Computer-Mediated
Communication Magazine /
Volume 1, Number 8 / November 1, 1994 / Page 7
Challenges for a Webbed Society
by John December
(john@december.com)
[This article is a chapter in
the book, The World Wide Web Unleashed
(Sams Publishing, 1994).]
There are subtle, complex changes taking place in human communication,
thought, and relationships within online communication and information
communities. The Web is part of these changes, enabling new forms of
communication, information delivery, and fostering new associations
among people. One challenge for our society is to grapple with the
questions raised by these changes. How might our culture, society, and
communication patterns change as a result of widespread Web use?
In this chapter, I approach these questions by focusing on
specific ways the Web alters communication, thought, and society, and
on what issues arise from such changes. For people involved in the
task of installing Web servers and for users trying to make sense of
browsers and HTML, the Web may seem to consist only of a set of
technical details, protocols, and network connections. However,
communication on the Web, like human communication over computer
networks for the past several decades, displays characteristically
human qualities, including emotional, chaotic, surprising, and at
times passionate or mundane exchanges. The Web illustrates how the
inevitable pull of human beings toward each other in any communication
system alters relationships, the way people think, and what they
expect from communication.
The Scope and Extent of Web Transformations
Although the Web has changed the face of networked information
dissemination dramatically over the past years, it is a much larger
question whether the Web has or will ever change our society and
culture significantly. The use of any communication technology evolves
in the context of broader societal change, in ways so subtle that we
may never be able to detect them.
Predictions
Many inventions in human history were thought to be the ultimate
catalysts for sweeping social change: The telegraph would eliminate
wars, the telephone and television would bring democracy and education
to the people, and computer-mediated communication would transform
society as Hiltz and Turoff envisioned in The Network Nation: Human
Communication via Computer.
So the idea that the Web is the technology that will transform
our culture must be tempered by noting the hollow predictions about
earlier technologies. Humans often utilize technology in far too
complex and quirky ways for neat predictions to come true.
While not always far-reaching in their effects on society,
however,
technologies have gradually and subtly changed communication patterns,
relationships, and expectations. With 24-hour cable news, we expect to
see a dramatic or important event as it happens. With global
telecommunications, we expect to reach nearly anyone worldwide by
telephone. Participants in global computer-mediated communication
forums such as
Usenet expect to communicate with other people interested
in very specialized discussion topics. Like Marshall McLuhan's vision
of a global village, the electronic landscape today binds us together
with connectivity we expect to access instantly.
The Web fulfills several "niches" within the communications landscape
like few technologies before it and offers a new set of expectations
about information that break the traditions of linear print.
So while the Web may fail to live up to any prediction that it
will radically alter our lives immediately, its qualities as a
communication technology may have some effect on future expectations
and communication patterns. Also, the Web already offers unique
features--interactivity and one-to-many broadcasting
capabilities--that set it apart from previous communication media.
The Web fulfills several "niches" within the communications landscape
like few technologies before it and offers a new set of expectations
about information that break the traditions of linear print.
The Web Fulfills a Dream and a "Gap"
Vannevar Bush, in a landmark article called "As We May Think" in the
July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly,
described his vision of a
device for helping the human mind cope with information. Bush observed
that previous inventions expanded human abilities to deal with the
physical world, but not floods of information and knowledge. Observing
that the human mind works by association through "some intricate web
of trails carried by the cells of the brain," Bush proposed a device
he called a "memex" which could augment the human mind through
"associative indexing." Bush's vision was for a system of information
which could link documents in "trails" that could be saved and shared
with others.
The Web fulfills Bush's dream of a memex in many respects.
While a "universe" of knowledge is still evolving on the Web, the
hypertext "trails" on Web pages are associative indexes that people
save and share. The Web can link information in useful ways, giving
rise to new insights--a transformation of information to knowledge
that Bush described in terms of applications in law, medicine,
chemistry, and history.
An HTML version of Bush's article
,
developed by Denys Duchier,
contains links to several applications that fulfill Bush's
predictions.
