The Net and its Unique Characteristics - Community Building and Global Networking

Everything across the spectrum from a simple community bulletin board, which may be a computer hook-up to a telephone so you can dial in to your local library, to telephone networks such as AT&T, MCI and Sprint, commercial on-line services like America Online, satellite and broadcast television, cell phone networks and the Internet itself, a global network of more than 50,000 interconnected computer networks, are all part of Cyberspace. Together, they can bring you news, entertainment, emergency messages, email, entertainment, movies and games.  You can, and people do now, order a pizza, do their banking, their grocery shopping, buy a car, get a mortgage on their house, look for a college or a nanny for their child, all over the Internet. Going beyond those practical uses, one should recognize the increasing power of the Internet and its effect on your life. Marshall McLuhan, the ground breaking writer and teacher who electrified audiences in the sixties with his vision of a "global village" formed by mass communication, foresaw that the characteristics of an electronic medium such as television, much more than its content, would attract the user and shape his experience. McLuhan summed up his views in his book "The Medium is the Message". Some mediums, particularly in the beginning stages, are so captivating that their power to transmit words, pictures, emotions, energy, transcends even the content which they are transmitting. This might be called the recognition factor: We recognize the power in the potential of a new medium. When radio was born, or motion pictures, then the talkies, and finally television, we were all mesmerized. Their day to day content--commercials, or serials or adventures or comedy --was not as transfixing as knowing they had the power to keep us all spell bound by overwhelming emotions at moments of national peril, tragedy or triumph. Such moments were D Day, the Abdication of the King of England for the woman he loved, Pearl Harbor, the death of John F. Kennedy, man's landing on the Moon. (McLuhan, 1996)

It is this power to focus the world's attention and to expand and deepen our experience by making us part of a transforming event, which captures the imagination of man with the media. The Internet, however, adds an entirely new dimension in that it frees us from our dependence on a broadcaster and allows us the possibility for communication among ourselves, not through the lens of broadcasters or film or TV directors, or screened by the editorial boards and policies of newspapers, but each of us, on our own, may now decide to reach out and touch any one in any nation in the world instantly.

Because this new medium of the Internet is so powerful and so filled with promise, particularly the promise of community building, it is vital for women to understand the implications of having access to the most powerful communications network in history, to learn its dynamics and understand what is at stake in its future. 35 million people are on the Net today from all over the globe, many of them women. The means to communicate is here, the audience is listening and many sites have already formed on the Web to address the fundamental issues of providing a global electronic support system for women. ( Cyberatlas, 1997).

Net a Tool for Living and Working - like Swiss Army Knife

The Net is not just one thing, but several things at the same time, comprised of different tools in the same shell, like a Swiss army knife. The Net is a communication tool, like the telephone, telegraph or TV.

The Net is also a repository of information, not just one library, but thousands of libraries, and universities and museums. You can get on the Web and take a virtual tour of the Louvre without ever leaving your study. You can receive every medical journal published, right on your desk top. Or you can earn a graduate degree, at home.

But the quintessential experience on the Web is the formation of communities of common interests connected by a thread or web in space. That thread is the ability to communicate, instantly, with anyone in the world with an email address. Physical proximity is no longer required for someone to become close and part of your world. Your neighbor in cyberspace may be the woman in Australia writing a study on your specialized field.

It is this sense of community, this special capability of global networking, which is unique to cyberspace and makes it a special and distinct kind of experience. It is true that you can telephone Italy or Nairobi . But it is also true that you are not likely to find yourself chatting with a half dozen or dozen total strangers, one from Naples, another from Nairobi, one from Singapore, another from Sweden. There is a sense of connectedness and immediacy in being able to reach out to the most remote corner of the globe in an instant. This capability of the Net to break down masses of people into communities of interest is a critical factor. Companies, like Kodak, which depend on fostering knowledge and transforming it into actual achievement, have found that knowledge is best achieved by communities of interest with concentrated , shared learning and a focus on action to achieve a particular goal. To achieve women's goals, we need a critical mass of women and women's organizations to share their knowledge and strategies. We need " to use more of what (women already ) know, to create opportunities for private knowledge to be made public and tacit knowledge to be made explicit" (Stewart, 1997)

Electronic networks form the basis for shared knowledge and become powerful learning forums. Communities of interest foster teamwork, nourish social forms of learning and provide a means to capture,synthesize and formalize knowledge, to marshal its use into action plans (Stewart, 1997)