[comp.society] what if...

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