The Web offers other correspondences to many features of Bush's
memex. There are "trails" within the
subject trees
of information on
the Web that connect extremely useful documents and resources. Web
browser hotlists serve as "trails," where people record their stops of
interest along paths through the Web. As Bush predicted for his memex,
there are many people on the Web today "who find delight in the task
of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common
record." The Web's basic structure rests on Bush's principle of
associative indexing, and the flourishing of information on the Web in
the last few years demonstrates its potential as a "universe of
documents."”
In addition to fulfilling many needs identified by Bush for
human intellectual activity, the Web also fills a "media gap"
identified by Tetsuro Tomita. In his essay, "The New Electronic Media
and Their Place in the Information Market of the Future," (in
Newspapers and Democracy: International Essays on a Changing Medium,
A. Smith, editor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), Tomita observed a
pattern in the way traditional communications methods were used to
reach audiences. Methods such as letters, telegrams, and conversation
reach a very small audience in amounts of time ranging from immediate
(telephone) to several days (a letter). Mass media such as radio and
television, newspapers, books and movies reach very large audiences in
times ranging from immediate (radio, television) to weeks (magazines)
to months (books). But the middle range--audiences of 10 to 10,000
people reached within times ranging from immediate to a day--is a
gap filled by few traditional media. This is too small an audience for
mass media and too large an audience for personally controlled
(traditional) media. Yet this is the audience and time delay gap that
many forms of computer-mediated communication fill, including the Web.
The Web offers immediate delivery of information to specialized
audiences. There are many examples of webs that draw audiences in the
range of Tomita's media gap--in fact, these audiences are what the
Net seems to support in abundance. Specialized groups in Usenet and
specialized webs do not necessarily appeal to massive audiences (in
the 100,000 to millions range), but to quirky, specialized groups of
hundreds or several thousand people. Before the invention of computer
networks, an individual could not easily seek out several hundred
others interested in a specialized hobby or area of interest, when
those people were spread worldwide. No traditional media offered a
personally available means to accomplish this. But the Web does
fill this "media gap," and this feature
is certainly a contributor to the Web's
popularity and growth.
Changes in Communication Characteristics
As part of fulfilling the needs identified by Bush for a system of
associative thought and by Tomita for reaching specialized audiences
in the media gap, the Web alters many characteristics of
communication:
- Time and space constraints. Like many forms of computer-mediated
communication (CMC), the Web provides a way for users
to create communication artifacts that can be accessed by
anyone at any time. The benefits of this asynchronous
communication are:
- People don't need to be co-present in order to exchange
a message.
- People can communicate with and associate online with
others based on interest rather than geography.
- Power and communication control. The power of the press lies
with those who own a press. On the Web, everyone with the
necessary skills owns a press.
Dissemination of ideas on a mass and medium scale is no longer
filtered through organizations and institutions but can come
directly from individuals. Net and Web-based magazines
(zines) can
flourish rapidly or die quickly based on the ambition or interest of
their publishers.
Even without the label "zine," all web pages serve as
"publications" that anyone can access. On the surface, this is
a dramatic shift from institutions as holders of the publishing
key. However, the cacophony of voices on the Net generates
"noise," causing users to seek guidance according to
signposts--institutionally sponsored or established
commercial publishers, or web pages that have grown reputations
for various purposes.
The Web can shatter institutional control over knowledge (which
relies on geographic proximity of members, and boundaries on
knowledge dissemination) and give control to individuals and ad
hoc, online groups.
- Expressive possibilities. The Web offers expressive
possibilities that no other information space has provided
before. The Web's text is unbounded--not constrained to a
single artifact or work--but can include links deep into other
works by other authors. Web text thus can be never-ending,
finding continuing associations among texts through
hypertext links.
- Relationships among people and information. Paper texts
reference each other--in fact, this is the basis for
scholarly works and the "great conversation" of literature.
However, the association on paper is referential (in the form
of a citation, excerpt, or summary of the other work) rather
than associative (a live "link" directly to the other work).
