Freedom, Community and the Third Wave: An Analysis of the Magna Carta for a New Civilization and The Community Builders Guide to Telecommunications Technology Documents (page 2 of 2)
by Paul Shafer

A Different Perspective

The Community Builders Guide to Telecommunications Technology proffers a much different perspective on technology. For serious community builders, the central metaphor for the Third Wave --or any other age, for that matter--is not cyberspace, but community. Where Toffler and company are content to wait and see what the communities of the future will look like ("No one knows what the Third Wave communities of the future will look like...") the authors of the Community Builders Guide realize the necessity of acting today to build the communities of tomorrow. It is not technology that shapes the process of community development, but people. At the same time, however, they understand the relevance of the new technologies for community building and have developed a strategic vision for the incorporation of technology into organizational planning.

It is essential that community builders take an active role in their approach to technology; they must "ask serious questions about what issues they want to address using technology, and how the information super highway can help them achieve community goals and improve the lives of its citizens." Thus, community builders must "be deliberate and strategic as they venture out in the midst of this information revolution."

The function of the guide is threefold: (1) to introduce community builders to some of the opportunities and potentials of the new telecommunications technologies; (2) to raise awareness of relevant policy questions affecting the use of and access to technology by community organizations; and finally (3) to provide a process to aid community groups in assessing needs and resources that might be addressed through new technology.

The authors of the Guide argue that telecommunications can be utilized as an effective community-building tool in three different areas. The first of these involves information sharing that enhances community-building activities by linking together groups with common interests. Secondly, technology makes possible increased public access to information and civic processes. Finally, technology can improve service delivery to communities at easily accessible sites in areas like education, health and social services.

The overarching policy issue affecting communities concerns access and use. Barriers that affect access to technology such as cost, location, training and others must all be fought if communities are to effectively use new technologies. Community organizations must be especially aware of phenomena such as technology redlining and the market-driven development of infrastructure if they are to ensure fair access for people outside the loop of capital.

In conclusion, the authors of the Guide offer a collaborative community assessment process to help organizations find a starting point for their utilization of technology. "Since the technology serves the people, and since people make communities, our focus here is on how to get people together for the purpose of building together. With a spirit of collaboration the assessment process becomes more of an exploration of resources than an exploration of need; the process is a community treasure hunt. Once discovered and developed, the existing community resources will guide the plan for technological supports."

Which path points the way to real freedom--the Third Wave frontier or the technological community treasure hunt? Before answering this question one must acknowledge the necessity, in any comprehensive reckoning of society, for both theoretical and practical scrutiny of the issues at stake.

The Community Builders Guide recognizes the practical necessity of strong community-level organization for a healthy society. Individual participation in social institutions as diverse as family, neighborhood groups, trade unions, church organizations, and countless others establishes common ground and shared interest among the diverse elements of society. These institutional links, and not the myth of libertarian freedom, form the backbone of a free society to the extent that every society is necessarily determined by its social character, that is, by what unites and is held in common. (Libertarians must find their way back to Rousseau's state of nature.) Without this understanding of the real bonds tha together, any theoretical account of society is necessarily one-sided and abstract.

Perhaps the real question, then, concerns the relation of technology to the social fabric of our society. A genuine account of the now and future society, in other words, must consider the affect of new technology on the social institutions that make the values of a free society real. According to the Third Wave-inspired authors of the Magna Carta, the concepts definitive of our present society--property, the marketplace, freedom, community, and government--will all be revolutionized by technology and the bioelectronic frontier. Yet technology, in itself, is nothing new; after all, primitive sticks and stones are a form of technology and affected human life in their own way just as significantly as cyberspace. Thus, it is not technology itself--whether fire, gunpowder, printing press, or microchip--that is the primary issue. What is really at stake are the ideas and values constitutive of civilized human life and the form they take in actual social and political institutions.

To fully understand the relation of Third Wave technology to both the ideas and institutions of society therefore requires more than crystal ball speculation about the future. Whatever the future holds, it must necessarily emerge from the actuality of the here and now. Before we leap toward an uncritical embrace of the bioelectronic frontier and the free enterprise it promises, we must interrogate the ideals constitutive of a free society and determine which social forms make those ideals a reality.

As the Community Builders Guide points out, there are many very real political issues to consider as we make decisions about the technological future. How, for example, can we guarantee fair use and access to Third Wave technology? How can we help the many disenfranchised victims reconnect themselves to society? What is to prevent the elite classes from consolidating their power? Cyberspace alone provides no answer to these questions. What is needed is critical analysis of capital, of accumulated power, of the real meaning of freedom and democracy. Even as we embrace cyberspace as the wave of the future, we must continue to address the old questions from the past.