It is human nature to describe a new technology in the terms of the one it is replacing, if only to make what is unfamiliar seem less threatening and more marketable.
The railroad was first known as the iron horse. Blimps were called air ships.
Now, what is displayed on the two-dimensional computer screen is being touted in the language of three dimensions. The Internet is fast becoming “our new town square,” says President Clinton. Chat rooms are “much like the cafes, clubs and coffee shops you find in a city,” according to America Online.
And those are simply some of the metaphors plucked from the worlds of architecture and infrastructure.
We are opening a window. We are getting on the information superhighway. We are heading for the chat room, the lobby, the shopping arcade, the plaza. An area to which we temporarily cannot gain access is said to be “under construction.”
All this suggests that design matters as much in cyberspace as it does in physical space. Just as the planners of the New Urbanist movement seek to build communities through features like front porches, which enable the person in the rocking chair to socialize with passersby, so the designers of cyberspace are creating their own social architecture. It aims to let us leap the boundaries of time and space and find fulfillment in a modern-day version of the old Italian piazza, with its rich assortment of activities, sights and sounds.
Or so it goes in theory.
In reality, as a tour of the Internet suggests, it is far easier to slap a label that says “community” on a product than to come up with the real thing. For all that cyberspace is bringing together high-minded experts who post learned commentaries on electronic bulletin boards, and for all that it encourages random human interaction that approximates the vitality of a city street, it is in many respects the Wild West without the sawdust–a lawless realm of free-flowing obscenities and sexual innuendo, where the authorities seem to lack the will to prevent breaches in Internet etiquette, or “netiquette.”
The lack of good manners may be the least of its shortcomings. The worst of its social architecture makes for communication that is, at best, primitive. In the popular chat rooms, for example, where people in different places type text on keyboards and watch others’ words appear on their computer screens, one can only peck out the letters “lol”–shorthand for “laughing out loud”–when someone tells a good joke. The cavemen sitting around the fire chewing mastodon meat had it better than that. At least they could hear each other grunt as they recounted the day’s hunt.
“Virtual space right now comes without all five senses attached,” acknowledges Anders Nereim, who chairs the interior architecture department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where students are exploring the relationship between architecture and virtual reality.
Just a start
Such is the academic interest in cyberspace that experts already have staked out positions pro and con, much as they do with controversial approaches to design like postmodernism and Deconstructivism. There even is connoisseurship, which deems such legendary virtual communities as The Well, founded in the mid-1980s in the San Francisco Bay Area and now 10,000 members strong, to be cyberspace models on the order of St. Mark’s Square in Venice.
Proponents of the Internet argue that just as television advanced far beyond its pioneer days of black and white, so the Internet eventually will offer a more sophisticated means of communication.
To a certain extent, that’s already happening. Some virtual reality companies allow users to represent themselves as graphic symbols, known as “avatars,” and to interact with each others in virtual environments such as theme parks, music stores, even a supposedly smoky cigar bar with a jazz trio. Internet news groups, which bring together subscribers to discuss topics ranging from presidential politics to the Chicago Bulls, can exchange film clips as well as text. Architecture students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology use a combination of video conferencing and electronic mail to cooperate on urban design projects with their counterparts at an architecture school in Portugal.
“(The Internet) connects people and supports activities,” says William Mitchell, dean of the School of Architecture at MIT and author of the 1995 book “City of Bits” (MIT Press). That is very different, he says, from the gloom-and-doom scenario of “everyone sitting in darkened rooms, in their underwear, writing e-mail messages to each other.”
But others, such as Christine Boyer, professor of architecture at Princeton University and author of the 1995 book “CyberCities” (Princeton Architectural Press), paint a far less rosy picture. Besides the bad behavior on the Internet, they lament the fact that of the nation’s 193 million adults, just 46 million–about one-quarter–have Internet access either at home or at work, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
To these critics, the World Wide Web is nothing less than a gated community, open almost exclusively to those who speak English and who have enough money to buy a computer and a modem.
“Those who hype the whole revolution say it’s creating communities,” Boyer says. “But let’s look at who has the ability to be linked. There are black holes of electronic communication”–like the areas housing the nation’s poorest citizens.
Visiting some chat rooms
A Sunday night tour of the chat rooms of Dulles, Va.-based America Online, the nation’s largest computer service with 10 million subscribers, gives credence to both sides. There’s a real, raw energy out there in cyberspace, but it needs considerable refinement to achieve the ideal of building communities.
Dialing up America Online, I move my computer mouse so the arrow on the screen points at a cheery symbol called “The People Connection,” which is advertised as a “community center.” I click the mouse and am transported to Town Square Lobby 548, where one user is “flaming” the others–that’s Internet-ese for spewing vulgarities or verbally abusing your fellow chat room visitors. There’s more flaming going on in other chat rooms.
