Villemard "Correspondance Cinéma-Phono-Télégraphique" [Cinema-Phono-Telegraphic Connection] Visions de l'an 2000, 1910 Chromolithograph BNF, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie*

Is an ideal "community" made up of virtual identities a utopia? Is humanity necessary to the creation of a utopian place? Does the Internet provide a "place" where a utopian community can be created? Why or why not?

Benjamin Barber (Rutgers University)

Bodies may not be necessary to utopia, which is after all nowhere. But they are necessary to the building of societies, both real and ideal, for we are our bodies (as well as our souls), and to divide or segregate the two is to jeopardize both. The Internet is in any case a poor candidate for utopia, because its communities are always artificial and mimetic-dependent on actual communities of real women and men to acquire their human identity. The Internet can elaborate on, reinforce and celebrate communities of the real, but it cannot create them ex nihilo. Anonymity cannot be the road to civic responsibility any more than isolation (sitting alone in front of a screen) can be the condition for connectivity.

Francesco Battisti (University of Cassino)

We have used e-mail for some years by now, and we have found out that virtual identities tend to be short lived, whereas in real life, people live longer and are capable of changing themselves, adapting to new environments and changing conditions. People assuming an alternative identity, either a nickname or an avatar, get tired of it quickly and leave it aside in searching out real people for chatting. Virtual identities resemble an Internet Carnival where people wear masks during the night. In this sense, physical bodies seem to be necessary not to initiate, but to complete a utopian society, where real people act in the way they think. Otherwise, utopia would have the ephemeral aspect of Carnival, a happening, a show… and Utopia would not be taken seriously.

Robert Fogarty (Antioch College)

Oscar Wilde once wrote that a map of the world that fails to include Utopia is not worth looking at. The Internet, like all seemingly endless spaces, can help people create other worlds for themselves, but so can a great book, or a sonorous symphony.

James Gunn (University of Kansas)

I wouldn't rule out any kind of existence, including computer personalities; we can't fetter the future with our ephemeral prejudices. I think the Internet has potential but not necessarily for a utopian community.

Naomi Jacobs (University of Maine)

Yes, in the sense that Thomas More's Utopia (1516) is a utopia – that is, in the sense of a utopian fiction. Like any utopian fiction, the virtual community made up of virtual individuals can provide a salutary vision of how things might be different from and better than they are. And it can provide what William Morris called "an epoch of rest" from the frustrations, sadnesses, ambiguities, and horrors of the world we inhabit. But a community of virtual identities carries no political efficacy unless it enables action in the real world. Any true utopian society must consist of people dealing with real problems in the material world: growing food, raising children, getting people from place to place, etc. Furthermore, I can't imagine a utopian society that isn't enriched by the full range of sensory and kinetic experiences to which our bodies give us access. However, alternate online identities can certainly collaborate in the creation of utopian fictions or visions, which might then be used as the basis for utopian action in the physical world. The Internet can be a wonderful tool for connecting like-minded people and organizing common action, as we saw recently with the protests against the WTO in Seattle. It can provide a place for planning a utopian community but not, I believe, for realizing one. The very ease with which people move into and out of such electronic networks, simply ending their participation if they don't like who they find in any particular community, makes the utopian dimension of such activities rather thin. To my mind, a truly subtle and provocative utopia must embrace difference and find other means than evasion to address conflict – thus growing and changing.

Ruth Levitas (University of Bristol)

Well, this depends what you mean by a utopia! Since a virtual community is a no-place, it may qualify. For most of us, though, the question is whether it could be a model of a good society, at least in someone’s terms; or a society which expresses the desire for a better way of living. Certainly, there are those for whom the image of utopia is projected onto the Net, as there are those who regard it as dystopian. Up to a point, I suppose, forms of interaction on the Internet might be models of how democratic discussion might work. And yes, you could have a virtual community populated solely by alternate online identities, and this is as much a utopia as any utopian novel. But that isn’t the same as the creation of a utopian society. For this, physical bodies are not so much necessary as inevitable, as despite a lot of hype about the Internet, we are, actually, embodied creatures – with all the physical vulnerability that that entails.

Elizabeth McCutcheon (University of Hawaii)

I think of the Internet as a tool, a technology. Is there a difference between a utopian society that is described in a book and a utopian society that is described on the Internet? I'd need to think more about this. Or is the question: is an imagined community on the Internet that claims to be utopian a utopia? Again, I would beg the question, because I don't think a utopia can be realized as a place. It seems to me that utopias, insofar as they set out to negate a negation (that is, society as we know it in the actual world), can be imagined but can't be wholly separated from the societies they presumably reject, and themselves raise other questions. So, though a utopia may claim to be a place, it is really a process or an unrealizable goal.

