A now famous cartoon in the New Yorker shows one dog saying to another, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” In his best-selling cheer for everything digital, The Road Ahead, Bill Gates exults that “anyone can send anyone else a message on the Internet,” and notes that correspondents “who might be uncomfortable talking to each other in person have forged bonds across a network.” (Gates laments that the incorporation of video technology with e-mail and other forms of communication on the Net, while much to be desired in some respects, will “do away with the social, racial, gender, and species blindness that text-only exchanges permit.”)
Gates’s comments are curious. First, it is not true that “anyone can send anyone else a message on the Internet.” This is true for Gates and his friends, to be sure; but most people are still strangers to cyberspace, either because they don’t have the stamina to master a new and often intimidating technology or because they simply do not have the financial resources to connect. As of now, users of the Internet are overwhelmingly young, white, middle to upper-middle class, and male–although the extent of women’s involvement seems to be increasing fairly rapidly. Connections of various kinds are being made through cyberspace, but these electronic rendezvous do not seem to be crossing gender, class, and racial barriers in any significant way. Many worry that the juggernaut of advancing cyberspace technologies will leave economically disadvantaged people out of the information loop.
Even if computers become more affordable for more people, how will poorer folks learn how to use them, especially if schools in lower-income neighborhoods have less access to computer education? As computer expert and cyberspace critic Clifford Stoll has pointed out, the cyberspace community is not as friendly as it often claims to be. Because of the “exclusionary nature of technocratic culture,” it is up to the user to figure out which system is best, to decipher the new, jargon-heavy terminology, and to install and maintain the software. Outsiders are often put off by “a liturgy of technology.”
Second, the anonymity of nonvideo interaction in cyberspace is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, textual communication can be a leveler. On screen, a person is judged only by his or her words. It is reasonable to imagine that people who might otherwise avoid each other would willingly converse through e-mail. If the impersonal medium enhances the personal dimension instead of eclipsing it, these online relationships could be converted into more full-blooded off-screen encounters. On the other hand, I am afraid this pleasant scenario requires a basic honesty and integrity that the culture of cyberspace often lacks. Furthermore, the particularities of race, age, gender, and economic status cannot forever be erased if people are to know each other as embodied beings in the physical world. A racist may converse online with someone of another race, whom he comes to appreciate as being a good writer, well educated, and friendly. The crunch comes, though, when the racist finds that his e-mail correspondent is typing with hands of another color. If the racial anonymity is never broken, no progress toward racial reconciliation can be forged. If racial realities are revealed and prejudice continues, nothing has changed.
The same problems exist for age, gender, and economic status. What kind of community is being created when its members are digitally sheared of these characteristics? Community worthy of the name is largely fashioned out of the recognition of our embodied and sometimes awkward particularities, within a context of regarding one another as fellow humans worthy of respect and civility. The Christian deepens this by adding that people are made in the image and likeness of God; they are not only our neighbors, they are objects of divine concern. Civil communities–places where a soul may flourish with other souls–ask us to present ourselves as we truly are before others as they truly are, that we might learn where we agree, where we disagree, how to disagree agreeably, and how to assist and persuade each other through compassion and reason.
Community is impossible without some level of trust, even among strangers. We try to live in a good neighborhood where we can trust those around us not to accost us or harm our property. We must trust our accountants and our medical doctors to be reasonably competent with our assets and our bodies. How much can cyberspace reinforce trust? Francis Fukuyama puts a damper on cyberspace optimists, such as Albert Gore, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, George Gilder, and Newt Gingrich, who think that computer technologies will decentralize knowledge, eliminate hierarchies of all sorts, and liberate the masses from political oppression. He points out that trust is indispensable for cultural and economic betterment, and that it is not easily established through the largely impersonal interaction of computer technologies. Fukuyama writes in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity that “trust does not reside in integrated circuits or fiber optic cables. Although it involves an exchange of information, trust is not reducible to information.” Rather, “trust is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms . . . of other members of that community.” Developing this kind of behavior when cyberspace is our primary means of interaction is difficult if not impossible.
Virtual communities are often just too virtual to trade on this kind of trust. In many ways, the nature of cyberspace is conducive to deception. The day after the Oklahoma City bombing, a message was posted in the Usenet database (misc.activism.militia), which read:
OK City bombed by FBI. Now they begin their black campaign in order to spread as much terror as possible. . . . They will try to tie it to Waco. Janet Reno is behind this, the campaign will succeed because the media will persuade the public. Expect a crackdown. Bury your guns and use the codes.
The San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Newsday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other newspapers referred to this message with great alarm at the frightening prospects it evoked. Its author, however, was not a wild-eyed extremist but a journalism student at the University of Montana who posted the message as a joke. Similar pranks have involved claims about alien autopsies, Microsoft buying the Vatican, the dreaded modem tax, and phony political Web pages.
Clifford Stoll mentions watching an online interview with California governor Pete Wilson. Evidently a poor typist, Wilson barely answered five questions. There was little opportunity for compelling political discourse. Stoll observes, “Seeing his text intermittently scroll across my screen, I realized that I had no way of knowing if [Wilson] himself was at the keyboard or merely one of his minions.”
