mfidelma@cc5.BBN.COM (Miles Fidelman) (10/15/87)
I periodically ponder on the following question: If and when networking becomes widely available to the general public, what effects will it have on the way we organize our political and economic activities? Any ideas? Miles Fidelman
taylor@hplabs.HP.COM (Dave Taylor) (10/16/87)
Miles Fidelman recently asked: > If and when networking becomes widely available to the general public, > what effects will it have on the way we organize our political and > economic activities? I think that this is a quite interesting question and would like to take a tentative stab at answering it here. As has been pointed out elsewhere, in the information society we have, similar to many other societal organizations (I'd actually argue that this is something that all societal organizations devolve into, but this isn't the place for that), the concept of classes of people, and an implicit valuation of them based on what class they're in. We are already seeing a very atypical cross-section of our society and other countries societies represented on computer networks (consider the readership of this digest) typified by a higher than average level of education (indeed, a significant percentage are associated with universities). In this country at least, to obtain higher education implies that you're probably not a minority (due to funding of the education, lack of opportunities to have a good initial education, discrimination, and many other factors) so we also find that the users of computer networks tend to be non-minorities. Further than that, the people who ascend the heirarchy are those that have the highest level of ability to express themselves on the electronic media, which indicates that composition and literacy are significant factors. Added to that, we've all seen messages from people saying something like "I'm fighting with my editor/software and hope this gets out" which adds `computer literacy' (although we've already had a discussion in this digest about what that term means), and, of course, the *time* to interact with the computer system. This last is why I believe a higher than is normal in society percentage of single people or people that use computers on a daily basis use computer systems too. Hmmm...I think I can summarize this by stating that the selection factors for the existing computer systems seem to be mostly: o having access to the appropriate equipment (through work or home) o having the education to learn how to effectively use the equipment o having the time and inclination to use it o being able to express yourself adequately via the written media and these imply: o being of the appropriate ethnic, racial, or financial background to allow for an appropriate level of education, o being sufficiently financially stable yourself to be able to afford the equipment (while it is true that some people have received computer equipment as gifts, it's a fairly low percentage across the various systems) o having sufficient opportunity to obtain an appropriate education via college or otherwise. With this list of constraints, let's now go back to the original question that Miles proposed and break it into two: Will networking become widely enough available to effect political and economic activities? and What will that effect be? I'll continue by addressing the first further. In a nutshell, I do not believe that in the current socio-political atmosphere we have that computer networking access will become sufficiently widespread to effect political and economic activities over and above the simple automation of the various aspects of each. (that is, the Congress and other related government bodies are moving towards more and more computerization, and the use of these computers for communications, and various economic bodies (e.g. the stock exchange) are moving towards greater computerization also, but not in a way designed to fundamentally change the workings of the organization) The fundamental issues here are those of Access and Inclination. It would be fairly simple, really, to have public-access computer terminals spread throughout the world (it is just an economic question) but the part that cannot be helped by a group is to create the desire in the individual to actually take part in the computer network. (indeed if the desire was there and sufficiently strong we'd ALREADY have these public computer terminals) We need merely to look at the abyssmal percentages of people in the US that turn out for elections - voting is the tangible proof that we live in a 'democracy' and while people might have "America: Love it or Leave It" bumper stickers on their cars, these people are more likely not to vote than otherwise. The plain truth is that people will tend to do what they want to do, and that most likely will have nothing to do with the exercise of their personal freedoms. Put another way, how many people do you think would drop off of computer networks if it became illegal to send personal or private electronic mail, punishable by a fine levied by the local authorities? I would guess that droves of users would vanish the same day. Why? I'll let someone else surmise about that... Another point is that in France MINITEL is a computer network that you can connect to for free - simply call the French PTT (aka the phone company) and ask for a MINITEL terminal. It will then give you the immediate ability to query an electronic phone directory for all people throughout France, plus a host of other (mostly charged) services. Yet very few people outside of the technologically enthused have them. Why? But let's not be quite so pessimistic, take a great leap of faith and assume that we DO suddenly have an enthused populace and easy worldwide access to computer networks for all, including those handicapped, economically disadvantaged, speaking other languages, and so on. What would the effect on politics and economics be? I think it would be devastating. One of the fundamental cornerstones of political (and economic) organization is the value of information, and the subsequent need to protect what is yours. We can see this by just about any decision that any high official makes - there are always factors that they are aware of that we are not - we're missing the vital information that they're protecting. (of course, in some sense this is necessary and ends up being called "classified" information with the higher classifications being limited to smaller and smaller subsets of our population (and a demographic comparison of THOSE groups and our society would prove to be most interesting too)). A computer network implies information traffic. It also implies that people would be able to actually interact with their political and economic repre- sentatives (if it still makes sense to have those at all) directly on an issue-by-issue basis. While I think that this could be molded into a true democracy, it would require a different sort of human being and a different society to what we have now, and have had for almost all of human history. We would need a classless society, and as I've said elsewhere, I don't believe that is a natural way for creatures of any sort to exist. Heirarchies impose order on chaos and unlike entropy, I believe the evolutionary stable strategy is for things to tend towards order. Ah well, a pretty pessimistic reply, I suspect, but I'd be very happy to have some of these arguments refuted. I *hope* we can achieve a Brave New World with the use of computers and the flow of information, but I just don't see it happening given the way we humans are... Awaiting response, -- Dave Taylor ps: interesting reading on this subject is "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod (Basic Books, 1984).
