The ELECTRONIC highway and the FUTURE of our COMMUNITIES Garth Graham aa127@freenet.carleton.ca BC in 2001 Conference Royal Roads University Victoria, BC, October 25, 1996 I haven't even begun, and here I am already playing typographic word games with the title of your conference. Fair warning - I do a lot of thinking about the consequences of travelling on electronic highways. But, rather than travelling, I find it far more interesting to think about what happens when you get some place. Your title assumes that its the highway that's the cause of change in community. I'm going to try and convince you that it could be the other way around. If we can consciously think about the future of living in communities in new ways, then the "design" of the electronic highways that take us in and out of them will follow the new objectives we set, and not the other way around. I'm going to show you what happens if you make the idea of community front and centre in public policy planning. Also, what happens if you don't. Let me be quite clear about where I'm headed. In a Knowledge Society, public policy that is not grounded in community won't work. 1. OVERVIEW There are two stories in this presentation. The main plot is about the future of community. But the subplot demonstrates a method for imagining futures. I'm going to start by playing with the idea of electronic public space. Then I'm going to use the concepts that electronic public space evokes as a platform to develop four scenarios about the future of community 1.1 ELECTRONIC PUBLIC SPACE - BEING THERE, NOT GETTING THERE... An electronic highway is a privately owned transit system - a way of getting in and out of places. An electronic highway routes and switches your bits outside your door, but what do you do with your bits when you are at home? An electronic public space is a commons - a "place" where we come together and express our shared responsibility. To coin a phrase and mix a metaphor; now that there's an electronic chicken in every POT (POT stands for plain old telephony), an electronic highway has no business in the kitchens of the nation. 1.2 SCENARIOS - FOUR FUTURES FOR COMMUNITY: Why Scenarios? I believe that anticipating the future is one the most essential skills for citizens of a Knowledge Society. There are formal methods for doing this and I'm going to demonstrate one of them - how to create scenarios as a method of thinking about the future. As a way of exploring the consequences of using electronic public spaces in daily living, I'm going to outline four scenarios for the future of community. But I'm also going to show you, step by step, how I wrote them. * CYBURBIA - the world of the cyberspace shopping mall and the 500 channel universe * GLOBAL VILLAGE - the official future of the information highway, where knowledge workers find their community only in big corporations * NO GO ZONE - a violent world of road warriors and city states that exclude all but the wealthy * HARMONY - a world where the local action of self determined communities successfully counter-balances the pressures to globalize I'm not a very practical person, as you are about to find out. But I try and keep an old rule of thumb in mind - never eat anything larger than your head. However, you can't imagine the future of community without first imagining the future of the society within which it sits. The society of the present and the society of 2001 aren't the same. We have to take the leap and begin to "design" social change, not just the highway. This is a fairly large task. But it is not an impossible task. I jumped into the pool of thinking about social change to swim a few lengths, and discovered I was in the middle of a Trans-Pacific solo kayak crossing! But, by using scenarios as my paddle, I learned some things. If I share them with you, I'm hoping we can raft some kayaks together. 1.3 IMAGES OF ELECTRONIC PUBLIC SPACE I believe the idea of electronic public space is more important to the future of healthy communities than the idea of an electronic highway. [image] - The BC 2001 conference graphic, showing a computer terminal superimposed over a mountain village with the electronic highway coming from outside the frame and ending in a point at centre screen. There are no people in the picture. The conference graphic is a great illustration of what's wrong with the highway metaphor in public policy. "Community" is the goal or the market of the policy. It's the place where the electronic highway starts and stops, the coordinates of the "on-ramps," the terminus for the transportation of bits. It's as if government and business get the bits to the edge of community, but at that point their responsibility stops. It's not only a transportation metaphor, it's a linear, connect- the-dots metaphor. How do I erase this picture from your mind and replace it with something more appropriate? One good graphic would have a huge conceptual impact on how we think about a Knowledge Society. It must have something to do with electronic public space, with picturing a virtual community as every bit (pun intended) as much a locatable place as is a "real" world community with geographic coordinates. I went looking, but I couldn't find it. Somehow we've imagined the characteristics of a sort of virtual place. But, while we're settling that place at a rapid rate, we still can't visualize what it looks like in our minds. [image] - Poster from the first Canadian community networking conference in 1993. It shows isolated individuals climbing up over a terminal keyboard and merging, ghost-like, into a slightly forbidding futuristic cityscape on the screen. As program coordinator for this conference, I was happy with this poster then. I'm not now. These people are leaving us behind for some unknown other, and the way that they are isolated from each other is disturbing. There is no sense of community in this picture. [image] - "IGA puts groceries online," newspaper picture of home shopper using one of 14 IGA "cybermarkets" in Quebec (http://www.iga.net/qc). Here's a better image. It shows how ordinary and ubiquitous our daily use of the Net is becoming. It shows a national business interacting directly with local consumer needs. This changes the way the consumer buys, but it also changes how and where the corporation does business by making its web site a transaction space. But it's still a picture of an individual, not of virtual neighbours. [image] - A 19th century barn raising lithograph, with a computer terminal superimposed on it (From a Whole Earth Review article on virtual communities, Summer 1991). This is the only image I found that even comes close. But its rural life flavour doesn't convey anything specific about the feel of living in future electronic community. The only thing that's common to all of these is that screen! (eg. Sherry Turkle. Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet). Maybe we won't get anywhere with this problem until the interface devices disappear into the background and all we really see is each other? Or maybe it's not something that we can objectively see, just as the CPU/chip that is really the "computer" (for now) is iconically replaced by the key board and screen in our pictures of computers. We look at just the surface(the input/output devices) because looking "inside" doesn't tell us anything? What I really want in a graphic is a geographic icon or spatial metaphor that maps the coordinates of electronic public space as a place where people interact. It also needs to feel multi-dimensional, to give a sense of what it feels like to operate in an open and distributed system. Yes, I know there's the Web and the Net and the Matrix, but I can't yet see how I get to be "me" in those geometries Let me ask you. Visualize virtual community as electronic public space, an open multidimensional self-organizing space that is communally designed and used as a commons. How would you draw it? What qualities would such an image need to include? [image] - A flat two dimensional representation of the three dimensional shadow of a fourth dimensional hyper soap bubble, and a word list of the "visual qualities of electronic public space." That's a checklist of the qualities that would need to be in a visual metaphor of virtual community before it could approach the utility and familiarity of the highway metaphor: Feels like... Communal, neighbourly Open ("public") Trust Social networks Integrated diversity Civic engagement Town meeting Distributed functions Hypertext Netware Groupware Simulated "reality?" feedback Cyberspace "mapping?" When I tried this one out on some colleagues, they said "Garth, you've got a list of abstract qualities plus some abstract mathematics. You're getting farther away from what you want." That's true. My hyperbubble has even less people in it's "landscape" than the conference logo. There is no good metaphor for a "space" that we cooperatively occupy mentally. There is no icon for being there. We are doing it, but we can't seem to visualize what it feels like to integrate into a shared thinkspace, to be "in" groupware up to our "I's." Until we visualize it, it will continue to be very hard to talk about. Let me leave you with the challenge to find me this.... As I switch to talking about scenarios, It's going to look like I've left this topic of electronic public space behind. But, in fact it's the key assumption underlying my scenarios - that electronic public space is a transaction space, a real place where people interact. 2. STEPS IN CREATING SCENARIOS Is the future a dangerous place? Are things getting better or worse? Who or what is going to steer you through the dangers? My personal experience is that the public interest groups involved in electronic highway policy and telecommunications deregulation are not anticipating what it will feel like to live in a Knowledge Society in any coherent way. But then neither is anybody else. I also believe that only looking backwards gives such a skewed view of the possibilities that it makes for bad decisions. To see forward with a clear eye, you must dream long and plan short. Scenarios as stories are part of dreaming. No one can predict the future. But anyone can influence the direction of future events by having a clearer sense than those around them of where they want to go. If you "never have time to think," then creating scenarios provides time and a means for serious thinking about the "there" in "getting from here to there." Creating scenarios is a specific method of telling "What if?" stories about the future. It's a preliminary step in the design phase of thinking about major problems. You do it in advance of strategic and tactical planning. You do it in order to apply, in the words of a leading practitioner Peter Schwartz, "The art of the long view." The audience for those stories is anyone inside and outside of your organization who you feel you must influence in thinking about the consequences of future courses of action. It provides common vocabulary in the discussion of options and alternatives for future action. It surfaces surprising possibilities that might not otherwise be considered. The scenario development method uses an analysis of basic trends and uncertainties to expand the imagined range of possibilities for action. It proceeds in steps as follows: a. Identify a decision - agree on a key focal issue or decision - What keeps you awake at night? b. Key driving forces - identify key internal and external driving forces affecting that decision. c. Rank the factors of highest importance and greatest uncertainty. d. Factor analysis, building toward story logics by cross-referencing the uncertainties against each other. e. Name and tell the stories - come to an agreement about a limited set of story lines that describe possible futures. Create a narrative skin that fleshes out the scenarios and their implications - now we can anticipate what we previously didn't imagine could happen. f. Identify signposts - select leading indicators or signposts - how will we know which mix of possible futures is actually occurring? At the end of the process, you can come back to your decision and see it differently in the light of several possible futures. 3. CREATING SCENARIOS - STEP ONE - DECISION Scenario creation is driven by agreement about a particular decision related to a significant problem. Normally, it's pretty clear whose decision and problem these are. They belong to the group that comes together to think about it. But, working this up on my own, I had to imagine someone and their problem in order to begin. This proved more of a challenge than I thought. The problem itself seems simple. But my personal experiences with addressing it have resulted in years of frustration. How do we fully engage the thinking of all stakeholders about what is clearly a radical social transformation, and how do we re-attach lost questions of the public interest to the public policy agenda? Given that general public experience of Internet connectivity is growing rapidly, where should the centre of gravity be in making socio-economic decisions about electronic highway impacts and re- structuring processes? Where will we locate the choices about applications of new communications tools? Who decides; individuals, communities, governments, or businesses? So far, the dialogue has been largely between government and business. But every attempt at grassroots dialogue I've seen recently shows that the degree of public experience of and concern for connectivity is far greater than governments and business expect. To me, it has always made sense to increase the attention paid to community centered choice. That's why I see community networks as important, because they are a powerful local means of turning experience into practice. So, what might happen in anticipating socio-economic change if we focussed on the local and not, as does federal information highway policy, on the global? The "problem" is the weight to give bottom-up (community centered) approaches to participation in decisions about socio-economic and political change as opposed to top down imposed approaches. Who knows best? Or, stating the question of who knows best? in classic impact