Dossier, Volume 14 #4

Online, Who Do We Say We Are?

Beyond their impact on how people work, learn and play, computer networks have affected people's perceptions of themselves and their relationships with others. They are part--although by no means all--of the reason why many of the building blocks of personal identity are becoming increasingly fuzzy, in North American society at least. These computer networks allow a person to interact with others in a context where nothing is known about them except their online persona. Many Internet participants value this feature of their chosen medium. Thus, Thomas W. Cook posted to the can.infohighway newsgroup from Queen's University in Kingston in January 1995:

"The Internet is the great equalizer. Readers of my messages don't know if I'm an `angst-ridden teenager,' an `unemployed writer' or a `university professor.' I could be male or female and my skin could be any colour of the rainbow. If someone is going to judge me, they have to do it based on my words and my ideas."

The form of identity-blurring that has attracted the most attention has occurred in the area of gender. It is not surprising that a person of one sex will sometimes take on a persona of the other sex--particularly males taking on female personae. This has happened in Internet newsgroups, but especially in the role-playing games known as MUDs [Multi-User Dungeons]. "MUDs are an identity workshop," writes Amy Bruckman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has studied the phenomenon. Bruckman describes a MUD as "a text-based multi-user virtual-reality environment." Participants create characters who build a social milieu by communicating with other characters within a defined space. A character can be male, female, gender-neutral or plural, irrespective of the sex and number of the creator. "Without makeup, special clothing, or risk of social stigma," writes Bruckman, "gender becomes malleable in MUDs."

It has become commonplace to ascribe the latest sex/gender developments to computer networks. Thus, a Newsweek cover story on bisexuality in July 1995 called the Internet the "most significant" of the factors creating a "bisexual moment": "The Internet has emerged as a safe harbor where users can play fluidly with gender, both their own and that of their virtual partners." Similarly, Washington lawyer Martine Rothblatt, author of The Apartheid of Sex, sees the future capacity of the information highway to transmit virtual reality images as an important element in bringing about her projected utopia in which the very category of gender as we know it today is abolished.

The same skepticism needs to be applied to predictions of this sort as to other utopian claims about the Internet. The widespread questioning of received notions of gender is a long-term change in society that probably would have taken place with or without computer networks. But computer networks clearly do have the capacity to contribute further to a fudging of traditional gender roles, and indeed to a breakdown of divisions among social roles in general.

Closely related to identity is community; the questions "Who am I?" and "Who are we?" cannot be completely separated from each other. The effect on community of the Internet, and more broadly of the information highway, has been the subject of a vigorous debate. For some observers, computer networks are helping to create new forms of community. Thus, political theorist Mark Poster suggests that "there are surely new modes of association in the bulletin boards and MOOs [MUDs, Object-Oriented] and MUDs....When human beings, with or without the significant mediation of machines, interact and exchange symbols, there is community of some sort. The problem is not whether MOOs and bulletin boards are communities, but how they are communities."

Howard Rheingold, who became involved in the online world through a San Francisco-based bulletin board called the WELL, entitled his book on computer-mediated communication The Virtual Community. He describes how the WELL helped one of its members deal with the crisis brought on by his son's leukemia. "The model of the WELL and other social clusters in cyberspace as `places,'" Rheingold writes, "is one that naturally emerges whenever people who use this medium discuss the nature of the medium." Rheingold is careful not to press the claims of the virtual community too far, but the sense of community that he feels binds him to other WELLites emerges clearly from the pages of his book.

Others, however, see computer networks as contributing to the breakdown of what remains of our traditional communities. Thus, John Gray wrote in the Manchester Guardian in April 1995:

"Real communities are always local--places in which people have put down roots and are willing to put up with the burdens of living together. The fantasy of virtual community is that we can enjoy the benefits of community without its burdens, without the daily effort to keep delicate human connections intact. Real communities can bear these burdens because they are embedded in particular places and evoke enduring loyalties. In cyberspace, however, there is nowhere that a sense of place can grow, and no way in which the solidarities that sustain human beings through difficult times can be forged. We should reject the offer of the Internet communities to deliver us from the unchosen constraints of local life."

The historian of telecommunications in Canada, Robert E. Babe, is a more strident proponent of this view:

"The Information Highway will emphasize communication designated for audiences defined on bases other than geography: for example income, class, occupation, hobbies, sex, age, race, tastes, type of accommodation, specialized knowledge and so forth....By contrast, nation states, communities and legislative processes are all defined on the basis of geography. The `Information Highway', therefore, by expanding transmission capacity to the home, will help break down local or indigenous communication, substituting in its place a `cyber-community' or `virtual-community'--with definite political economy implications....The world becomes the stage in which individuals and those organizations delimited geographically (for instance national governments) become rendered quite powerless."

Babe concludes that "all those with a love of life, democracy and of community should now be pushing to stop the Information Highway before it begins."

So who is right? Clearly, computer networks make it possible for us to communicate with some people more closely, frequently and immediately. They also make it less necessary, and perhaps more difficult, to relate to the local communities in which we live. On balance, is this a gain or a loss? Do computer networks represent a rebirth of community, or the last nail in its coffin?

