How is it good?

Technology harmful? The internet harms community? Do these strings of words even make sense?

Sure. Sometimes, but not totally, and not inevitably. What the internet does is accelerate and multiply whatever it touches. Let’s wiggle our fingers in front of our faces, make wobbly sounds, and travel back in time to the mid-1980’s to early 1990’s.

Back in those days, we had cable TV and Rush Limbaugh, sure. And mail-order catalogues, too. Correspondence schools, and Harold Bloom. And the religious right, and “razor blades in apples.” And gays. And gun nuts. People did things together, and they were afraid of things for no good reason. We gathered, summoned by free ads in the back of local newspapers, photocopied fliers stuck on utility poles, and could read things we agreed with in magazines like National Review or In These Times.

Going back further, we had the national divisions of Watergate, Vietnam, labor struggles of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, a huge division called the Civil War, and other structural divisions taking the form of the Whiskey Rebellion, Shay’s Rebellion, disagreements between property owners and tradesmen, and not even the War for Independence was universally welcomed. The Salem witch trials were at least as much about the breakdown of community as about the illegality of magic. None of these things needed the internet to happen.

So it’s likely that the internet will be intimately associated with the further breakdown of community. More accurately, though, it’s likely that the internet will be intimately associated with additional breakdowns of community. Bu since what community really is is a profoundly intricate interconnecting network for networks–one with a geographic component, but which has never been merely bound by local geography–the internet is unlikely to destroy community in the way we have traditionally though of it.

Briefly, what the internet can be expected to do to community is increase the atomistic nature of modern American society. My examples of the 1980s and 1990s were chosen to point up this trend. We have a way of individualizing our perspective on the world here in America. Probably the last time we really had unified mass experience of the world was World War II. Since the earliest part of the post-War period, we’ve been endeavoring to individualize the world for our own benefit. This individualization was fitful in the early decades of the post-War period.

By the late 1960s, though we were getting pretty good at it. We could talk increasingly only with people with whom we agreed, and our idea of community became less bound to geography and more associated with the idea of the like-minded. This, as the examples from the pre-1980s paragraphs was intended to show, wasn’t new. There had always been a sense that the like-minded had at least as much in common with one another, no matter where they lived, as the people who lived near each other did regardless of station in life.

Back to the internet. Now narrow-casting, browser history-sensitive ad targeting, rss feeds, and who-knows-what all make the experience of the internet ever more an experience of looking in a very, very busy mirror. (In the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, there’s a circus exhibit. One of the elements is a row of holes in the wall. You stick you head in, and the interior lights up. At the far end is a mirror, and you see your face overlain with colored lights in the form of clown make-up. This has been there since at least 1978.)

The internet allows you to shop any time, day or night, from your couch. Telephone ordering has been available for as long as Sears has had phones, but the internet accelerates the trend of not going to a local store.

So, really, if the nature of the internet is to atomize communications, shopping, and what all… if it is to make the elements of community which are interest-based ever less geographically based… then, really, is it a good idea to make it even more pervasive, ever more available, and ever more ever more?

Sure.

Community has survived more serious challenges in the past. And the forgr project is fundamentally about linking community with this technology.

In closing, “brake” is a funny looking (and funny sounding) word.