Ah, Cyberspace!
How Do We Want
to Live?

ALIENATION IN THE MODERN WORLD. The feeling of anomie is perhaps nowhere captured so graphically as in George Tooker's 1950 painting, The Subway. One critic has commented that the work encapsulates "man's resignation and surrender to a cold and vastly growing technological urban society," while another has written that "these are human beings who have been robbed of humanity, isolated from one another by the exigencies of modern life. Each exists as an island of terror." Tooker himself has said of this painting, "I was thinking of the large modern city as a kind of limbo. The subway seemed a good place to represent a denial of the senses and a negation of life itself. Its being underground with great weight overhead was important." (Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art)

Bob Adams, who recently retired as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and is a longtime student of American inventiveness and of its inner aims, observes that the technological revolution is "hastening the decay of place." The rising number of networks, says Adams, is making people indifferent to distance or the concept of distance. "Something has really changed," he maintains. "Basically, what we're doing is decapitating local societies." In other words, highways have replaced abodes. The new bodies that have arisen from these decapitations are evidencing themselves continually. Journalism, banking, entertainment, education, sex, friendship; everything can be done and found in cyberspace.

he paradox of place that Adams points to--between devices that allow people at once to reach out and reach over or away from one's real community, as opposed to one's virtual community--bears directly on America's continual problems of class warfare and racism. One obvious trouble with the potentialities for interconnection relates to who gets what. There would be one kind of future America if rich and poor had equal access to the new networks, and another if the superhighway were solely the road for the affluent. One is reminded of Robert Moses's device of building overhangs on his bridges out of the inner city in New York, with headroom too low for buses to pass through. The poor, specifically blacks, who traveled by bus, would be kept out of the suburbs.

The danger is that we will have the information-rich and the information-poor, but the problem is more than one of equal opportunity. Even if it were guaranteed that rich and poor would have the same access, we return to our earlier question: What is it that people, rich and poor, want? A ten-year-old African-American boy or a Latino or Asian girl from some inner city who plays chess and who links up with other chess players in the country, or even around the world, may simply be overlaying one segmented classification with another. The idea of class is key to any discussion of the emerging technologies, because, in an odd way, the emerging technologies are deepening the class system while purporting to circumvent it.

All American inventions are created with a mind to obliterating the class system, and all wind up reaffirming the various divisions, or in creating new ones. First, a few people have a car, a telephone, a TV; then, a great many have them. Yet nothing is really changed by these acquisitions, and the class system endures because of other circumstances created by the new inventions. Americans do not like to admit the existence of classes; we founded ourselves as a retort to class-ridden Europe. Our answer to Europe's class system was to set up--as an ideal--a prosperous, landed Jeffersonian class to which everyone would belong. What we have evolved into now is a multiplicity of classes, including the information class created by the emerging technologies. The way America has structured itself, people live surrounded only by people who live like themselves. Homes in like neighborhoods cost the same prices; schools are alike; clothing and manners are similar; people socialize with economic peers. Americans live cocooned with members of their own class. Yet we still deny the idea of class in America, and this denial may not allow us to see what the effect of the new technologies will be on how we live with one another.

So eager are Americans to hide the idea of class from one another, they do not have the slightest idea to what class they belong. The top 20 percent of American families have as much money as the remaining 80 percent. The top 5 percent of that 20 percent make as much as the remaining 15 percent. In that 5 percent, once again the top one-fifth (that is, 1 percent of America) makes as much as the other 4 percent. Yet if one asked a couple making $40,000 before taxes and a couple making a pre-tax $200,000, what class they were in, both would answer (honestly and persuasively) not only that they belong to the middle class, but also that they are just scraping by.

There are at least two reasons for this status blindness, both having cropped up in the past thirty-five years. One is the enormous fissure that began to develop within the middle class between the upper and lower extremes. The other is that the middle class began to split into various subclasses. The 1980s (in spite of what was said about "morning in America") was the time that the bottom began to fall out of the middle class. From 1960 to 1974, real wages and salaries for workers increased by 20 percent. From 1977 to 1989, the wages of workers with less than a high school education fell 20 percent, and the overall median wage for men plummeted 123 percent. Among full-time working men ages 18-24, the proportion earning less than $12,195 per year (in 1990 dollars) more than doubled in the 1980s, from 18 percent to 40 percent. Even the lower top one-third of the upper middle class has been slipping fast. From 1989 to 1993, white-collar executive wages dropped 0.8 percent; technical workers' wages, 2.9 percent; and those of college-educated employees, 2.5 percent. In 1993, for the first time in history, there were more jobless white-collar workers than blue. This economic rejiggering has created classes within classes within classes--like Russian dolls, without the smiles.