assessment terms, who benefits from the electronic highway and who pays? What will give communities a greater sense of control over their futures and a greater influence in the design of the communications infrastructure that is altering their lives? The difficulty is, who's the "we" that asks these questions? Basically, it's a decision for local, provincial and federal governments, but it's a decision that public interest groups have already decided and are urging for governments' attention. This puts us into the middle of a dilemma described very succinctly by Dr Ursula Franklin. In a lifetime of citizen action on issues of technological change, she began with the belief that politicians were well intentioned but ill-informed. She moved pragmatically to the belief that they were ill-intentioned and well informed. In other words, the problem in effecting this change in policy isn't one of awareness. It's a tactical problem of demonstrating political necessity. Very recently, public interest groups and high tech corporations in Canada have begun to talk to each other about the concept of electronic public space, or virtual community, and its absence from the public policy agenda. Is it now time to change the official language of discourse from electronic highway (communications as the transportation of bits) to electronic public space (communications as talking)? (Heather Menzies, Whose Brave new world, p.xiv, refers to, "...the importance of language in the construction of public perception.") I decided to imagine a Provincial Information Highway Advisory Council (PIHAC) that advises a Cabinet Minister and that has its feet straddling the gap between the government and the community. What could it recommend to the politicians that might make a difference? I then imagined that the PIHAC finds official dialogue about the electronic highway does not contribute to general public awareness of the real issues involved and does not adequately engage key stakeholders in informed decision making. It wants to recommend a credible approach to the use of new communications technologies that would place the quality of life in community at the centre of electronic highway policy. Here's the DECISION they agree on to initiate their creation of scenarios: The concept of ELECTRONIC PUBLIC SPACE is missing from the official public policy agenda about the nature of a knowledge society. It should be there - YES OR NO? 4. CREATING SCENARIOS - STEP TWO - FACTORS What I am about to do is just one person's perspective, and that's not a good way to create scenarios. Any group following the same route that I'm taking would not produce the same results. Like all complex systems, the process of authoring scenarios is highly subject to initial conditions, particularly the mix and motives of the group that does it. The second step in creating scenarios, identifying key internal and external driving forces that affect the decision, always goes fairly fast. It's basically brainstorming, something that people are comfortable with. It's easy to generate huge lists, but that slows things down later when you begin to work with them. It's best to keep each of the two lists, internal and external, down to around twenty items. I'm only going to show you enough of my original lists to demonstrate the process. 4.1 KEY INTERNAL FORCES IN THE TRANSITION TO VIRTUAL COMMUNITY - The sustainability of community networks - Does virtual community increase / decrease civic engagement? - Role and purpose of community networks - Acceptable use policies and behaviour in EPS - Democracy or other forms of local governance? - Adapting community nets to WWW - Bridging experience among communities SUSTAINABILITY: Across the country, you'll find almost as many models for financing community networks as there are communities. They range from the "full freenet" volunteer model to shared common service WANs where institutions that are already heavily networked pool their resources. We don't yet know which of these are going to be the best practices. CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: Are we making communities better or worse? When networks become large factors in the life of a community, are we still a society in which we have special obligations to one another as citizens? In effect, do we stay in "place" or do we surf our way to somewhere else? (see, for example, the concept of social capital in Robert Putnam. Bowling alone: America's declining social capital. Journal of Democracy 6:1 Jan/95, 65-78) PURPOSE OF COMMUNITY NETWORKS: Do community networks merely provide access, connectivity and non-profit community oriented content services? Or are they defenders of electronic public space at the community level, and designers of a new zone of socialization where community experience of life in a Knowledge Society can be turned into practice? ACCEPTABLE USE: The value of a network increases in relation to the complexity of its connections. So the more open it remains, the more valuable it becomes. As the Net becomes a place where, more and more, the transactions of daily living occur, than behaviour IN that place becomes an ever greater critical factor. How does a community balance netiquette as customary use and the outside pressures to regulate the extremes of behaviour by law? DEMOCRACY: G.K.Chesterton once said, "The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly, the rich have always objected to being governed at all." In what way does the transformation of democracy as our form of governance depend on the restructuring of civic life? Jay Weston, one of the founders of National Capital FreeNet, once said we should be "downloading government, but uploading governance." But by what means? In general, politicians don't use email. Why not? ADAPTING TO WWW: Community network boards are finding that solving this problem involves far more than understanding new software. They are finding profoundly difficult questions of how to express even the existence of a community in the transaction spaces of hypertext. BRIDGING EXPERIENCE: To what degree are inter-community alliances, such as the BC Community Networks Association or Telecommunities Canada, critical to the success of virtual community in fostering community development? 