The Internet Is Redefining Distance, Time and
Community
New York Times: May 6, 1997
by Vince Giuliano
For the first time in human memory, distance and time of transit
are vanishing as barriers to communications. History has no
precedent for this. We may know this as an intellectual
construct, but what it ultimately means remains quite invisible
to us.
Marshall McLuhan said that our media surrounds us like water
surrounds a fish. Because we live in it, we are unconscious of
it, unconscious of how it changes our expectations, how it shapes
us and how we can, in turn, shape our reactions to it.
What are the implications of distance-independent communications
for families, for nations, for governments, for world commerce,
for religion -- and for the communities these entities represent?
I speak here mainly of what I know from my own limited personal
experience, but my mind boggles when I try to think the
implications through. So I would like to put some of these issues
out for reader discussion in this Cyber Times Forum. The
Disappearance of Distance About Community New Communities and
Nations Some Questions
The Disappearance of Distance
---------------------------------------
With each change in popular media, the strange, the incredible
becomes very normal. Television, the telephone and air travel
have already done that in my lifetime. But there are many more
recent examples, ones connected with the Internet.
Recently, I was sitting in Pamplona, Spain, at a desk across from
my friend Noelia Fernandez. My notebook computer was linked to
hers via an Ethernet LAN. I copied about thirty of my saved
e-mail messages into her machine in about three minutes. Very
ordinary and nothing to think twice about. Piping information
over a distance of four feet. Except that the signals took a
route about 10,000 miles long in order to go those four feet.
The data went from my computer out through the Internet (passing
through Noelia's machine in the process, since I was using
Noelia's Internet connection), to my POP mail server in
Burlington, Mass., then back across the Atlantic, and again back
into her machine.
They traveled via who-knows-what combination of frame relay, FDD,
ATM, ISDN and dozens of other protocols, over circuits of
Telefonica de Espaņa, British Telecom, France Telecom, MCI,
Sprint, AT&T, Nynex and who knows what other lines. Thousands
of packets each with its own unique path, some going under the
ocean, some perhaps traveling via other countries, others flying
thousands of miles beyond the Earth's atmosphere, were all
re-assembled into the originals, only 4 feet away.
Why did I send the messages that way? Because it was a bit more
convenient to communicate via regular e-mail. Of course, it cost
Noelia and me nothing beyond our regular monthly Internet fees.
The 10,000 miles of signal path did not occur to me until after I
had reflected on the incredible thing that happened.
The week before I had done the same thing in Caracas, Venezuela,
back and forth to Boston, while sitting across from Christian
Oliver, head of El-Universal Digital. No big deal. Day to day, I
use the same mail server in Burlington (14 miles away) to send
mail to my wife and business partner, Melody Winnig, though our
computers are 50 feet apart in our home and connected by a local
area network.
The actual distance of a signal path means next to nothing for
e-mail and Web access today. And, as the Web goes multi-media,
distance will vanish for quality, live, real-time video between
any two people anywhere. Lifelike reality in sound and
images will be there before we know it for connections
between homes, offices and virtual meeting places -- in real time
with cost not dependent on distance. In my home, I already have a
cable modem which gives me a bandwidth of 10 megabits per second
(more than 300 times the speed of a 28.8 Kbps modem), Cornell
University's CU-SeeMe videoconferencing technology and streaming
audio and video. And these are trinkets compared with
what is coming.
As the importance of distance vanishes, so does the importance of
geography and location as defining what is going on.
About Community -- Beyond Location
---------------------------------------
Some of the dictionary definitions I have found for community are
these:
a group of people living in the same locality; the people with
common interests living in a given area and under the same
government; a group or class having common interests; a unified
body of individuals; and a body of persons of common interests.
Social and cultural factors like religion, ethnicity and language
are, of course, crucial to defining community. But the
communities most people experienced before modern transportation
and the telephone were pretty much delimited by location. Thus,
in Jerusalem there have long been Moslem, Jewish, Coptic
Christian and Roman Christian communities. However, these have
traditionally been segregated into different quarters of the
city.
Great-Grandpa Vincenzo's community
My great great grandfather Vincenzo Giuliano passed his entire
life Squillache in Southern Italy, part of Calabria. From tales
of distant, now-dead relatives, I can only speculate what his
life was like, but I know that his community was homogenized and
isolated.