Hundreds of chat-room monitors are supposed to watch out for such abuse, but America Online has 19,000 chat rooms going on any given night, according to spokewoman Tricia Primrose. Those who feel threatened can click a small yellow circle called “Notify AOL.”
“While we can’t be in every room at every minute, we can give people a mechanism to call us if they need help,” Primrose says.
Disgusted with the flaming, I try other chat rooms–those about “romance” are packed–and finally reach one called “Artists Cafe 1.” The arty screen names of the users–NeoPicasso is the best one–suggest a trendy gallery district, like Chicago’s River North or New York’s SoHo. “Hello fellow bohemians,” one person says upon entering the room.
Within minutes, a crisis emerges.
Someone whose screen name is Roxy complains that she has an essay due the next day on a piece of art–and she hasn’t started yet.
“So write it,” someone says.
“Roxy, can you say procrastination?” chimes in someone else.
A bit later, I identify myself as a writer doing a story on chat rooms and ask why people are here.
“To waste time,” one replies.
“I’m here because no matter where I go, here I am,” says another.
“At times, I prefer this to TV. At least it requires a little thought,” a third says.
I ask what they like about the Net.
“I think you can be yourself easily.”
“You don’t have to be bashful.”
“You can release the deepest thoughts–without giving a s – – -.”
What are the drawbacks?
“You can get really attached to someone but you don’t necessarily get to meet them in person for various reasons. . . . But . . . you get over it.”
As much as I enjoy real urban spaces like Chicago’s Daley Plaza, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I also got a kick out of the Artists Cafe. It was interactive and unpredictable. It had humor and pathos. There was immediacy in the electrons.
What the Artists Cafe lacked was depth, and that failing is caused in part by way the chat room is laid out on the computer screen, with a little box providing just enough space for each participant to type in one, maybe two, sentences for each squib of conversation.
Because of that feature, there is no room for long, well-thought-out paragraphs comparable to those that can be posted in news groups. And with no one serving as a moderator, the conversation was a mess, with three trains of thought going on at the same (my version above is edited).
Making it a community
The experience gave me a new appreciation for how a human conversation, seemingly so simple, actually is pretty complex, with our gestures and body language communicating at the same time we speak. Rolling your eyeballs nicely tells a windy speaker to (ahem) pipe down. Right now, it’s hard to do that in a chat room.
“The cues we use in a human grouping are all missing,” says the School of the Art Institute’s Nereim.
And while the people in the Artists Cafe mentioned that they cherish the anonymity of the Internet–where you are not judged by your looks, your car, or your clothes; no one else can see them–that anonymity clearly cuts two ways. It gives those who engage in flaming almost absolute freedom to do whatever they please.
That’s important because real communities enforce standards of behavior. They expect their members to act responsibly. Underlying the apparent chaos of public spaces is a framework of order, as renowned urban thinker Jane Jacobs pointed out in her 1961 book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (Vintage Books).
No public space will attract many people if it is not safeguarded either by the police or the citizens who live near it. Indeed, the very notion of urban civilization and community policing are bound up in Western history; the word “police,” like the word “politics,” derives from the Greek word “polis,” meaning mother city.
But police presence is not enough. Even the Internet news groups, which are monitored more closely than the chat rooms, have their shortcomings. With their specialized topics, they are really communities of interest, which by nature restrict who participates. In that sense, they lack the complex identity of the piazza, where one can simultaneously engage in an individual activity, like bartering for a piece of meat, and take part in a collective urban experience.
Of course, we are missing much more on the World Wide Web that you’d find in a town square, all the intangible features that have nothing to do with verbal communication–the echo of feet on cobblestones, the flap of pigeons’ wings, the peal of church bells, the laughter of children.
But by bringing together people who might never have met in physical space, cyberspace can be a powerful community-building tool.
Social bonds are needed
The Well’s success as a virtual community is often ascribed to the fact that one of its architects, Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogue, realized it would be unwise to champion exclusively the human-contact model of experience or the virtual mode. Rather, he set out to discover where they intersected.
So members of The Well meet each other not only online but also in real-space parties, though as writer Katie Hafner pointed out in Wired this year, “pretty much everyone later observed that the shapely personalities projected bore scant resemblance to the people who showed up.” The parties nevertheless allowed them to build social bonds, and that enabled them to share intimacies in cyberspace.
One came from a member who announced that, after years of searching, he finally had found his biological mother.
In response, he heard from the fellows whose screen names were “maddog” and “tex”:
“My thoughts are with you.”
“Mine too.”
