The final plenary session brought to light areas of agreement and disagreement, several specific proposals, and topics requiring further investigation and discussion. The debate was organized around the summaries of the discussions surrounding the three major themes prepared by Frankel, Teich, and Runkle.
Opening the "Re-Vision" roundtable, Peter Neumann pointed out that there are "horrendously complicated" issues at stake here, and despite the AAAS- sponsored meetings, there is "a long way to go." Adding that any formal controls on the GII will have to balance the needs of privacy against enforcement, he expressed doubts that "privacy will get its fair share."
"It is pretty clear that there will be 100 million people on the Net by the year 2000," said Mike Roberts. Predicting that the future of cyberspace will be only as good as its grounding in basic human rights issues, he concluded that, in the absence of agreed-upon norms of behavior, the construction of the GII might be handed over to lawyers by default, in the hopes of getting the "fewest things wrong and the most things right" -- a prospect he was uncomfortable with and which elicited several objections.
A balance of rights and safeguards "needs to address national sovereignty versus international norms," said S. Ramani of the National Centre for Software Technology in Bombay, India. Ramani also suggested that those who would set out to build a GII, should decide first how to balance "doing a comprehensive job" against "getting something done in a reasonable time."
Among the most provocative commentaries, in terms of highlighting a basic point of disagreement that could be difficult if not impossible to address, were the last two presentations of the meeting, by Trotter Hardy and Deborah Johnson. Hardy centered his comments on a "vision" for the GII, emphasizing that a basic attribute has to be freedom: "If people are going to self-govern, then they must have freedom to come up with their own rules," he asserted. Hardy claimed that he is "optimistic about cyberspace," and the opportunities it offers as a "real world thing," and not just a "laboratory" for social experimentation. "We have a chance to let people create for themselves a better world," he concluded.
In contrast to Hardy's "utopian vision" of the technological future of humanity, Johnson offered her own "distopian vision." Arguing that neither technology nor information is morally neutral, she suggested that, far from engaging people in daily life, computer-mediated communication may give them a way of distancing themselves. Believing it will lead to "voluntary and involuntary insularity" of individuals, she cautioned that the emerging information infrastructure may result in the destruction of any sense of community rather than the synthesis of new communities.
Perhaps Johnson was warning against the horrors of Sayshell and Hardy was raising the specter of the future Earth, but regardless of their intent, these two presentations touched off the liveliest -- and most revealing -- discussion of the meeting. They also raised the most difficult question for those planning for the emerging global information infrastructure: What essential quality of humanity is going to be altered, for good or bad, by the emergence of this new "community"? While no one addressed this question directly, there were many interesting comments, a few of which will suggest the flavor of the discussion.
Marc Rotenberg spoke for many in saying that "I want to believe Trotter's vision, but I tend to accept Deborah's and Peter's." In contrast, decrying the "Luddite turn" the conversation had taken, Ramón Barquin of the D.C.-based Washington Consulting Group pointed out that "every technology brings problems," but they basically "can't be stopped." Melynda Claire Reid, an artist and writer from Greensboro, Florida (who eschews capital letters in her E-mail correspondence), raised the specter of Mao-Tse Tung as an example in our own century of the "dangers of elegant vision and precise language." Branscomb cited others who had expressed hope that computer technology would be "enabling, ennobling, and empowering," but whose hopes were dashed by the influx of newcomers who clog the enterprise with "ridiculously unimportant things." She claimed that she, herself, was more optimistic, however, contending that we will be able to "bend the technology to our collective will."
William Middleton, a consulting engineer from St. Davids,
Pennsylvania, responded that "technology always gets a bad rap," insisting that technological tools are
"morally neutral," and their power thus was determined by their "human handlers." Arguing against the
neutrality of technological tools, Berleur suggested that,
according to 25 years of research on computers and society, it increasingly clear that, instead of looking at
the impact of computers on society and individuals, "we need to think in the reverse way: How do we
want to shape the technology?"
After grappling with the issues confronting those who would try to shape the emerging GII, many conference participants could hardly disagree with Roger Needham's paraphrase of Mark Twain: "It is tough to foresee the future before we get there."
In the course of the conference several participants raised the question of whether it might not be desirable to hold a "cyberspace constitutional convention" to address the issues raised during the Wye conference. But even such an ambitious undertaking, which presumably would deal with the specific issues raised by the GII, would likely not address the basic questions that came up again and again, both explicitly and implicitly. Simply put, what does it mean to be human, do humans by their nature choose to do good, and what defines a human community? The new generation of humankind venturing into cyberspace will not likely answer these questions any more definitively than previous generations, but like all previous generations, they must try, lest by default they find themselves crammed into the oppressive caves of a new Earth, or isolated on the shores of Sayshell.
 “Part I: A Vision for the Global Information Infrastructure” |
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“Part II: Thinking Through the Three Themes”
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“Part III: Re-vision: Where Do We Go From Here?”
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Op-Ed Papers
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Table of Contents
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Welcome Page
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