Last Thursday, June 2nd, USA Today ran an intriguing article: Beyond Kiwanis: Internet Builds New Communities. The piece focused on how technology, specifically the internet and cell phones, helps to build new communities and strengthen engagement around the country.
There’s some inspiring news in the piece; but there are also some potential dangers that we must address.
On the upside, the piece suggests that people are more “connected” with each other through their use of technology. One man is quoted as saying, “I wouldn’t have been able to be Cubmaster of Pack 152 without email. I don’t have time to do traditional phone trees and calendars by hand.”
I’m a youth soccer coach, and I know exactly how he feels. For years, I made individual phone calls to contact my team about changes to practice times, game venues, uniforms, and countless other things. Now, I can contact my entire team with just the click of a button; and, as long as I have my laptop, I can stay in touch from anywhere. There’s no doubt in my mind that e-mail has made me more connected to my players – as a team, and as individuals.
The USA Today article suggests that people are now more civically active through the use of technology. For instance, the articles states, “Activists are using instant text-messaging to organize protests.” It goes on to say, “MoveOn.org has become a big factor in liberal political organizing.”
I know of many instances where people have used technology to become more civically engaged. Meetup.com has been phenomenally successful at helping people with common interests find each other.
But amid that silver lining lurks some questions we must confront about the use of technology in civic life. Here are three questions to consider:
One of the main points in the USA Today piece is that by increasing the number of contacts through the use of technology we create vital “ties” to one another. This rings true with my own experience. But the questions I pose above suggest that we need to think beyond the mere number of “ties” that are being created among us.
Simply having social ties that derive from the use of technology will not, on their own, help us address issues such as improving public schools, reforming social security, ensuring health care for people, or a host of other public concerns that people wrestle with every day. To address those effectively, we need to be able to imagine and act for the public good.
Thus, we must make sure that as we use technology the following ideas are in place:
I could go on, but for now I’ll only list these three ideas. I list these, in particular, because I am now completing a new book, Hope Unraveled, which traces people’s relationship to politics and public life, their community, and each other over the past 15 years. What’s clear in the book is how people have retreated from the public realm. Also clear to me is their latent desire to engage with one another and to gain a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves.
At issue is how we will tap into people’s latent desire – will it be to provide more spaces for people to engage as individuals expressing their own needs, or as citizens who are interested in acting for the public good.
I believe deeply that people want to work for the public good. We just need more venues to foster this collective action, and I hope that those who are designing new technology platforms will build them in ways that reflect the people’s aspirations.
Just as much as moving from the “I” to the “we,” I think we need to keep in mind HOW we are speaking to each other. A couple years ago I attempted to engage in intelligent conversation with others who were making use of the open forum bulletin boards on our local newspaper’s website. I had hoped to enter into meaningful discussions of issues of concern to our town. Instead, I was confronted by people who had too little education and apparently too much time on their hands. When they could not respond to reasoned arguments with reasoned arguments of their own, they resorted to such clever responses as “Oh yeah? Well, you suck.” As a result, our newspaper ended up (as apparently many others have been forced to do) dismantling this particular part of their website because they could not expend that much time and energy monitoring the language and the vicious attitudes.
In the Spring 2005 MC&S Newsletter (from the Mass Communication and Society Division of the AEJMC), Dane S. Claussen offers a discussion Orrin E. Klapp’s book Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society. Claussen notes, “. . . perhaps the most memorable part of Klapp’s book was the graph that showed that up to a certain point, a positive correlation exists between the amount of information that a person receives and the meaning that one obtains from it, but after a certain point, a continued increase of information received results in a decline in meaning.” As he quotes Klapp, “. . . information can become noiselike when it is irrelevant or interferes with desired signals, so tending to defeat meaning. . . . By taking in too much noise, a person becomes cluttered, not integrated.” This is what we face increasingly as methods of communication become easier and easier to use.
I think we need to remain polite and open but vigilant. The time is ripe in this country for the rise of more people the likes of Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930 and early 1940s. Coughlin was able to access more than thirteen million people each week with his anti-Semitic diatribes by playing to their fears and hatreds during a time of uncertainty, using the greatest means of communication of the day: the radio. With the Internet, who knows where such backward and unproductive thinking could lead? The audiences are in the hundreds of millions.