Allen W. Batteau
Department of Anthropology
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan
December 6, 1995
Prologue
A specter is haunting North America. It is the specter of ubiquitous information-anything, anytime, anywhere. The foundations of existing institutions-government, corporate, academic-crumble as legions of networkers use the power of information to warp time and space, interpersonal context, and social verities. New institutions and new leadership in the society will emerge only among those who understand where this information revolution is carrying us.
Background: the problem
I begin my paper in a melodramatic fashion, with an allusion to a document by a fellow named Karl Marx, to highlight what I see as a critical problem in our discussion: the nature of the information "revolution" that appears to be sweeping our country. It is undeniable that vast changes are taking place in digital technology and in the corporate, government, and academic institutions that are its primary users and sponsors; one need only look at the restructuring of the entertainment/telecommunications/ computer industry to appreciate this change. Whether it is revolutionary or merely a continuation of trends that are nearly 100 years old is a subject of perhaps ultimately academic debate. Whether this "revolution" is all hype, as Wired magazine tells us, or a set of developments that will change the way Americans live, work, learn, and consume, as Bill Gates tells us, dictates the character of one's involvement, sitting on the sidelines or engaged in the development of cyberspaces. Whether it will create new possibilities for democracy, and whether that is something we really want, is a question that should concern us all.
In an effort to answer some of these questions, my networked colleagues and I have ventured forth, in good anthropological fashion, toward a frontier where computers are rare and modems scarce. We have launched a series of experiments to bring computing into inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago and Detroit. We have launched these experiments for several reasons. First, the inner city presents the greatest social distance between technology developers (suburban, middle-class, university educated) and technology users (poor, minority, uneducated), and as such presents an incredible laboratory for testing hypotheses about the relationship between technology and society. Second, the potential of this technology for dividing us into a nation of information haves and information have-nots should be of concern to all Americans. Third, we saw in the inner city not poverty and pathology but an underserved market. We believed that if the right information resources could be created, the inner city would finance its own universal access. I want to stress this last point because we have launched all of these initiatives as business ventures, to be judged on their ability to generate a profit.
I should acknowledge here that our work owes a great debt to my colleague, Jorge Reina Schement. Dr. Schement's studies of telephone service in the inner-city neighborhood, and how residents creatively use telephone service to improve their lives, has been a constant guide for us.
Following in Dr. Schement's footsteps, we found that there was a market for advanced information technology and resources in the inner city, although it doesn't mirror the middle-class or suburban market that most of us here are probably familiar with. We, too, are still attempting to develop an adequate characterization of the market.
To expand on that point as a fundamental statement of my problem, we lack an understanding of the demand characteristics and potential uses for advanced information technology and resources in the inner city. We know that families there have substantial information budgets, that some purchase computers, and that their interests in content go well beyond entertainment. Beyond that, our knowledge grows quite murky, with but a few points of light, in the form of locally specific anecdotes, to illuminate the landscape.
A number of initiatives around the country fall under the rubric of "community computing." I am organizing this paper around computing because in our society the computer, in both its technological and its totemic statuses, appears to be the driver of information usage today; the next ten years will see an even greater convergence of computing and telecommunications and the use of this new technological hybrid to bring numerous applications and forms of content into homes, schools, and workplaces.
One form of community computing is the freenet movement, which has a stronghold in the Midwest and in California. Freenets are the digital equivalent of public access channels on cable television, which is to say that they are not free but rather piggybacked on top of other storage and processing, where the opportunity costs are almost free. Freenets are essentially bulletin board and email systems, in which anybody in a given territory can subscribe post messages (including commercial messages) or create a discussion group. Many-perhaps most-freenets are university or library established and are used to publicize their services. Most do not have full PPP/SLIP connectivity and hence cannot offer the graphical resources of the World Wide Web (This, incidentally, illustrates an interesting and problematic point. Freenets began to take off just as the web became viable. Graphical user interfaces offer a broader range of authoring capabilities and, I would suggest, make computer-mediated communication far more visually accessible than ASCII text displayed in hardware fonts. Even elements as simple as proportional fonts, bars, and shadow boxes heighten the visual appeal of a message. Freenets that do not upgrade to this technology will become silent movies in the age of the talkies.).
