Computer-Mediated Community Networks in the United States: If they are so good, why are they so scarce and why do they so often fail?

Joseph Schmitz
Assistant Professor
Department Of Communication
University of Tulsa
Oliphant Hall 129
600 South College Avenue
Tulsa, OK 74104-3189
Phone: (918)-631-3810
Fax: (918)-631-3809
joseph-schmitz@utulsa.edu

This paper addresses our session theme—Electronic Networks and Democracy: Setting the Research Agenda, a quest for theoretical questions about and conceptual linkages between the use of electronic community media and participatory democracy. It also represents, in perhaps over-large measure, a confessional tale (Van Maanen, 1988) of a self-described and by now somewhat cynical utopian community media activist. During the mid to late 80’s I had the privilege and honor to assist Ken Phillips, then head of Santa Monica’s Information Systems Division, and the City of Santa Monica, as we created Santa Monica’s Public Electronic Network, the first municipal community network in the United States.

A Brief History of PEN

We envisioned a system that would foster what Ray Oldenburg (1991) later called those great good places. We sought to combine the technical expertise gained from that city’s early and systemic adoption of electronic mail and file sharing with socio-technical expertise available at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School For Communication. I served as a bridge between Ken Phillips, PEN’s organizational champion, and Everett Rogers, a distinguished scholar of the diffusion of innovations and of communication technology. During my doctorial studies, as a resident of Santa Monica, a friend of Ken Phillips, and a student of new organizational media, by happenstance I was ideally positioned to help craft what was then a revolutionary application of new computer-based communication technology to community media.

PEN, funded by a $350,000 grant from Hewlett-Packard, was designed to use a central computer, a modem bank, and 20 public terminals to link city residents via personal home computers or public terminals to each other and to the city. It combined an extensive searchable data base of municipal documents, social services, and contact information with point to point email and a wide-ranging array of electronic conferences. Its objectives were to: 1) provide easy access to, and use of, public information, 2) to aid the delivery of city services, 3) to enhance communication among residents, 4) provide electronic conferences and increase a sense of community in Santa Monica, 5) to diffuse knowledge of, and access to, new communication technology, and 6) to provide equitable distribution of these communication resources to the economically disadvantaged. These goals were set well before the popular realization, a decade later, of the existence of a “digital divide”—an outcome widely anticipated by scholars of new communication media (see Rogers, 1995 for a prescient description of why elites are likely to disproportionately benefit from such innovations in communication technology). Our use of then existent computer-mediated technology was based upon adapting emergent corporate email systems and ARPANET or BITNET technologies. This strategy, embodied in PEN, preceded the Internet by five years and it offered non-hyper linked but searchable text archives that could be customized by the system’s individual users.

During the early years PEN was wildly successful. Santa Monica was hailed as an example of the “city of the future” by regional, national (The Wall Street Journal & Wired Magazine), and international media in such countries as France, Germany, and Japan. The City of Santa Monica, Ken Phillips, and occasionally Everett Rogers and I would host visiting delegations from other states and countries. Within four years PEN had almost 6,000 registrants; conferences hosted more than 50,000 entries each year. Even so, according to our user surveys, for most users—email was the “killer ap.” During these first five years the Santa Monica city government sent out more than 1,500 media kits and videos that touted PEN, the first municipal government-sponsored community network, as a model for progressive and democratic communities to emulate.

PEN also became a political tool for grassroots organizing (see Wittig & Schmitz, 1996 for a description of PEN as a medium uniquely suited for local organizing). In those heady early years, PEN was used by local activists to stop the city from privatizing a city beach facility (via a successful Save our Beach campaign). During this fractious political dispute, PEN was used to derail a “done deal” and force the city to conduct a referendum about selling a municipal beach front property to a local private group, a proposal that city voters later soundly defeated. PEN had been instrumental in coordinating and proselytizing adherents so much so that the City Council was forced to rescind its earlier decision to sell desirable beach-front property to a local corporation.

Early on the PEN Action Group came together as a coalition of residents that included homeless persons; later this group successfully sought city funding for their SWASHLOCK program (showers, washers, and lockers for the homeless). PEN permitted homeless participants to demonstrate their competencies and shared human needs in a setting that conveyed authentic and legitimate goals. As a member of the PEN Action Group but also as research-driven, participant-observer, I hung out with several homeless men (when I was not teaching classes at the USC School of Business). Everett Rogers, Ken Phillips, and Don Paschal (a homeless man), and I later published a scholarly account of how PEN had changed daily life for some of the Santa Monica homeless residents (Schmitz et al., 1995). The importance of SWASHLOCK funding lay not in the $125,000 that had been devoted to homeless residents but in the power of PEN to galvanize popular support, given the serious problems and contentious issues that 2,000 homeless residents posed for this city of 90,000 homed persons.

