Page 71 - Culture Technology Communication

56 Steve Jones

someone communicates to us. That fear keeps us clinging to the com-
munities within which we feel a sense of trust, of safety. In physical
terms these are, increasingly, gated communities. In terms of com-
puter-mediated communication these are “Gates-ed” communities,
ones in which we hold keycards in the form of passwords, connectiv-
ity and access. In cyberspace these are what I believe is an analog of
“metropolis”: “Micropolis,” namely, smaller and smaller groupings of
people, fractal metropolii. I use the term “fractal” in this case both in
the sense of a figure with self-similarity at all spatial scales, and as a
play on words, a concatenation of “fractured” and “partial.” Micropo-
lis is a fragment, a fractured substitute in our lives for a polity. But it
is also a fractal in the sense that social groupings in geographic, phys-
ical space, and ones in cyberspace, are gaining in self-similarity at and
through all levels. Online, micropolii are gated in an oddly interlock-
ing fashion [a gate opens into a community, but may also, like a cosmic
wormhole, open into still another community seemingly very different
and separate, though linked via interest (Jones 1995)]. Micropolii are,
I believe, the result of what Marshall Berman (1982) identified as
“The innate dynamism of the modern economy, and of the culture that
grows from this economy, annihilat(ing) everything that it creates—
physical environments, social institutions, metaphysical ideas, artis-
tic visions, moral values—in order to create more, to go on endlessly
creating the world anew” (288).
Interconnected though micropolii may be, they rarely form a col-
lective via their interconnectivity, instead serving groups just
slightly different one from the other. We experience a fragmentation
of community just as we have on introduction and spread of cable
television, magazines, and numerous other media. Our sense of oth-
ers is very wide, our experience of others not very long. Perhaps this
is due in some part to the approaching end of the millennium, a time
when life seems to simultaneously speed up and slow down, the for-
mer feeling aroused by our sense of the length of time, the latter
brought on by our sense (to borrow from Laurie Anderson’s observa-
tions during her performances) of time’s width. As we sit on the cusp
of millennial change, we not only feel that time stretches very far
back, that it has a retrograde trajectory, but that it stretches very far
ahead, too, perhaps so far ahead that we cannot comprehend, and as
we near the year 2000 the millenium becomes a handy marker for
us, a time buoy if you will. It bobs along, always at a seemingly un-
changing distance from now, though I wonder how that distance will
affect us in 1999 when we can no longer use years a measure that
keeps us distant from millenial change.