What Should We
Call the Net?
by Peter Lyman
Political
discourse about the Internet is dominated by three metaphors that serve
as competing visions of the role of technology in the information society:
information superhighways, virtual communities, and digital libraries.1
The information superhighway metaphor marked the transition from the
Bush administration's National Research and Education Network (NREN)
to the Clinton administration's National Information Infrastructure
(NII). NREN, a research program established by the High Performance
Computing Act of 1991, focused policy leadership in government research
and education agencies, such as the Department of Education, the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Science
Foundation (NSF).2 In 1993, the Agenda for Action launched
the NII, a trade policy focusing leadership in the Department of Commerce,
which has the responsibility to regulate interstate commerce.3
As political discourse became dominated by the commercialization of
the Net under NII policy, the virtual community and the digital library
metaphors emerged as competing visions, in part reflecting federally
sponsored university research and development on collaborative work
and digital library technologies.
How well do these
three metaphors work to guide the transformation of the Net from an
invention into an innovation? What new kinds of names might we use to
renew the vision of the Net as a medium for education and research?
How can we move the debate from an "information policy" that focuses
narrowly on digital markets to a more encompassing "innovation policy"
that envisions the new roles of the university in a networked society?
To answer these
questions, we need to explore a deeper and more interesting question:
What kind of innovation is the Net? "Net" and "Web" are good names for
inventions because they describe the infrastructure of networked
information technologies well, but they are not good names for innovations,
the new institutions and social practices that are made possible by
these inventions. The rhetoric surrounding innovations is more than
just semantics, for it reflects the struggle of economic and political
interests to shape or contain the process of change. When electricity
was turning from invention to innovation at the turn of this century,
for example, Thomas Edison defended his economic interest in direct
current by promoting the use of alternating current as a technology
for capital punishment.4 This kind of political struggle
is reflected in the metaphors we now use to talk about the Net.
The Information
Superhighway
Microsoft advertisements
invoked the information superhighway metaphor when they asked, "Where
do you want to go today?" The information superhighway is a powerful
idea, for it frames computer networks as a revolutionary new means of
transportation. Transportation technologies have historically
determined the scope and modes of control of institutions like the state,
markets, and corporations. Thus the near instantaneous global scope
of the Net inevitably suggests the possibility that this is a historic
innovation. The information superhighway is a useful metaphor because
it clearly defines the respective roles of government and business in
this innovation process, but it is silent about the role of education
and research.
Vice President
Al Gore's superhighway metaphor uses the Interstate highway program,
sponsored in the Senate by his father, as a model for information policy.
The Interstate highway system was a public-works program intended to
carry interstate commerce at high speed across the country, to promote
economic development by creating a transportation infrastructure for
national markets. By extension, the government's role in the information
economy is to build network infrastructures -- especially, in this case,
tax incentives, laws, regulatory rules, and treaties -- but to leave
invention and innovation to private industry.
The superhighway
metaphor treats information as a commodity and therefore as private
property deserving legal protection. Thus in 1998 the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA) amended federal copyright law to protect digital
information. Now a second step is being debated -- the revision of section
2B of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), a national model for state
laws governing commercial transactions. If adopted by the states, this
revision would govern digital information just like other commodities
being transported on the highways, by contract law. This illustrates
the political power of language. Whereas transportation metaphors treat
information like a commodity, governed by contract law, virtual communities
treat information like a form of speech, protected by the First Amendment,
and digital libraries would have us treat information like print, governed
by copyright.
The DMCA
In 1995, the Commerce
Department issued a white paper on copyright proposing legislation to
protect digital signals as intellectual property.5 The concept
of the right to copy, so useful in regulating print, was extended to
signals on the Net in the form of a "transmission right," which defined
the transmission of a signal as a form of copying requiring payment.
This extension
of mechanical copying to include electronic transmission rests on the
transportation metaphor -- both highways and networks transport commodities
-- but it also conceals key differences between signals and physical
commodities. Is digital information really a commodity, one that resembles
either print or other kinds of manufactured goods? Commodities are scarce
because one person's consumption of them deprives another of their use;
ownership of them is easily protected because they are physical things;
and they are transparent because the buyer knows about their utility
before purchase. None of these characteristics are necessarily true
of information commodities.