Santa Monica’s PEN was not the only template for using CMC to meet local community needs. Two years earlier Tom Grundner had developed the Cleveland Free-Net, a similar text-based computer conferencing system that was sponsored by Case Western Reserve University. Grundner’s vision was to make community computing and conferencing a public good; he envisioned a confederation of Free-Nets that he headed. When Grundner approached Santa Monica with an offer to become the second Free-Net, Phillips readily declined that relationship although we incorporated elements of the Free-Net design. About that same time Frank Odasz founded Montana’s Big Sky Telegraph. Along with San Francisco’s WELL, these entities provided the initial templates for modern community networks. Later during the mid ‘90’s second generation web-based community networks like the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV), Charlotte’s Web, and the Seattle Community Network began to appear.

PEN and the BEV provide rich sources of data because both community networks were intensively studied by academic researchers. My colleagues and I have conducted surveys of PEN users at three different points in time. And Annenberg School researchers have used PEN as the site for many case studies. The Blacksburg Electronic Village is particularly noteworthy, not just because Blacksburg is the most wired community in the United States, but because it had a formal director of research, Andrea Kavanaugh (loosely affiliated with Virginia Tech) who, with her associates, conducted annual studies of that community network and its users.

Lastly, Dr. Kavanaugh and I have recently conducted a multi-site multi method study that used random samples to intensively view four community networks (BEV, PrarieNet, the Three Rivers Free-Net, and the Seattle Community Network). We also interviewed these network managers, affiliated listserv managers, and listserv managers and members from 22 more community networks. Results of our study may be found at http://www.bev.net/agout/researh/funded.php.

Community Network Outcomes

While each community networks is a distinctive entity lodged in a unique social setting, all of our research findings reveal a common thread. Our data clearly show that community networks offer an antidote to the social malaise that Robert Putnam has termed “Bowling Alone.” Although the PEN and BEV studies used quite different methodologies and investigated community networks in quite different settings— i.e. the trendy, politically liberal, affluent, and highly educated residents of an urban Santa Monica, California differ greatly from the less educated, much poorer, more conservative, rural residents of Montgomery County, Virginia. Even so, users of both community networks reported that their use helped them to participate more actively in community events and to forge new links with other members of their local communities. Community network users said that they participated in more off-line activities, had access to more local people and information, and were more politically active.
One of the more important findings of our Department of Commerce project was that compared to Internet users or non-CMC users, those persons who also used a community network were substantially more involved in their community as measured by the Rothenbuhler community involvement scale (Rothenbuhler, 2001). The variance accounted for by the use of a community network exceeded 10 percent of the total scale variance. Thus, at the individual level, community networks seem to raise the level of social capital substantially. A recent PEW, The Internet and American Life study used both ethnographic and metropolitan statistical data to compare five cities with vibrant community networks with all other large cities (Horrigan et al., 2001). The authors concluded that community networks were directly responsible for enhancing social capital, economic prosperity, and the quality of life. Such evidence strongly suggests that active community networks foster participative democracy in ways that enhance political, social, and economic outcomes.

The Ontology of Community Networks

Community networks are complex, multilevel, self-organizing, socio-technical systems that are intensely malleable. Each community network functions at the individual psychological level, at dyadic and relational social network levels, and they are constrained by existent local, regional, and national cultural norms and assumptions. This makes deconstructing community networks a formidable task. I believe that reductionist approaches inevitably limit our understanding of these phenomena even though I must acknowledge that I have used such approaches in my own community network research. One seldom mentioned problem is that processes that occur at one level do not correspond with processes that dominate at other levels of analysis.

