August 18, 1993 Notes for an address to Community Networking: The International FreeNet Conference Carleton University, Ottawa By Peter Calamai Editorial page editor, The Ottawa Citizen My job here is to sketch out some sort of road map, a map to guide Canadians and others from where we are today to our destination, the Information Society. And I should also try to suggest what FreeNets -- community networks -- are going to contribute to this journey. Are they the caterpillars that clear the rough path or the paving machines that make it smooth. Or are they the road signs and guardrails? The first tractor- transports? We'd better agree on our definitions. For me, data are undifferentiated facts without context. Information is organized data that we, as individuals, have not yet absorbed. Once we have integrated information into our own internal frameworks, it becomes knowledge. We talk all the time about an Information Society but, in fact, what we really need is a Knowledge Society. Community networks like FreeNet, can provide information but they cannot provide knowledge. Information can be held in common, knowledge cannot, as noted by Harlan Cleveland, an American who has been thinking and writing about the ramifications of an Information Society for governments. First, however, let's talk about the power of an image. The power of Irma, a five-year-old girl whose life was ebbing away in a Sarajevo hospital while petty United Nations bureaucrats insisted that relief planes leave the besieged city empty. (There is, I devoutly hope, a special place in Hell for such people.) Then John Burns of the New York Times wrote about Irma. All of sudden what was impossible for one girl became possible for hundreds of wounded Bosnians. All of a sudden there are hospital beds waiting from Bonn to Boston. All of a sudden Canada has a field hospital to spare, although we didn't have one when relief authorities begged a few weeks earlier. The power of an image. Now suppose Irma's story had instead been told on the Internet, say in a soc.bosnia.victims group on Usenet or a listserver devoted to humanitarian issues. Would there have been the same reaction? I think not. The people reading that Usenet group or subscribing to the listserver would have been already interested in the topic. Some might well be the same petty bureaucrats who blocked Irma's evacuation in the first place. Some would be activists, some propagandists, some apologists and maybe a few lurkers. But most would be there because they wanted to know about this issue. The story of Irma, however, had its dramatic, global, instantaneous impact because it was largely read by people who didn't want to know about it. Almost none of the people who picked up their Ottawa Citizens last week would have asked to have that innocent face peering out from their personalized, custom-tailored electronic newspaper. They wouldn't have put in Boolean search terms for "shrapnel" and "spine" and "five-year- old." They wouldn't have instructed the software selection program to find items that would ruin their breakfast. In this sort of Information Society, Irma would now be dead and buried. The point of this exercise is that we have to decide where we want to go before we draw up the road map. Which particular Information Society should we set out for? Despite all the rhetoric about an Information Society increasing the scope and variety of information available to individuals, in fact most people, if given the opportunity, would probably decrease the scope and variety of information they receive, not increase. What they might increase is the quantity and selection of information on very narrowly-defined topics. For most people in the Western world, information now is broad and shallow. In this particular brave new Information Society, it would be narrow and deep. This is more than just a different way of slicing the information sphere; it is a decision to turn your back on the world, especially the parts that make us feel uncomfortable or remind us just how helpless we are. A desire to shut out the ugliness of the world is not new. What is new, is the role of technology. Before, advances in technology tore down the barriers: Gutenberg's movable type shattered the book publishing stranglehold of the monasteries with their ranks of illuminators and calligraphers; Marconi's radio waves leapt past border guards and customs censors; direct broadcasting satellites mean the end to national content regulation of TV. At first, the Internet and community networks would appear to expose us to even more of the unpleasant truths in the world around us. But they also provide the technology to block those distressing realities. Is someone on the net getting under your skin? Set up a kill file and you'll never have to even look at a header of a message from him or her again. In effect, it's a call screening device that covers the world. Automatically. After a little while, you forget it's even there. Isolationism isn't the only danger of an Information Society. Not thinking may be even more pernicious. Listen to Edward de Bono, the father of lateral thinking: "Many people believe," Del Bono has written, " that if you collect enough information it will do your thinking for you and that the analysis of information leads to ideas. Both are wrong." Del Bono argues that society suffers from a misconception about what thinking actually is. It is not processing but perception. For so long we've had to devote enormous parts of our mental capacity merely to collecting and analyzing information that we've had very little left to devote to developing and refining ideas. With the marriage of raw computing power to giant telecommunications capacity, we have information slaves to do the drudgery. Will we use the mental capacity that has been freed up to develop, new and more fruitful ways of thinking? Not based on