Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

There has been a lot of publicity and analysis about the depersonalizing aspects of our modern, increasingly urban, high tech civilization. The transition from a primarily rural agriculture base to an industrial mass production culture, coupled with rapidly increasing population density, have concentrated people into increasingly higher density urban environments. There have been some studies that indicate that the optimum group size for humans is around 100. It's a paradox of human group dynamics that the more people are in a group, the more alone each individual becomes.

A lot of the finger pointing is at the technology base of our civilization, and especially at electronic communications. First the telephone replaced face to face interactions, and then email took away even the nuances of the voice, leaving nothing but bare words to convey information.

It turns out there is a lot more to this communications thing than just assembling a mutually agreed set of symbolic representations for the objects in our shared physical world. Language is only part of the information transmitted between humans in a typical interaction. For many people, language is the least useful part of human communication.

In small towns and villages, there are few enough residents that you probably know something about the people you meet passing on the street. You can gather more information from the nonverbal communication embedded in their appearance, and even more from their expression and the sound of their voice when exchanging greetings. A lot of information exchange was lost when people moved into large cities where they no longer knew their neighbors, and started using crude technologies to communicate over distances.

Bare words - simple unadorned language - is all that email has been able to support. Yielding to the desire to include additional meaning, people have taken to including smiles or frowns to their messages using crude hieroglyphs like :-).

The great writers of humanity's past were able to communicate powerful emotions across centuries using nothing but the written word. The legal foundations of our business and civil systems are based on the premise that the written word can accurately and completely convey any meaning necessary to human commerce or civil life.

But the products of our modern subliterate educational system, their imaginations and language skills bludgeoned into desensitized incompetence by endless hours of vacuous video abuse, have lost the ability to express themselves in written words. A Time magazine study in 1993 indicated that over 50% of American adults lacked the language skills to compose a standard business letter. The World Wide Web (WWW) is still a very immature and ill-defined technology, but it shows at least a glimmer of hope at mitigating some of the downside aspects of our urban industrial civilization.

The most obvious aspects have already been over publicized. For the keyboard-challenged, the WWW provides a point and click interface. Those who prefer their literature with lots of pictures can find plenty of shiny things on the web to momentarily fill their limited attention spans. But there is much more for the at least moderately literate.

Manipulative propaganda is well represented by the on-line versions of all the major newspapers, magazines, and TV networks. There is also plenty of mindless drivel. But many web residents take some pride in their pages, and the results are well worth experiencing.

There is a false perception perpetrated by the competing older media that the electronic village is inhabited entirely by culture deprived technologists. The WWW has made the Internet much more attractive to artists and other noncomputer fixated participants in our culture. Painters have published graphic images of their paintings, musicians offer music clips, cartoonists show off their best strips, writers their past articles. Some parts of the web have become a sort of voluntary library of our culture - or at least those parts that extend into the connected world.

Some businesses use their pages as a form of interactive advertising. Others maintain an attractive site offering features with nothing to do with their core business as a form of corporate image building - in the same vein as sponsoring sporting events in the physical world. Some companies have devised ways to offer commercial services in the electronic village.

In theory, nearly anything that can be found in print can be found on-line if you know where to look or how to ask the network for it. Just putting long established printed materials on-line can open up entirely new possibilities when paired with the searching and sorting capabilities of computers. And there are many things that can only be found digitally.

The attractions of the more obvious aspects of the electronic village are easily appreciated. But there are some subtle aspects that may turn out to be of major sociological significance over the long term.

The current theory that humans have a relatively small optimum group size goes a long way toward explaining the propensity of humans to subdivide larger populations. It appears possible that the underlying motivation for a lot of very counterproductive human activity down through the ages has been to ensure that the total group size an individual had to deal with remained manageable regardless of the total population size. If you can only handle so many of "us", you have to find a way of defining all the rest as "them".

Small groups of racially mixed individuals tend to coexist pretty well. But when population grows, the need to find selection criteria by which to split the population into ever smaller subdivisions appears to grow as well. In the past, group membership was only coarsely defined - race, sex, age, etc. Distance was an overwhelming limitation - you pretty much had to find a way to define a group out of the people living near you. Physical characteristics were an obvious choice. And when visually obvious factors like skin color weren't available, purely artificial differentiations like language or religion had to serve.

By eliminating the distance barrier, technology makes it possible to consider the entire world as potential group membership. With so many potential members, it becomes possible to define membership criteria very narrowly. You may be the only one in your local area with your particular obscure obsession, but your odds of finding kindred souls increases dramatically when you're drawing from the web population of over 30 million.

