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Understanding Micropolis and Compunity

Steve Jones

In my book CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and
Community (Jones 1995), I argued that terms commonly used in the
US to describe the Internet such as “information highway” and “na-
tional information infrastructure” are unfortunate but telling
metaphors. They bring with them much intellectual and social bag-
gage, largely due to the startling parallels between the current proj-
ect, this “information superhighway,” and the one spurred on in the
US by both World Wars, the interstate highway system—not the
least of which is the reliance on the word “highway” and the roman-
tic connotations of the open road. Another important parallel is the
military origin of highway building [as established by Thomas Jef-
ferson, among others (Patton 1986)] and the military origins of what
is presently the most prominent information highway, the Internet,
in Defense Department computer networks linked to university re-
search centers. And yet another parallel is to the 1960s “space race”
and our quest to lead in new technologies and science.
And race ahead we do. I think racing, to push the motoring
metaphor, serves well to characterize a social bias based, in essence,
on movement itself. We can acknowledge several things that com-
pose it; competitive spirit perhaps, a modern need for mobility also,
and curiosity as well. It is a movement based on speed, rooted in
transportation, and oblivious in large part to that which is trans-
ported. To put it another way, loyalty is to the movement of some-
thing (often ourselves, but not always) from one place to another, to
flow, and not to that which is being moved (the last word’s double-
entendre intended), to content.
I believe this quest for movement is well-illustrated by our early
understanding of electricity, and can be most easily recognized in the
work of Nikola Tesla (Cheney 1981). In the late 1890s Tesla envi-
sioned a world linked by electricity. He proposed the development of

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