The greater the number of people who join an electronic community, the more valuable it will be to everyone who uses it. Most of the world’s skiing enthusiasts will participate, at least occasionally. In time, the world’s best information about skis and skiing will be available electronically. If you join, you will find the best slopes near Munich, the lowest price anywhere for a particular set of poles, and the latest news and advertising about all ski-related products. If people have taken photos or made videos of a race or a trip, they can share them. Books about skiing will be reviewed by anyone who has an opinion. Laws and safety practices will be debated. Instructional videos will be available on a moment’s notice. These multi-media documents will be available free or for a charge, to one person or to hundreds of thousands. This community on the information highway will become the place to go if you are interested in skiing.
If you want to get yourself in better physical condition before trying a hard slope, you might find training more fun if you are in close electronic touch with a dozen other people who are your size, weight, and age, and who share your specific goals for exercise and weight reduction. You would have less to be self-conscious about in an exercise program in which everyone else is like you. And if you still were uncomfortable, you could turn your video camera off. Members of this community could get together to encourage each other and even work out at the same time.
The community of skiers is quite large and easy to define. On the information highway there will be applications to help you find people and information that intersect with your interests, no matter how specific. If you’re thinking of visiting Berlin, the highway will make vast amounts of historical, touristic, and sociological information available. But there will also be applications to let you find fellow enthusiasts there. You’ll be invited to register your interests in databases that can be analyzed by the applications. These applications will even suggest people you might like to meet. If you have a collection of Venetian glass paperweights, you’ll probably choose to be a member of one or more world communities of people who share this interest. Some of those people may live in Berlin and have collections they’d be delighted to show you. If you have a ten-year-old daughter you’ll be taking with you to Berlin, you might query whether there is anyone in Berlin who has a ten-year-old, shares your language, and is willing to spend time with you during your visit. If you find two or three suitable people, you have created a small—and probably temporary—community of interest.
I recently visited Africa and took a lot of pictures of chimpanzees. If the information highway were available now, I would put out a message saying that if anyone else from the safari wanted to exchange photographs, he or she should put them on the same bulletin board where I had posted my chimpanzee photos. I would be able to set it up so only fellow safari members could have access to that bulletin board.
Already, thousands of newsgroups on the Internet and countless forums on commercial on-line services have been set up as locations for small communities to share information. For example, on the Internet there are lively text-based discussion groups with such names as alt.agriculture.fruit, alt.animals.raccoons, alt.asian-movies, alt.coffee, bionet.-biology.cardiovascular, soc.religion.islam, and talk.philosophy, misc. But these topics aren’t nearly so specialized as some of the subjects I expect electronic communities will address in the future. Some communities will be very local, and some will be global. You won’t be overwhelmed by the number of choices of communities any more than you are now by the telephone system. You’ll look for a group that interests you in general, and then you’ll search through it for the small segment you want to join. I can imagine the administration of every municipality, for example, becoming the focus of an electronic community.
Sometimes I get annoyed by a traffic light near my office that always stays red longer than I think it should. I could write a letter to the city, telling the folks who program the lights that the timing isn’t optimal, but that would just be one cranky letter. On the other hand, if I could find the “community” of people who drive the route I do, we could send a strong complaint to the city. I could find these others by sending a message to people who live near me or by posting a message on a community affairs bulletin board that showed a map of the intersection accompanied by the message: “During the morning rush hours hardly anyone goes left at this intersection. Does anyone else think the cycle should be shortened?” Anyone who agreed with me could add to my message. It would make it easier to fight City Hall.
As on-line communities grow in importance, they will increasingly be where people will turn to find out what the public is really thinking. People like to know what’s popular, which movies friends are watching, and what news others think is interesting. I want to read the same “newspaper front page” as those I’m going to meet with later today, so we can have something in common to talk about. You will be able to see what places on the network are being looked at often. There will be all sorts of “hot lists” of the coolest places.
Electronic communities, with all the information they reveal, will also create problems. Some institutions will have to make big changes as on-line communities gain power. Doctors and medical researchers are already having to contend with patients who explore medical literature electronically and compare notes with other patients who have the same serious disease. Word of unorthodox or unapproved treatments spreads fast in these communities. Some patients in drug trials have been able to figure out, by communicating with other patients in the trial, that they are receiving a placebo rather than the real medication. The discovery has prompted some of them to drop out of the trials or to seek alternate, simultaneous remedies. This undermines the research, but it is hard to fault patients who are trying to save their lives.
It’s not just medical researchers who will be affected by so much access to information. One of the biggest concerns is parents having to contend with children who can find out about almost anything they want to, right from a home information appliance. Already, rating systems are being designed to allow parental control over what kids have access to. This could become a major political issue if the information publishers don’t handle it properly.
On balance, the advantages will greatly outweigh the problems. The more information there is available, the more choices we will have. Today, devoted fans plan their evenings around the broadcast times of their favorite television shows, but once video-on-demand gives us the opportunity to watch whatever we like whenever we like, family or social activities, rather than a broadcaster’s time slots, will control our entertainment schedules. Before the telephone, people thought of their neighbors as their only community. Almost everything was done with others who lived nearby. The telephone and the automobile allowed us to stretch out. We may visit face-to-face less often than we did a century ago because we can pick up the telephone, but this doesn’t mean we have become isolated. It has made it easier for us to talk to each other and stay in touch. Sometimes it may seem too easy for people to reach you.
A decade from now, you may shake your head that there was ever a time when any stranger or a wrong number could interrupt you at home with a phone call. Cellular phones, pagers, and fax machines have already made it necessary for businesspeople to make explicit decisions that used to be implicit. A decade ago we didn’t have to decide whether we wanted to receive documents at home or take calls on the road. It was easy to withdraw to your house, or certainly to your car. With modern technology you have to decide when and where you want to be available. In the future, when you will be able to work anywhere, reach anyone from anywhere, and be reached anywhere, you will be able to determine easily who and what can intrude. By explicitly indicating allowable interruptions, you will be able to reestablish your home—or anywhere you choose —as your sanctuary.