mandel@well.UUCP (Tom Mandel) (10/17/87)
Miles Fidelman writes: > If and when networking becomes widely available to the general public, what > effects will it have on the way we organize our political and economic > activities? One rather likely consequence, it seems to me, is that widely available networking will do much to empower special interest groups, both in the political sense and in economic terms. In the former domain, the work of Dave Hughes in Colorado is illuminating. Also of interest is the enormous response from the world of networking to the proposed FCC ruling to remove the current exemption for computer communications from requirements for access charges. While the number of individuals involved in networking today is a very small fraction of the population -- 1% at best -- the FCC was innundated with complaints about its proposal. This sort of instant political activism -- with considerable clout, since early networkers are likely to come from socioeconomic groups with high political leverage -- seems like to grow significantly in the rather near future. On the economic or business front, there are at least two issues to consider. First, there is how networking will affect the world of work. The literature in this regard is extensive, focusing (incorrectly, in my view, on the impacts of more people working out their homes. A more interesting consequences is that networking facilitates the emergence of all sorts of information-oriented businesses at the grass roots level. Watch the number of high-level special interest BBS and CC (computer conferencing) systems emerge as hardware prices drop and software improves. The other issue I am thinking about is that of consumption, i.e., using computer networking to find and buy things. There is already some evidence that network-aided shopping is going to work out, although perhaps not for the mass markets. I don't expect it to become a major channel of distribution for many years to come, but will certainly serve special interest markets as an adjunct to other, existing channels. Tom Mandel mandel@kl.sri.com well!mandel
clif@chinet.UUCP (Clif Flynt) (10/20/87)
Dave Taylor writes: >Miles Fidelman recently asked: > >> If and when networking becomes widely available to the general public, >> what effects will it have on the way we organize our political and >> economic activities? > >I think that this is a quite interesting question and would like to take >a tentative stab at answering it here. > > [ ... An excellent, but rather pessimistic article followed. ] Dave Taylor suggests that not much will change, and that people will not make much use of the medium of computer communication to elected officials if it became available. I think there is a technology availability question here, and less of a learning curve for society than he imagines. I draw my conclusions from the situation I see in Ann Arbor, where there are a few very well used computer bulletin board systems. A particular example is a system called m-net. This system has some dozen dial in lines, which are almost all busy most hours of the day. The people on the system range from college profs to 8 year olds. When the system started several years ago, the participants were primarily techies, but in the past few years this has changed to the extent that the people interested in technical discussion are much in the minority. M-Net runs a conferencing program called Pico-Span, which is quite friendly to the new user, and allows a non-technically inclined person to participate easily and quickly. Pico-Span allows topics of discussion ot be divided up among conferences and items. (Similar to reading News with the -S option.) I think the ease of gaining access to M-Net, and the speed with which someone can become familiar enough with it to make use of it contributes to the switch from techie to non-techie users. Now that $100 will get someone the minimal hardware for accessing on-line info, I think that the software and the availability of cheap access to that info are the limiting factors. The growth of public access systems like m-net, chinet, anet and ncoast seems to indicate that people want access to information. One of the conferences that has been running on M-Net for a couple years now is 'Fair-Witnessed' by Perry Bullard, a Michigan State Representative, whose constituency includes parts of Ann Arbor. (In acutal fact, it's run by one of his aids who hardcopies the conferences for Mr. Bullard, and types in his responses.) Over the past couple years, Mr. Bullard has been available to answer questions, enter the text of bills he intends to introduce, and generally be available to the voters. On at least one occaission, after reading the arguments between the other participants in the conference he modified the text of the bill he was going to introduce. Now, the availability of Mr. Bullard on M-Net is not much different than writing him a letter, which would be read by an aide, and handled in much the same way that his responses in the conference are handled, but the sense of immediacy is much different. And since the conference is not a one-on-one with Mr. Bullard, but rather like a noisy town meeting, there is a much greater chance for Mr. Bullard to see the opinions of those he represents. The problem I see with this medium is that the volume of information can grow so large that people will need some method of filtering it down to a level that they can handle. Clif Flynt