The emerging technologies are imposing a new class system on the existing ones. The technological class system has as its overarching context the ability to use the new machines. If everyone has a computer, everyone theoretically belongs to the same class. But within that overarching class lie thousands of subclasses--from chess players to militia members. As with physical neighborhoods, people are still living with members of their own class. Hence, the question again arises: Do we understand the act of living with one another simply to mean communicating within our on-screen class?

rue, not all on-screen communication is isolating. Across the country virtual communities are cropping up that have that real community as their aim. Mark Rosenman, vice president of the Union Institute in Washington, D.C., who cites the ideal of "connection" as the key to telecommunications, speaks of "the possibility for a new kind of associative infrastructure." He is leery of information that "atomizes rather than aggregates." William Boyd of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida, notes that there are several "associative" projects now in Eastern and Central Europe. One connects some 25,000-30,000 secondary school children in Romania and their teachers in 120 schools to the Internet. Another is helping independent news bureaus and nongovernmental organizations in the former Yugoslavia to set up on-line bulletin boards to share information--a search and rescue operation in most cases. In San Francisco, a virtual community, or BBS (bulletin board system) called WELL--the Whole Earth Lectronic Link--develops connections based on similar environmental interests. In Blackswood, Virginia, a virtual community has arisen out of commercial interests; shoppers in the area do practically all their shopping on screen. Yet the members of these communities also meet with one another in reality to discuss their common interests, do business, or simply get together socially, having established a basis for communion over the wires.

Kristen Mirenda, a graduate student at Columbia University who is making a study of the Internet, tells me that she and a couple of hundred people have set up a virtual community in New York called ECHO--East Coast Hang Out. It began as an on-screen venture, but soon its users, having established common ground, engaged in F2F (face to face) meetings with one another in bars and restaurants. She says that the Net "creates more intimacy" because the relationships exist on two levels--the written word on screen and the alive, or spoken, word in person. The Net, she maintains, has created "a different kind of discourse." Though members of ECHO are normally constrained face to face, they are not at all shy to tell secrets and scandals over the Internet. According to Mirenda, the two-layered communication, virtual and real, is like a play in which the audience, and the players, know what the players are thinking as well as what they are saying. Mirenda is careful not to claim too much for ECHO. "People just see it as a valuable extension of their social lives," she reports. "We're aware that this is a developing medium." Yet she knows that her social circle is much broader than it might have been, had not the relationships been started on-screen.

There, one does not know the race or the religion of the person with whom one is communicating--unless such knowledge is intentionally conveyed. Thus, the computer eliminates one old context of discrimination. A friend of mine met a young boy in Harlem, who was expert on the computer, and who clearly loved working on it. When my friend asked the boy why he so enjoyed the machine, he said: "It doesn't know that I'm black."

Still, the problem of continued classification remains. One may develop a different sort of class on screen, or on line; one may have a deeper and more complex relationship; but a class or a stratum has still been established. Mirenda speaks of a hierarchy of social and intellectual importance that the Internet encourages. The on-line pros are most prized in ECHO; there is, she notes, "an aristocracy of experience." In a sense this is a form of equal opportunity, with the best and the brightest rising to the top. Yet it is still another social division.

So: Do we want to live with one another in a complex of homogeneous groups, each composed differently from former groups, yet just as separate? Mitch Kapor, chair and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, claims, "Life in cyberspace is often conducted in primitive, frontier conditions, but it is a life which, at its best, is more egalitarian than elitist, and more decentralized than hierarchical." The hierarchies, though, are still present; they are just differently construed. And while elitism of the conventional sort may be diminished, each group thinks of itself as elite and has a hierarchy within it. At the moment, cyberspace is like an office tower consisting of clubs and associations where everyone keeps to his or her own floor.

Does this structure affect the relationship of people with the national entities devised to keep them together? How do we want to govern? Will government become a vast floor of its own in the office tower, available to all the other groups yet separate, like a health club? If it is agreed that communication is the soul of democracy, the more people can learn what is going on in government, the more they can let government know if they approve or disapprove, then presumably the more responsive government will be to their wishes. The question of how we want to live with one another is, in a way, the only question a democracy asks.

ne of the effects of expanded communication may well be a greater number of political parties. To over 50 percent of Americans, who have stated that they would like to see a third party, the promise of a third, fourth, or tenth political party is welcome. Indeed, the whole idea of party, established 150 years ago, is going to be challenged by the emerging technologies. Expertise or authority will reside in any group, or in any individual, who is able to make a persuasive case. Former intermediaries are breaking down.