Use of a freenet requires one to own a computer or travel to a library or other institution that makes computers available to the public. One of the earliest freenets, the Santa Monica Public Access Network, established kiosks that allowed even the homeless of Santa Monica to have email addresses. Before the netbozos took over, this access had some great benefits for Santa Monica: It improved communication between the homeless and other residents of the city, allowed those who had been voiceless to articulate their needs, and led to the creation of some innovative city services for the homeless. The ultimate fate of Santa Monica PAN, where a few angry voices crowded everyone else off the air, is also illustrative of the limitations of this technology: It created new public spaces. But like all public spaces, in the absence of policing (a system administrator or moderator), Gresham's law took over. Bad tokens drove out good.
A second form of community computing is the development of institutional networks at the community level. In every major city, schools, hospitals, social service agencies, and churches are setting up networks and creating computer facilities. Detroit's public schools are creating a system-wide network, with ISDN connectivity to every school and 56 kb lines from the schools to a central facility. Anticipating a major falloff in traffic after 3 P.M., they are looking for ways to open this network to other institutions. This story is being repeated all over the country.
A limitation of this approach, offered here not so much as a reproach but as a caution, is a push for too-great reliance on hardware-an "if we build it, they will come" view. Indeed, some will come, but others will not. We know from extensive experience in business that if the potential of computing is to be realized, an adequate training and support environment must be provided. The costs of training and support actually exceed the costs of end-user devices. When this point is not understood, one finds rooms full of hardware.
Other activities worth mentioning are the cybercafes that are springing up around the country. The one that I am familiar with, in Birmingham, Michigan, offers internet access (at $10 per hour??) plus cappuccino at $5 a cup. They are still developing a viable business model and are supporting themselves by selling web home pages at $2,000 each.
Also worth mentioning, since our subject is community, is the idea of a virtual community. These online, ongoing conversations have been discussed at length elsewhere; they provide social participation to numerous individuals and forms of interaction that are especially valuable to dispersed or isolated individuals with shared interests. Whether virtual communities can be extended much beyond their current domains-and whether there is any value to this step-are interesting questions.
Some conclusions can be drawn from the current level of activity in community computing. First, there is strong demand and interest, although this demand is sometimes directed at the computer-as-totem rather than the computer-as-technology. One can expect to find continued strong growth.
Second, hardware costs are only a minor issue. Given the declining unit costs of storage and processing power, we are very close to the point where it would be to the telephone companies' advantage to give away low-end computers with 2,400 baud modems. Whether the regulators would let them do this, and how these devices would be used, is another matter.
Third, more important than hardware costs is a much larger and modestly intimidating set of issues whose trends are not as auspicious as those of hardware costs. These include:
The success of community computing will depend on the ability of user groups to finesse these and similar issues.
"Community" is perhaps the most misused term in popular sociological discourse today. When activists talk about "the community," they are putatively referring to something genuine, out in the neighborhoods-in contrast to the downtown artificiality of government and corporate institutions. When civic leaders talk about "our community," they are painting a picture of inclusiveness. Other usages include a reference to occupational or technological or interest commonalities, such as the scientific community, the Unix community, or the First Amendment community.
The sorts of communities I am interested in are communities-in-place-that is, groups of people whose ties are based, among other things, on geographic propinquity, making possible multistranded, face-to-face affiliations. Usually this is less confusing to people who live in a community than to the sociologists who study their lives.
Having established this minimal definition, there are multiple perspectives on "the community," several of which are critical for establishing the community context of universal service. The first perspective is community demographics. Although one sometimes automatically associates a community with some sort of demographic similarity, there are many exceptions. In some suburban tracts where zoning codes and homeowners covenants are strictly enforced, communities do indeed represent a very narrow demographic slice; absent such mechanisms, heterogeneity-of either race, ethnicity, occupation, or education-is more typically the norm.
Nevertheless, communities do have demographic profiles, which establish a set of constraints for any place-based computing strategy. Low-income communities will be more cautious in their hardware purchases; Hispanic communities will require Spanish-language services; less-educated communities will require different forms of support and documentation than more educated communities will require.
One community in which we conducted a study was the South Chicago neighborhood. Comprising 3.3 square miles and having a population of approximately 41,000, this community is 62 percent black, 32 percent Hispanic, and 7 percent white. The unemployment rate is approximately 20 percent, due primarily to the shutdown of the South Works, a steel plant adjacent to the neighborhood. Approximately 40 percent of the residents are below the poverty level.
These demographics affected the community's relationship with computing-but in some unexpected ways. The effect might be summarized as the cultural magnification of demography. In this predominantly minority community, many saw computing as a "white thing;" in this poorly educated community, many told us that they didn't think they could use the computer because they were not well educated enough.
