Group Vision: How Collective Imagination Can Change the World
In preparing for today's lecture on internet governance (whatever that is), I ran across an essay by Langdon Winner from 1997. It's called “Cyberlibertarian Myths and the Prospect for Community,” and it's pretty bleak.
Mr. Winner says, in summary, that cyberlibertarians in 1997 are both shallow and obsessed. Shallow because they don't seem to care about community, institutions, democracy, or citizenship, and obsessed because they value individuality, free markets, and homogeneity above all else.
Let's assume he was right. Has the Wired culture made any progress towards enlightenment in the last seven years? I'm going to suggest that it has — but it just hasn't become conscious of the communitarian realities of online life yet. The time may be ripe to collectively imagine a better world. We can do this in two ways: by shedding light on the role of groups in our lives, and by realizing how the networked, interactive screen changes our relationships with these groups.
If this sounds vague to you, consider this: We are just now beginning to see the structure of social organizations in new ways. We know that scale matters. We know that, given the chance, people will find ways to trust each other and work creatively together to pursue shared goals.
But many groups we're involved with are dysfunctional (like large corporations) and don't seem susceptible to change by individuals. This is stressful. (Indeed, one definition of “bad” stress is an inability to change your environment.)
What if you could enrich your life with groups you haven't thought of before: different forms of jobs, interest groups, affiliations; crossing geographical and other boundaries, perhaps lasting for only a short time?
What if you could change groups you care about by acting collectively with others? What if you had more choices, both of roles and affiliations?
Networked, interactive screens make all of this possible. We can visualize the groups we're involved with (and we should force those groups to have an online component); we can form new kinds of firms that exist only online; we can see the state of the group at a glance; and we can interact with the group using the screen.
It turns out that the individual may not be the most important element of online life. Groups may be — and now we can collectively imagine them in ways we haven't been able to in the past.
David R. Johnson and I are talking about writing a treatment of this subject. This sounds to me like a possible response to Mr. Winner. But let me know.
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