the track record so far. Consider the pocket calculator. It relieved people from all sorts of tedium -- the seven times table, carrying the four in the 10s place and so on. And where is the improved thinking from all that spare mental capacity? The moral. It is not the potential of the information technology that will determine the shape of the Information Society (or what we should really call the Knowledge Society.) It is our own existing wants and desires. So if we now have shaped a world, or a nation, or a community that is intellectually flabby and morally bereft, then that's the sort of Information Society we're likely to wind up with as well. It will be shared and it will be public but it will be an mere illusion of a true Knowledge Society: a shared public hallucination as someone said in the New Yorker magazine recently about William Gibson's cyberspace. So, where you wind up on this road map isn't determined by the grid references of the destination, of one particular Information Society or the other. It's determined by where we are now -- the grid references of the starting point -- and by what sort of compass heading we set out on. Where are we now? We're in a nation where almost one-third of adult Canadians haven't got the reading ability to comprehend the story of Irma as told in the newspapers last week. That's based on an extensive literacy test of 9,500 Canadians carried out by Statistics Canada in 1990. Only 68 per cent of adult Canadians can handle the sort of reading chores found in everyday life, Stats Can reported. They presented that result as good news. So forget about one-third of present Canadians having any sort of real participation in this brave new Information Society. They're already our information underclass and community networks are just relegating them farther into the darkness. (In my view, all the talk about increasing telecomputing literacy is not only elitist, but actually immoral, if community networks are doing nothing to help people struggling with achieving ordinary literacy. And there is something you could easily do: set up a discussion area where adult literacy learners could post their writings and exchange ideas. It might have to have restricted access at first but it would tackle the perception of being an underclass.) What else do we know about where we are today. We're in an era where people are crying out for issues to be presented at the level of values. Yet the proliferation of information so far has tended to obscure values, not clarify them. Here's a specific example. There is already a debate underway over competing visions of what to do with Canada's creaking social welfare scheme. Prime Minister Campbell has spoken about some form of workfare. Others have responded with studies in mind-numbing sociologiese to prove that the workfare means are faulty. But nowhere has anyone posed the straight-forward question: what's the difference in values. Is it as simple as this? Those who advocate compulsory workfare believe, deep-down, that if you're on welfare, it's because of some fault in you as a person. Those who reject the compulsion believe, on balance, that it's the fault of the economic system, not of the individuals. Our problem today isn't information overload, it's interpretation undercapacity. Somebody has actually expressed this as a law in the field of cybernetics. It's the Law of Requisite Variety which states that the capacity of a regulator for communication and control needs to be comparable to the variety of the system being regulated. This law has already been applied to the governance of an Information Society. If you look around you, you'll see that our systems of governance are being overwhelmed. Information and the power of the state are leaking out everywhere: at the top, as nations are forced to pool sovereignty in all sorts of alliances; sideways through the multinationals who conduct the world's commerce; at the bottom, as single-issue groups take control of their own destinies. Government has only two choices. Reduce the variety of the system being regulated or increase the variety of the regulator. The first is increasingly impossible and the second, increasingly difficult. The second is difficult because it involves operating at the level of values, it means we have to use some of that freed-up mental power to increase our interpretation capacity. In the last few minutes, I'm going to talk about one way this might be accomplished. It's not the only way but it's one that is especially well suited to community networks. It has to do with "framing" issues so our society can learn and adapt. The goal is to help people translate data and information into knowledge they can use. An ability to frame issues is, in my opinion, key to the successful transition to the Information Society. What do I mean by framing issues? Putting them in context, to be sure. But more importantly, framing highlights the underlying values that people are actually searching for. Take the Charlottetown accord for example. The defeat of the accord in last November's plebiscite is interpreted by some as a failure of information. After all, the "yes" side outspent the "No" side 13 to 1 publicizing its version of the agreement. Or it's explained as a rejection of the elite, because of voter alienation. I may be biased, since the media are considered part of the elite, but I believe neither reason is correct. I think the accord was defeated because the "No" forces were better in "framing" the core issue of values. The core issue was your belief in diversity. Would Canada be strengthened by diffusing responsibility and power from the centre to others -- the provinces, natives, Quebec? The "No" side "framed" this as the issue and forced the "Yes" side to fight on this battleground. And the "yes" side lost because Canadians are still, despite all the rhetoric about a community