Far from the public eye, a battle is raging over abstractions. It touches our hearts and minds. And although it's
a battle with consequences, it's a battle that really shouldn't be
fought at all.
The battle I'm referring to is the one between the optimists and
the pessimists.
On one side are the optimists. They believe that in spite of
everything, things are getting better. The pessimists, as everybody
knows, believe that things are inevitably getting worse.
Ironically, it's the point that both sides agree on that's the most
dangerous: that historical momentum makes human effort unnecessary. Both views imply an inevitability that is, not only inaccurate, but paralyzing. In short, they offer excuses that many people are consciously or subconsciously looking for, reasons for not getting involved.
But, with apologies to Shakespeare, if neither an optimist nor a
pessimist be, who or what should we be? Is there a word for a better way to think about the future?
Luckily, such a word exists. The word is meliorism -- the belief that the world can be made better by human effort. (But note that the flip side -- that human effort can make the world worse -- is also true.)
What does all of this have to do with the evolution of the
Internet? Plenty.
For one thing, the Internet inspired the optimists to some of the
greatest rhetorical heights of all times. The optimists convinced
many people that a Golden Age was imminent. The governed would
achieve parity with the governors. Knowledge would flow equally to
all and education would be transformed. The wisdom of crowds would rule the land. And censorship was impossible because information
wants to be free.
On the other hand, cynical utopia deniers -- dour pessimists --
continued to assert that things will always be unequal, the Internet will change nothing at all, and that the human race will never develop the civic intelligence that it needs, Internet or no
Internet.
But little-by-little, people are breaking free of the optimism/pessimism trap. They are realizing the Internet is not magic after all. They are learning that it's not immune to the forces that
created the commercial television or radio we know today.
The fact remains that the Internet represents an extremely rare
opportunity. For one thing, it's a meta-medium that can assume many
shapes. Because it's becoming a tool that billions of people use,
it could help people of the world work together to address their shared concerns.
The "coulds" could be multiplied ad infinitum: The
Internet could be used to help mediate discussions between adversaries; it could be used to develop solutions to problems of environmental degradation, oppression and intolerance, and violence. It could...
A critical question surfaces in relation to these issues: Is
there a role for business in building the information and communication infrastructure that promotes the civic intelligence that the world needs? And if not, why not?
Unfortunately, the standard rules might not apply. For one thing,
who is interested in building capabilities for people with few
economic resources? And while the costs of despotism and anarchy
are high indeed, democracy has no immediate ROI. And would venture
capitalists bother with ventures that have dubious aims like developing social imagination or improving collective problem-solving capabilities?
Clearly, people in business can be counted on for innovation for
economic gain. My presumption is that they could retool themselves
intellectually for social innovation as well.
Meliorism, unlike optimism or pessimism, doesn't allow us to wriggle
out of our responsibilities. In the case of the Internet, meliorism
compels us to imagine what the Internet could be and to work for those possible outcomes.
We have the imagination and the resources to build the Internet
that the utopians may have envisioned and the dystopians swore we'd
never see. It will take the meliorists who have gotten tired of the
silly debate over optimism and pessimism to roll up their sleeves
and actually make it happen.
— Douglas Schuler is a faculty member at The Evergreen State College, where he teaches interdisciplinary programs such as Community Information Systems, Global Citizenship, and Civic Intelligence in the Real World.
In my opinion, it's not really a matter of "control" but "influence." My feeling is that while any person's influence on the future of the Internet may be very small, it's not zero. (While "looking for the best things in the worst" may be a very time-consuming and non-productive activity. :-) )
That's what I was taught in high school when we read Ben Franklin. Meliorism seems to fit equally well.
The bottom line, that we need to work to make the Internet what we want it to be, seems a given, but one most of us prefer to ignore. Of course the rule applies to everything else in our lives, too.
David asks an important question. It's one thing to say that we need the ideas and efforts of meliorists, it's another thing to actually come up with useful ideas! While there wasn't space in the blog to go into this issue in depth, I intend to pursue it in forthcoming blogs (using "civic intelligence" as a design orientation). This is where I've been working for the past 25 years.
Amy Rogers Nazarov (and others) provided some good examples and there are lots more out there. For now I'd suggest that any ideas, tools, or technology that increase and improve collective problem-solving are worth looking at. As to technological approaches, I'd suggest projects that support citizen science as well as deliberative / collaborative systems. Improving our civic intelligence will require education, policy, activism, and a change in consciousness -- as well as technology.
