I feel honored as an American to write the preface for this collection of important essays on how communities can best use the new electronic medium. Although our perspectives and experiences are bound to vary, I believe that there are certain core values that we share because we are human and because we inhabit human communities. Although this fact may not be well-known in Italy, at least some of the current discussion in the United States can be traced to Italian civic associations. Robert Putnam, a professor from Harvard University, has shown (based on his observations in Italy) that the strength of informal civic networks increase the strength and vitality of communities.
Communities are fundamental to human life for they define the set of associations that is not authoritarian, nor based on commerce or the family. Although this type of relationship may be the most "humane" of human relations, the traditional and, therefore, unchanging community belongs to history. This fact does not mean that the need for community has passed. On the contrary, a new community has been made necessary; a new community that contains elements of the old, yet is more conscious, inclusive, understanding, intelligent, proactive, flexible, resilient, and principled than the old. The keys to this new community include activism, education, dialogue, and struggle; and access to media, to communication technology, is essential to the use of those keys.
Unfortunately communities are under assault. Global economic shifts can bring wrenching changes and feelings of helplessness. Communities are becoming more stratified economically and, as we often see, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. These problems are compounded (or at least not alleviated) by increasingly unresponsive governmental and business interests. Furthermore, the communities have little chance to resist or to organize; history is apparently outdistancing them. With global media monopolies (along with politicians, government bureaucrats, and censors) framing the issues, controlling the agenda of public discourse, and constricting communication, it is clear that access to communications technology is critical if communities are to overcome their disadvantages.
Apparently born in the United States, but spreading across oceans and computer screens all over the world, there is some glimmer of hope for community media. A unlikely alliance of activists, technologists, educators, librarians, and other civic and community boosters are developing a new breed of computer network systems that go by several names including community networks, civic nets, Free-Nets, or public networks. These systems are designed to be public, easy and inexpensive (if not free) to use. More importantly, they can facilitate dialogue (for the first time) among groups of people. There may yet be an opportunity to shape the technology to make it more responsible to community needs: large numbers of people are beginning to use the new systems, the costs are relatively low, and the shape of the medium is in flux.
The big question is whether community networks can have a positive impact. Since the beginning of community networking in Berkeley, Cleveland, and other places there has been a tension between the optimistic notion that community networks would become as commonplace as public libraries, and the pessimistic suspicion that public networks will gradually dissipate, replaced by digital-gambling, home shopping, hyper-violent virtual reality games, and cyber sex.
What's the nature of the challenge that confronts community networkers worldwide? Can we put a shape or a name on the vague specter of doubt in order to better understand the threat and to perhaps confront and rebuff it? Only this: those with community networking interests may not have the persuasiveness, the resolve, the allies, the resources, or the ability or desire to make common cause with others in the field and work together. The global businesses, cyber-pundits, government bureaucrats, and politicians, acting in tacit cooperation with a citizenry that is too jaded or intimidated to think or care, may ultimately prevail.
There are, however, reasons to be hopeful. At the core of the interest in community-oriented democratic technology -- whether they're based in Italy, the United States or Canada, Asia, Africa, or elsewhere -- is a tentative faith, a cautious confidence in the people's ability to understand their situation and predicament and to help shape, however imperfectly, their own destiny. The dream and yearnings for a just world is capable of motivating a disparate group of people in a thousand locations simultaneously around the world.
A tapestry of democratic technology -- of which community networks are just one part -- consists of networks and networks of networks, transcending political and economic borders and linking all community and democratic enterprises. It couldn't be built by individuals nor orchestrated by an institution or a company. It will be necessary for thousands, millions, of people and organizations with a strong and urgent sense of social responsibility to link together and push resolutely in a forward direction, an equitable and sustainable direction. Only then can community become a tapestry of principled and purposeful thought, talk, and action.