Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!sun!decwrl!hplabs!hplabsz!taylor From: clif@chinet.UUCP (Clif Flynt) Newsgroups: comp.society Subject: Re: what if... Message-ID: <906@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM> Date: Mon, 19-Oct-87 19:43:49 EDT Article-I.D.: hplabsz.906 Posted: Mon Oct 19 19:43:49 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 21-Oct-87 06:33:25 EDT References: Sender: taylor@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix Lines: 70 Approved: taylor@hplabs Dave Taylor writes: >Miles Fidelman recently asked: > >> If and when networking becomes widely available to the general public, >> what effects will it have on the way we organize our political and >> economic activities? > >I think that this is a quite interesting question and would like to take >a tentative stab at answering it here. > > [ ... An excellent, but rather pessimistic article followed. ] Dave Taylor suggests that not much will change, and that people will not make much use of the medium of computer communication to elected officials if it became available. I think there is a technology availability question here, and less of a learning curve for society than he imagines. I draw my conclusions from the situation I see in Ann Arbor, where there are a few very well used computer bulletin board systems. A particular example is a system called m-net. This system has some dozen dial in lines, which are almost all busy most hours of the day. The people on the system range from college profs to 8 year olds. When the system started several years ago, the participants were primarily techies, but in the past few years this has changed to the extent that the people interested in technical discussion are much in the minority. M-Net runs a conferencing program called Pico-Span, which is quite friendly to the new user, and allows a non-technically inclined person to participate easily and quickly. Pico-Span allows topics of discussion ot be divided up among conferences and items. (Similar to reading News with the -S option.) I think the ease of gaining access to M-Net, and the speed with which someone can become familiar enough with it to make use of it contributes to the switch from techie to non-techie users. Now that $100 will get someone the minimal hardware for accessing on-line info, I think that the software and the availability of cheap access to that info are the limiting factors. The growth of public access systems like m-net, chinet, anet and ncoast seems to indicate that people want access to information. One of the conferences that has been running on M-Net for a couple years now is 'Fair-Witnessed' by Perry Bullard, a Michigan State Representative, whose constituency includes parts of Ann Arbor. (In acutal fact, it's run by one of his aids who hardcopies the conferences for Mr. Bullard, and types in his responses.) Over the past couple years, Mr. Bullard has been available to answer questions, enter the text of bills he intends to introduce, and generally be available to the voters. On at least one occaission, after reading the arguments between the other participants in the conference he modified the text of the bill he was going to introduce. Now, the availability of Mr. Bullard on M-Net is not much different than writing him a letter, which would be read by an aide, and handled in much the same way that his responses in the conference are handled, but the sense of immediacy is much different. And since the conference is not a one-on-one with Mr. Bullard, but rather like a noisy town meeting, there is a much greater chance for Mr. Bullard to see the opinions of those he represents. The problem I see with this medium is that the volume of information can grow so large that people will need some method of filtering it down to a level that they can handle. Clif Flynt