For these and other reasons it seems best to use multiple methods and analytical schemes. Adaptive structuration (Poole and colleagues) has potential to reveal shared, “deep” meanings while also acknowledging individual actors’ potencies and volitions. A similar conceptual scheme borrowed from anthropology (Salins, 1981) and well articulated by Ortner (1984) holds that change in such complex social systems is both dynamic and indeterminate:

“that although the actor’s intentions are accorded central place in the model, major social change does not for the most part come about as intended consequence of action, however rational action may have been. Change is largely a by-product, an unintended consequence of actions by many persons. To say that society and history are products of human action is true, but only in a certain ironic sense. They are rarely the products the individual actors themselves, set out to make.” (p. 156)

I would add that present complexity theories of self-organizing systems offer additional conceptual leverage (Wheatley, 1999). We can view such systems as loosely corresponding across analytical levels and as connected sub-systems that are governed by the relationships among and the strengths of arrays of “attractors” within the socio-technical systems at each level of analysis. These attractors may take multiple forms; they may be the interests of coalitions of stakeholders, they may be shared sets of assumptions, cultural “givens”, or even underlying structural power relations.

The Rise and Fall of Individual Community Networks in Some Locales and Their Absence in Others

Sometime between its fourth year and its sixth year the demise of PEN had been assured. By this time Southern California was in a deep recession. Homeless residents crowded the parks and provided “cover” for both homed and homeless law-breakers. Many homed residents of Santa Monica were outraged at the squalor and aggressive panhandling by individuals that they viewed as homeless. I (then an avid runner) became afraid to run in many parks during the day and I was reluctant to run at all at night.

Three other factors greatly influenced the eventual decline of PEN. First, the dialog in many conferences had become increasingly rude and filled with invective. A former city mayor characterized PEN’s hardcore users as “mean-spirited people who pound out their anger on the keyboard” (Reed, 1991). PEN’s lack of civility greatly troubled Ken Phillips who once confided to me that he wished he could shut the conferences down and start over with a new set of ground rules and participants. This conflict highlights a special category of conflict characterized as a “wicked problem” because legitimate values clash—and that which is a solution for one represents a problem for another. City sponsorship exacerbated these problems for PEN because the City Attorney had concluded that Santa Monica could not legally censor “free speech” even though it was patently offensive or incendiary. In addition, the option for closed conferences was viewed as contrary to state statute as was the option for moderated conferences.

Secondly, after the initial and exuberant adoption of PEN by many persons with high status in the community, an adversarial relationship between some vocal PEN participants and PEN’s city managers arose. PEN became a battle ground for factions that wanted the city to offer different structures, rules, and additional services while other ad hoc groups railed against any form of city intrusion into their community network. Phillips, the creator and organizational champion of PEN was chastised even though he had staked his career on this innovation. In fact when our journal article was made public and we “revealed” that some department heads had been reluctant to connect 90,000 “electronic bosses” to the city, it was hailed as A Smoking Gun by some PEN activists (including one person who would later become a City Counsel Member). During this period I was chastised by Ken’s replacement as Information Systems Department head and my access to city operations was somewhat curtailed.

Lastly, upon Phillips departure, the city revamped the conferences in ways intended, according to city informants, to let the conferences “die on the vine.” At the same time PEN was transformed into a web site which was gradually but relentlessly morphed into a set of Santa Monica web pages that permitted greatly reduced interactivity between residents and city officials but discouraged interaction among residents and discussions about city policies. Internet portals had begun to offer world wide email services and PEN’s early activist successes were used to justify the fears of departments that wanted to discourage civic participation. As Phillips put it to me bitterly just before he left, “Joe, you don’t understand; you think city government exists to serve the people—the f…ing people exist to serve city government.” While such a sentiment was crudely put, it offered insights to internal governmental stakeholder politics and power relationships. PEN had come to be an impediment to smooth functioning of city officials and it had served to constrain their policy options. Without a strong internal champion (Ken had earlier forged close relationships with most City Council Members) and a supportive external constituency, PEN was dead. In some ways PEN was a victim of its own success; in others it had become antiquated by the Internet. Clearly PEN’s fate was the ironic result of intended actions that reflected existent social conditions and illustrates Salins’ (1981) view that “change occurs when traditional relations confront novel phenomena that do not respond in traditional ways.”

About the same time that PEN had failed, the Cleveland Free-Net was also failing because Tom Grundner had lost interest/influence in that CN and because Case Western Reserve University (citing Y2K costs) had reduced its commitment of resources. In the United States, for the past decade, the number of active community networks has but risen slightly (to presently about 250) although the community network innovation seems to be diffusing more rapidly in Canada and Western Europe. Most of the early text-only community networks did not survive the Internet boom and many of the later “benchmark” community networks have subsequently failed, e.g. Charlotte’s Web. This leads to an interesting question: If community networks are so good at enhancing social capital and the local quality of life, why are they so rare in the United States, given the affluent, highly educated population and the rapid diffusion of computing and communication in this society? The final section will offer a set of interlocking propositions that may account for some of these contradictions.