Like print, digital
information is both artifact and idea, but as a commodity, the idea
is described in abstract terms, as "content," obscuring the relationship
between the use of information and its economic value. As we shall see,
the virtual community metaphor reverses this equation, seeing only the
use value of ideas, not their commodity aspect, and the digital library
metaphor attempts to balance the two.
To make signals
behave more like physical commodities, the DMCA promotes the protection
of information by encryption, prohibiting the development or distribution
of technologies to break encryption. Here technology assumes the enforcement
role that law has previously assumed, thus fundamentally changing the
nature of political control. Copyright is an ex post facto protection:
it is always possible to copy something, but there may be legal consequences
if the copy is not legally defensible. This flexibility allows for fair
use, the legally defensible use of copying for educational purposes;
but encryption would prevent use absolutely. As a consequence, the DMCA
has authorized the Library of Congress to study the impact of encryption
on fair use in the two years before the law goes into effect.
Thus the DMCA explicitly
uses legislation to direct the process of invention. The Net began as
the fruit of a federally sponsored research partnership among industry,
government, and higher education. The NII has passed the initiative
to industry for commercial exploitation. Although a computer scientist
may approach "rights management software" or "information security firewalls"
as interesting technical problems, these problems are funded -- and
equally interesting problems are not -- because the interests of the
publishing and entertainment industries have won the political battle
to name this innovation. This is not unusual: the Constitution builds
the politics of innovation into the fabric of American history. What
is unusual here is only the absence of higher education as a full partner
in the innovation process.
UCC 2B
If copyright law
protects the expression of ideas as property, it also treats them as
a public good through fair use, which allows for limited copying for
ed ucational purposes as long as markets are not caused to fail. Fair
use thus balances property rights with First Amendment protection for
print and the language of the copyright clause of the Constitution.
Print is protected by copyright not simply because it is property but
because treating it as property will lead to "progress in the useful
Arts and sciences," which is what the eighteenth century called technology
and science. This link between science, technology, and progress is
the foundation of an innovation policy that, centered on research and
the dissemination of knowledge, led to the establishment of land-grant
universities in the mid-nineteenth century and the NSF in the mid-twentieth
century.
However, the publishing,
entertainment, and software industries have successfully argued that
digital information should not be treated like print and thus began
a revision of UCC section 2B to adapt contract law to protect digital
works. If the revision is enacted by a state, information will be protected
by shrink-wrap licenses, essentially contracts defining the terms of
use, since information itself will be rented, not sold. Since commercial
codes are the business of the states, interest groups will pressure
state legislatures to adopt the UCC 2B concepts, although copyright
will continue to provide the federal framework for information property.
As we shall see,
the virtual community and the digital library metaphors raise fundamental
questions about the NII, but even within its terms, two very important
questions of justice remain unsolved.
- Equality.
"Universal service" was a public good established by the Telecommunications
Act of 1934 in recognition of the emergence of the telephone service
as a fundamental social innovation. Following this model, the NII
proposed that "universal access" to the Net for educational purposes
should be a public good, thus the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) implemented an "E-rate" to subsidize the connection of public
schools and libraries to the network. But while subsidies for local
telephone service had been hidden within long-distance telephone rates,
the E-rate appears as a tax on telephone bills, provoking widespread
political resistance. Even if the universal access doctrine had succeeded
(and an alternative funding strategy may yet emerge), access to the
Net would not subsidize the use of intellectual property. As documented
by the Commerce Department's recent report on "The Digital Divide,"
if the use of information is distributed on the basis of wealth, a
new kind of information inequality will be created, one that is particularly
pernicious in an information society.
- Privacy.
Unlike other forms of reading, the use of networked information is
always potentially under surveillance; thus, data about personal use
of information is the first genuinely new kind of commodity in the
digital marketplace. In response, the European Union issued a "Privacy
Directive," defining personal digital information as the property
of the individual concerned. In contrast, American policy relies on
current privacy laws and industry self-regulation as a solution to
the problem. Thus the information highway metaphor constructs information
privacy as a trade dispute with Europe rather than as a political
issue about the commercialization of private information.