Moreover, a paper reference is bounded (cast in the medium and
space of the referring text) rather than unbounded (changing
the user's focus of attention entirely into the space of the
referred text via a hypertext link).
Associative linking fosters relationships among people in
addition to relationships among information. Experts in a
particular field create pools of knowledge on their home page.
When other people link into these pages, cliques of experts
form. These cliques might be based on information or on
hobbies, interests, culture, or political leanings. The result
is that "electronic tribes" can form that meld cooperatively
linked people in associations that could not be possible any
other way. For example, related information from a subject page
in
CERN's
Virtual Library
reveal collections of experts, institutions, and
organizations all interested in a particular subject or topic.
Through these links, the Web reveals relationships among information
and people. Unlike the linearism of text that integrates ideas
in a single form, the Web relies on creating linked
relationships among disparate pieces of information to build
meaning. Unlike the ephemeral, synchronous communication spaces
of
Internet Relay Chat
and
MU*s, where text-based conversation
flows and is usually never recorded, Web linking reveals
relationships--and these links form a record of information
relationships.
Issues and Challenges
As the Web alters communication and information patterns, the
resulting change raises issues our society must face for individual,
group, and societal responsibility. Moral and legal issues will arise
in the areas of individual behavior, societal responsibility for
issues of access and information literacy, and the new relationships,
communication, and thought patterns the Web fosters.
Individual Behavior: Packet Ethics
The current Internet/Web relies on an open-access model: anyone can
follow a public link in a web page and call up a resource, whether it
is a 300-byte HTML file or a 1.8 Megabyte MPEG movie. While the
relatively limited number of Web users today and adequate network
bandwidth make this model feasible, its future is threatened if there
are far more Web users without a proportional increase in bandwidth.
Essentially, the problem relates to the "tragedy of the commons"
situation: a commonly held resource (network bandwidth), when made
freely available to all, sometimes results in users abusing the
resource.
This issue is not yet a serious problem on the Web for several
reasons. First, unlike a grazing commons for livestock, network
bandwith is not consumed permanently, but only temporarily occupied.
Second, advances in network technology have made more bandwidth
available, and the bandwidth that exists is not needed all the time.
Although popular Web servers are noted for their degraded performance
during busy times, it is unlikely that all potential Web users will
try access to any given Web server
at the same time. In fact, the telephone system depends on
this same principle: If everyone with a phone tried to make a call
simultaneously, there would be "phone jams."
So while the aggregate behavior of users dispersed across a
network often might not cause serious bandwidth problems today,
widespread patterns of bandwidth-intensive individual behavior, in
extreme cases, can. What about the user who heavily accesses graphics
or movies on the Web? While there may be no laws to stop this user, an
agreement between the user and the Internet service provider might
restrict such activity. If the user violated this agreement, he or she
could loose the account. However, on a much larger scale, enforcement
and the definition of what is "overuse" is harder to pin down. Our
society's emerging sense of "etiquette" has only begun to address this and
other issues about behavior in a public network space.
While
Arlene
H. Rinaldi's excellent Net Etiquette guide
touches on many
practical issues of personal behavior, larger questions remain that
are not easily resolved or codified. For example, what about
individuals who provide information that may be:
- Illegal in some jurisdictions where it could be downloaded (for
example, non-exportable encryption programs or information that
is banned in a particular country or state)
- Offensive to others beyond mere "disagreements," but violating
cultural and community standards for offensiveness
- In violation of copyright laws or counter to Net traditions for
information dissemination and intellectual property protection
- Intended to undermine or overthrow a government
Court cases may test these issues and prompt legislation.
However, our laws and customs today aren't prepared to answer the
issues these situations raise.
Societal Responsibility: Access Issues
If the Web becomes a major form of communication for government,
commerce, and education, how can we assure that everyone has access to
it? Access is more than just physical--it means not only having the
ability to use the hardware and software to access the Web, but having
the knowledge (information literacy) to make use of the content.