4.2 KEY EXTERNAL TRENDS INFLUENCING THE CONTEXT OF THE DECISION - Public attitudes to structural change - Only gov't can put us all in the same room - The political economy of knowledge - Tech. convergence and cheap connectivity - Identity/place - the rise of self determination - Future of work / end of jobs - Communications is talking, not transportation - Citizens or consumers? ATTITUDES: We all know that a profound socio-economic restructuring is under way, but what do we really know about how people feel about it and in what context of past or future they place their understanding? Is it totally a matter of fear and anxiety, or is there more to it. Some people are pushing for change, not everyone is resisting. ONLY GOVERNMENTS: If the social rules are changing, by what means do we re-negotiate them? In the public interest groups, I have friends who believe strongly that both the decisions and the means to them are a government responsibility. I have other friends who believe that we act now and tell the government later, that policy change always follows social change. Some of them are busy grinding Toronto to a halt at this very moment. POLITICAL ECONOMY: A political economy of knowledge treats information as a verb, not a noun. A political economy of knowledge values unique individual experience and expression far more than an industrial economy. Ideas really matter, but they are not scarce resources. This turns the tables on traditional economic thinking based on competition in the allocation of scarce resources. The rules for making money are quite different. TECHNOLOGY CONVERGENCE: The new generation of computer chips started shipping last May. While I envy those of you who have your 200 megahertz Pentiums, their chip only has 3 million transistors. The new chip has 20 million. IDENTITY/PLACE: The key social unit of a Knowledge Society, isn't the group, it's the individual. If Aboriginal First Peoples and Quebec can have a right of self determination, why can't I? But this shift toward individualism makes the question of how our relation to a particular landscape shapes our identity even more important. What virtual space does a self determining me need in order to be me? FUTURE OF WORK: Opinion polling in Canada consistently shows that the end of jobs is THE number one fear. DEFINING COMMUNICATIONS: The very language that we speak about public policy "on" the electronic highway, or "in" electronic public space colours the outcomes we can imagine. CITIZENS OR CONSUMERS: I know why businesses view me as a consumer. But why are governments so eager to see me as a mere consumer of what they now call electronic services? This baffles me! 5. CREATING SCENARIOS - STEP THREE - RANKING FACTORS BY IMPORTANCE AND UNCERTAINTY The only factors we'll be carrying forward from this step are those that rank highest in importance and highest in uncertainty. This step can get quite dramatic when people realize we're going to leave some of their favourite themes out of the next steps in the analysis. But we can and should come back and use these checklists when we're fleshing out the stories in the scenarios. We're not really abandoning anything. 5.1 INTERNAL FORCES RANKED BY IMPORTANCE AND UNCERTAINTY: "H" stands for high, "L" stands for low. H/L - SUSTAINABILITY: Community networks are highly critical to community control of the virtualization of local social networks. So, whether or not they survive really matters. But I believe several of the many financing models are quite sustainable. The ability of community nets to pay their own way is not uncertain. H/H - CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: There is a direct connection between a personal commitment to be "in" a particular place and the social capital of that place. But, when time and distance don't matter, will we stay or go? H/H - PURPOSE OF COMMUNITY NETWORKS: Electronic public space is at the centre of my argument. Frankly, I don't see how communities can defend EPS without local ownership of a community network. But it's not certain when and how they'll recognize this purpose. H/L - ACCEPTABLE USE: Paying attention to this problem is difficult and necessary. But you live your way into it. You don't solve it. H/H - DEMOCRACY: My guess is that representative democracy does not survive restructuring. But I'm not certain of that. L/L - ADAPTING TO WWW: Community nets and virtual social nets are doing this every day L/H - BRIDGING EXPERIENCE: I rank this LOW in importance from the community's perspective because local alliances across agencies are more important than external alliances within sectors. Also because the Net does crosslinks automatically and with far less cost than negotiating new institutions. I rank it HIGH in uncertainty, because it remains to be seen which way the resources for alliances will flow. 5.2 EXTERNAL TRENDS RANKED BY IMPORTANCE AND UNCERTAINTY: H/H - ATTITUDES: The politics of this, the art of the possible, depends on climates of opinion about the nature of problems. It's not at all certain what attitudes are shaping the direction of public opinion. L/H - ONLY GOVERNMENTS: While the role of governments is important, it is also quite certain that they will react to change, not drive it. H/H - POLITICAL ECONOMY: I think there's good odds that the defenders of the old economic rules have enough power to really get in the way of change that could be beneficial. But I'm not certain that they will always win. H/L - TECHNOLOGY CONVERGENCE: Does anyone doubt that it will converge? H/H - IDENTITY/PLACE: World wide, the shift in emphasis to individuals is a huge factor in basic social change. But we've only begun to consider how electronic social networks affect basic definitions of the individual's sense of identity. H/L - FUTURE OF WORK: Does anyone doubt that the nature of work is changing? H/H - DEFINING COMMUNICATIONS: Whether transnational corporations will begin to see self-interest or threat in the idea of electronic public space as a commons, remains to be seen. H/H - CITIZENS OR CONSUMERS: To see citizens as consumers, bureaucrats would have to stop being "corporatist technocrats." Even when the netizens start to increase their influence inside public administration, it's not certain that bureaucrats can make this change. 5.3 SUMMARY OF MOST IMPORTANT AND UNCERTAIN FACTORS * INTERNAL: * civic engagement? * purpose of community nets * forms of local government? * EXTERNAL: * Attitudes to change * Political economy of knowledge * self determination * communications as talking * Citizens or consumers? 6. CREATING SCENARIOS - STEP FOUR - FACTOR ANALYSIS; SPECTRUMS OF CRUCIAL UNCERTAINTY: Next, taking each remaining factor in turn, we stretch it out into a continuum of possible actions... * CIVIC ENGAGEMENT decreases, people leave home. It increases, they stay put. TRAVELLERS <<<-------------->>> RESIDENTS * PURPOSE - are community networks quasi-governmental access and content services or are they creators of a new zone of socialization? SERVICES <<<--------------->>> EPS DEFENSE * In a KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY, ideas are not a scarce resource. An Industrial economy is about competition over scarce resources WIN/WIN <<<------------>>> WIN/LOSE * Are networked COMMUNICATIONS about technically transporting bits or about social transactions among people? GET THERE <<<------------>>> BE THERE If we relate the spectrum where the ROLE OF COMMUNITY NETS ranges from defending EPS to providing services, to the spectrum where CIVIC ENGAGEMENT ranges from leaving the community as a disengaged traveller to staying in place as a committed resident, we have four quadrants where we can subjectively imagine what the outcomes or possibilities of these interactions might be: ELECTRONIC PUBLIC SPACE /TRAVELLERS (go) Engagement is individual, not social. If people grow community nets, they focus on individualistic interests, needs, RIGHTS SERVICES / TRAVELLERS (go) As commercial ISP CONTENT services improve, community nets disappear ELECTRONIC PUBLIC SPACE / RESIDENTS (stay) Virtual community serves need to capture learning about Knowledge Society transition ...community networks serve a BINDING function SERVICES / RESIDENTS (stay) Community nets INSTITUTIONALIZE as part of civic sector "informing" services, but as "not-for-profit," they are marginal to the society's economic priorities. 