From: Rassismus im virtuellen Raum, eds. Christian Flatz, Sylvia Riedmann and Michael Kröll, Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1998, 34-48.

Two kinds of highway

I intend to combine thoughts on the US information superhighway with deliberations about another type of highway, the Californian Highway Number One. The information superhighway is a project of the 90s: a US-wide digital communication system combining computer, TV and phonelines in order to provide interactive access to all sorts of information. The Highway Number One is California's most beautiful highway, built in the 50s and running from North California to Mexico, mostly along the Pacific coast with wonderful scenic views.

Connecting the prospect of the information superhighway with a look back to the Interstate highway system is not unusual. Ralph Smith, who as early as in 1971 - in his book The Wired Nation - was the first to conceive of an "electronic highway system", described it as "a new interstate highway system". And today Vice-President Al Gore, the country's leading advocate of the information superhighway, suggests: "One helpful way is to think of the national information infrastructure as a network of highways - much like the Interstates begun in the '50s."

The analogy usually serves to promote the new system. As the older of the two, the interstate highway system, has proved such a success - realized as it was in the face of many mental and emotional obstacles - the parallel might help to overcome obstacles to the new system.

But I neither want to justify the new system by looking at the old one, nor will I suggest that we should simply move on to the new system for reasons of contemporariness. My aim is rather to compare the types of experience linked to these two systems and to suggest that we should combine them, should cruise along both kinds of highway.

The concept of the information superhighway

Once fully established - hopefully around the year 2000 - users of the information superhighway will get access to the greatest libraries, can participate in lots of virtual communities, design their own TV-program, teleshop and telecommute (work from home) or have telemedicine - a list which, of course, is not comprehensive. The Government calls the new system the "national information infrastructure" (NII). But its use will, of course, be transnational, the information superhighway providing access to a global network.

Basically two origins and two visions are combined by the superhighway. The first is a cerebral highway, where information and communication are the key commodities. The second is an entertainment highway, where movies, TV shows, interactive games, and home-shopping offers prevail. The first, the information-based vision of the information superhighway has grown out of the country's experiences with computer online services and especially the Internet; by connecting a personal computer to this network of networks, people can tap into innumerable storehouses of information - including news, research papers, books, business statistics, government reports, health care tips, and so on.

In contrast, the entertainment-based vision sees the superhighway as an extension of cable TV. Instead of waiting for movies or programs to come on, people will be able to watch just about anything they want, any time they wish. The program also includes interactive fare - movies where you can choose the outcome and game shows where you can be a participant.

The goal of the superhighway project is to merge these two visions. There are, however, considerable obstacles which this proud vision will have to overcome - technological as well as financial challenges and obstacles arising from the conflicting interests of different groups -, and there are several problems being discussed with respect to the information superhighway, for instance: Will it produce anything but never-ending cacophony of information noise? Doesn't it create an information overload which confuses, disorientates and finally disables the user in finding what he wants? Doesn't the freedom of choice in conditions of overchoice turn into un-freedom? Doesn't the information system widen the gap between society's information-rich and information-poor? Will it not threaten personal privacy? Doesn't it increase narcism and the loss of a sense of community and shared values? This catalogue of questions could easily be continued.

In the follwoing considerations I'd like to address some of these questions. First the question of information overload and of a supposed loss of freedom. To answer this question, I will look at the Internet, the furthest developed information-system so far. Secondly, I will discuss the question of narcism and of the loss of a sense of community. For that purpose, I will consider the so-called virtual communities.

Up to this point I will engage in a sort of defense of the superhighway enterprise by refuting all-too-common objections arising from ignorance or a highly-developed unwillingness to recognize what is really going on - an attitude which is closely connected with traditional attitudes of European cultural critique.

But I will not merely advocate the new tendencies, or even praise them as the only tendencies we should follow at present and in the future. My considerations will rather highlight the emergence of a counter-tendency which I call the revalidation [dt. bitte: Revalidierung] of non-digital forms of experience. In the third part of my paper I will focus on this aspect and take a glimpse at current ways of wandering between different types of reality.

I. Using the information superhighway - and using Highway Number One

Internet: information overload or increased individual freedom?

Internet provides people with access to an immense variety of information. You can get news or topnews or information about banks, entertainment, environment, sports, markets, copyright, medicine, Supreme Court decisions, and so on. You can read the Spiegel or L'Espresso or various low-budget publications.

