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Understanding Micropolis and Compunity 57

Perils and Parallels

A friend once remarked that “no one ever said that change had to
make any kind of sense at all,” a statement both true and revealing.
Its truth is rooted in the randomness of change, in the inability to,
god-like, will everything into place. It reveals that we nevertheless
try to make sense of change, whether we try to will change into
being or not. And perhaps we work even harder at sense-making as
we become ever more sensitive to the ephemeral nature of meaning.
The activity of sense-making has, in the case of life in compunities,
made clear four areas that are common, forming a consistent narra-
tive pattern illustrating where social concerns lie: privacy, property,
protection, and privilege. That these themes are central to our dis-
course about new communication technologies is telling both be-
cause it makes our concerns clear and because it points out the
mythic nature of technology’s promise. The former is not difficult to
discern, as these themes are easy to find in our conversations about
the Internet and compunity. The latter is no more difficult to discern
either, but requires the historicizing of these narrative patterns to
help explain the role of new communication technology in social
change.

Privacy
Much of the current discussion about the information superhighway
revolves around privacy. It forms the core of many a government’s
concern that a “back-door” must be created for every computer and
network (using the “Clipper chip” in the US, for instance) to allow
access for the computer equivalent of continual surveillance and
eavesdropping. In more commercial terms, one can ascertain corpo-
rate interests in gathering information electronically from us as
well, and perhaps the most notable such attempt via computer-me-
diated communication was Microsoft’s intention to include as part of
its Windows 95 operating system a program element by which, upon
electronically registering the software, information about a person’s
hardware is transmitted to Microsoft.
Privacy also forms the core of concerns about how information
about ourselves will traverse the highway. Will anyone be able to
“tap” into the data stream and fish out our credit or medical records?
Will they be able to intercept credit card information as it zips from
Internet site to Internet site? How will we prevent that from hap-
pening? What will happen to all the data that we send? Since data is