Vincenzo rarely traveled outside this subsistence-farming
community only a few square kilometers in size, a world
unaffected by gasoline motors, telephone, telegraph, electricity,
or even the railroad. Every place of interest to him was
accessible by walking. Long distance travel was rare, and mainly
by horse. Possibly, community was centered around the town
square, the church, the Inn, and the houses of relatives -- but
the truth is that I know little of how it actually was. I doubt
that he went to school, owned a book, or traveled far.
Perhaps once in his life Vincenzo traveled to Naples, perhaps
even to Rome, a capital city of incredible splendor but a
universe away by the measures of distance in his lifetime. For
those in Squillache, America, England and the rest of the world
must have seemed exotic fantasies when they came to the mind at
all.
My communities
Like my great-great grandfather, I also live in a community, in
Wayland Mass., but this is the community where my home is, and
has little to do with my social communities. The houses here are
far apart, on two-acre lots, but behind the houses on both sides
of the road are thousand of acres of woodland. In the summer when
the leaves are out, you can walk completely around my house and
not see another one. There are deer, coyotes, and even moose have
been seen here. Paths in the woods lead to tucked-away farms and
acres of ripe pumpkins in the fall.
I also experience social community, of course -- in fact multiple
communities, but none of these are geographically determined. I
don't know most of my neighbors. Liberated by the automobile, the
phone and the airplane, my most important communities include
people scattered through the United States, Latin America and
Spain.
Cyberspace has profoundly affected all communities to which I am
tied. In my community of work, I am part of a distributed network
of electronic publishing consultants with affiliates in four
United States cities, Spain, and Latin America, a cyber-empowered
virtual corporation of sorts. We could not function
without our e-mail, faxes and notebook computers. Some of us,
like Noelia and Melody, first met online.
Then there is my community of family. Four years ago, I found my
lost half-brother Terry in the online CompuServe directory, after
having lost track of him for years. Of course, my grown kids in
Utah, Maryland and Massachusetts keep in touch with me online, as
do both my wife, Melody, and my ex-wife, Lil.
Then there are my communities of friends, and my communities of
interest, all of which have their own important online extensions
too.
Your communities
You probably have a lot of personal experiences of
cyber-community and perceptions of where things are or could be
going -- and probably some compelling tales to tell. I invite you
to share them in the Forum associated with this column.
Physical community and Cyber-community
These days, home is wherever you have connectivity. (!)
An important role of the physical community is to empower social
community-at-a-distance, traditionally through infrastructures
like roads, telephone lines, and access to an airport. Now, at
least in the United States, access to broadband communications is
becoming another important determinant of property values.
I happen to be lucky because of where I live. A fiber-optic cable
runs down my street and Federal Express trucks ply up and down
the lane all day long. Like many of our neighbors, our
main workplace is our home. With our three phone lines,
high-speed cable modem for Internet, three cell phones, fax and
Ethernet LAN in the house, we enjoy communications as advanced as
any that can be found in an IBM corporate office.
New Communities and Nations
---------------------------------------
Nations have long served as important macro communities, defining
all sorts of social, economic (and sometimes religious) rules of
behavior, enacting such rules into laws and enforcing them
through police powers. Until now, the state had absolute
sway over what went on within its borders. What came
into the country was monitored by custom officers at borders and
airports.
Cyberspace is eroding those borders, at least in
terms of jurisdiction. In fact, nation and state are often
irrelevant in the formation and conduct of online communities.
Intellectual properties flow freely across the Net, knowing no
borders. What's more, all this is happening at a time when
intellectual properties represent a greater and greater portion
of both human industry and the global economy.
It is next to impossible for a nation to monitor them,
much less block or levy taxes on global data. If the
Communications Decency Act is upheld by the United States Supreme
Court, for example, hundreds of sites in other countries can
continue to provide sexually explicit material on the Web freely
to anyone in the United States who wants it. While it
would be technically possible for the United States to adopt the
draconian measures of Singapore and China, which have basically
restricted their residents to national intranets, such controls
are available only to totalitarian governments that also exert
total control over their communications utilities and mass media.
The disappearance of geography on the Net probably has other
serious implications for nations and their relationships with
communities. Readers are invited to submit their own examples and
discussion of this topic.
Some Questions and Issues
---------------------------------------
This Week's Forum Topic:
What are the limits of technology-generated communications in
creating community?
Are cyber-communities without real human interaction inherently
two-dimensional? How much face-to-face human
communication is required for what purposes? Can
broadband communications become so realistic as to allow
development of continuing intimacy without physical contact? Or
are we already there without broadband -- as exemplified by
people who fall in love and find their partners purely through
e-mail?
Vince Giuliano will introduce a new conversation every Tuesday in
the Electronic Community forum.