Although the information
superhighway metaphor identifies the transportation function of the
network, in making the development of electronic commerce markets the
primary focus of innovation, it has not yet addressed the economic inequality
and privacy issues that it generates. As Newton Minow, the former head
of the FCC, has asked, What is the Internet equivalent of public interest
broadcasting?
The Virtual
Community
Technology predictions
are rarely accurate, thus in retrospect it is not surprising that the
Agenda for Action's vision of the future missed the most important innovation
produced by the Net: the World Wide Web. The European Laboratory for
Particle Physics (known as CERN) released Web software in 1991, and
Mosaic was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) in 1993. Yet it was inevitable that the emergence of the Web
could not be predicted by the NII's industrial policy because, in Brian
Kahin's words, it implies "a paradigm shift from circuits to tiny packets
of information as the organizing unit of telecommunications."6
The NII was based on the model of an industrial distribution technology
for mass-produced products, whereas the Web is a participatory technology
organized around the collective production of knowledge for which there
is no historical precedent.
The virtual community
metaphor describes the new modes of social life emerging on the Web,
highlighting the communication function of the Net. The term
"virtual community" refers to an unanticipated social cohesion that
occurs on the Net, even among people who have never actually met face
to face, a cohesion based on exchanging gifts of information as a medium
for social collaboration. In this sense the word community is
apt, even when applied to technology-mediated communication, for communities
have always been based on gift-exchange.
And yet the idea
of a virtual community is perplexing in a world in which technology
is often associated with increasing social isolation. This idea of a
network-mediated community was first used to describe the many ways
the Net served as a medium for the exchange of information -- the chat
groups, lists, electronic mail, and later, Web pages -- that unexpectedly
began to build a sense of intimacy and belonging. Electronic communications
are in some ways spontaneous and intimate, like speech, even when conducted
anonymously. However, and this is a defining characteristic, because
the Net is a written medium, the conversation of virtual communities
creates archives of written information, giving groups a sense of history
and identity. The Web might therefore be described as a gift-exchange
economy within which seven million authors (and counting) have collaboratively
written the largest text ever compiled.
Distinctive new
kinds of virtual social groups now seem to be emerging, strongest when
face-to-face relationships are extended by the Net, but possible even
without them. Indeed, some of the most important kinds of communities
can exist only virtually because their members are socially or geographically
isolated, such as disabled senior citizens, gay and lesbian teenagers,
people with extremely rare diseases, or members of radical political
movements.
In describing the
Net as a medium of communication rather than transportation, the virtual
community metaphor defines information in terms of the process
of using and creating knowledge rather than in terms of the product,
intellectual property. This contrast illustrates the ambiguity at the
heart of every concept of intellectual property: ideas themselves cannot
be owned, yet "expressions of ideas," to use the language of
copyright law, are packaged within manufactured artifacts. The great
power of the virtual community metaphor is to point out that intellectual
property originates in social relationships such as gift cultures, particularly
educational and research communities. Good legislation, such as print
copyright, helps markets and gift-exchange communities to be complementary
by managing the boundary between them.
In exploring innovative
new communication modes that create new kinds of knowledge, the virtual
community metaphor highlights the way that the superhighway metaphor
is rooted in an industrial model. In contrast, the Net is an innovation
that may change the very nature of social and economic life, as is illustrated
by Manuel Castells's description of the "network enterprise" as a malleable
organization that manages global information flows to produce
wealth.7 Some bankers believe that money can no longer be
treated as a commodity; it is now a global information flow beyond the
fiscal control of national banks. If so, new kinds of barter andgift-exchange
economies may serve as a model for entirely new modes of non-marke t
exchange based on information "currencies" rather than money.
The idea of virtual
community has an empirical basis in the beginnings of new kinds of social
relations based on gift exchange on the Web, but like all other political
metaphors, it derives its rhetorical power from a theory of justice.