Of course, using the system requires specific competences in order to find not just something, but the thing you really want. Even after working with the system for only a few hours however, you will already achieve a certain degree of competence. The system is highly self-explanatory.

Using the system, people soon develop certain habits in selection, a personal way of reducing the complexity of the information offered. Competent users are not at all lost in the system. And they get considerable help from expert systems. Software programs called intelligent agents use artificial intelligence to alert us to sought-after information, and eliminate the choices that would just bog us down. This software even sorts out the "need to know" from the "nice to know".

The system also offers the opportunity to define an individual selection of news, your personal news-collection. Using a service called "First", you can define the type of news you are interested in, and each evening an expert system will search through the 15,000 news stories it has received during the day for the subjects you have specified, and you will get your news the next morning. Another service called "Newscast" even provides you with personalized news 24 hours a day. And soon people will be able to get their selections not only on their computer screens, but on their TV screens, too.

There is in fact neither disorientation through information overload nor mere information-noise. And there is just as little reason for complaining about dangers of uniformity (which are all too often associated with the digitalization of information by people who follow the old lines of cultural critique). Just the opposite is true: The totality of available information enables you to make perfectly individual information-choices.

Hence the new technology doesn't threaten, but increases the freedom and individuality of information. But you should be a competent user. However, this was already the case for radio and TV use. In the case of the Internet you even get every help you may want along the way.

At the end of The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard mentioned, among his proposals for the information age, the demand for free public access to all sorts of data banks. This is, I suppose, precisely what's put into practice by the Internet. Everybody gets access and can use the information for his own, unsupervised purposes. The in-built interactivity - which allows users not only to receive but also to send messages to a potentially broad range of other interested users - supports the same purpose.

What needs to be effectively guaranteed, however is the openness of different information sources and low user's costs.

This, of course, is a political issue, and the US-Government is aware of its responsibility in this respect. Accordingly, Al Gore says: We have to "provide open access to the network". "The most important step we can take to ensure universal service is to adopt policies that result in lower prices for everyone." And the democratic claim "to avoid creating a society of information `haves' and `have-nots'" is, as Al Gore points out, "the outgrowth of an old American tradition. Broadcasts, telephones, and public education were all designed to diminish the gap between haves and have-nots."

The belief in the liberating and democratic effects of communication generally is an old American belief. In 1835 Tocqueville wrote: "I know of but one single means of increasing the prosperity of a people that is infallible in practice that I believe one can count on in all countries as in all spots. This means is naught else but to increase the ease of communication between men [...] America, which is the country enjoying the greatest sum of prosperity ever accorded to a nation, is also the country, which, proportional to its age and means, has made the greatest efforts to procure the easy communication I have spoken of." - With regard to this, the information superhighway is a contemporary way to pursue this old American dream.

The gap, then, will not be one between information haves and have-nots, but one between people requiring and not requiring information. This, in my view, is completely concordant with democracy. Free access at very low costs is what democracy needs and what the government has to take care of. But the question whether or not somebody makes use of the possibilities offered, is strictly and completely his or her decision. If there were a gap between users and non-users - not for reasons of cost, but of interest - then there would be nothing wrong with that. Democracy has to provide equal access, not to impose equal use - or to limit the use to the average. Such tendencies arise from an erroneous concept of equality. The equality has to be that of opportunities, not of usage.

Thus I think in general, that we can advocate the liberating and individualizing effects of this new technology. Those who use it, will not encounter information noise, but information gains; and those, who only find information noise, will not use it. And the old-fashioned fear of uniformity is groundless. Here, as in many other respects today, universalization is accompanied by an increase in individuality and diversity. And the possibilities for individual choice exist not only for an elite, but on all levels: from the advantages for scholarly research to the many choices of personal entertainment.

Using Highway Number One: the contemporary revalidation of non-electronic forms of experience

Sunset-tourism

Let me now change the type of reality I am speaking of. I will tell you another story out of the heart of California, of that country, which - due to its leadership in microelectronics - is so addicted to the development of the information superhighway.

Every evening, people get into their cars and drive to Highway Number One, in order to watch the sunset at the Pacific coast. I witnessed this on several occasions in the Stanford area, but the same procedure takes place in other regions, too. From Stanford, it takes you about half an hour to reach the Highway Number One and to visit your familiar place on the rocks or to walk along the beach and watch the sunset. Some people do it shorter, they drive to a vista point on top of the hills between Stanford and the ocean and watch landscape and sunset from there (this will take you about 15-20 minutes). - Why do these people do this?