7. CREATING SCENARIOS - STEP FIVE - NAME AND TELL THE STORIES: We've just come through the difficult and frustrating part of creating scenarios. It takes analysis of many diagrams before the keys to a bigger picture begin to emerge. If you haven't done this before, at this point it's difficult to believe it will all come together. In a workshop we'd take an overnight break to let the mind unconsciously chew on the details. Invariably, the next morning several people say, "I see how it all fits." 7.1 NO GO ZONE * City states, walled towns, excluded enclaves and road warriors * Paranoid cyberpunk dystopia * Politics of discordant ideologies * Security, individual rights and freedoms * Community nets as zones for flame wars and social experiment This scenario is the cyberpunk dystopia of William Gibson's novel, "Neuromancer." But the name "No Go Zone" is actually the title of an essay on the web site of the anarchist writer, Hakim Bey. He describes a badly fractured world, where the communities that survive turn inward and isolate the governable from the ungovernable. On the one side, there are city states and walled towns, and on the other, self-defining enclaves that have withdrawn from "government" control or been kicked out. People, in trying to survive, are pre- occupied by what's in it for them. The issues engaging local participation within each city state or NGZ focus on individual needs and rights. The key political issue is security and the key political emotion is paranoia. The choices about where to live are very limited for most people. Except in the city states, behaviour is largely ungoverned. In the excluded enclaves, the concept of "membership" in anything is highly fluid. Individual identity is self-determined, because the wider society doesn't care. This is a world of poverty, road warriors (for example, Somalia "technicals") and the power of the gun. What democracy there is, operates only within city states, and it is open only to those with property. Politics is subject to capture by demagogues and ideologies. Cults of personality flourish like weeds. This is US inner cities. It's Lagos. We all know it. This is the least "deferential" of all of the political climates, so democracy begins to give way before the priority that people feel for security. The high value placed on individual freedom inhibits the emergence of socially cohesive organization. There is fear, political turbulence, class conflict, and far more have-nots than haves. This is the "dissonance" scenario, the opposite of the Harmony Scenario. The word "discord" characterizes interactions among temporary alliances, not the word "accord" used here in British Columbia's Electronic Highway policy. Economic power is gatekeeping power. It depends on secrets, trading information and islands of expertise. Markets fragment into localized micro-markets. This actually is as close as it gets to pure market in any scenario, because the social fragmentation makes organization of monopoly supply very difficult. While imagination doesn't rule the political economy, it is the most unbounded in this scenario. Where there are resources, the NGZs are highly experimental about modes of cultural expression. Within themselves, the city states are too static and homogeneous to allow for innovation. The Inbred imagination of city states feeds secretively on the ideas of NGZs. The voyeuristic desire to know what you've excluded, produces a strange hybridization of ideas. "Reality" becomes optional in truly unexpected ways. The climate for the growth of community networks is highly situational, and the content of community networks is oriented to rights issues. Since NGZ occupants are ready to become travellers at the slightest loud noise, participation in the structuring of things like community networks becomes an exercise in "just-in-time" citizenship. In other words, without a high degree of perception of the relevance of an issue to immediate needs, there's very little participation. NGZ community networks, such as they are, are flame war zones - exciting and dangerous places - acting as islands of fragile social coherence within the anarchy. The degree of civic engagement necessary to sustain a community network as "service" is absent. However, their role as social experiment zones is fully understood. After the structure of our present world completes its disintegration, the fragmented society that results in No Go Zone is quite stable over the long term. This is a new and lasting Dark Age of Anarchy. 7.2 CYBURBIA * Individuals isolated as consumers of artificial experience * Culture as commodity * A politics of apathy and user-pay, indifferent to democracy * Pressures to down-size, de-regulate * Monopolistic global markets * High rates of broadcast business failure * Community nets as electronic not-for-profit content ghettos This scenario is the cyberspace shopping mall of Neal Stephenson's novel, "Snow Crash." Social movements fizzle as an alliance of transnational corporations and wealthy state governments slows or diverts "unplanned" changes. In the undifferentiated global mass markets that emerge, it is very easy for transnational corporations to organize and control monopoly responses to economic demand. There is pressure to "down-size" governments as a means of achieving the deregulation necessary to allow markets to operate unimpeded. This world emphasizes commerce, consumer and market above all other forms of organization. It commoditizes everything. Communications is defined as the transportation of bits. Information as a noun (ie. as a "resource" or commodity) is the thing or object that the bits convey. Culture as "content" is itself a commodity. It's a culture of the consumption of artificial experience. The generators of culture content get richer than the consumers of it. Economic power is again gatekeeping power. But in this case, the power depends on control of standards, policies, technical systems, and the data structures that allow for the classification of individuals as consumers into market segments. Key political issues are the cost/price of the telecommunications that deliver the electronic goods and services and protecting channels of corporate access to information. Individual behaviour is not governed. It's regulated by market price, particularly the market price of police and jails. This is clearly a world where the law is "users pay." It has the lowest level of civic engagement of any scenario. Except for their purchasing behaviour, the social behaviour of individuals is of relatively little interest to governing institutions. The governors see citizens only in the role of consumers. In reaction, citizens