CHAPTER 2

       History

2.1 DIGITAL CITIES

      We can ask to what degree digital cities and community networks are examples of civic engagement. While most have the goal of supporting community involvement, they all have something of a “Chamber of Commerce” quality to them in the sense that their primary goals are to connect businesses to citizens and to publicize and popularize the community to outsiders. The need for significant technical capital in terms of both money and infrastructure meant that large institutions such as telecoms, city governments, and universities needed to work together to make the digital cities a reality. These entities view the community and its needs differently than citizens might. In the next section, we explore the emergence of civic activities on platforms not designed specifically for this purpose and therefore without design constraints on activity.

      Van Dijk (2012) identifies four distinct periods in the development of digital democracy: (1) teledemocracy in the 1980s as networked computing environments first appeared; (2) virtual community in the 1990s in which communities of interest and locality could interact and share (with an emphasis on replacing “lost community”); (3) new democracy at the turn of the century in which the global reach of the internet, the possibilities for mass participation became apparent; and (4) Web 2.0 era as the dawn of social media and civic journalism made participatory environments prevalent. We focus in this book on the last era, however in this chapter we spend some time charting how we got here.

      As soon as it became clear that information and computing systems would break out beyond large corporations and military and scientific applications, and that their uses were vastly broader than accounting, record keeping, and mathematical calculation, people began to imagine their use in civic and governmental realms. When document processing and hypertext emerged in the 1970s, an early dream was that public documents, which were printed at great cost and either mailed to citizens or kept in publicly accessible places such as post offices and libraries, could instead reside online. By the 1990s, community-level and city-level websites were appearing which informed citizens about and involved them in civic affairs. The so-called “digital cities” movement emerged at this time with many forward-thinking communities developing a cyber-presence for municipalities and their citizens. Often the metaphor was tied closely to real urban spaces, with a community being represented spatially, citizens having “home” pages, and navigation being accomplished by moving from place to place though the simulated environment.

      The internet emerged from its development into broader common use in the 1980s, and almost immediately along with it came the dream that people could use it to form neighborhood, city, state, national, and transnational amalgams to pursue common ends. The phrase “digital city” was used to indicate the movement of city-level and community-level activities of civic life into the digital domain.

      Van den Besselaar and Beckers (2005) trace the origin of the term “digital city” to the founding in 1993 of De Digitale Stad (DDS) in Amsterdam, widely considered to be the first attempt at creating a connected urban network with civic goals beyond simply experimenting with emerging technologies. DDS arose in an environment that had already appropriated the new technology of cable television for community access purposes. An amalgam of hackers and community activists embarked on the DDS project with the goal of offering universal internet access and developing applications that citizens could use to accomplish civic ends. According to van den Besselaar and Beckers (2005):

      “The organizers wanted to introduce the Internet and its possibilities to a wider population by providing free access to the Internet, creating an electronic public domain for social and political debate and enabling free expression and social experimentation in cyberspace” (p. 68).

      One of the first accomplishments of DDS was to link politicians with citizens and to set up political discussion forums to support elections taking place in 1994. As far as I know, this is the first use of a digital network environment to support an election. Although it grew quickly at first, DDS had a difficult time transitioning through various phases of technological change, particularly the introduction of the World Wide Web, and the ultimate commercialization of the internet. The rise of commercial providers of competing services such as email and search tools eroded the large user base who focused primarily on these particular services.

      A significant feature of DDS was its use of an urban metaphor to organize its services and features. DDS contained a “library,” “post office,” “city hall,” “arts and culture center,” “election center,” special interest “cafes,” and other virtual places. This metaphor was maintained when DDS switched from a text-based interface to a graphical interface, and the latter allowed designers to present the “digital city” spatially as a city map and to support “strolling” as a navigational metaphor. Users were encouraged to have a “house” in a virtual neighborhood, which was an early version of representing the self in cyberspace. While this drew considerable attention from researchers as an innovative and interesting experiment in virtual public space, it may have proved limiting both technically (there were limits on the number of houses and sizes of neighborhoods, for example) and in terms of the constraints of the metaphor with regard to imaginative new applications. An attempt to deploy a 3D interface to DDS and integrate it with live television was probably ahead of its time in the 1990s and resulted in a reduction in users who had the bandwidth and computing power to use DDS. By 2001, DDS had disappeared (see Van den Besselaar and Beckers, 2005 for an extensive history).

      Several community network efforts with similarities to DDS appeared around the U.S. at about the same time (Schuler, 1994). Examples include Big Sky Telegraph, Berkeley Community Memory (Farrington and Pine, 1996), Santa Monica Public Electronic Network (Rogers, Collins-Jarvis, and Schmitz, 1994), Seattle Community Network (SCN), and Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV). According to Yasuoka, Ishida, and Aurigig (2010), the earliest digital city was the Cleveland Free-Net, founded in 1986 as a research project within Case Western Reserve University.

      The Cleveland Free-Net (CFN) was a local network initially not connected to the then-nascent internet. It provided email and online bulletin board services to its users, who numbered almost 160,000 by the time of its discontinuation in 1995. The evolution of the CFN was largely an experiment in technical capability, however it was also an early example of an information network in which the users played a significant role in producing its content. The founder of CFN, who also envisioned a “National Public Telecomputing Network” (NPTN) in advance of the fully realized internet, described several requirements for public networks (Schuler, 1994). They should be:

      • community-based, such that everyone has a stake in the content;

      • reciprocal, where users are both information consumers and producers;

      • contribution-based, in which the content of forums is generated by users;

      • unrestricted,