There is an obvious explanation. The Californian sunsets are unique. Once you have seen them, you will never forget them again. What is fascinating, is not only the incredible change of the colors of the sea - turning from white and all sorts of grey to blue, pink and black -, but above all the sky with its metal clearness and its tones of orange and pink, enriched by tiny clouds and fog-streaks. In my personal view, it is the most wonderful premonition of our final experience, of the impression we will have when once we die. (Of course, I am not going to propose, that we will see an ocean and a heaven at the moment of sunset in our last seconds, but we will probably experience - maybe by quite different means - a similar kind of infiniteness, of a move towards the universe, of being freed from all borders and of being absorbed in a kind of final redemption.) Sure, people may usually just enjoy the wonderful spectacle of nature without thinking about death.

Living in two wonderlands

My point is: this sort of sunset-tourism doesn't decrease, but increases in the age of electronic wonderland. And what's more: The same people are addicted to both kinds of experience: to good old nature and to electronic virtuality, to both Highway Number One and the Information Superhighway. Having returned home and having had dinner, many of these people sit down at their PCs and turn to the virtual realities of Internet.

Are these people schizophrenic? Not at all. Both forms of reality can very well coexist and be combined. They even seem to challenge and provoke each other. One way to understand this correspondence, would be that of analogy: Both types of experience transcend narrow locality, strive towards wider horizons, long for a universal perspective. Another explanation would follow a model of contrast: The experience of virtuality seems to be increasingly accompanied by a desire for full reality - which normally remains unsatisfied. This provokes a turn to primary reality and an intensification and altogether a revalidation of primary experience. In this sense, watching the outstanding Californian sunsets becomes an opportunity to fulfill this desire. Watching the sunset is just the kind of fulfilment you sometimes need when spending most of your time pursuing virtual reality.

II. Virtual communities

Let me now discuss another standard reproach: the supposed narcism and the loss of a sense of community caused by the increasing use of electronic communication.

Standard-reproach versus obvious advantages

Sure, electronic communication is currently increasing in use. `Chat' is the most common online activity today. People talk to each other - writing on their keyboards and watching their screens for replies. They communicate on all kinds of matters - private as well as public, expert as well as banal.

Some explanations for the attractiveness of electronic communication are obvious. I will mention only three. 1) There are advantages for specific groups: People whose physical handicaps make it difficult to form new friendships find that in electronic communication they are treated as they always wanted to be treated - as thinkers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, not carnal vessels with a strange appearance and an inappropriate way of walking or talking. 2) There are general advantages: Online you can cross national und cultural borders without difficulties; you meet people of numerous ethnic and religious backgrounds, from all corners of the globe, young and old, straight and gay. Not real America, but electronic America - or the electronic globe - is today's melting pot. 3) In virtual communication, you can always decide how far you want to reveal or to hide yourself, which side of your personality you present or which image of a person you build. In acting out yourself in both everyday life and electronic communication you may more fully realize yourself.

The conventional cultural criticism of electronic media, however, objects to the arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this type of communication, deplores its presumed singularization effects and even blames it for the decrease in the sense of community in everyday life. Electronic communication, these people say, may be `modern' in the sense of furthering individualism, but what we need is a `postmodern' turn to communitarianism. We should fight the consequences and limit the use of electronic communication - this, at least, is what communitarianists say.

The case of the WELL

I don't partake of this criticism. I want to show its falseness by taking a closer look at virtual communities. There are different sorts of virtual communities. The cutting edge of scientific discourse today is migrating to virtual scientific communities, because through E-mail you can read the electronic pre-printed reports of molecular biologists and cognitive scientists long before they are published in reviews - having already become outdated. But I'm not going to speak about scientific, but about everyday virtual communities. I refer above all to Howard Rheingold's very informative report on one of these communities, the WELL. It is located in the Bay area around San Francisco and mostly comprises people of this region, but it is open to other users, too, as its name indicates, for "WELL" means "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link". Similar systems exist all over the world: TWICS, for example, in Tokyo, CIX in London, CalvaCom in Paris. Millions of people on every continent participate in bulletin board systems (BBs) of this kind; in the US alone there were probably sixty thousand such systems in 1993 - only fourteen years after the first had been launched in Chicago and California. Each of these systems comprises between a dozen and some thousand participants.