And rather than the old boolean either/or limitation of physical selection criteria, technology makes it possible for group membership to become more a matter of fuzzy set theory with degrees of membership. Degrees of interest or noninterest in model railroading and/or heavy metal bands becomes a viable group membership selection criteria. At my option, I can avoid some groups, occasionally visit others to satisfy passing interests, and actively participate in others.

The ability of the individual to largely self define his degree of membership in various groups regardless of birth right, physical attributes, or other traditional arbitrary criteria, may eventually have profound effects on all forms of human relations. Rather than the classless society promoted by various failed political movements, we may end up with so many potential classifications that the concept of class conflict is overwhelmed into oblivion.

In the physical world, when you're wearing your "going to the Laundromat" last resort clothes, were just sprayed with mud by a passing bus, and find yourself uttering an unfortunate string of expletives at excessive volume while hopping on one foot after stepping into something nasty, it might occur to you that you're not broadcasting quite the public image you would really prefer.

While being caught in shabby dress might be the most mortifying experience some can imagine, others suffer far greater insults everyday. In the physical world, the involuntary aspects of a person's existence often inappropriately affect all aspects of their interactions with others. The fact that someone's legs don't work or their speech is distorted has nothing to do with the contribution they can make in other ways. And yet, even among well intentioned people, these things always seem to color our interactions.

While a person's basic personality and nature will eventually show through even the most carefully crafted facade, to a large degree, a person's physical challenges only carry over into the electronic village at that person's option. To an increasing degree, the involuntary aspects that so dominate some lives can be left behind in the electronic village.

With the still crude alternative interface devices becoming available today, some individuals who have overwhelming difficulties communicating in the physical world of rapid speech and impatient listeners, can cope much better with the asynchronous electronic world where it doesn't matter how long it takes to construct a message. Surfing through web pages from around the globe can be much easier for a quadriplegic than flipping the non-interactive paper pages of a book.

Steven Hawkings, who continues to make monumental contributions to both the substance of science and our understanding of complex phenomena - even though without his computer he would be unable to communicate his thoughts to the outside world - is perhaps an extreme example of the value of technology in mitigating the physical and mental disabilities that have been so cruelly limiting in the past.

Interaction with the other residents of the electronic village is optional in both directions. On the WWW, browsing is as anonymous and non-threatening as you want. Unless you willingly provide the information, outside of simple hit counters, there isn't any way for the publisher of a web page to know anyone visited, let alone their identities. You may have intentionally sought out a page based on a key word search, or followed a link from another web page. But however you got there, if you find you've happened upon a page that doesn't suit your tastes, "and now for something completely different" is both literally and figuratively only a couple mouse clicks away.

If you find a web page that strikes a particularly harmonic chord, most home pages provide a convenient email hypertext link to share your thoughts with the person behind the page. Unlike the real time limitations of a telephone conversation where you often think of things you wish you'd said only after hanging up, you can take your time and consider your email message before sending it.

However, unlike the undefined demand for attention of a telephone call - where you don't find out if the message is important or just another annoying telemarketer until you pick up the phone - it's relatively easy to filter or block email. Proper etiquette on the web doesn't require responses to unsolicited email just to be polite. The demands for attention and other impacts of obnoxious cretins on the more positively and productively oriented web residents, so difficult to avoid in the physical world, are easily ignored/deleted in the electronic village.

If you feel you have something to share with the rest of the electronic village - or just suffer from excessive ego and the need to broadcast your flawed self image to one and all - you can publish your own web page. As the publisher of a web page, you determine what you're going to put in it. And even when you're having a bad hair day, your web page continues to present your best - or at least intended - image.

However, while you can put what ever you want in your page, you can't oblige others to visit. If you want people to stop by and experience the creative effort you put into your page, you must respect your intended audience, and provide an attractive reason for them to come.

Perhaps the most threatening aspect of the WWW to the vested interests of the pre-digital world is that the web has no respect for national borders - or many of the other artificially contrived traditional means of physically dividing populations. As far as the web is concerned, it's as easy to access a page from the other side of the planet as from next door. The elimination of the significance of distance and physical location from a person's world view can make it very hard to stir up those chronic diseases of human interaction - nationalism, tribal hostility, and clannish pride - that have caused so much tragedy in our past.

The web today is still a largely unrealized potential. The Internet and WWW are currently threatened by the fears of the uninformed, and the censorship and political manipulation of those with reason to fear wide spread unrestricted access to information. Whether the Internet and the electronic village it supports will be allowed to flower into a truly valuable part of civilized life, or are twisted into yet another missed opportunity, is still very much in doubt.

The politicians are gathering up the nerve to try eliminating our electronic freedoms. If those of us who value our freedoms fail to make our opposition impossible to ignore, we stand a good chance of losing the most powerful information technology humanity has yet devised.