one’s family and neighbors.

Thus to encourage families to live closer to one another and people to be more involved in their communities, the Amish banned the owning of cars.

Wearable wireless computing and instant/ephemeral communities

Usually when we think of using the internet, we think of people bound to their desks at wok or home. This has started to change some with wireless net access and laptops, but we still expect that users are going to be interacting with other people via computers rather than face-to-face.

Now consider an extension of the idea of the personal ad where people are looking for friends/lovers or classified ads where people are looking to buy or sell something.

Each person’s list of wants and haves is carried around with them in computer-readable form in a portable computer with a wireless internet connection.

This portable computer shares the user’s lists with everyone else’s portable computer as soon as any similarly equipped portable computer owned by someone else comes within several meters.

When a match occurs between something that one person wants and another person has, both people are immediately notified and contact information is automatically exchanged.

If such a technology is widely adopted, people out in public people will no longer be nearly as anonymous and it will be possible for strangers (including businesses harvesting information for marketing purposes) to infer some things about you from the information in your want/have lists. This could make for some hard decisions about just how much of your information you’re willing to share. But, if the technology works as advertised, the process of making face-to-face friends, finding real relationships, and informally buying and selling things will get substantially easier.

Interestingly, if in the future such a technology becomes very widely adopted, the act of not broadcasting your haves and wants might be considered rude when everyone else is doing so. They may expect to know those things when starting conversations with you if you are a stranger to them. (See Bruce Sterling’s story “Dragonfly” for an example).

It all sounds like science fiction but we’re part of the way there already. The “Intro” software doesn’t have each person broadcast their wants from a wearable computer, instead they put their information in a central database that other people can access via the internet. But from that point on the process is similar.

The software helps people attending the conference to very quickly identify the few people at the conference who are interested in the same things they are: the exact kind of person people go to conferences hoping to meet. In addition to interests and personality information, Intro users are asked to provide their picture, a short video greeting, a list of things they like being asked about to start a conversation, personality, hobbies, and an email address.

Between software like Intro and the research like that being done in the Wearable Computing article, we may just be moving into an era where computers and the networking between them starts to bring people together face-to-face rather than isolating them with their attention focused on a screen.