The important and amazing thing is the great solidarity between the members of these communities. Although virtual, these communities are very effective communities in everyday life. Let me quote three examples from WELL: There is a parenting conference, where parents can immediately profit from the experience of other parents; when you find a tick on your child's head, you get advice as to how to get it off faster from these people than from the pediatrician, and these people, whom you know through several conversations, you trust. Another example: One day, a person reported that some members of his family had leukemia. This was a real bombshell - because most of the conversation in such communities is downright chitchat and idle talk. The other participants replied both emotionally and intellectually. Within a few weeks, most of them became - by virtue of the exchange of information on the subject - experts on blood disorders and learnt to understand how parents can stand up for their children in the medical system without alienating the care givers. The third example: When a former member of the community who had later moved to Asia was reported to be in a hospital in New Delhi, suffering from severe hepatitis and liver failure, the community organized the best available help in place within a few days and then transferred funds to get the patient to a hospital in the San Francisco region for further treatment. - You see: from everyday problems to emergency cases, the community is extremely helpful and shows a remarkable sense and practice of solidarity. - Whereas the cultural criticism speaks of narcism and isolation and of a loss of the sense of community, nothing of this sort really is the case, but precisely the opposite is true: The virtual communities are communal in a way which the so-called real communities have long since lost.

Regaining community and democracy

Perhaps we have generally to think the other way round in these matters. If conservative criticism blames virtual communities for the loss of real community feeling, it mistakes the effect for the cause, for indeed the hunger for virtual forms of community seems to be a consequence - not the origin - of the fact that informal public spaces have more and more vanished from our real lives.

And, in principle: Virtual communities are less a threat to democracy, but could rather be contemporary means to rebuild democracy. - I will just mention three arguments for this:

1) Electronic communication in some ways reestablishes the public sphere, whose goal and decline has been described by Jürgen Habermas. Electronic communication can become a sphere of free communication and underpin discussion of ideas among citizens. The information networks really constitute a sort of "electronic agora".

2) Virtual communities are largely the arbiters of a sense of community, the disappearance of which has so often been deplored. Robert Bellah, for example, deplores "America's loss of a sense of a social commons", and advocates a "need for rebuilding community". Virtual communities are, in my view, at least to a certain extent proper ways of rebuilding solidarity and community. Therefore it would make much more sense to explore their democratic potential than to damn them by mere ignorance.

3) The virtual communities - in contrast to politics and the big media - can reinforce democracy. Politics have taken the turn from public discussion and participation to party-management and autonomous administration and have thereby lost the soul and almost the facade of democracy. And the public media at the end of the century will - according to Ben Bagdikian's prediction - be dominated by five to ten corporate giants who will control most of the world's important information-channels, and these media lords are not likely to donate the use of their privately owned and controlled networks for all the kinds of information that unfettered citizens and nongovernmental organizations tend to disseminate. In this situation, the alternative local and planetary information networks in virtual communities properly function to reinvent and revitalize citizen-based democracy. Of course, I am not saying that the virtual communities provide the or even a sufficient solution to the current problems of democracy - how, for example, could they integrate the manifoldness of such communities on the level of a state? -, but I am opposing the all too self-satisfactory and blind denial of the democratic potential of virtual communities.

To sum up this point: Blaming the turn to virtual communities for the loss of the sense of community, is mistaking the effect for the cause and completely fails to recognize the proper communal and democratic content of these communities.

Virtual communities re-entering real space

Having argued that the common reproaches against electronic communication are silly and ungrounded, I'd like to point to an aspect which I've mentioned before, when contrasting the use of the superhighway with the fascination by sunsets. - What about the relationship between virtual communities and everyday reality?

Virtual communities do not have to remain in cyberspace. They can re-enter real space. There is even a tendency to do just that. Rheingold reports that the WELL-community sometimes has parties at one of its member's homes. Virtual conversation becomes a real encounter. The members of the WELL also have a regular annual picnic in the San Francisco Bay area. Other communities all over the world do the same. This is surprising for the common deprecators of virtual communication, but in fact it is quite natural. There is no necessary or definitive separation between cyperspace and real space. As the examples mentioned before demonstrate, electronic communication is often highly devoted to problems in real life. ("In real life" is, by the way, a common expression in electronic communication, abbreviated as IRL.) The amount of solidarity between these people even renders it more likely that they want to meet in real life, too.