A gift is given to establish or renew a social relationship, not primarily
to gain an economic advantage. Even today, the boundaries of community
are defined by gift giving: within the family; among friends; within
the scientific community; and as a form of social capital in civil society.
Nor does the concept of the gift necessarily exclude self-interest or
competition, for in giving away intellectual property on the Net, one
expects to receive information in return or perhaps social status in
the eyes of the community.
Education and research
on the Net have produced two particularly interesting experiments suggesting
that innovative gift economies have the potential to sustain cooperative
forms of social life in an information society. First, authorship
in cyberspace is often communal, not individual, challenging the intellectual
foundations of current intellectual property law. And second, networked
communities are exploring new concepts of community-owned, public-domain
intellectual property called open software.
Authorship
The idea of intellectual
property is founded on the image of an individual author-genius who,
in creating the "original expression of an idea," creates value and
thereby property rights. Since this description, taken literally, would
apply only to Robinson Crusoe, in recent social science the idea of
the author is evolving into what has been called a community of practice.8
Communities of practice, often professional groups whose solidarity
comes from collaborative research and learning rather than from a shared
sense of place, have become an important tool in analyzing knowledge
management in the corporation, replacing the idea of the individual
worker or author. For example, Walter Powell describes a biotechnology
paper that was published with 133 authors, from 85 institutions.9
If the idea of the author changes, everything else about intellectual
property must change, notwithstanding the fact that intellectual property
law is firmly built on a seventeenth-century description of the production
of knowledge.
Open Software
Just as industrialization
began with the enclosure of public lands, the NII has begun the information
society with the enclosure of public rights to information. And yet
at the same time, Linux has emerged as an operating system built by
a virtual community of programmers, a community of practice. Linus Torvalds,
the creator of Linux, is this new kind of author, one who organizes
a flow of programming tasks to volunteer programmers around the world
linked into a community of practice by the Net. Eric S. Raymond calls
this the "bazaar style" of software building, in which code placed on
the network is subject to peer review and revision by other programmers,
in contrast to commercial software, which is built "cathedral style"
by corporations.10
Open software is
not simply placed in the public domain but is protected by a form of
copyright often called GPL, the General Public License, or sometimes,
"copyleft." Open software allows for public use but is a form of copyright
in order to prevent commercial enclosure by the market. Linux is becoming
the standard software among Third World nations that do not want the
information age to re-create the domination of the South by the North
using technology, rather than colonialism, as the medium of domination.
The virtual community
metaphor contrasts the idea of information commodities with a vision
of the Net as a medium of social and cultural cooperation. In this sense,
the virtual community metaphor restores social context to the concept
of information by focusing on the communities that create and consume
information. The words information and information content
signify the economic value of software and digital copyright in
legal discourse but are empty of empirical content, because we know
so little about the social contexts within which they have value. But
there are also problems with the virtual community metaphor, interesting
problems.
- First, what
does the word community mean in the disembodied context of the Net?
Virtual communities have been romanticized in the press, but social
science has not yet been able to document and analyze these new social
phenomena.
- Second, the
lack of structure and quality in the information that is in the public
domain makes the gift economy of ideas on the Net problematic. The
great virtue of the NII is in creating economic incentives for investment
in quality. Thus it might be argued that the idea of virtual community
also fails to understand the symbiosis between the market and communities,
in ignoring the subsidies and sponsored research that have made the
Web possible.
The Digital
Library
As a solution to
the problem of the public interest in education and research, the digital
library metaphor suggests that as a public institution, the public library
could serve as a model for mediating between the market economy and
the use of information by gift-exchange communities in civil society.
The information superhighway metaphor often goes too far, as in some
UCC 2B discussions in which each information use in every social context
would require payment. The virtual community metaphor often goes too
far, as in the claim that "information wants to be free." Intellectual
property must sometimes be a public good, particularly for educational
purposes and more generally as a means of providing for equality of
opportunity in a society in which access to information is increasingly
important, but it cannot simply be free. In industrial society, the
public library has managed the boundary between markets and communities.