Certainly, the picture the word community conjures up for most of us is local and compact: a small town, or perhaps an urban neighbourhood, with people who mostly know one another and participate in common economic, social, cultural, civic and religious institutions. There is much that is admirable in this picture. But the conclusion that all communities necessarily have to be geographically based does not automatically follow.

For large numbers of people in the western world, including most of those who are likely to be communicating through computers, the compact local community within which most of one's significant human interactions take place belongs to the past. Your aged parents in Winnipeg, your daughter in Somalia, your college buddy on assignment in Beijing, your scientific colleague in Germany and your lifelong friend who is working in California may be more important presences in your life than your neighbours in Burnaby or Laval. Furthermore, the compact community has always had its narrow side, and belonging to a racial, religious or sexual minority, for example, can make you feel very lonely within it. If computer networks can help people communicate and maintain elements of community across geographical boundaries, or find soulmates who are geographically distant from them but close in other ways, then these networks are performing a valuable service.

On the other hand, Babe has identified a very real difficulty. All our political structures are geographically based. If we enhance communities that cross geographical boundaries at the expense of local ones, the effect will be to weaken those political structures. The beneficiaries will be those institutions that are effectively organized across geographical lines--in other words, multinational corporations. This is why Babe urges Jean Chrétien's government to "reverse policies embraced by the Mulroney Tories that lead to death. There is no better place to begin than by scrapping the Information Highway."

Babe's plea draws us into the fascinating debate over whether political units form the most sensible boundaries for the flow of information, any more than they do for flows of material goods and people. This, in turn, brings to mind the dreaded G-word, globalization--which is very closely bound up with the information highway. Babe's argument fits into a school of writing on globalization which implies that almost everything valuable and distinctive in national identities risks getting wiped out as huge multinational corporations, and even some not so huge cultural enterprises, steamroll their way to world domination.

Babe is correct in arguing that governments still have essential roles to play, contrary neoliberal views notwithstanding; governments, in many places the democratic embodiment of the people they represent, must band together to restrain and diminish the depredations that form an unfortunate backdrop to the undoubted advantages offered by transnational trade and information flows. However, broad conflicts that pit corporate elites against workers and their families at the national level often occur in even starker form at the global level, and it is not by hiding behind nationalist or protectionist banners that such disputes are going to evolve in ways favouring those at the middle or bottom of the heap. Policies and attitudes that aim to create justice and equity within the boundaries of a nation-state need equally to be applied outside these boundaries.

Nor is it helpful to try to opt out of the global flow of information. Canadians already have access to such manifestations of the information highway as the World Wide Web and satellite television. The Canadian government may be able to speed up or delay some elements of the highway, broaden or limit access to it and influence its content--and it is important for the government to act intelligently in doing all of those things. But it is no more practicable (or desirable) for the government to "scrap" the information highway than to scrap the telephone.

While we are generally optimistic about the effects of the information highway on community, we do not of course mean to deny the special value of face-to-face contact, even for those who are most marginalized in their geographical communities. "I do wonder about leaning too heavily on the Usenet," wrote one contributor to a sexual-minority newsgroup. "I think that it is a mistake to look to us for the kind of support that is best obtained from `real' not cyber folk." Another writer agreed: "In the long run, YES, support from real people is essential, at least for those of us who live in the real world....The support I received [online] was an important part of my journey. But as I gained support in the real world, my need for electronic support declined."

In the modern world, face-to-face contact has long been supplemented by other tools for communicating and maintaining community, such as the telephone and the postal service. Computer networks are simply another instrument in this toolbox, whatever their real advantages (speed, many-to-many communication, ready-made supportive networks) or novelty value.

In June 1995, on the occasion of the annual Hebrew Book Week, the editors of the Israeli daily Ma'ariv expressed the fear that in the computer age the printed book would soon be a thing of the past. While "a title ordered by computer will never supply the sensual pleasure of feeling a book, inhaling its scent, and turning its pages," they wrote, "what is easier, quicker, and more practical will, in the end, overcome that which is merely enjoyable."

Of course, such sentiments could also have been expressed in the face of the revolution brought about by the printing press five hundred years ago. And while looking at an illuminated medieval manuscript still gives us pleasure of a sort that a Stephen King paperback will never provide, most people nowadays would agree that the advent of the printing press was, on the whole, a step forward.

But the Ma'ariv editors' complaint should not be dismissed out of hand. The advantages of the information highway are most often expressed in terms of speed, convenience, volume. "When wallet PCs are ubiquitous," writes Microsoft head Bill Gates in a typical passage, "we can eliminate the bottlenecks that now plague airport terminals, theaters, and other locations where people queue to show identification or a ticket."

What about quality, depth, beauty?

These are things the information highway, no matter what form it takes, will not in itself provide. But quality, depth and beauty may become available to people who would previously not have had access to them, and people who create things of quality, depth and beauty may have outlets for them that would not otherwise be there. If the information highway fulfils some of the promises suggested by the Internet, what it will be able to provide is breadth. After all, where did we get the above quote from Ma'ariv, a newspaper that is not exactly ubiquitous on Canadian newsstands?

From the Internet.