become apathetic about politics at all formal levels of government. Voting rates in elections spiral downward. The democratic notion that the people are the government fades before the reality of a gap between the governed and the governors. The isolation of the governors from the people renders democracy ineffective. The governors entertain the governed to keep them happy. But the only happiness lies in the "up" phase of manic depression. Cyburbia has the most volatile long-term economy of any of these scenarios. In spite of its consumer orientation, this scenario is the least likely to get the demand and supply equation right. When you only "broadcast," it's hard to listen. Perversely, because they have deliberately isolated the individual as consumer, the governors have a great fear of fragmentation, of things falling apart. They view chaos as anarchy and not, as would a true political economy of knowledge, as another word for diverse complex opportunity. They are right to have this fear. The markets they create are subject to technical systems dissonance, consumer confusion and rejection, and high rates of business failure. Systems that self-organize in the manor of unfettered markets are subject to self-organizing criticality. The true scope of the instability in this economy is not apparent until there's an explosive failure, an event horizon of total market collapse. There is little utility or "market" for community networks in Cyburbia. Community networks that design themselves as non- competitive content or access providers are the first to disappear. Their content may be oriented to social improvement, not to entertainment, but the market for "non-profit" content is almost non- existent. Their costs rise out of sight as their former volunteer activities become professionalized and institutionalized to compete with the growth of parallel commercial ISP access and content services. They face direct opposition from corporatist technocrats who view them as "electronic not-for-profit content ghettos." The concept of valuing a community of place that shapes both individual identity and social association disappears. No one really resides anywhere. Communities must compete for "residents" as a commodity, just as they now must already compete for business development. Suburbs are managed as horizontal condominiums. The occupant at home becomes a tourist of media-based experience, with no sense of local obligation. This is a "Boob Tube Maxed" scenario, where the vision of the planetary Internet leading to a "Hive Mind" becomes plausible. In this scenario, there is no revolution, but the collapse definitely will be televised. 7.3 GLOBAL VILLAGE * Organizations as communities of interest * Politics of leadership, loyalty, and personal networks * Access rules channel ideas into conformity * Technocratic indifference to social impact * Community nets as shared common administrative services This is the official "electronic highway" future, the one most likely to emerge if things continue the way they are. This is the future that Peter Drucker predicts in his essay, "The age of social transformation," (The Atlantic Monthly, Nov 94). He believes that knowledge workers will find community in the big corporations. He calls this the "government of the workplace community." I hope he's wrong, and I'm not alone in this. John Ralston Saul in "The unconscious civilization," and Heather Menzies in "Whose brave new world: the information highway and the new economy," cover the same trends as Drucker, but with far more chilling consequences. In Global Village, residents of a community of place may identify with the ecology of that place, but not necessarily with the people in it. They disengage from place and re-engage within organizational infrastructures. This accelerated shift into global "communities" of common interest and away from communities of place characterizes a major shift in the focus and quality of engagement. Enthusiastic technological determinism displaces discussions of the social contract. Public fascination remains fixed on rapid technology change and is indifferent to its implications or impacts. There is constant public repetition of the phrase, "No one really understands the social impact of a knowledge-based economy." But this expression is coupled with a betting of billions on a private understanding of exactly where the speakers want it to head. This is the technologist's paradise, the revenge of the nerds. Markets stratify into regions and sectors. As these markets triumph, the individual attitude is, "What? Me worry?...Me first!" This attitude ignores an underlying theme of undeclared class warfare. There are huge short term economic gains but, in the long term, there's rising depression, confrontation and conflict across the boundaries of competing communities of interest. The "stakeholders" in those communities are highly skilled in competitive modes of interaction. Conflict resolution agendas are a matter of winners and losers. Paradoxically, this world places a high value on innovation and on individual conformity. Managers rule, and elites dominate what remains of government infrastructure. Rules about access to knowledge bases are used to control and channel ideas and imagination. Large planet-wide organizational structures become static and stale. The politics of teams, team players and coaches takes precedence over community-based politics. Economic power depends on gate opening, not gate keeping. But gate opening power depends on personal networks, mentoring and teaching (as opposed to learning). Greed values loyalty. The frequent claim that knowledge- based economies require the restructuring of corporations into learning organizations is understood as a form of hypocrisy. In fact, the innovation necessary to realize a true Knowledge Society is not reachable via this route. The inability to see community networks as other than non-profit service providers still creates some "market" for their efforts within the civic sector. Community networks are easy to sustain as shared common administrative services (ie. as process oriented, rather than learning oriented). They are harder to sustain as zones of social interaction. In effect, community networks are viewed primarily as a component of the economics of development. They become institutionalized as part of the 'civic" sector's education and information services. Community networks conflict with the authority of corporations, because they confuse corporate community members about what's inside and what's outside corporate boundaries. But corporations do encourage what they see as a harmless role of community networks, maintaining a sort of democratic "dialogue" between politicians and the public. This is because government-centered effort to maintain the appearances of representation is a non-threatening and not particularly effective exercise of power. What governments actually do is not a priority on the transnational corporation's agenda. If there's any community network growth, it's within communities of special interest. Networks force more dialogue within politics and more demands for accountability, but, as the middle class disappears, there is also more elite accommodation. The key political issue is leadership. In a Global Village, the "Chief" is everything. Behaviour is governed by autocratic control and the assumption of a tough love/hate parental and patriarchal responsibility over workforces. The identities of the workers are abstracted into the idea of "workforce" until they disappear from of sight. 