"We need a place to ground cyberspace. That will require online community information spaces that act as “e-commons,” a crucial balance to “e-commerce.”
New technologies have many positives. They can feed economic growth and create a “global village.” The spread of the Internet undermines repressive governments. Web 2.0 technologies create new opportunities for co-creation of content to inform and engage millions of people.
Yet they also hold dangers. Materialistic values threaten human values. Family life, community ties, and privacy are put at risk. The mass culture may well produce, as many have said, “more and more of less and less.” For all the promise, we could end up more powerless.
We need a place to ground cyberspace. That will require online community information spaces that act as “e-commons,” a crucial balance to “e-commerce.”
Many people today feel powerless over larger cultural trends, including the increasing prevalence and power of new technologies. But the civic legacy of the freedom movement of the 1960s (that I participated in as a young man as a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) provides models for overcoming this powerlessness. The movement’s central theme of civic agency—that ordinary people can be architects of their lives, shapers of their communities, and collaborators with others across differences on common challenges—has re-emerged in the 2008 election season. In fact, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” a central theme of Barack Obama’s campaign, comes directly from the freedom movement. Bernice Johnson Reagon composed the song in the early 1960s. It became a rallying cry of the movement, capturing the spirit of citizenship and freedom schools that trained blacks in skills of collective action such as how to chair a meeting, research an issue, and negotiate with people of other views and interests.
Beyond a particular candidate’s message, I believe these words have resurfaced because people once again feel a sense of urgency about gaining control over their lives, communities, and the future of our society and the world.
In 1954 the Supreme Court outlawed segregation, but it required a broad movement that enlisted the talents and energies of citizens to change a way of life. This involved returning to older concepts of the citizen as a builder and co-creator of our communities, our culture, and our democracy. In the process, people recalled that democracy itself is best seen as a way of life, not simply a vote (either at the ballot box or in the click of a mouse). These ideas had been eclipsed by consumerism and the focus on private life in the 1950s. But when Martin Luther King Jr. described the Civil Rights Movement in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” as “bringing the entire nation back to the great wells of democracy that were dug deep by the Founding Fathers,” he was helping the nation remember. The movement sought not only to “realize the promise of democracy” for African-Americans, but to make democracy’s larger meaning come alive again.
King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference sponsored hundreds of “citizenship schools.” “What is a citizen?” was the question posed in church basements and beauty parlors by leaders like Dorothy Cotton and Septima Clark. As people struggled with the answers, they came to see themselves as “first-class citizens.” And that meant that they would concentrate on community problems like sewers and roads and dilapidated schools, as well as voting rights. “Nobody is going to solve these problems for us,” Cotton would say. Government could be a resource, but people had to take on civic responsibility.
The Continuing Challenge
Though it did not end America’s racial divide, the movement made huge progress in dismantling legal segregation. It also left us with a vital legacy of civic agency to draw upon. The 21st century version of segregation is sometimes called the “digital divide”—the lack of access of poor and minority populations to new technologies. But in fact, in the U.S. and around the world, access is not the real question. The Digital Divide group (www.digittaldivide.org) has identified far graver problems internationally:
In the U.S. the Internet can also loosen the roots and relationships of poor, minority, and working-class communities, as young people (and others) enter the intoxicating and seductive world of cyberspace. These are dangers faced by people in suburbs, as well. Many parents feel that they have little control over what their children watch, the music they listen to, or the friends they socialize with online. Growing numbers express concern about the exchange of private information on the Internet. As in agriculture, where we have come to recognize the danger of mono-cultures, we face the danger of a mass media monoculture, as communications industries become more concentrated and local cultures that are supported by local media are displaced.
What is to be done?
Past challenges facing our nation—the struggle to end racial segregation, the Great Depression, the struggle against fascism—required the energy, talents and wisdom of the whole citizenry. Today, the technological revolution is an occasion and a challenge for a new citizen movement.
The concept of the commons has relevance once again. Historically, the commons was a civic meeting ground rooted in the real life of communities. The commons expressed the culture, traditions, histories and common work of particular places. It was something people helped to create; through the work of creating commons, people gained a sense of stake, pride, and ownership. The commons took many forms. Newspapers, congregations, schools, libraries, locally owned businesses, union hiring halls, settlement houses, community festivals, fairs, bands and sports teams all could be seen as commons in which people participated, around which they gathered, and through which they developed a collective public signature in the larger world.
As we shifted to an expert-dominated service society, many commons lost the qualities of civic centers and their roots in places. Libraries and schools began to serve “customers.” YMCAs shut down community problem-solving projects and opened racquetball courts. Health clinics in Minneapolis resembled those in Portland. The loss of the civic commons is a major reason for current widespread feelings of powerlessness.
But powerful countertrends are emerging using new technologies. Many libraries and schools and non-profits are reinventing themselves as “civic centers,” using information technologies as vital resources. Forms of citizen journalism, telling the news of community life, are proliferating. Citizens are creating neighborhood web pages and online conversations about public issues.
New federal, state, and local policies will be crucial to support this work, which also requires new institutions to spread the information commons approach. In 2001, I worked with a group including Paul Resnick, Peter Levine, Lew Friedland, and Robert Wachbroit, among others, to develop policy proposals for resources and technical assistance that could spread new information commons. We also proposed a “civic extension service” for the information age (http://www. si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/civicextension/index.html).
Community information commons are part of a new, larger civic movement. This movement involves the growth of anchoring community institutions of many kinds, through which people seek to control their destinies. Two examples include the Project for Public Spaces in New York City (www.pps.org) and Community-Wealth.Org (www. community-wealth.org), both of which provide tools and support services to strengthen local communities, what PPS calls “placemaking.” The civic movement is also generating new concepts and practices such as citizenship through public work. Public work—productive, sustained effort by people with diverse interests and views who develop capacities for work across differences on common civic challenges—is distinguished from dominant definitions of the citizen as voter, volunteer, or aggrieved protestor. Public work emphasizes the citizen as a strong civic agent, a co-producer of public goods and collaborator with others in solving public problems (www.publicwork.org). It is taking many forms, including an international youth civic movement called Public Achievement (www.publicachievement.org, www.public-achievement.com, www.paunite.org).
Both stronger public places and stronger citizens will be essential for a flourishing democracy—and for reclaiming control over the technologies that are, after all, our human creations. The digital world—if we see it as a supplement and not as a replacement for face-to-face interaction—has much to offer in building such a democracy.
About the Author
Harry Boyte is founder and co-director of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute on Public Affair’s Center for Democracy and Citizenship. He is also founder of Public Achievement, a theory-based practice of citizen organizing to do public work for the common good, which is being used in schools, universities and communities across the United States and in more than a dozen countries.