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The lives of people everywhere in the world seem increasingly to be shaped by events, decisions and actions that take place far away from where they live and work. Cultures, economies and politics appear to merge across the globe through a rapid exchange of information, ideas and knowledge. The advent of the mobile phone, satellite television and the Internet means that communication from one side of the globe to the other is virtually instantaneous. Distant events are presented to us on a multitude of video screens even as they are taking place. Newspaper and TV headlines relay to our homes, offices, schools and libraries news of a series of crises, fears and panics, which suggests that across the world change maybe out of control.
Our cultural and political certainties are challenged by the rise of new movements and the emergence of new institutions. The authority of social institutions seems to be increasingly redundant in the face of powerful and apparently dominant global forces. Thus, we seem to be living in a world of increasing change and uncertainty, in what Giddens (1999) has characterized as a “runaway world.” “For better or worse,” he says, “we are being propelled into a global order that no one fully understands, but which is making its effects felt upon all of us” (Giddens, 1999). Developments in information and communication technologies have the power to change the spatial frames within which we live and work. In other words, they alter the ways we think about the relations between people and places. They alter the assumptions that we make about where and when certain activities are permitted or expected to take place. Instead, of having to go to a bank we shift funds about from a beach in the Caribbean and rather than searching for shops, shops follow customers around electronically. We have electronic connectedness.
The Internet has the potential to create links between people and groups with shared political interests - and for them to promote their ideas to others. By increasing access to information the Internet brings about a greater engagement and interaction between the individual and larger polity. In the new world spaces of informational exchange, everything is subject to sale, and the sale is everything to the subject. The digital domain greatly accelerates how all dissolves into thin air as well as the profanation of all that is holy. The e-migration of digital beings and their lifeworld into cyberspace brings "the system" almost all the way home as a lifeworld. Online agency becomes us, because, as Baudrillard (1981) observes:
The consumption of individuals mediates the productivity of corporate capital; it becomes a productive force required by the functioning of the system itself, by its process of reproduction and survival. In other words, there are these kinds of needs because the system of corporate production needs them. And the needs invested by the individual consumer today are just as essential to the order of production as the capital invested by the capitalist entrepreneur and the labor power invested in the wage laborer. It is all capital.
In an argument related to the idea of virtual communities, Turkle (1984: 1995), Harroway (1991), Mitchell (1994: 1996) and Virillo (1986: 1991: 1997: 2003) often relate the Internet to the idea of the 'public sphere', as developed by Habermas (1989). In an ideal public sphere, citizens would discuss issues of concern and arrive at a consensus for the common good. Habermas did not feel that we have an effective public sphere in Western societies, partly because commercial mass media has turned people into consumers of information and entertainment, rather than participants in an interactive democratic process.
Traditionally, you needed to go someplace to do this sort of thing-to the agora, the forum, the piazza, the café, the bar, the pub, Main Street, the mall, the beach, the gym, the bathhouse, the college dining hall, the common room, the office, or the club -and where you went pegged your peer group, your social position, and your role. It also framed expectations about how you should represent yourself by your clothing, body language, speech, and behavior and about the interactions that were to take place. Each familiar species of public place had its actors, costumes, and scripts. But the worldwide computer network-the electronic agora-subverts, displaces, and radically redefines our notions of gathering place, community, and urban life. The Net has a fundamentally different physical structure, and it operates under quite different rules from those that organize the action in the public places of traditional cities. It will play as crucial a role in twenty-first-century urbanity as the centrally located, spatially bounded; architecturally celebrated agora did in the life of the Greek polis (Mitchell, 1996).
Clearly the technological means have emerged to replace these spatial and architectural arrangements with electronics and software, and it isn't hard to construct plausible arguments in favor of such a substitution. For a start, political assemblies could become virtual, with representatives connecting by computer network instead of sitting together in chambers. This is not such a big step; assembly chambers are already equipped with electronic systems for recording votes, and most of us watch the proceedings - if we watch them at all - on C-Span or on local cable.
Mitchell (1996) contends, “Grizzled old operators still like to assure us that ‘all politics is local.' But in the cyberspace era, things may be very different. You do not have to buy into Perot's appallingly reductionistic view of political discourse to realize that cyberspace has the potential to fundamentally change political institutions and mechanisms. It opens up ways of assembling and communicating with dispersed political constituencies, new opportunities for instigating and formulating issues, and mechanisms for providing decisions and feedback at a much faster pace than in the past” (p. 12).
Classroom learning takes place not just in the stable, orderly, controlled, linear, sequential, mechanistically "lawful" environment; but also in those situations which are open, fluid, dynamic, ever changing - even educationally "chaotic." The classroom environment molded on "means/ends" determinism - and pedagogically predicated on a Modernist scientific worldview of prediction, certainty, and stability - is not the only environment in which learning takes place. A "learning" classroom may be modeled on a postmodern worldview in which the uncertain combination of ambiguity, randomness, and contestable knowledge challenges the students (and teacher) to think .
This diversity is recognized not as educationally divisive, but as a learning opportunity. In this context one public education possibility will be to use the learning potential of personal and group political understandings - as well as misunderstandings - to help students "come to terms with their own and other's identities and to understand how the world shapes and is shaped by social interaction” (Tierney, 1993). Public schools will be better able to help students understand the self and the other as part of the continuing search for a universal and a personal politically constructed knowledge base.