7.4 HARMONY * Villages that globalize, not global villages * The (virtual) community is the network * Citizens as self determined netizens * Politics of equity in opportunity to learn * The pace of change accelerates * Community nets replace local governments As I did in the other scenarios, I'd like to begin telling Harmony's story with a reference to a book. Unfortunately, it has yet to be written. Howard Rheingold's "Virtual community" begins with a strong defense of the value of electronic social networks, then slides toward a pessimistic ending. Douglas Schuler's excellent "New community networks: wired for change" is more of a cookbook than a fully realized vision of the role of community in the Knowledge Society. Jeremy Rifkin points to the non-profit sector and the role of social capital in "The end of work," but his client for his change message is still the CEO, not the grassroots. In a very real sense, those of you who are creating successful community networks are making up original stories faster than anyone can report them. The communities of the Harmony scenario are villages that globalize, not parts of a global village. Linkages in communities as networks are very strong. Healthy and diverse local economies evolve new forms of socio-economic association, by-passing traditional production methods and supply routes. It's easy for local governments and businesses to form regional alliances to counter- balance globalizing influences. There is maximum hope for sustaining the middle class, and maximum capacity to generate new knowledge, because socio-economic infrastructure in this scenario closely mirror's the open and distributed structure of the Internet. In effect, socio-economic change goes with the flow, and that has powerful synergetic effects. Here too, economic power depends on gate opening, not gate keeping. Gate opening depends on expressing experience in the context of virtual social networks, and on learning (as opposed to teaching). The first law of a political economy of knowledge is that the more you share what you know, the more you can know. The "stakeholders" in these communities are highly skilled in cooperative modes of interaction. They readily take on moderator or facilitator roles for the sake of the pay-back in learning those roles produce. Conflict resolution agendas are a matter of win/win, and of "getting to yes." The Harmony scenario has the greatest capacity to support the kind of individual self learning and continuous learning that a Knowledge Society pre-supposes. The citizen as netizen understands that information is a verb (informing), not a resource. They place greater emphasis on social interaction processes. There is rapid social change toward use of virtual organizational structures and of net-based "spaces" as transaction spaces for daily living. Hands-on experience of these new modes of interaction produces a growing optimism, and a sense of personal control re-emerges. Rising consciousness of socio-economic impact produces new approaches to the negotiation of the social contract. In effect, the utility of measuring development by sustainability and full social cost accounting begins to erode confidence in the concept of measurement by Gross National Product. New forms of social association define new individual identities (the self, the persona) in new ways. Pressure for individual and group self determination is a defining characteristic of our present world (eg. of individualism is Michele Wright's song title, "She's nobody's girl"). This scenario accepts and responds to that pressure in a positive way. Inward self confidence replaces the comfort of "belonging" to organizations that define your "self" for you. It is individuals who think. When thinking becomes the central purpose of social organization, rather than control, ideas can then take precedence over rules of access, unblocking creative energies. The pace of change over the long term continues to accelerate. The "consolidation" phase of restructuring is a long way in the future. Rates of local political involvement in virtual electronic democracy are high. But self-determining individualism governs forms of political association more than representation (ie. electronic democracy operates within the framework of a just-in-time governance that is direct, participatory and anticipatory). In fact, individualism makes for huge difficulties in getting agreement that someone can represent someone else under any circumstances. The experience of participation in good local government increases the effectiveness of modes of accountability and decreases reactionary demands for deference to authority. Thriving virtual communities have spin-off effects on the quality of social interaction within communities of place. There is a very large role for community networks in mediating this process. They directly contribute to civic engagement both within and across groups. They capture and share local experience about the transition to a Knowledge Society, enhancing local capacity to identify communications needs and control impacts on local communications systems development. They provide easily accessible new zones of socialization or acculturation for learning about new modes of social interaction. They support participatory and direct democracy. In effect, community networks begin to replace local governments, fulfilling a social binding function that present governance structures leave out. Community networks are seen as an essential component of successful community infrastructure. In Harmony, the key political issue is equity of opportunity to participate in both the social and economic sectors as they restructure. People are thought of as responsible for citizenship. Behaviour is governed by reciprocity among responsible adults. The highest value is placed on individual autonomy within cooperative modes of social interaction. 