The Absence of Community in Frameworks for Public Policy
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COMMUNITY: THE LINK ACROSS
DIGITAL DIVIDES
October 24, 2001
In our community
of community networkers, what common needs will cause us to agree to work
together? That’s a question for the
Global Community Networks Partnership (GCNP) to address, not a question for
international and multinational organizations. Their question, and the panel’s
question, is different - is there an agenda of common interests that might
allow the global community networking movement and international agencies to
cooperate in joint action? Certainly the
agendas of the first two global CN Congresses supply a daunting checklist of
issues that, from the viewpoint of community networks, require attention and
resources.
Community is
about integrative social relationships, not locality. As social networks, communities are primarily
concerned with reciprocity in addressing common objectives and needs. Community can emerge whenever groups of autonomous
individuals[1] ask themselves – at this
moment, what can we do to work together?
Any social
network that is characterized by high degrees of self-organizing
interdependence is behaving as a community.
For example, in a networked economy, a market is a community. When all participants in a market approach
perfect information about price, that market approaches behaving as a community
of common interest. The rules that
pattern the behaviors of a community relate directly to the immediate
circumstances of its relationships to the ecology it inhabits. Community is nothing more than an agreed set
of rules for behaving consistently in solving problems of daily life[2] in a particular locality
or common set of circumstances.
If the
foundations of reciprocity are solid in thousands of functioning communities,
any wider society that coheres from their socio-political and economic
relationships is also functional. At the
“world” level in global networks, this surfaces a political economy of ideas,
not of ideologies. But the composition
of this new world is not unitary. It is
pluralistic[3]. In peer-to-peer networks, where any can
connect to any and often will, nation states and international agencies have
limited capacity to modulate the signals that inform the behavioural responses
of communities to the many worlds they now freely inhabit. Also the capacity for them to create new
worlds at will is growing rapidly. This
is not chaos. This is certainly not
nationalism. It is just different. The chaos occurs as a consequence of reaction
to that difference.
GCNP is active
in 35 countries. The existence of this
movement surfaces capacities inherent in online communities that can balance
many of the competing and conflicting forces in the world in a new and
different way. And it’s existence is
still largely under the horizon of most international development agencies.
Almost nothing
in any of the digital divide action plans suggests awareness of the nature of
the bridge to community that must be crossed to achieve their objectives. GCNP needs to become useful in negotiating
the factors in the public interest that make possible the practices of
community development online, especially when items on current public policy
agendas ignore or threaten the application of those practices.
Defining a new framework of assumptions
- Community (the zones of socialization
where iterations of non-zero sum games occur most easily), and management
and governance (the zones of competition for power viewed as a limited
resource) are three antithetical but dynamically related modes of
structuring systems of human interaction.
- The presence of community is always
a threat to the efficient administration of management and governance
- The presence of community is an
indication of effectiveness in the balancing of cooperative and
competitive interests.
- The networks of a networked global
economy are social, not technological.
The primary mode of structural interaction which works best in the
political economy of networks is community, not management and governance.
- In digital divide action plans, the
need to alleviate the disruptive impacts of competition (or at least
accommodate reactions to them) has caused global alliances of common
interest between management and governance. But, because of the primacy of
competition, it is difficult for people in those alliances to imagine the
will to intensify the presence of community that is already in being. A construct[4],
called “civil society,” has been invented to obscure that failure of
imagination.
In Learning
Societies, failure of the imagination is a sin.
The construct of civil society presumably “institutionalizes” human
interaction in a manner similar to the other two modes. At best, this might serve to make more
familiar some social changes that seem to threaten conventional views of
necessity in social organization. At
worst, the search for representativeness in civil society is a shell-game. It will have no possible conclusive result
except to divert the attention of those drawn into it. For elected politicians and technocrats to
shift the blame for the failing legitimacy of representative democracy from
themselves to civil society is to make an end-run on accountability.
The presence of
community is always going to be a threat to management and governance. Management and governance are ways of doing
things that automatically seek to balance issues of competition in the
allocation of scarce resources. They
imagine economic or political power to be a resource, and thus get trapped into
the perpetual spiral of playing zero sum games.
The presence of
community implies a different way of doing things (that is to say, a different
set of “technologies” with a different set of cultural practices in the
understanding of their use). Community
fosters diversity because it integrates autonomy and interdependence. It requires qualities of relationship that
are the antithesis of the control that the players of zero sum games seek to
achieve. Therefore an alliance where the
needs of management and governance take first precedence will, by reflex, seek
to inhibit the emergence of community.
International
organizations often represent extensions of national politics by another
means. This is true whether or not they
are serving universal principles (as they should), or are expediently serving
the purposes of their more powerful member states. The practices of community development online
are the products of successful transition to a learning society. They are manifestations of how it will feel
when you are there. International
organizations are still in the process of transition and are finding it to be
difficult. They are going to need an
altered model of the good society if they are to succeed.
The role of community in the emergence of Learning Societies
The
GCN Partnership's mandate is to increase interdependencies in the diverse and
distributed community of those who act on the local level to understand and
develop community online. The most
appropriate experiences of community development online are local, uncentered
and widely distributed by their very nature.
The instinct to centralize something in finding a route for applying
that experience to socio-economic development in general is diametrically
opposed to its essence. How can we
enhance the strength that emerges from local autonomy in self-organization
without turning it into its opposite?