Today, we struggle to teach print literacy to people.
What will the
world be like when information literacy skills are needed in addition?
Experts in communication today would be hard-pressed to even define
Web information literacy, much less be prepared to create curriculum
for a variety of educational contexts. At the same time, Web
communication is here, and those who are skilled can take advantage
of it.
Can a society justify creating an elite information infrastructure, one
that enriches only the privileged with the resources, skills, and
knowledge to use it?
Moreover, many initiatives for providing skills in networked
communication focus only on physical access to networks and tools.
Skilled people to set up the equipment and train people in Web-based
communication is another, perhaps scarcer, resource. Networked
communication today requires a fairly specialized set of skills. While
the Web masks the details of some communication activities (like FTP
commands or the details of a telnet connection), it raises still more
issues (for example, the fine points of HTML page design, how to
create a working HTML Form).
How will our society deal with a form of communication that
requires such specialized knowledge on relatively expensive equipment?
The
U.S.
Library of Congress has a Web server
but whom does it serve?
Can a society justify creating an elite information infrastructure, one
that enriches only the privileged with the resources, skills, and
knowledge to use it?
Human Relationships: Balancing Online and Offline
If modern civilization obliterates safe public spaces for people to
meet and freely interchange ideas, how will our society deal with such
spaces formed only online? Will psychological dependence on networked
communication create imbalances in offline relationships? Research in
computer-mediated communication has not answered these questions with
regard to Web-based communication, and answers won't necessarily come
soon or easily (For example, the debate about television's impact on
our society continues).
If network activity becomes a major form of human
communication, people may associate more freely online because they
are not slowed by geographical or temporal limits. How will our
institutions (government, education, religious) change to accommodate
these new associations? Institutions often act as a force to help
people achieve a group identity, but if people can create their own
group identity in the form of network-based alliances, how will this
change offline institutions? What will happen to those institutions
whose power and influence are usurped by groups performing the same
function online?
Ultimately, the communication possibilities offered by the Web
can't help but change human relationships. People no longer might
identify with a physical neighborhood for companionship or advice;
they can turn to a cyberspace neighborhood, based on mutual interests
and association, as a source for support and information. (This has
already happened for many people in many online communities). Will
this continue to erode physical public space? In the long term, the
relationships the Web fosters will certainly continue to raise more
questions as well as open up new ways for people to associate.
Summary
Like failed urban planning and architecture schemes, technology
developed to transform society often falls flat when given over to
people to use. The Web, a technological invention that has spread
through voluntary use, perhaps has an advantage over such inventions.
Despite the rapid growth of Web traffic and activity, however, the
significance of the impact of the Web on our society remains unknown.
There are several characteristics of the Web that may indicate
its power to change our lives. The Web very closely fits Vannevar
Bush's description of a tool essential for extending human thought.
Similarly, the Web fits very well into Tetsuro Tomita's "media gap" of
audiences and time constraints that traditional media do not reach. As
a means of communication, the Web transcends time and space
constraints, alters power and control, makes possible new expressive
styles, and creates new relationships among people and information.
Our society is just beginning to face issues that may have more
serious impacts if Web use becomes more widespread. Individual and
societal responsibilities for Web use, access, and training have not
been defined, and the way Web-based communication alters human
relationships has not yet been examined in detail. In the long term,
human interaction online can't be planned or predicated any more than
the growth of vibrant, exciting cities. Our society is only beginning
to identify the changes the Web may have already brought to
communication.
¤
REFERENCES
- Hiltz, R. & Turoff, M. (1978). The Network Nation: Human
Communication via Computer. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
- Tomita, T. (1980). The new electronic media
and their place in the information market of the future. In
Newspapers and Democracy: International Essays on a Changing Medium,
Ed. A. Smith. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
This article appears as a chapter in the book,
The World Wide Web Unleashed
by John December, Neil Randall, and others
(Sams Publishing, 1994).
Copyright © 1994 Sams Publishing. All rights reserved.
Printed by Permission.
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