While discussing the demographics, I should also put to rest one issue. This was a low-income community. Yet we found in our survey that the typical family spent $170 a month on information, including print and broadcast, telephone, and other communication. Those with children also said they were willing to spend more if they thought it would benefit their children's education-an average of $16 a month more. These numbers make it clear that if networked, computer-mediated communications replaced parts of their current consumption of information, then the costs of the basic infrastructure-transport and end-user devices-are within their reach.
While the community demographic profile establishes a set of boundary conditions, it is clear that they are not as stringent as one might imagine. A second characterization of the community is in terms of its institutions-the churches, schools, civic associations, and block clubs that form an important part of people's lives. Indeed, these institutions provide a far better understanding of the community than do geography and demography. First of all, people do not necessarily associate with their neighbors, particularly if there are racial or status differences between them; they will associate across status lines within the churches. (The churches, incidentally, established a fundamental structure of the community; blacks were Protestant, Hispanics were Catholic.) Elementary schools were a truly community institution, broadly embracing the neighborhood yet also incorporating some of its basic divisions.
These institutions were keenly interested in our work. They tended to have more-educated leadership, many of whom had at least a passing awareness of current developments in information technology and were interested in understanding how this new technology could aid their institution. Although more than 80 percent of the respondents to our survey (conducted in June 1995) said that they had never heard of the information superhighway, all of the institutional leaders we worked with had.
We will return to the issue of community institutions, both as players in a community-based information strategy and in terms of some of the tensions faced by grassroots organizations.
A third perspective on the community comes from an identification of common needs. Here the data and the voices of the residents were unambiguous. The big four were education, jobs, safety, and housing. Various institutions and community associations had programs in place to address these issues, although their resources were never adequate. It would be foolish to think that technology would solve this problem, particularly in a competitive society. It is equally foolish to think that information and technology are irrelevant to the solution.
A final perspective to introduce is that of culture or subculture. Communities have subcultures; if they did not, they would not be communities. A community's culture provides the lenses through which the members perceive the world: whether in a misfortune they see a crisis or an opportunity; whether they see their neighbors as people who are deserving of their trust or not. A community's culture holds the community together; it is the safety net, more than any government program. It provides a floor through which none may fall, although it also creates a ceiling above which members should not rise. The community's culture is a source of stability and cohesion within a resource-poor and chaotic environment.
One cannot mention culture without introducing two other terms: power and investment. Community cultures are related in complex ways to the degree to which members of the community have, or feel they have, control over their own lives. Likewise, a community culture is a consequence of the investment of lives and livelihoods in the community's institutions. When families spend their evenings helping fellow parishioners, when parents volunteer at their children's school, when neighbors work together to clean up their street, they are investing in their community and developing its culture. They are willing to do so because they anticipate some return from their investment-if not in their lifetimes, in their children's. On the other hand, if they do not see that such investment will yield any return, or if they expect more powerful forces to take it away from them, they will not make the investment. In that case, the community's culture will be weak and defeatist at best.
To view universal service in a community context, we require a vision of a community-based information strategy. Within this vision we can then work out the costs and the details of how the market will support universal service. For example, one vision might be characterized as bread and circuses. The new media will be far more efficient than today's cable TV for transporting entertainment into homes. If that is all there is, we could nevertheless reduce adolescent violence and grow a new generation of "mouse potatoes" with low-cost, state-of-the-art, interactive entertainment tailored to teenagers.
An alternative vision would be to create uses of information that are empowering. These could range from educational applications to personal and community resources such as information on job availability and/or neighborhood development strategies. In our research we found that education and housing were high on the list of information "wants" that a new information resource could supply. With a modest amount of cleverness, there could be a profitable business in providing information empowerment.
How much does information empowerment cost? Stated that way, the question is nonsensical. Empowerment can neither be sold nor granted; it can be recognized, and perhaps cultivated. None of us can go into an inner-city community and provide information empowerment; but we can provide the tools.
We learned several things in our efforts to bring these tools to some Chicago neighborhoods. The first set of lessons I will summarize with a figure, which I characterize as the compass rose of the information superhighway. These six issues-content, transport, network architecture, device location, user community, and access and presentation-are the six interconnected issues in a sociotechnical architecture of advanced information services. The user community, for example, affects and is affected by the location of end-user devices. Likewise, what sort of devices one can locate where is affected by network architecture.
A second set of issues concerns the presence of local information leaders. In a corporate setting, we characterize these people as champions or change agents. In the community, these people are the champions for change, the individuals who have bought a computer for themselves and are eager to show everyone else what they can do with it.