8. CREATING SCENARIOS - STEP SIX - IDENTIFY SIGNPOSTS. WHICH FUTURE IS OCCURRING? * Women's education levels by country: This is the best indicator of change in the ways that cultures are re-defining individual identity and autonomy, and thus the spread of a global Knowledge Society. * Fear / anxiety (as symptoms of negative reaction to change) - Teeth grinding...dentists are finding a rise in jaw damage from clenched teeth caused by stress. - Pop song pessimism: The pessimism content of US pop chart songs accurately predicts economic depressions and suicide rates. - Jail population growth: correlates with declines in civic engagement and political will the address social issues directly. * Community networks growth: If communities continue to find community nets useful, this also shows something about relative levels of civic engagement. * New metaphors: Do government agencies talk about web sites as "places" to transact business, or only in terms of access to information. Is that highway metaphor fading from view? 9. CONCLUSIONS: Revisiting the decision is each scenario The decision? - I don't know how the PIHAC will express all this to the MInister. But the three to one odds suggests they'd better find a voice they are comfortable with. There is a need for community- based ownership of both the application of new communications media and the learning that takes place in the new zone of socialization that electronic public space represents. If we don't wake up to the reality of what social interaction in electronic public space means, we are going to get variations of a very dark future. It must be "community" that re-defines the new identity that is caused by the new dimensions of self-awareness that virtual community as virtual social network provides. NO GO ZONE: A role for community networks in the defense of electronic public space is largely missing from this scenario. The predominance of issues of survival, autonomy and individual rights doesn't allow for effective social institutions that regulate a commons, electronic or otherwise. This leads to the tragedy of the virtual commons - over exploitation for short-term personal greed and gain. CYBURBIA: In this scenario, nobody can see the social relevance of electronic public space as a commons - because both creators and consumers of electronic products view it as a "content ghetto" for a disappearing non-profit sector. GLOBAL VILLAGE: In the global village, people identify with communities of special interest and with those corporate communities that provide their major means of economic gain. The local is in conflict with the global, and the global competition sees all commons, including electronic public space as a zone of potential conflict. Best to avoid or ignore it if possible. HARMONY: Ultimately, the factors that drive this scenario are matters of personal values - autonomy and confidence through self determination, social integration through civic engagement, and a resident's sense of comfort in a place called home. Let me underline that. It is individuals who make choices about personal values, not governments, and not corporations. But public policy can create a climate that supports and sustains those decisions. We can't get from here to Harmony, unless public policy starts to include the idea of: - civic engagement as the central element of social equity and community development - community as the essential element for counter- balancing the socially destructive aspects of globalization - a local electronic public space as a commons - a need for an autonomous local community network to defend electronic public space and express the community's communications needs. If you do make community development the heart of a sustainable economic development policy, then you must include in policy the concept of electronic public space, and of community networks as the means to defend it. If you do not place community at the centre of your actions, count on a future that involves variations of the other three scenarios. If only because scenario creation causes you to think deeply about a problem, you can't do it without some significant changes in your point of view. Good scenarios always contain some surprises. I was surprised by the very personal nature of the choices to be made. The bottom line, the two essential qualities that intertwined to cause the scenarios to come into focus, were civic engagement and self definition. What happens to our individual sense of self when the social associations that define that self are mediated by transactions in virtual spaces? In effect, if I don't hold fast to the idea of community, I won't get to be who I want to be. I was surprised to confirm by analysis what I previously held as an instinct - the degree to which the idea of community is central to the success of a Knowledge Society. The best place to act is directly at the community level... 9.1 COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: Take comfort that "community-based" strategies for development are the right way to go. This should be a decision based on more than a feeling and more than pragmatics. It should be a conviction, based on thoughtful examination of anticipated alternatives. Your investments of time and money, but mostly commitment, in community development will give you a greater means of control over your futures than any other alternative. Community is the means whereby a Knowledge Society becomes a civic society. A Knowledge Society that is a civic society becomes more knowledgeable than one that is not. 9.2 VIRTUAL COMMUNITY: Community as virtual community is the key to understanding the knowledge society. Virtual community as electronic public space is a design problem. It's a "place" that matters - to identity, (to defining who I am). It's a shared thinkspace - deliberately and consciously designed to reflect the community values, principles, qualities, feelings, desires, conflicts and connections to outside worlds. It re-defines the identities of the co-designers and users of that space in new ways. The "I/Thou" of virtual community is a different social reality. 9.3 OWNING A COMMUNITY NETWORK Community ownership of a community network is the key to understanding virtual community. A community network is the best means of turning local experience of how virtual and social geography interact into knowledge and practice. That local experience is unique. It must be the community that tells its own story to itself and the world - and in so doing, defends its place on the Net as a local electronic commons. If I put my faith in community-based action, as I've always done, it can't be misplaced. If I put my faith in any of the other grand electronic highway schemes, it will lead to disaster. In a Knowledge Society, it matters more than ever that each of us cares enough about the place where we live to commit to civic action on its behalf. The cost/benefit ration of our social capital investment gets the highest rate of return in the Harmony Scenario. In fact, if we bet on some of the other possible futures, we will lose our social capital shirts. Physical geography is finite. Eventually we discover the boundaries by seeing over the edge, if not by any other way. But what lines do we want to draw around what we can imagine. And why do we want to draw them? The range of possible mental landscapes is not at all bounded, at least not in any sense that we now understand. It is infinite. Then how much does the place where we start an infinite journey affect its outcome? If we don't know where home is, then we don't know who "we" are. The key to Canada's success in the transition to a Knowledge Society, the best route to a Knowledge Society that mutually reinforces the autonomy of individuals and the integrity of community life, isn't electronic highways. It's electronic communities.