If Community Networks are so Good, Why Don’t More Exist?

At the individual level

As individuals in this society we are continuously subject to multiple constraints on our time, resources and attentions. A vibrant community network requires attention and commitment to others, to civility, to collaboration, and to a synthesis of shared local interests, and agreed-upon processes to address local issues. While common locality suggests multiple interdependencies and consequent needs for meaningful symmetric interactions, the creation and maintenance of community networks requires a commitment to shared public goods that is increasingly difficult in this social order. While unemployment was low and the economy was booming, work hours per household increased substantially and time to devote to public goods, in turn, declined. Now that more persons are unemployed, many persons have more time but now lack resources to devote to creating shared public goods. This reduction of the potential to create social capital is exacerbated when “rational” economic conditions offer incentives to remain a noncontributing “free-rider” in domains where the market fails, e.g. the social contracts and shared values that bind us together across our differences.
Individuals are increasingly cynical about participatory democracy in the United States. Lowered voting rates reflect and reinforce the vastly increased influence of ever-increasing huge political campaign contributions. The enormous political and economic “perks” for government officials that are offered by “dueling special interests” contribute to political apathy at all governmental levels. To the extent that most individuals feel politically impotent, they are unlikely to exercise such influence that they might possess. The current regulatory, legislative, and executive climate discourages rational actors’ attempts to exercise political rights.

One corollary to sustained democratic engagement is that there be some agreed upon sense of equality of opportunity. Since 1960, indicators of inequality have risen dramatically. Even though the populace is better educated if time in school and level of educational attainment are proxies, present economic inequalities are vast and rapidly increasing. Last year the top 1 percent of the population held 40 percent of the societal wealth. I argue that these elites demonstrate little interest in sponsoring public goods such as community networks that might enhance participative democracy.

At the organizational level

Community networks require organizational stakeholders who are willing to devote resources for public goods. Additionally, they require organizational champions like Ken Phillips for that innovation to be successful. While universities would seem to be ideal “core” community network stakeholders, relatively few universities have adopted this role. Systemic “attractors” limit university investment in community networks. These attractors include ever-present budget limitations along with high staff costs and competencies that seen to yield low short-term organizational benefits. In addition, many communities feature cultural divergence between the “town and gown.” Lastly, pressures to publish and obtain tenure at research institutions or pressures to devote scarce resources to students at teaching institutions limit the intensive professorial service needed to establish and maintain a community network. Comparable sets of attractors limit the emergence of community coalitions of stakeholders as organizations that might host community networks—although the Seattle Community Network provides a nice counter-example. Here, it is useful to note that the Seattle Chapter of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility served as the initial host for this entity.

While the non-profit sector constitutes a significant source of potential resources for community networks, typically non-profits focus on specific missions, sectors, and upon developing internal organizational competencies. Although there has been an increasing realization that alliances of nonprofits can be effective, community networks require that such an alliance be constructed to foster democratic participation. Often this mission is incongruent with the perceived missions of the respective existent organizations. So far “umbrella” organizations such as the United Way have shown scant interest in community networks although the United Way is increasingly concerned with maximizing collaborative community outcomes and in using communication technology to foster nonprofit goals (United Way, 1996, 2001, 2002).

W. Richard Scott (1999) notes in his concluding book chapter about organizational pathologies that present times are notable because so many and so powerful organizations now exist. Further, he argues that organizations, by their very nature, are relentlessly dedicated to further self-centered goals. Given the ease of over-conformity to internal goal structures, Scott concludes that a plethora of organizations are displacing the powers formerly held by “natural” persons who privileged multiple ties, goals, and relationships. In a similar vein, Morgan (1997) notes that transnational corporations accounted for more than 70 percent of the world trade in 1994. And if we array nations and corporations according to GNP or Sales, during 1994—52 of the largest 100 entities are individual corporations. In such an array, Mitsubishi sold more goods that Indonesia produced; General Motors was ranked higher than Turkey or Denmark. Such a distribution of organizational resources provides few incentives for the creation of public goods such as community networks. In fact this distribution suggests that powerful economic and political interests favor lessened participatory democracy.