Migration of political activity to cyberspace forces us to rethink traditional relationships between the civic and the urban - that a community is not necessarily related to any particular place or construction. Today the Oxford (2004) definition of a community as a "body of people living in one place, district, or country" is eroding. A community may now find its place in cyberspace. This new site is not some suitable patch of earth but a computer to which members may connect from wherever they happen to be. The foundation is not one of marking boundaries, but of allocating disk space and going online. And the new urban design is not one of configuring buildings, streets, and public spaces to meet the needs and aspirations of the community , but one of textual and symbolic constructions to create virtual places and electronic interconnections between them. Within these places, social contacts will be made, economic transactions will be carried out, cultural life will unfold, surveillance will be enacted, and power will be exerted.
As these communities develop, we will need to consider not only their urban design - the places and interconnections that they provide, and their look and feel - but also their civic character. We will have to figure out how to make cyberspace communities work in just, equitable, and satisfying ways. So far, there are no definitive answers to the questions, but there are at least a few emerging models to consider.
The commercial online systems have developed, until now, as company towns - centrally controlled enterprises that own the infrastructure and try to make money by renting space to information and service providers, by charging access fees to subscribers, and like broadcast media by selling advertising. Some smaller, dial-in systems belong to the communitarian, utopian tradition. They have relied on generating a shared commitment to the common good and on informal, barter systems of information exchange. The Internet demonstrates the possibility of a multilayered, heterogeneous system in which the constituent communities organize themselves.
As communities increasingly find their common ground in cyberspace rather than on terra firma, these sites will be debated, extended, and transformed. The fundamental questions of cyberspace's political economy will urgently be contested. Who plays, who pays, and how is this decided? How is intellectual property to be managed and protected? What is the role of agency? How should communities define their boundaries, and how might they maintain their norms within these boundaries? What are legitimate forms of power? How might political discourse be constructed?
A teacher speaks students listen and respond. The teacher has access to some body of knowledge, beliefs, and practices, and makes this body available to students. The underlying diagram of a school appears in its simplest form when disciples gather within earshot of a teacher in a place made by the shade of a tree. The less sedentary Socrates strolled in a grove, with his disciples keeping pace. The little red schoolhouse puts students in a box with the teacher in front. Bentham proposed "Chrestomathic" monitorial schools -a variant on the panopticon - had a single master in the middle surrounded by a circle of six monitors to keep order, then circular tiers with seats for nine hundred boys (Mack, 1969). Modern schools, colleges, and universities have greater spatial differentiation and far more complex plans. Schools, colleges, and universities are spaces that exist primarily to bring students and teachers together so that a sharing of knowledge can take place.
They provide multiple classrooms to allow different sorts of instruction to proceed simultaneously; they add libraries, laboratories, art and design studios, music practice rooms, and other specialized facilities; and they link the pieces together with long passageways. Residential institutions - like that planned by Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia - integrate rooms for scholars and provide hierarchies of informal and formal meeting places, so that the plan reads as an illustration of the dedicated scholarly life. The demand that colleges and universities typically make is to be "in residence" - to be part of the spatially defined community. Therefore, these communities enforce strict compliance with academic timetables, classroom schedules, and calendars.
Of course there have always been alternatives to making such permanent, rigidly organized places of learning. Pre-industrial societies had their itinerant teachers and holy men who spread the word wherever they could find audiences. By providing printed books and efficient mail service, the Industrial Revolution made correspondence schools possible. Two-way radio allowed a teacher in Fairbanks to instruct children living in remote areas scattered across Alaska . Broadcast television and videotapes (in conjunction with reasonably good mail service) creates the possibility for distance education to flourish. Today digital telecommunication is producing a powerful resurgence of this alternative tradition. Being online may soon become a more important mark of community membership than being in residence.
As the digital telecommunications era dawned, some schools were very quick to begin exploring the potential role of campus networks. At Dartmouth in the 1960s a network of interactive terminals was put in place and heavily used. At MIT in the 1980s the campus-wide Athena system pioneered the educational use of networked workstations with high-bandwidth interconnections. By the 1990s campus networks were commonplace from the elementary school to the university.
Today the Internet has begun to shake up the traditional, insular structures of schools by creating quick, convenient, inexpensive channels for worldwide, campus-to-campus interchange of text, images and data. Network connections quickly create new ways of sharing knowledge and enacting practices and so force changes in the characters of teaching spaces. At the very least, a classroom now needs a computer workstation integrated with the old blackboards and slide projectors. And instead of taking notes on paper, students use their laptop computers. Rooms fragment into scattered information access points.
Increasing the numbers and types of informed Internet consumers will ensure that the Internet does not become the domain just of the moneyed elite. Furthermore, with increased Internet access and the skills to use, more individuals can take advantage of the wealth of government and grassroots resources increasingly available online, which can often be made more locally accessible than having to go across town to an office.
In its early days, the Internet was more fun for the knowledgeable few. Those were the days when no one was determined to quantify the population, there was a perceived consensus about what constituted netiquette, business interests were virtually silent. However, in the aftermath of an AOL disk arriving every day in the mail and politicians giving token nod to universal Internet access, the point and purpose of the Internet is continually evolving. The Internet is both useful and problematic. While the technology revolution has been sweeping the world, there are many for whom technology has never been a significant part of their lives. Many other issues are confronting communities, yet no one deserves being left without the opportunities that Internet technology can bring. In many urban and rural US communities, libraries and schools have been the only potential places to share these technologies.
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References
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