of communities, a centralizing people. We fear the American bogeyman too much to gamble with strength through diversity. You don't have to agree with this theorizing, however, to see that defining the issues in terms of values is key. Some commentators have called this the myth-making ability. Take the Gulf War. What was the seminal event in "framing" that war? It was the testimony that invading Iraqi forces had dumped babies from incubators in a Kuwait hospital in order to take the incubators back home. If you were monitoring public opinion closely at that time (and I was) you could feel something snap. On the buses and in coffee shops the next day, people talked about little else. The Iraqis had been transformed into subhumans and the Alliance could do anything it wanted, at any cost. When that story was later revealed to be false -- propaganda by Hill and Knowlton that fooled even Amnesty International -- it still continued to frame the Gulf War. It still demonstrated a lack of moral values, but this time on the part of the West. The same thing happened with Irma. She seized the agenda because her finally was something we could all understand about the war in Bosnia. More importantly, she symbolized that the corruption of values had spread from the combatants to those who were supposed to be helping. There's nothing terribly new here. We've always seized upon people who were good at communicating a shared vision, a "myth" that encapsulated our core values. Look at Sir John A Macdonald, John Diefenbaker, Pierre Trudeau. Look at George Grant, Margaret Atwood, Northrop Frye. (Or for the Americans in the audience -- FDR and Ronald Reagan.) We may turn from them later but their ability to "frame" complex issues gave them great power. In newspapers, we've recently learned this old lesson anew as well. An academic investigation of how Americans acquire political knowledge through the mass media found that television and magazines appealed to people because they "framed" the news better by putting it in context. If you want to know the full fascinating details, the book is called Common Knowledge: News and the Construction of Political Meaning (W. Russell Neuman, Marion R. Just and Ann N. Crigler, University of Chicago Press, 1992.) If you want to know the result, look at the background boxes or fact boxes that the Citizen now prints with most continuing major news stories. And here, finally, is where I think community networks have to take the initiative in the transition to an Information Society (which I still insist ought to be called a Knowledge Society). We have to help people deal with this complex information world by encouraging them, forcing them if need be, to use that spare mental capacity to think about values, about how issues should be framed. Lord knows this isn't easy. The level of public discussion on the net is appallingly shallow. You get the distinct impression that there are a lot of participants more familiar with circuit boards than with 18th century enlightenment. What the Information Society needs, desperately, are people with some grounding in the humanities, people who have actually thought about philosophy and read some history. Do you actually believe that the ethical and moral questions being raised on the net are new. They aren't. They are different in degree, but not in kind, from the questions that arose as other frontiers were crossed in the past. In crude terms I'm suggesting people should engage their brains before putting their fingers in motion. The ability to communicate instantaneously seems to discourage reflection. You can see how far we have to go by looking at the minutes from the Mechanics Institutes that flourished in many 19th century rural towns in Canada. These were a forerunner of public libraries and now of community networks, places where interested people (men, of course) came together to discuss and debate current issues. Often their sole source of topical information was a newspaper that was passed around from hand to hand or read aloud. They also had, however, the pooled knowledge from the experience of all the participants and they had been thinking about the issues during the day as they worked in the fields. The level of discussion -- the insight into the human condition, the recognition of underlying values -- recorded in those Mechanics Institutes minutes is far more profound than anything I've yet seen on the net. We're still at the stage of putting a thousand monkeys in a room with typewriters and trusting that one of them will eventually hammer out "To be or not to be, that is the question." So let's start simply, with things close to home. Before we weigh in on Bosnia or GATT, how about an intelligent net discussion about reforming schools? What are the underlying values our society wants to inculcate in the education system? How is this being addressed right here in Ottawa-Carleton? If you want some more local topics that need to be framed and discussed, try these: the role of the National Capital Commission the future of the National Arts Centre the plan for a South Urban Centre You've probably got dozens of others you'd prefer. And you'll have all sorts of ideas about how the means by which these could be aired: a simulation model for educational expenditures, interactive sessions with NCC planners etc. My plea is simple. In the chaotic, every-person-for-themself regime of the net, each of us must individually try to inject some concern for values, try to remind people that framing the issue is more important that just throwing data at the question. I realize this isn't the detailed road map you might have been expecting, hardly one of the TripTiks from the automobile association. But I have told you where you're starting from and indicated the one direction I think that community networks ought to go. Getting to the Knowledge Society now is up to you.