Practice in the Electronic Community

Practice in the Electronic Community

Like community practice, the Internet has frequently been heralded as a force for progressive social change during its short but eventful life history. Its record to date, however, is decidedly mixed. The potential certainly exists for this powerful technology to advance the causes of human freedom, well-being, and community. At the same time, however, this extraordinary communication network, which in less than a decade has become nearly universal in scope and sweep, has also demonstrated the potential to become simply another extension of the global economic marketplace. Far worse, it could become a power tool for class domination or a simple reinforcement of existing and future inequalities.

The Internet was at its inception a commons rather than a marketplace (Lohmann, 1992). It was born of the collaborative interests of physicists around the world to find easier and more effective ways of sharing their research results. Scientists such as Tim Berners Lee, the author of HTML and the Web protocol “http,” primarily were seeking ways to improve scientific collaboration. Very quickly, it became apparent that the ease of use that the World Wide Web granted scientists also could have major implications for enhancing democracy (as in the work of the Benton Foundation) or for improving communication between isolated members of a community.

Increasingly, however, these communitarian notions have been overwhelmed by images and ideas of the Internet as a single, enormous shopping arcade. It is good to remember here the difference between hype and reality. Even before the http://dot.com market meltdown of 2000, the actual track record of e-commerce and business-to-business solutions was just as spotty and equivocal as any of the assorted progressive [Page 637]experiments in promoting electronic democracy or community via the Internet. Dot-coms simply have larger advertising budgets. For every publicly celebrated Internet success story, there are 50 highly promising possibilities, 100 interesting innovations that did not pan out, and 10 workable innovations largely unknown to anyone but their creators.

The sudden growth of the Internet has meant that some old favorites, like the Foundation Center Library (http://www.foundationcenter.org) and the Grantsmanship Center (http://www.tgci.com) can now also be found online, along with newer or more local resources, such as Guidestar's online listing of tax-exempt organizations (http://www.guidestar.org) and the Maine Philanthropy Center (http://www.megrants.org). The Internet has also been a major boon to recent protest movements like the anti-World Trade Organization movement, which is linked by a variety of Web sites like http://www.wtowatch.org and http://www.tradewatch.org.

In this brief chapter, we examine several developments in online technology and resources that appear to hold great potential for advancing human well-being and social justice. Community organizations are already taking advantage of this technology and have achieved tangible results. The topics we will examine are electronic communication and networking, electronic advocacy, fundraising support, geographic information systems, and database management. We conclude with a brief discussion of information poverty and the growing disparity of information haves and have-nots.