Community's Demise

To begin with, online shopping may hasten the decline of downtown areas. In this regard, he said, "cyberspace is going to finish what Wal-Mart started." Unlike Wal-Mart, though, the effect will not be limited to retailers. Online options will also sap the revenue of accountants, travel agents, lawyers, insurers, stockbrokers, and other professionals. "That's not just a problem for business; it also hurts cultural and community vibrancy."

Sclove also suggested that the NII may erode social bonds. If loyalties shift from the actual community to virtual communities, citizens may become less inclined to help neighbors or to take part in local politics.

In addition, Sclove spoke of the peril of "the electronic colonization of personal time." People are taking hours once devoted to family, friends, and community, he said, and spending them online, a trend that the full-fledged NII will exacerbate. For instance, work will increasingly follow people home: "We'll stay up all hours online, completing the work we didn't finish that day at the office--if we still go to the office at all."

Sclove outlined four steps to ameliorate the problems. Technological innovation, he said, should be accompanied by evaluation of its impacts, regulation to reduce its harms, compensation for those adversely affected, and public representation in the policymaking process. He deemed these recommendations technically and economically feasible but "politically improbable."

From the audience, Jock Gill of the White House Media Affairs Office questioned Sclove's distinction between actual community and virtual community. "What is the meaning of the word 'community' for the 21st century?" Gill said. "We are very social, gregarious people....The online environment is part of the reinvention of the word 'community.'" He noted that his family lives in Boston; now, thanks to the Internet, "I can take some of my community with me."

Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, another speaker, offered an example of a meaningful virtual community. "When I moved to Washington from Boston, the moving van that was carrying all my stuff caught fire," he said. "I lost about 90 percent of my material goods, including a major chunk of my library." He announced the news on the WELL, a California-based online service. At someone's suggestion, he posted a list of the books he had lost in case other users had extra copies they were willing to part with.

"Over the next six or eight months, every week I received books in the mail, many from people I had never met face to face," Godwin said, "and that felt more like community to me than anyplace I'd ever lived."

There's a moral hazard if social bonds disengage from the local. The local is where we are materially interdependent with other people. We share the same water and air, the same political jurisdictions. Who is going to care for the neighbor who doesn't happen to be a member of a virtual community when there is no longer a face-to-face community life?... How are we going to deal with local school problems, health service, public infrastructure, and zoning, if citizens at the local level no longer share a common life?

Richard E. Sclove
Executive Director
Loka Institute