Another effect will be to change representative participation to direct democracy through such devices as national referenda. Technology will make voting easy so the number of voters should increase exponentially. Political analyst Kevin Phillips predicts that by the year 2020, "most people will vote by modem, telephone or mail--and overall citizen participation will be much greater." The main goal of all this increased participation is to reverse the flow of power from top-to-bottom to bottom-to-top. Phillips sees the new political future as creating "virtual Washington." Perhaps eventually we shall also have virtual inefficiency and virtual corruption.

Will greater participation produce better government? The underlying assumption of our democracy is that the more people who take part in governance, the more voices heard, the better off the country will be. That assumption will be tested by a system in which everybody theoretically can enter the competition to run the country. The emerging technologies could produce government by chitchat. Still worse, at a time when we are already swamped by single issue politics, we could have an even greater proliferation of identity politics, with people joined together around conditions such as ethnicity and race. To place this question in the context of getting on with one another: Do we want to live in a perpetually unsettled, indeed deliberately unsettled, political environment? If we do, will we approach something akin to a parliamentary system in which any single issue can bring down a government? Do we really want to have everyone an equal source of power?

Then, too, how does all this participation affect the nation? As communities increase, as citizens become communities unto themselves, the whole idea of nationhood is brought into question. Just as individuals now bypass place, so groups of individuals may bypass national borders. Our diversity is so great now, it is amazing that we still think of ourselves as one country. The television historian Erik Barnouw predicts that cyberspace will make the whole idea of nationhood obsolete. If that is so, the empowerment of the individual citizen within democracy may at once be working to strengthen the democracy and to override it.

Furthermore, though the emerging technologies will broaden the power of the people, the technologies themselves are likely to be controlled by a very few corporations. Every big corporation wants a piece of the action, be it the superhighway or the vehicles that travel on it. Bell Atlantic, Time Warner, and TeleCommunications are striving to become the dominant cable company. Intel, Microsoft, AT&T, and I.B.M. seek to be the premier software and electronics firm. If small companies or interest groups cannot squeeze their way onto the screens, the idea of universal participation in government, or in anything, will be merely hypothetical.

There is no necessary correlation between a vast enlargement in participatory democracy and the destratification of society. Political power, like social fellowship, will exist in numbers. And people will find like-minded company in numbers to get what they want. Nothing in the revised system would bring Americans closer together or create a feeling of national cohesion. The original aim of the country--equality of opportunity--may be served. But in the past equality of opportunity has not brought more peaceful co-existence in and of itself, or resulted in a nation that feels united in purpose or in affections.

f the emerging technologies simply rearrange our differences with one another, is that a bad thing--if power is made more equal? History would suggest that the differences among people--tribalism of one sort or another--is inevitable. The trick--to date unachieved--has been to prevent the elaboration of differences from ending in mayhem. It may be that the "din of democracy" will create one form of mayhem, verbal mayhem, that will counteract or neutralize the real mayhem that results from racism and class warfare. That is, we may grow more intimate with one another by shaking up the old contexts of intimacy. If this is so, virtual reality may be seen as superior to real reality.

In Neuromancer, the novel that coined the term "cyberspace," William Gibson describes cyberspace as "some place that you can't see but you know is there." The fact that the country is turning with such zeal toward this new universe suggests that we want to be in a place we have never been before. Since we seem to have seen everything in this century, we may want to be somewhere we cannot see but know is there.

Cyberspace may be meant to give us an escape from the life we have. To a great extent, we do not like where we are in America these days. We are neither in favor of multiculturalism nor the backlash to multiculturalism. We do not like political correctness or its opposite. People seem to be driven more by fear than anything else, even these days when the economy is up and crime down. Fear shapes most of modern life--the evidence surfaces in everything from metal detectors to home alarm systems to sexual "protection." We know we cannot go back to the past. We cannot live in the future. But we can go somewhere else in the present, even if we cannot see it.

