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John Fraim, GreatHouse Company

From Cyberspace to Local Place

Community Growth Through Electronic Technology

"Our world may suddenly seem senseless to many people because, for the first time in modern history, it is relatively placeless."

Joshua Meyrowitz
No Sense of Place

"The homogeneous and undifferentiated character of modern cities kills all variety of lifestyles and arrests the growth of individual character."

Christopher Alexander
A Pattern Language

"The enduring competitive advantage in a global economy lie increasingly in local things - knowledge, relationships, motivation - that distant rivals cannot match."

Michael Porter
Harvard Business School

"40% of the American population votes once each two or four years for federal officials. But they also 'vote' hundreds of times a day by the products they buy, the web site they visit. The first is called democracy. The second consumer behavior. However, in the electric age of the internet, consumer behavior is quickly becoming the new democracy. While there is little current chance of changing federal voting, there exists a great opportunity to monitor local consumer behavior and use it to create new and truly democratic communities."

John Fraim

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Freedom & Equality - The Dualities Of America

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The concept of duality is one of the most ancient concepts in history with roots in philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. It suggests a world composed of opposites - masculine and feminine, consciousness and unconsciousness, day and night, summer and winter, white and black, fire and water.

With the founding of America these historical duality's were embodied in the two key American ideals of freedom and equality.

Yet in applying the concept of duality to the ideals of a culture, the American Founding Fathers created an impossible paradox. This paradox revolved around the fact that both are true but both cannot be true at the same time. Each needs to await its cyclic dominance in time. Freedom might symbolize one period of America while equality another period in America.

Despite the long range cyclic dominance under one or the other of these symbols, the two ideals battle against each other each day in popular culture.

The ideals are at the center of the American political system and its basic two-party system of Republicans (freedom) and Democrats (equality). This division is reinforced by Republican ideals such as local government self-sufficiency, lack of constraints on competition and a free-market economy. Against these ideas are Democratic ones of greater government control over local areas and a centralized, planned economy.

In economics, the concepts are related to a global, free-market structure and a capitalistic economy (freedom) in opposition to a more socialistic, government controlled system (equality). The economic dichotomy of the two ideas finds a relationship to a mass economy based around mass production and consumption of similar products. Or, around an economy centered around customized production and targeted niche markets of consumption.

In business, freedom is related to the new digital and internet businesses and such things as emerging "open source" computer codes, the flexibility of the modern workplace, "outsourcing" of work and decline of labor unions. Against this business freedom is the equality business model based around the mass production format of a similarity of work functions and less flexibility.

In communications, equality is represented by concepts like mass communication and what communication theorist James Carey notes as the "ritual" view of communication. Mass communication came to dominance with the three television network system of American television in the 50s and 60s. On the other hand, freedom is represented by segmented communication evidenced by greater targeting of magazines and the proliferation of cable television stations. This idea of communication is what Carey notes as the "transmission" model of communication.

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Freedom & Equality = Place & Space

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But of all these, the two greatest ideas associated with freedom and equality are the ideas of place and space. Place, and its representation in local community, has played a crucial role in American history and character. Symbolically, place is associated with the American ideal of freedom and the early history of America from the 16th - 19th century. Space, on the other hand, is associated with the American ideal of equality and the later history of America in the 20th century.

American history has evidenced an evolution from place to space (from freedom to equality) with the movement from a rural to urban culture, a craft to mass production economy and a linear, mechanical technology to a non-linear, electronic technology - from creating things and objects to creating information about things and objects. Things are contained and owe allegiance to place. On the other hand, information pervades space owing allegiance to no place.

The dominant symbol of space in the late 20th century is the internet. It should not be surprising that the orientation of the internet has been in line with the cyclic dominance of space over place and therefore outward into the cyberspace of the global village rather than inward toward the place of local community.

The dominance of the symbol of space and the internet has been accompanied by an anticipated decline of the symbol of place and community. Yet ironically, the Internet - the major symbol of the trend towards dominance of the equality of space over the freedom of place - possesses the greatest potential of returning America to a rediscovery of a new sense of place and freedom.

The cyclic return to the symbolism of place and freedom may have profound implications for a contemporary America homogenized by the equality of cyberspace. In this world of equality of experience, freedom is an illusion. It allows choice to create and choose greater amounts of information and products which, at the same time, possess lesser characteristics of differentiation.

A rediscovery of place will begin to be realized when the focus of the internet is redirected away from global space and towards local community place. It needs to occur soon when there is still the last vestiges of feelings for place in the vast sea of trance-like cyberspace.

(Note: The above is the first part of an internet business plan in development for Sonoma County. Readers interested in the potentials of the internet for local community are invited to comment to us. They can also visit The Progress and Freedom Foundation at http://www.pff.org and

particularly the Magna Carta or the Smart Communities site at http://www.smartcommunities.org)

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