On Virtual Communties -- 20 years ago

Just found this -- my address to BBC online communities day, around 20 years ago. A brief excerpt:

The quality of community in tomorrow's wired world is an important concern. It is not, however, the first question we need to ask. The prefix "cyber," from the Greek word for "steersman," implies that cybersociety will be steered in some manner. The first question to ask is: Who will be doing the steering?

Decades before computers existed, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley wrote about future dystopias where society is commanded by an elite who use advanced communication tools to control the population. The malevolent dictator Big Brother and the paternalistic dictator Mustapha Mond used technologies of surveillance and persuasion to steer the societies of 1984 and Brave New World. E.M Forster, also writing years before digital technology emerged, wrote a novella, The Machine Stops, that painted a future society steered by the machines themselves.

Today's world is a combination of all three visions, with a surprisingly democratic twist.

The Orwellian portion is the invasion and commodification of privacy, aided and abetted by digital information gathering and surveillance tools.

The Huxley portion is the disinfotainment machinery that sells experiences, beliefs, issues, and candidates to a world that willingly pays for the illusion of information in the guise of entertainment...

The Forster part is the globalized economy, where liquid electronic capital has become detached from humanly recognizable goods and services

The global economy depends upon a rapidly self-innovating technological infrastructure. Superheated economic competition requires the biggest players to concentrate massive resources on technology development. For these reasons, the only thing we can know with any degree of certainty about tomorrow's world is that technologies will be more powerful than they are today. And communication technologies, because of their ability to influence human perceptions and beliefs as well as their power to command and control automatic machinery, will continue to grow more powerful and persuasive, if not more true, authentic, and humane.

The democratic twist is that more people today have more to say about how their world is steered than any other time in history. Structurally, the Internet has inverted the few-to-many architecture of the broadcast age, in which a small number of people were able to influence and shape the perceptions and beliefs of entire nations. In the many-to-many environment of the Net, every desktop is a printing press, a broadcasting station, and place of assembly. Mass-media will continue to exist, and so will journalism, but these institutions will no longer monopolize attention and access to the attention of others.

It is not yet clear how this democratization of publishing power will translate into political change. The critical uncertainties today are whether the citizenry will learn to use the new tools to strengthen the public sphere and whether citizens are going to be any match for the concentrations of money, technology, and power that are emerging in the Internet era.

One important point of leverage where these critical uncertainties can be influenced is the role of journalism in civic affairs. If the BBC doesn't take the lead in this regard, it isn't easy to think of who else will. And I think you are off to a great start with BBC Online. I want to pose a few longer-term questions. How can professionally gathered news stories and civil citizen discourse be blended in a way that enhances democracy? If BBC or any other organization can take a lead in answering this question, it will be doing the world a great service.