The Leveler
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
- Hoyle Hodges
- Internet: Knowledge and Community
- Response for 29 Jan 2011
- The Leveler
- The environment in which we live out our lives is not a cafeteria containing an endless variety of passively arrayed settings and experiences. It is an active, dictatorial force that adds experiences or subtracts them according to the ways it has been shaped.
(Oldenburg 1991 qtd. in Shuler, New Community Networks Wired For Change, pg 5) Oldenburg states that “need a third place” he goes on to define the features commonly found in “third spaces” as having a low profile, on neutral ground, serves as a leveler and conversation is the main activity, the regulars, home away from home, and a playful mood. How these third places fit into the digital age is something that is still not completely a settled argument. While most of Oldenburg’s positions are based on the brick and mortar physical places in our communities, the author (Shuler) has gone on to further apply the basic features to digital community networks. Conversation as the central activity of digital community networks while still the primary activity does lose the intimacy of face to face conversation, and the audible context that you are able to hear and understand with a telephone call. The author does point out that digital conversations can lead to participation in more than one at time and this can lead to a disjointed response. To overcome this, the use of recombinant telecommunications (Galloway and Rodriguez qtd. in Shuler pg 8) has been encouraged and experimented with by various people including the Electronic Café which brought together 5 different communities in the greater LA area and used multiple means of communications. Internet, email, graphics, slow scans TV, telephone, and video conferencing. As the web has matured this effort has morphed into the Electronic Café International with a presences in many countries. By combining the types of technology used by the communities they were able to develop effective cross community collaborative projects. My own experience of using Cyber Cafes in different countries reinforces their experiments, as in some places these cafes were a real focal point within the community for access to the web, phones, copy machines, fax machines and other digital technology. It is no surprise that these cyber cafes continue to play a large role in developing countries as they let disadvantaged groups interact with the outside world on a level playing field, both in the features described by Oldenburg and with each other. Emerging recently is a trend by governments to limit access to these digital third places during times of crises and popular uprisingings. The digital third place must be defended, and encouraged by legitimate governments to maintain their legitimacy in an increasingly digitized world, where connectivity is seen as a basic human right and a right of communities regardless of size or stature. The United States must take the lead in this area, but so far has waffled as realpolitick and their consequence raises its head. Community and third places have morphed with technology, if we continue to ignore the assaults on them whether from the right against the LGBT Neighborhood, or the left with its recent calls for censorship marketed as “civility” the digital third places may go the way of the brick and mortar third places.
While I agree whole heartedly with Putnam’s conclusions, I do not believe he goes far enough into other types of social media and technology. I believe that society is already moving past the television age Satan’s Eye in every living room (Pope Pious). Television and its dominance as a leisure time activity gained enormous traction in the 1950’s long before the Internet and social networking had been invented. As digital technology has become much more common, the Internet has begun to replace the television as the main activity during leisure or free time. The potential is there for a huge return to community and civic actions via digital means. It maybe too soon in our “digital life cycle” to see the trend, but as more and more people connect via the web the spill over into face to face interactions is on the rise. The stereotype of the loner nerd, hunched over a computer playing video games is just that a stereotype, what is actually happening is social media is being used in big and small ways to bring like minded groups of people together for actual action and interaction.