Return to primary experience

In a way, the members of virtual communities, when meeting in real life, do the same as the sunset lovers I described before. In both cases, a return from virtual to real experience takes place. Or, to put it more sharply: What's really going on there, is an obvious revalidation of real experience through virtual experience. - This, to my knowledge, hasn't been sufficiently recognized in the discussions of recent years.

Real experience is a quite extraordinary thing, when you meet people whom you know pretty well from their messages, including private messages, but whom you have never met in person before. Rheingold describes this as "one of the oddest sensations of my life". And a student, who had met her boyfriend through Internet Relay Chat, reports: "The first time I actually touched him was one of the biggest rushes in my life. To walk into the airport and see him sitting there, in Real Life, it was scary and it was wonderful."

We are long used to virtualizing our personal relationships - by the use of letters or phonelines. In the cases I mentioned, people proceed in the opposite direction: They turn from virtuality to reality. None of these types of reality is any longer closed in itself. We can move from one type to the other, and they also affect and interpenetrate each other.

Remember my description of the sunsets: In some sense, these Californian sunsets, too, are real and virtual at once. Though being natural phenomena, they imply a high degree of virtuality on the aesthetic level - and this, of course, is what we appreciate and what makes us drive over to see them.

The idea of primary reality is currently affected by the experience of virtuality, there is interchange between these two types of reality, and therefore natural phenomena are not just traditional counterparts, but can also become contemporary partners to electronic or virtual experience.

III. Revalidation

Two-way perspective

My defense of the steps towards electronic communication and virtual communities follows a two-way-perspective. All too often we think of defending or furthering these tendencies as being equivalent to denying the relevance of the natural or everyday forms of experience - by declaring them to be lesser or outdated. But this is not what I have in mind at all. I'd rather draw your attention to the fact that the highly developed electronic world goes hand in hand with a new appreciation and revalidation of non-digital forms of experience. The network-freaks in the Stanford area also prone to the fascination of sunsets, and the WELL-beings in the Bay area extend their interaction to real life.

It is this two-way-model that I would advocate as being both descriptively adequate and normatively promising. Electronic experience doesn't simply overcome or absorb the more traditional forms of experience, but also revalidates them and recognizes them as an unsubstitutable limit, and even as defining a desirable goal. It is following both types of experience - cruising along both the Information Superhighway and Highway Number One - that we achieve a fuller and contemporary realization of our existence.

Interconnections

The mutual influences, modifications and interconnections between electronic and non-electronic experience I mentioned before can follow both a logic of similarity or contrast. Experts in electronic virtuality often prefer realities which involve a certain degree of virtuality (my examples were the sunsets and the first-time meetings in real life ). And digital illiterates admire the hyperreality of electronic presentations. Likewise the contrast and opposition between these types of reality can become attractive: Living in a real world of constraints, the electronic world with its ease of free variation and transition appears like paradise, and on the other hand before becoming familiar with electronic virtuality we hardly ever recognized the quasi-metaphysical autonomy and sovereignty of natural phenomena, or the sublime so to speak eventness of human actions and gestures like a smile or a touch as intense as we do today.

Wandering between different realities

Because of such interconnections and transitions, the dualism of electronic and non-electronic experience forms not a sharp duality but is rather the lead-in to a multiplicity of forms of experience. The important thing is that this doesn't cause our world to fragment, but that we become more and more able and used to wandering between such different types of reality and experience. As the relationship between them is not - as some contemporary thinkers have claimed - characterized by a logic of mere incommensurability and separation, but by several crossings and interpenetration, it is quite possible to connect these different types of reality and to wander between them. Living the contemporary possibilities to the full, we indeed become transversal wanderers - not between autonomous and separate worlds, but between different, yet interconnected types of reality and experience.

This, finally and in my view, is the task and the core of our - modern, or postmodern, or simply forthcoming - condition.

Sources:

Reid Goldsborough, Straight Talk about the Information Superhighway (Alpha Books, 1994)

Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community - Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Harper Perennial, 1994; first published in 1993 by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company)

Howard Rheingold, "Der Alltag in meiner virtuellen Gemeinschaft", in Cyberspace. Gemeinschaften, Virtuelle Kolonien, Öffentlichkeiten, edited by Manfred Faßler and Wulf R. Halbach (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1994) pp. 95-121

Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991)

Martin Scheller et al., Internet: Werkzeuge und Dienste. Von "Archie" bis "World Wide Web (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1994)