Libraries buy information in the marketplace and subsidize the free
use of that information by communities, within the limits defined by
the fair use doctrine.
Print libraries
create a public sense of place by solving the problem of information
management through collection development and the catalog, and by offering
subsidized access to them. Print collections, of course, can be only
a sample of all knowledge, since the total amount of published information
has grown beyond the financial and operational ability of any library
to collect. Equally important for libraries is the social dimension
of information management; the technical problems of collection development
and cataloging cannot be solved until it is known how a community uses
the collection and why.
The digital library
metaphor, then, raises interesting problems of scale. If digital libraries
have global scope and encompass all digital information, what is a collection
or catalog? Will the concept of the user refer to the individual consumer
or to communities of practice? Thus the digital library metaphor has
many variants, often separating the technical problem of information
management on the Net from the social problem of the definition of the
user.
Is It Free?
At the turn of
the twentieth century, public libraries and museums were founded to
serve as educational public places that were safe for immigrants from
farms and boats and that stood next to the city hall as models for civic
institutions. And yet in the course of the last fifty years, commercial
spaces have begun to perform public functions, beginning with the department
store and continuing with the mall. As a consequence, the function of
the print library as a subsidized public good is increasingly under
political attack, even as it is being used as an information society
metaphor.
Is It a Collection?
Taken as a metaphor
concerning information management, the digital library often does not
necessarily take free public access by citizens as a goal. The term
cyberspace originated in William Gibson's science fiction novel
Neuromancer and suggests "outer space" or "mathematical space."
It is a powerful concept precisely because of the connotation of being
free of the constraints of place in searching for information. From
this perspective both publishers and libraries, in their exercise of
authority in quality control and selectivity, limit the possibility
of finding information. The cyberspace metaphor implies a kind of libertarian
utopia, a place where individual choice is optimized. In one variant
of the digital library metaphor, then, information management might
imply a universal search engine optimized for individual choice, not
for a community, and not for subsidized public access.
Who Is the
User?
If the ideal of
information management for individual users or consumers stands at one
pole of the digital library metaphor, the idea of knowledge management
stands at the other. Knowledge management conceives of the intellectual
resources of the corporation not only in terms of the intellectual property
it owns but in terms of the knowledge-creating capability of the organization's
people acting in concert. In a networked world, knowledge management
requires creating a sense of place in cyberspace, to enable groups to
create knowledge. Thus Ikujiro Nonaka and Noboru Konno have used the
Japanese word Ba to go beyond the sense of place rooted in geography
or architecture to explore ways that a virtual sense of place might
be created.11 Ba, they say, most often resides in
a physical place, such as a library, but also exists in cyberspace,
as in a virtual community. Whether located in physical or virtual spaces,
Ba reflects a sense of shared values or skills and thus might
exist among members of a profession even when, although geographically
separated, they are a community of practice linked by the Net. The key
point for knowledge management theory is that such a sense of place
is the precondition for the intellectual work of any social group, and
its design is the ultimate technological innovation. Ba is also
a metaphor, perhaps, but one that requires us to think in new ways about
the Net and innovation.
The concept of
Ba is well illustrated by the virtual community of biotechnology
researchers described by Powell, suggesting that knowledge management
might be seen as the precondition of community and vice versa. In this
sense, the Web and the Net cannot be digital libraries, for libraries
reflect communities of practice, not collections of things.
The special value
of the digital library metaphor is the lesson that market economies
and gift-exchange economies may be symbiotic, but only if pragmatic
laws and institutions manage the boundary between private property and
public goods. Granted, this may be difficult when regulating the flow
of information on a global information network, for no one nation has
sufficient jurisdiction to enforce its laws. But it is also useful to
remember that the fair use doctrine emerged from a long period of negotiation
between publishers and libraries, not from a winner-take-all political
struggle.
New Metaphors?
Just as the automobile
was first called a "horseless carriage," we are now in a transitional
phase in which we interpret the future of the Net using institutional
models of the past -- highways, communities, and libraries. Information
superhighways, virtual communities, and digital libraries are metaphors
within which an indirect dialogue about questions of economic and social
justice in an information society is occurring. Each has strengths and
weaknesses as metaphors, but fundamentally, discussions of economic
and social justice should not be indirect. How can we find a language
to talk about the Net as an innovation?
