Our 29th ambassador is Edward Vielmetti of Ann Arbor, Michigan, talking about access to the Internet in public places and the digital divide on his personal blog, Vacuum. You can find his post in its original context here.
One Web Day is September 22; University of Michigan Law professor Susan Crawford is organizing it, with events and participation from around the world. It’s “Earth Day for the Internet”.
Around the world, we’re focusing attention on the importance of the internet to political participation – that’s this year’s theme. We’re also encouraging people to talk about (and do something about) internet issues they’re worried about – censorship, the digital divide, inadequate connectivity generally. The idea behind OneWebDay is to create a platform for a global constituency that cares about the future of the internet.
The piece of this that I have an abiding interest in is access to the Internet in public places; the development of business practices, community efforts, and municipal and library systems that provide some level of public computing and communications infrastructure that is not tied to a monthly fee from an Internet service provider.
There’s a large number of businesses, usually cafes and restaurants but also laundromats, supermarkets, and ice cream shops, where the proprietors can see a narrow self-interest in providing free network access to anyone who brings a computer and buys their daily aliquot of caffeine or sugar. This is an essential part of civic information infrastructure, because rather than being planned centrally by some committee, it just happens.
Sometimes, the free access comes with strings, most notably in my experience the existence of badly designed or configured firewalls that block access to perfectly reasonable web sites or tools. This failure is a market failure if there are enough alternatives – you walk down the street to the next cafe if it bugs you enough – but you can only route around censorship if you have an alternative. If the web access is really bad, I just don’t go back.
Centrally planned civic internets have been a failure around Ann Arbor; the much-ballyhooed Wireless Washtenaw has never developed either enough critical mass or enough ubiquity of coverage to justify its fees for service. Despite an advisory board that included every township supervisor who wanted to be part of it, it’s not part of the answer to universal free web access. In contrast, the privately funded Wireless Ypsi, which uses Meraki hardware in a mesh configuration, has hit enough of the business districts of Ypsilanti to make internet ubiquitous there, without the need for anything more than some effort and coordinating about how it’s done.
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If you have enough density of people online, networks start to get used for political participation and political action. Ann Arbor has been online in one form or another since Bob Parnes’s CONFER and Marcus Watts’s Picospan of the 1970s, so we have some experience with this, and elected officials who have been on the net as long as there has been a net to be on.
If all politics is local, then there is nothing more political than the local neighborhood mailing list, the group of 15-50 individuals in close proximity who all hear the same loud construction noise or see the same contractor getting hassled by the city and can mobilize in a density and coordination of action that gets attention and results. Here the universal access level that gets things done depends on older, lower tech, pre web coordination tools – the individual who has that email list and who can write the call to action to get attention or get things done. In all cases I’ve seen that work people reuse and repurpose existing free or ad-supported tools to manage these.
Every so often, issues leave the neighborhood level and appear in public. If you are lucky, you have a great newspaper, but great newspapers are hard to come by. Even without a great print newspaper, it’s entirely possible to have a really good civic news site, one which is resourceful enough to post city council meeting agendas and to get city council members to post under their own names, or one that sustains a distinctive perspective on town long enough to generate meetings which are offline and not just online.
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With this context in place, I see the digital divide as an opportunity.
Calling it a digital divide simply emphasizes that there is a divide – that the neighborhood of West Willow is different from the village of Manchester, and that there may not be much reason for those two groups of people to work together for collective action without some external impetus that seeks to weave them together.
In every community and economy there are holes, opportunities unrealized because people just don’t know that what they are looking for is there. The analog divide is even larger than the digital divide, and maybe (just maybe) when we realize that we can start to build practices that address that.
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More information:
- Laundromats with internet access: Washtenaw Wash: “24 hr laundry, wifi, enormous machines to wash your bedding”
- Badly designed firewalls: Sonicwall, which blocked Ning
- The failure of Wireless Washtenaw, compared to the success of Wireless Ypsi, quoting Brian Robb: “Most of the time, when you don’t have institutional involvement, things happen much quicker. We didn’t need committees, we didn’t need an advisory board, we didn’t need anything. … Seriously, in three weeks, we’ve done what (Wireless Washtenaw has) promised to do for four years.”
- History of Internet and computer conferencing in Ann Arbor, from Jan Wolter: Starting in the research labs of the University of Michigan, and moving out into the surrounding community, Ann Arbor’s conferencing systems were among the first to make sophisticated computer conferencing systems publicly available. The software developed in Ann Arbor, and many of the ideas incorporated in it, have been extremely influential and have been much copied. At the same time, Ann Arbor’s systems have a history of dedication to free public access and to democratic control that remains unique world-wide.
- Valdis Krebs writes about network weaving a a practice that supports the creation of robust & vibrant economic and community networks.
Edward Vielmetti is a resident of Ann Arbor, MI.
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