So, what common
ground is there for the negotiation of cooperation for joint action among
international and community networking organizations? From a community network’s point of view,
good partners will acknowledge universal principles of:
- Diversity
- Autonomy
- Public interest/public good
- Defense of the electronic commons[5]
- The sustainability of community
development at the local level
- Democracy as participatory and
anticipatory, not representative
To work
hand-in-hand with community networking associations, international
organizations will need to respond to that list. But surely the common goals that are found
will not involve separating society into sectors of business, government and
“civil society?” Surely the goal isn’t
to isolate some part of society that is somehow civil? The goal is to sustain a society that is good
by being civil in all its parts – characterized by a high degree of reciprocity
in all its interactions.
An alliance of
management and governance that excludes community becomes irrelevant to
bridging the digital divide. When we have “bridged” the digital divide, we will
not just address poverty, sustainability and social justice. Fundamental differences will emerge in the
rules organizing social systems. The
economic and political advantages that accrue from life in a Learning Society
do not emerge from the playing of zero sum games. They occur in the atmosphere of cooperation
and trust that is essential to the successful conclusions of playing non-zero
sum games. The rules which pattern the
behaviour of global markets, and which distribute the functions of production
and consumption which create those markets, are the rules of non-zero sum
games.
We are also
crossing over a bridge into whole new zones of socialization. In those zones, the determinants of social
networks, and the degree to which they require self-identification of common
interests by autonomous individuals in order to function effectively, are
completely different.
If these are reasonable
assumptions, what is the best strategy for accelerating a shift toward the
predominance of community as the primary mode for structuring both local and
global human interaction? If these are
not reasonable assumptions, what other assumptions should frame the strategic
issues from GCNP’s point of view? What does GCNP want to come into being? I believe the goal should be to increase the
potential for the emergence of Learning Societies. We are not there yet.
The presence of community is a critical component of the structure of social networks and political economy in a Learning Society. It is the essential quality causing dynamic self-organizing social networks to coalesce. And it is the existence of dynamic self-organizing social networks that cause perpetual innovation in systems of production and consumption. A Learning Society, by definition, needs far more community[6] and far less management and governance than we have now.
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ALTERNATIVE GLOBAL CHANGE AGENDAS
Garth Graham, October 24, 2001
END NOTES
[1] Because globalization
has brought down many of the walls that limited the movement and reach of
people, and because it has simultaneously wired the world into networks, it
gives more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states
than at any time in history. Individuals
can increasingly act on the world stage directly – unmediated by a state. (Thomas L. Friedman. The
Lexus and the olive tree. Anchor
Books, 2000, 14)
[2] Social
Appropriation…. Beyond their functional
uses, ICTs can contribute to development when there is social appropriation of
Internet resources. Social appropriation
occurs when Internet resources help transform daily life by contributing to the
solution of concrete problems. Evidence
of appropriation is not found in the use of ICTs, but rather in the changes
that they have brought about in the real world.
Only when Internet resources become useful tools for transforming
everyday life do ICTs reach their full development potential. (Ricardo Gomez
and Juliana Martinez. The Internet…Why?
And What for? Ottawa, IDRC, 2001, 6-7.)
[3] But what about the view
that globalization is a kind of cultural conquest? …Where governments reflect the
preferences and beliefs of most citizens, democratically or otherwise, and
where those preferences call for cultural distinctiveness and non-western
values, economic integration does not militate against diversity, least of all
against religious diversity. In the
west, globalization has been running at full power for years. Has it mashed the United States, France,
Italy, Germany, Sweden and Japan into a homogeneous cultural putty? It has not, and there is no reason why it
ever should. (“Is globalization doomed?” The
Economist, September 29, 2001. p14.)
[4] Nation-states attempt to
regain legitimacy and to represent the social diversity of its constituency
through the process of decentralization and devolution of power and resources.
This translates primarily into revitalizing sub-state national governments
(such as Scotland or Catalonia), regional governments, local governments, and
non-governmental organizations. Indeed, the dramatic expansion of
non-governmental organizations around the world, most of them subsidized and
supported by the state, can be interpreted as the extension of the state into
civil society, in an effort to diffuse conflict and increase legitimacy by
shifting resources and responsibility to the grassroots. (Martin Carnoy and
Manuel Castells. Globalization, the knowledge society, and the
network state: at the millennium. http://www.chet.org.za/oldsite/castells/poulantzas.html)
[5] Nor can the production
or distribution of global public goods be left to that powerful engine of
globalization, the market. Indeed,
public goods share two characteristics that the market abhors. First, they can be enjoyed by any number of
people simultaneously, so there is no price-deciding equilibrium of demand and
supply. Second, it is difficult, even
impossible, to prevent someone from enjoying a public good once it exists –
even someone who doesn’t pay for it.
Investors cannot sequester their own returns. A healthy ozone shield or stable capital
markets will benefit even those who contribute nothing to them. (Gordon Smith and Moises Naim. Altered
States: globalization, sovereignty and governance. Ottawa, IDRC, 2000,
18-19.)
[6] Any community that shares a "world" is necessarily bound into a network of responsibility. Without the continuing support of a community, any world (that is, any space of being) will begin to fall apart. If cyberspace teaches us anything, it is that the worlds we conceive (the spaces we "inhabit") are communal projects requiring ongoing communal responsibility. (Margaret Wertheim. The pearly gates of cyberspace. New York, Norton, 1999, 304.)
Last modified 2006-05-01 01:47 PM