What we can see is the computer. The computer, after all, presents the only tangible proof that cyberspace exists. Oddly, for the first time since artificial intelligence was concocted, we may seek to join our machines rather than to beat them. From the time of the Industrial Revolution, people have cursed machines for threatening to ruin our humanity. In Samuel Butler's 1872 satire Erewhon--"Nowhere" backwards--citizens establish a museum to which they consign their abandoned mechanical inventions, which they believe would swallow up their souls. Sort of a Smithsonian--with an attitude. Now, dwelling in Nowhere, we may be happy to forfeit our souls to a device that will transport us from an unpleasant, unmanageable reality. In a sense, we wish to be more machinelike, as the machine means escape. That would suggest that the whole enthusiasm for cyberspace is escapism in the name of progress, or perhaps escapism as progress.

ho are we in Bill Gates's future? For one thing, we are more than ever before information-gathering machines. The whole non-atmosphere of cyberspace is filled with information, some of it vital and fascinating, some of it trivial, some of it troubling and disruptive. One speaks of cyberspace as the invisible switchboard for a vast communications network, but it is almost exclusively a switchboard for information. Computers are not human minds. They only simulate two functions of human minds; they store vast quantities of information, and they process that information according to standard logical procedures. By giving our minds over to computers' "minds," we delimit our imaginative capacities severely--unless we treat the machines simply as quick and comprehensive reference libraries and assign them no greater power. When in the 1920s Karel Capek wrote his play R.U.R., in which the word "robot" first appeared, the image of the human machine took hold. But there has never been a human machine, nor have we ever ceded humanity to machines.

In short, information is a very limited form of communication, a way that has no necessary connection with helping one another, or with enhancing the country. Information is but one aspect of learning--not as wide as knowledge nor as deep as wisdom. And though it may serve as the grounding for both knowledge and wisdom, information, in and of itself, is simply information.

But let us say that in the future we learn more than we have ever learned, and that we learn it more rapidly than we have ever learned it, and that the basis of this learning is information. What do we want to learn? Since we are learning animals, who we become in the future will be shaped by what we want to learn.

There are two highly suspect presumptions about learning in cyberspace, the first of which is that it will be more widespread than before--more people will know more. But to learn on a computer, just as from a book, one still has to know how to read. Unless the emerging technologies directly address the serious problem of illiteracy in America, those who cannot read will be exiled from reality and from virtual reality.

The other suspect presumption is that learning in cyberspace will allow us to probe a subject more deeply, either through continuous inquiry or through explorations like that of the boy in Gates's movie, by way of CD-ROMS or similarly adventurous educating devices. But even if it is true that people will want to learn by grasping all the elements of information about a subject at once, in a multimedia effect, is the learning that results from this process as deep as the learning that comes from a book? One does not turn pages shown on a screen as one turns the pages of a book; one scrolls them. So, in a way, the computer returns us to a more primitive form of reading--scrolls. Over the long centuries we have come to think of words on paper as words. Words on a screen are pictures of words--at least they are now, since we still associate screens with the conveyance of pictures.

The difference has to do with what Sven Birkerts referred to in The Gutenberg Elegies--a book--when he wrote, "I value the state of mind a book puts me in." He means an imaginative state. Learning in cyberspace means learning a lot, very fast, all at once. Learning in "old" or real space means learning a little at a time, not so fast. The lack of high speed and the mental "spaces" or pauses between the chunks of information acquired allow and encourage private speculation. The information on a screen does not yet invite us to dream our way into a text. In time, it may.

Meanwhile, the burden of learning actually may be greater in cyberspace because, in many instances, we will first have to know what we want to learn before we learn it. An executive at Bell Atlantic says that he envisions an entire restructuring of higher education over the Internet: "The customer would decide what is important for him to learn. I don't know whether businesses in the future would think it more important that you had a degree from Harvard, or just some marketing courses from Harvard. And others from Stanford. And others from Wharton. You could make an individualized, customized university. People will be in more control of their lives."

To seek to assert control suggests that we not only know what we want to learn but also what we need to learn. This has a direct application in journalism. For better or worse, journalism provides most of our learning once higher education is complete, and many new technology observers see it as changing dramatically in the next few years. With newspapers produced on hand-held computers or slates, as in Gates's movie, nothing will show up on the screen that one has not asked to see. Also, readers will eventually be able to probe a news story to follow any line in it that attracts them. They will create their own news, just as students will create their own learning. Depending on their individual interests, people will write their own stories. People will narrow the surprises attached to learning. They will learn what they want to know and thus will be in tighter control of reality. Oddly, this will occur in a place of no reality.