Finally, there is an external context issue. That is to say that how these services are brought to urban communities is going to be partly driven by forces outside those communities. I am convinced that universal service within an urban community is a profitable business opportunity that does not require any public subsidy or public mandate; it does require a willingness by technology developers to experiment with applications and information resources tailored to inner-city needs. If the National Science Foundation can develop "tools for suburban schools," as one of its program officers characterized its efforts, the least it can do is provide similar support for the inner city as well.
The recognition of a broad spectrum of municipal and inner-city resources offers the entry point for developing a community-based information strategy and hence preparing a community for the full benefit of the information superhighway. The first step is to identify and evaluate the resources that are available, both in the community and in the city. In the community these resources can include local businesses, churches, schools, community development organizations, political clubs, block clubs, and neighborhood associations, as well as less formal aggregations. In some communities, for example, the post office represents an informal gathering place that is used for exchanging information. All of these resources will have their own agendas, and all will vary in their capability.
Related to this step is building a small number of central partnerships with organizations that are willing to invest their time in creating the information strategy. Community development organizations are a logical choice here, although in some communities schools or churches may be equally appropriate. The critical element here is that the leadership of the organization must have the sophistication to understand some of the implications of the information revolution. Part of building these partnerships is to establish and articulate the common goals of the partnership. A content company, for example, might have a common interest with community service organizations in selling information services that assist low-income families in finding housing. In this process, other critical partners will be found, such as municipal housing agencies.
These partners can cooperate in the assessment of the current information environment. Here it is essential to know what information resources the community has (and the credibility given to the different resources), what additional information resources are viewed as useful, and what information-intensive tasks the community faces. This information profile provides the baseline for development: If an individual's reading begins and ends with the National Enquirer, then a free subscription to the Economist will probably not enhance understanding of world affairs.
As information-intensive tasks are identified, they need to be prioritized. These priorities must belong to the community. The strategy is not to solve every problem but to thoroughly supply the critical information for solving the most pressing problems. Both the literature and interview information suggest that job seeking will be very high on this list; this identifies what types of information (content) need to be made available. In the case of job seeking, it would be the information bulleted on page three of this report.
Once we understand what sorts of information are critical to the community, we can use knowlege of both here-and-now and future technology to supply the information. For example, taking the first three bullets on page three, one could imagine a set of the following integrated services, available at devices placed in central community locations:
These low-end applications have nothing to do with the information superhighway. They can be put in place today, using the existing communications infrastructure and five-year-old computing technology. As these are planned, more futuristic enhancements can be visualized as well. Remaining within our domain of employment information, some additional information could be delivered over the next generation of communications services:
These, of course, are flights of fancy whose benefit to the community may be significant or nil. Only the community can decide. The general points are (a) the strategic information resources available to the community can be greatly enhanced using existing capabilities; and (b) the community's strategy should consist of both exploiting current capabilities and planning for future capabilities.
Only by exploiting existing technological capabilities for strategic purposes can the community develop the skills and sophistication needed to make strategic use of future capabilities. Information mastery (not just computer literacy) must be one more strategy in the toolkit of community development. In the absence of cultivating and growing the information skills and sophistication of the community, the information revolution will bring nothing more than a wider variety of entertainment and 500-channel home shopping.
Finally, such strategic planning of community information resources should address multiple task domains. Having several irons in the fire is always shrewd planning.
The final step is to develop the implementation plan, including device acquisition, applications development, and user training. All of these need to be informed regarding current and future technologies and flexible in their understanding of user vernaculars (for applications development and presentation issues) and alternative device locations. A plausible hypothesis would hold that for strategic uses within the community, optimum locations for high-end devices would not be within every home, but rather in central community locations such as stores, schools, and community centers. These issues should be driven by community purposes and objectives, not by middle-class habits.
In sum, the development of a community-based information strategy requires neither high-powered technology nor massive outside resources. It does call for the community to be able to set priorities and to mobilize local resources in pursuit of those common goals. And it further requires an awareness on the part of community leadership that the industrial world is entering into a revolution no less profound than the Industrial Revolution.
The information revolution is here. Like all revolutions, its full extent will not be understood until after some of the critical forces in society have been rearranged and strategic positions established. Like all revolutions, this one is difficult to understand in the swirl of events. New forces emerge daily, and there are surprises around every corner.
Like all periods of rapid social change, this revolution represents an opportunity for disadvantaged communities. The opportunity will become a reality only if communities can become the masters of the new information environment.
Networkers of the world, unite.
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Last updated: 9 December 1996 mkh