At the societal level

In many ways the Internet both helps and hinders community networks devoted to local interests. The ubiquity of the technologies including hardware, software, and human competencies makes establishing a community network much easier. Yet the Internet has become transformed in several ways that are hostile to community networks. Increasingly, web sites take us away from locality whether it be to interest groups, data bases, chat groups, and other “places” both imagined and real; see Doheny-Farina (1996) for an elegant and extended form of this argument. And commercial interests have trumped social interests in an uneven contest. A decade ago if a person tried to intrude in shared electronic space with an unsolicited commercial message, he (most users were then male) would be inundated with sometimes rude admonishments about breaching Net norms. Now it’s a rare day when I don’t get emails that offer Viagra, pornography, low interest rates, and toner cartridges.

Increasingly during the late 70’s politicians, more often Republicans, have successfully used election strategies to win elections for elected offices by claiming that governmental organizations are inherently less “efficient” that private, market-driven organizations. This strategy is ubiquitous even though the conditions essential for a “free market” rarely exist at present, that is: a) multiple transaction options, b) transparent exchanges, and c) free flow of price, value, and cost options. Even so, private markets are highly touted as both efficient and effective solutions for social goals. In a companion move, many of these political and economic stakeholders advocate tax reduction strategies that lessen the availability of resources which might be used to provide shared social goods in situations when the market fails.

For example, I presently live in Oklahoma. Oklahoma is very conservative state although nominal Democratic voters greatly outnumber Republican voters. Even so, six of the seven national legislators advocate highly conservative Republican policy choices. To provide context for these facts, Oklahoma is one of our poorest states; it ranks in the bottom five states in devoting resources to education; it has the second highest incarceration rate (but has above average crime rates); it has rampant structural government corruption; and it does not have a single community network. The state is now attempting to balance its budget through further cuts in education and social services. Elites are actively hostile to the prospect of a community network as I found out when I broached that possibility several years ago as a member of the Tulsa taskforce for information and communication technology.

Media consolidation, both vertical and horizontal and the removal of Federal restrictions on cross-media ownership have led to huge multimedia conglomerates. These organizational entities have both a global scope and strong financial interests to broadcast content that enhances their economic interests (cigarette placement policies provide but one example). Content devoted to the public good on publicly owned bandwidth has languished. While local news has been aptly characterized as “if it bleeds, it leads”, local newspaper ownership continues to diminish. Such a media environment augers against mobilizing a critical mass of stakeholders who would devote sufficient resources needed to maintain a community network or engage in vibrant discourse about local issues in ways that might seem to threaten elites.

Lastly, it seems that as our society features ever greater inequalities, we have increasingly engaged in what Veblen long ago characterized as conspicuous consumption. Transported by three-ton Lincoln Navigators or Hummers, many elites now live in gated and privately policed “communities.” It is sadly ironic that just as Los Angeles has become a majority-minority metropolitan area, only slightly more than 20 percent of its residents can afford to own their housing. And a tiny three bedroom home in Santa Monica that was originally build to house Douglas Aircraft workers during 1955, one that cost less than $35,000 to build, now costs about $750,000—in a city that billed itself in the 1970’s as the Peoples Democratic Republic of Santa Monica.

Long Term Prospects for Electronic Networks and Democracy

I am, very cautiously, optimistic that community networks will continue to be embraced by Western European nations although I defer to my European colleagues present today on such matters. In the United States, for the short term, prospects for more and more effective community networks and greater political participation now seem dim. Increasing budget deficits, increasing military budgets, and expanded military goals that are accompanied with diminished resources devoted to public goods auger ill for the prospect of creating vibrant community networks. The “war on terror” will continue to distract attention from local issues save for impending or actual catastrophic events. The Patriot Act and an increased intolerance for dissent that has been modeled by Executive and Legislative Branch leaders should serve to further limit the discourse that a participatory democracy requires.

For the longer term, I considerably more optimistic. Political views in the United States have tended to be cyclic; past excesses have often been corrected through democratic means. While increasing economic and political inequalities are, to me, profoundly troubling—we have vast resources of human capital. This society has unrivaled access to information technologies and a deep heritage of quasi-democratic governance. Given that we presently share more multiplexed and tightly coupled interdependencies and together face great ecological, distributive, and resource challenges—we have huge incentives to collectively develop long-term solutions to systemic societal problems. I hope community networks will play an increased role in fostering effective collaborative action.