All we ever have wanted to do was to control reality, while the reality of ourselves has proved most difficult to control. What, then, is the connection between knowledge and self-knowledge? If we only learn what we believe we need to know, how will we discover those things we do not know that we need to know, or that we forget we need to know? To get down to it: Is there a necessary connection between the gathering of information and the production of kindness and generosity? In the future, says Bill Gates, we will invent ourselves. What inventions will we make of ourselves? Will we become like the machines we have made--very smart, very fast, very hard?

f the future looks the way Bill Gates depicts it; if, in the year 2005 most of us will be sitting in front of an interactive machine that combines a computer and a television set; if we position ourselves at a keyboard and communicate with people we cannot see, being at once closer to them and more distant, more than ever it will be up to us to decide how we want to live in the world--with others and with ourselves. Barnouw says: "I'm worried about isolation," but in most ways, the choices we will face are the same choices we have always faced. Computers or no computers, we have always had to face them alone.

Cyberspace is where we lived before there was cyberspace. It is a state of mind that has always been its own place, which is neither the room, the house, the neighborhood nor the country. It is a dream state in which we live at the same time as we live in those more concrete contexts, a state of reverie. Yet it is as real as those other places, and, in a way, it has always existed in tacit competition with them. As children we were told, "Come back to earth," whenever we daydreamed. A teacher, catching us in a daydream would say when we came out of it, "Nice of you to rejoin us." Now, with cyberspace, dream space is a reality. With cyberspace providing an approved, indeed desirable, place to spend one's time in dreams there need be no cultural or intellectual disparagement of dreams. Dream space will be "in." Neither will one be "lost" in reverie. We are in our rooms and in cyberspace--both at once. States that were at one time in competition for legitimacy now complement each other.

One uses a train or a plane to transport food or bombs; one makes telephone calls to sympathize or to terrorize; the picture tube in one's home carries Shakespeare or sociopaths.

What then happens to the renegade dream state, the outlaw condition, the state of mind that once provided another country and another world? What happens to the expatriate mind that once gladly fled reality for nowhere, if nowhere becomes known territory? From one perspective cyberspace makes dream worlds into theme parks. It gives us everything that is possible, but delimits the thrill of discovering the impossible, and the mind that seeks to function in its own realm of civil disobedience finds its wildest dreams accommodated, accepted, honored on a screen.

And yet, the invention of cyberspace was the product of certain people's outlaw dreams. That alone should suggest that there are plenty of dreams left to realize, and plenty more that will never be realized. The mind seems to see to it that there is always some territory to occupy that exists outside the pale. Cyberspace presents its own unusual challenge to individuality--the challenge of legitimated wandering. Nonetheless, there will always be somewhere outside the nowhere to which dreaming people still will travel.

Who are we in cyberspace? Are we different people as a result of dwelling in virtual reality? The answer, as ever, is: We are as different as we choose to be. The railroad, the phone, the radio, were merely tools. Cyberspace is a tool, a perch in space from which we are able to look back at reality with greater moral clarity and then choose what we want to do with reality.

With all prior inventions, choice has appealed to varied impulses. One uses a train or a plane to transport food or bombs; one makes telephone calls to sympathize or to terrorize; the picture tube in one's home carries Shakespeare or sociopaths. Cyberspace, too, contains everything now, or apparently everything. The Gates movie gave a pretty fair idea of technology's beneficial capacities--speedier and more comprehensive medical services, criminal crackdowns, research, personal security, commerce, entertainment, daily life. Yet, if these were the only kinds of ways we wanted to live with ourselves, cyberspace would remain a theme park, or a toy shop, and nothing would be advanced with regard to who we are. How can we use the emerging technologies to be better people?

First, we have to choose to be better people. What this means concretely is to use the new networks to communicate the need for help, and the desire to give help. The emerging technologies will offer nothing really new if they merely serve to accelerate the work of current machines--which is all that Bill Gates demonstrated with his movie. Even if research is broadened and deepened, a highly hypothetical "if," it will still be but one step beyond Nexus/Lexus, two steps beyond a card catalogue.

The first cry heard over the telephone was a cry for help. And the cry was answered. "I need you," said Bell to Watson. That may have been the first cry ever. It is certainly the cry today--from the down-and-out, the ill, the illiterate, the lost, the outcasts of the world. One sees these people in Rwanda, the Sudan, Bosnia, and more than enough in America. How do we want to live in nowhere? Kinder, more useful, more helpful to those suffering from pain, ignorance and want? If that proves true, cyberspace may rightly be judged a new invention.

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