The old adage “seeing is believing” is now itself unbelievable, at least with respect to many electronic media. The digital darkening of O.J. Simpson’s face on the cover of Time magazine is a case in point. No one would have known the difference if Newsweek had not run the same mug shot without the alteration. This type of digital manipulation can be perpetrated in cyberspace as well, and may never be exposed. In Scientific American, photography expert William J. Mitchell observes that “we are approaching the point at which most of the images that we see in our daily lives, and that form our understanding of the world, will have been digitally recorded, transmitted and processed.” Altered photos were far more easily discerned before digital manipulations became available. Today, “digital images are manipulated by altering pixel values stored in computer memory rather than by mechanically altering surfaces.” This process hides the alterations quite nicely, as several illustrations in Mitchell’s article make clear. Photographic evidence–whether on screen or in print–is no longer above suspicion. This adds new poignancy to Jesus’ admonition that we not judge merely according to appearance, but with sober judgment. Yet the necessity of such constant suspicion in cyberspace hardly builds trusting communities.
As a medium, cyberspace is peculiarly amenable to the spread of what Generation-X guru Douglas Rushkoff calls “media viruses”: ideas that infect the masses at rapid speeds and in novel ways through electronic media. The Net makes possible a dissemination of ideas that bypasses the traditional intermediaries of editorial control, paper publishing, material transport, and so on. Of course, this can be used for good or ill; but cyberspace presents the opportunity for particularly virulent ideas to pollute people’s minds in unprecedented ways.
Emerge magazine recently ran an expose’ of racist groups who are exploiting the Net with evangelistic determination. Various white supremacist cadres–neo-Nazis, skinheads, identity groups, and others–are employing sophisticated technologies to proselytize. The Net allows these clandestine groups to network with each other as never before. A number of civil rights groups, such as the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, are attempting to monitor such groups. In April of 1996, a skinhead group disseminated a photograph of a prone black man being kicked by a white person. Another hate-mongering group advocates taking advantage of cyberspace anonymity to post injurious messages that appear to be written by “the enemy” (African Americans). They also advise other despicable racist practices. One white supremacist declares that “cyber-guerrillas” should “grasp the weapon which is the Net, and wield it skillfully.”
Although such irrational prejudice has been alive since sin entered the world, cyberspace opens new doors for the kind of racial acrimony that acts like an acid upon our efforts to establish a harmonious multiracial community. Unless there is a concerted and courageous stand for racial equality and reconciliation, the burning cross may shoot out sparks that spread like wildfire in the corrupted sectors of cyberspace.
Despite the many hazards to community that cyberspace presents, the medium can help create and solidify community when it is used carefully and is tethered to the real world in tangible ways. Although the splashy and garish Wired magazine is usually consumed with the young and restless world of cutting-edge (and off-the-edge) cyberspace technologies and philosophies, it recently devoted a thoughtful piece to a project that helped spouses of Alzheimer’s sufferers find a sense of community with one another.
The Alzheimer’s online project installed computers in the homes of Alzheimer’s victims for the purpose of connecting spouses who feel isolated, overwhelmed, and hopeless. A special network was developed, and the procedures for sending e-mail were simplified and explained, since those over 65 typically have little experience with computers. Over 200 people have participated, including a man named Linus who says that the computer “became my life-line. If someone came up to me and said they were going to take it back, I’d say ‘Take my left arm instead.'”
For these needy folks, cyberspace has become a place to give and receive advice and encouragement; it is a medium that met a desperate need when nothing else was available. Alzheimer’s patients absorb tremendous amounts of time and energy at any time of the day or night. This is especially taxing on aged spouses, who have little opportunity for normal socializing or recreation. Given these severe physical limitations, the ease and rapidity of e-mail has provided solace for these isolated souls. Often, the electronic contact has been followed up by phone calls and face-to-face meetings. In 1995, the National Information Infrastructure Awards selected the online Alzheimer’s project out of 150 applications for its first annual Community Award. Scott Bascon, a spokesperson for the group, rightly said that the project “exemplifies what it means to live in a networked society. Here we have lives enriched. Here, technology is used to break down some very difficult barriers.”
What made the online Alzheimer’s project work as a support group? Although it has been successful in alleviating suffering and bringing knowledge and friendship to those otherwise isolated, the project does not dignify all things digital. In this case, the people involved took up the technology as a last resort; other avenues toward community had been shut off because of the extremity of their situation. In addition, the participants were carefully assisted by computer savvy people who helped them set up the e-mail network free of charge. Few people ever experience such a personalized initiation into cyberspace. Moreover, the sensibilities of the participants in this project had been formed in a pre-computer age, so they would be less likely to succumb to the temptation to favor cyberspace connections over real-life encounters.
Generally speaking, the kind of community required for the resuscitation of national life requires the grace that comes through the human touch, the human voice, the human gaze. Genuine community shines through the human presence of truth expressed personally. Cyberspace can only mimic or mirror these experiences (however convincingly); it cannot create them. It can, however, beguile us into mistaking connectivity for community, data for wisdom, efficiency for excellence, and virtual democracy for an informed and active citizenry. It can even beguile us into worshiping the works that our hands have made. If cyberspace is kept closely fastened to the real world, and if we refuse its temptations to replace the literal with the virtual, it can in some ways enhance the natural bonds of humans in society. If not, it may instead eclipse much of what is good and true in genuine community.
Douglas Groothuis (dgrooth133@aol.com) is assistant professor of philosophy of religion and ethics at Denver Seminary. This article is adapted from his book The Soul in Cyberspace, recently published by Hourglass Books, an imprint of Baker Book House. To order this book, call 1-800-877-2665.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 14
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