One of the most important objectives is increasing the quantity and quality of meliorists. And part of this mission is raising this issue!
The "Internet" was once a use of a phone line to conect computers. It is now usually a cable. It can be a WIREless cellular apparatus. It has always been subject to FCC REGULATION since before Mr Gore helped invent it! The wizards behind the curtains always knew it was coming. How else did they write the Communications Act of 1934?
(51) WIRE COMMUNICATION.--The term ''wire communication'' or ''communication by wire'' means the transmission of writing, signs, signals, pictures, and sounds of all kinds by aid of wire, cable, or other like connection between the points of origin and reception of such transmission, including all instrumentalities, facilities, apparatus, and services (among other things, the receipt, forwarding, and delivery of communications) incidental to such transmission.
What are "instrumentalities, facilities, apparatus, and services"?
Anything at all including everything broadband involves.
Did you believe in 1986 when Teri Weigel was the Playboy Centerfold that once UNREGULATED WIRE COMMUNICATIONS developed and were called the Internet that you could watch her perform fellatio by typing her name on almost any computer on Earth? She had not done explicit PORN in 1986. Today a simply search for her name on ANY United States search engine will result in an explicit broadcast being offered.
You might have to promise that you are not a child but how many children fake being an adult to buy alcohol?
It might require a great deal of work to finally make it anything besides a way to surf for porn anonymously? I have started the work and it will probably just get tossed out of the Supreme Court in a few months? An Arkansas JURY still gets to decide in March of next year during the 221 anniversary of the US Title 17 HOAX.
Sure, there are plenty of clips of singing parakeets and stumbling Kardashians circulating the globe, cluttering up the pipe. But think of the great things wrought, or at least advanced by the Net, the kinds of noble goals I think Douglas Schuler is driving at here:
* An easy way to make micro-loans online
* Methods of meeting new friends and/or partners
* Forums for thoughtful discussion about any number of topics, such as the one IE gives us
* Information about medical diagnoses and chess rules and giblet-gravy preparation at our fingertips
Sure, there is a dark side to greater connectivity. Sure, there are vulnerabilities to be exploited by the unethical. But there are boundless opportunities for meaningful connection - between customer and vendor, between people of shared or opposing political views, to name just two - that are afforded us daily by the Web.
The Internet is the means to many ends, not all of which are unsavory.
jbailo, I completely understand your position. Critical thinking is very undervalued in media in general. And while I haven't run into someone retorting in the same curt fashion as you've experienced, I have noticed that mindless posts garner far more responses than thoughtful ones on FB.
Excellent point Mary! I may not always agree with what I read on this board, but I have found that everyone is willing to discuss each others point of view. I have read some very spirited debates. Once we learn to accept and embrace each others ideas, things can get better. Intolerance is never acceptable.
The question of use can be answered by a response dealing with structure; function follows structure, so if the structure of the internet is the right one, people will use it positively. Universal access in one form or another seems inevitable, the only question is whether the universal access is being choked at some point or another. If there are structural barriers to restricting access, and net neutrality, there can be no problems of access in the long term. I suspect that as cell phones continue to proliferate, and terminals and access continues to get cheaper, access in some form will be practically universal anyways.
As far as human rights, Article 19 of the universal declaration of human rights already guarantees part of the right: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." The rest seems implicit in article 27, "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits." Despite this, I'd say that rights are cheap; what we need are responsibilities. Who is responsible for guaranteeing access? No-one. If it isn't a natural progression towards universal access, and no one is required to provide it, the right is worth the paper it's written on. (Use expensive stationary.)
The social imagination and collective problem solving referred to occur naturally with a good medium; many such media exist online.
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The US National Security Agency learned the hard way that it can be dangerous to give a contractor too much money and access, with too little scrutiny. The NSA and other government agencies hire tens of thousands of contractors
a year to analyze data. Edward Snowden -- who revealed himself as the NSA leaker after fleeing the country -- was one such contractor, reportedly holding a $122,000 salaried position at Booz Allen Hamilton at the time of his departure.
Midsize businesses rarely achieve the same standards of security in their own datacenters as professional providers that specialize in delivering these services to organizations.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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