The Italian philosopher
Giambattista Vico argued that history changes when "barbarian poets"
create new languages and paradigms that have the power to give birth
to new cultures and institutions. Inevitably, one generation's poetry
becomes the next generation's cliche', words begin to hide partisan
interests, and we need to find new barbarian poets. Barbarian poets,
by definition, come from outside authoritative institutions; thus, perhaps
it would be more useful to listen to the language of those working collaboratively
in cyberspace to find new images to take us farther than the noble but
tired industrial-society language that we now use. Recent research suggests
that although commercial intranets were designed for inventory and personnel
management functions, communities of practice have become the primary
users. The lesson, as Vico might see it, is that innovation comes from
the users, not from the technology. The special power of the virtual
community metaphor is that however vague, it leads us back to the way
the Net is changing work, communication, and social relationships. That
is where new ideas and practices are emerging.
Those of us in
higher education are also trapped in metaphors that prevent us from
using the Net in innovative ways. "Information" is another dead metaphor,
originating in medieval scholastic pedagogy but, as we have seen, now
evolving into a container for a commodity vaguely called "content."
As administrators, we often think about the Net as infrastructure, but
as educators, we might begin by looking at the Net as a place inhabited
by new kinds of research and learning communities. And as citizens,
we might insist on replacing an information policy that commercializes
knowledge in a manner that endangers real research and education. That
is, we might develop an innovation policy for the Net that places information
technology in service to a vision of a learning society.
Endnotes
1. This article
is based on a paper commissioned by the Annenberg School for Communication
at the University of Southern California, for a November 6, 1998, conference
on "Technological Visions: Utopian and Dystopian Perspectives." The
conference papers are forthcoming in a book of the same name.
2. The High Performance
Computing Act states: "Such a program would provide American researchers
and educators with the computer and information resources they need,
and demonstrate how advanced computers, high-capacity and high-speed
networks, and electronic data bases can improve the national information
infrastructure for use by all Americans." See "High
Performance Computing Act" (1991), (August 1, 1999).
3. "The NII: Agenda
for Action" states: "Information is one of the nation's most critical
economic resources, for service industries as well as manufacturing,
for economic as well as national security. . . . Those technologies
will help U.S. businesses remain competitive and create challenging,
high-paying jobs." See "The
NII: Agenda for Action" (1993), (August 1, 1999).
4. Paul A. David,
"Heroes, Herds, and Hysteresis in Technological History," Industrial
and Corporate Change 1, no. 1 (1992): 129-80.
5. See report of
the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights of the National Information
Infrastructure Task Force, "Intellectual
Property and the National Information Infrastructure" (September
1995, modified November 15, 1995), (August 4, 1999).
6. Brian Kahin,
"Beyond the National Information Infrastructure Initiative: Technology-Informed
Policy and Policy-Enabling Technology," in Investing in Innovation,
ed. Lewis M. Branscomb and James Keller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1998).
7. Manuel Castells,
The Rise of the Network Society (London: Blackwells, 1996).
8. Jean Lave and
Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
9. Walter W. Powell,
"Learning from Collaboration: Knowledge and Networks in the Biotechnology
and Pharmaceutical Industries," California Management Review 40,
no. 3 (spring 1998): 228-40.
10. Eric S. Raymond,
"The
Cathedral and the Bazaar" (July 29, 1999), (August 4, 1999).
11. Ikujiro Nonaka
and Noboru Konno, "The Concept of 'Ba': Building a Foundation for Knowledge
Creation," California Management Review 40, no. 3 (spring 1998):
40-54.
Peter Lyman
is Professor and Associate Dean at the School of Information Management
and Systems, University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching
centers on information policy and the social dimensions of the digital
economy, particularly the sociology of networked information and its
implications for intellectual property policy. See his Web page at http://sims.berkeley.edu/~plyman/
for papers on the subjects mentioned in this article.
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