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Timothy Miller (University of Kansas)

The Internet is a tool, not a community or any kind of utopia. All kinds of tools may be used to build utopias, but ends and means are not the same thing.

Raymond Polin (St. John's University)

It is probably as justified to call the Internet a utopia as the printed hard-copy works of the past that made a similar effort. Physical bodies are not necessary to label an ideational construct a utopia, especially since any are hardly likely ever to have physical realization more than partly. Indeed, the Internet is a felicitously suitable medium wherein to play around with such speculations because the ideas can often be presented not only in word-form but also supplemented and elucidated by diagrams, drawings, photographs, and other visual presentations. In any event, all will contain a mix of imperfect plans, even when ethical, possible, or practical.

Kenneth Roemer (University of Texas at Arlington)

Virtual realities certainly allow kinds of play on grand scales – not just individual, but collaborative plays. And since a sense of imaginative play is an essential part of utopian speculation, it follows that virtual reality is a wonderful arena for this aspect of the utopian imagination. But I am suspect of utopias created by individuals in isolation communing with their screens. Of course, writing a literary utopia is not far removed from this process, but for much of print history, writing a book meant a huge commitment and (for many utopists up through the early 20th century) the hope that communal action would follow the reading experience. Virtual utopias might give the creators a false sense of doing utopia – playing without a sense of commitment – playing with themselves instead of communicating, listening, acting.

Dan Sabia (University of South Carolina)

As long as human beings remain embodied rather than disembodied creatures, as long as we live in the natural rather than the virtual world, even an ideal community made of virtual identities cannot be characterized as utopian. A utopian community describes what is alleged to be a desirable form of life, and forms of life are not reducible to people communicating on the Internet. This is not to say that (virtual) communities cannot be formed on the Internet; they can be and they are. Nor is it to say that the Net and related innovations cannot help promote (and be a part of) a better world. The Internet can and does bring people together in virtual spaces: it can and does facilitate the sharing of ideas; it can engender a sense of belonging and help dissipate feelings of alienation and anomie; it can promote critical reflection and encourage forms of personal and collective action. But people must act in the natural or real world to achieve utopia because that is the world into which they are born, and where they live and work, suffer, and die. The natural world is the site and the source of our worldly problems; until our minds (selves?) are downloaded, the Internet will likely prove more a detriment than an aid to utopia or social progress, a distraction from the work that needs to be done (and, I would add, an expression and facilitator of global capitalism).

Lyman Sargent (University of Missouri at St. Louis)

No to all the questions. To me a world of virtual identities is simply another version of the dehumanized dystopias mentioned previously. There is no place in the Internet where community is capable of being created. Any means that enhances communication has its positive elements, but is it communication when identities can be and are hidden or falsified? The notion of a community where you cannot be sure of even the most elementary aspects of human identity (gender or age, for example) is simply grotesque.

Brian Stableford (Freelance Writer)

I'm not sure what sort of meaning one can or ought to attach to the notion of a virtual identity. Operating under an alias, online or anywhere else, does not seem to me to qualify. Social relationships constructed online can, of course, be as life-enhancing (or not) as any other kind, but they constitute only one of the many communities that modern people may simultaneously inhabit, and can only become utopian as part of an all-embracing package.

Darko Suvin (McGill University)

While virtual or cyberspace is an interesting and potentially promising, as well as badly misusable, invention, I cannot imagine a purely ratiocinative bliss, one without sensory and motor feedback to the brain. As you know, beside the sense of a "radically better place" or "place with radically better relations between its inhabitants," the term of utopia can also be used in the negative sense of unreal cobwebs in the brain, what Lord Macaulay – an expert on colonies – sneeringly referred to when he said that an acre near London is better than a principality in the land of Utopia. For one thing, the Internet excludes the three quarters of humanity who do not have proper electricity and phone supply lines – say all my former students from India, China or Africa – nor can they hope to have it in the present organization of economics that enforces widening division between the relatively rich in the North and the abysmally poor in the South of our globe. I use the Internet in my professional work, and I have nothing against isolated and alienated individuals (as all of us are in this hugely privatized age) getting succor from wherever they can. But to pretend it is a messiah coming to save us all, in lieu of focussing on how it could be used for lightening life outside the Internet, seems to me utopian in the bad sense.

Wilhelm Vosskamp (University of Cologne)

The Internet can provide a place for communication, not a community in the sense of the original utopian societies (face-to-face communication and organization of time and personal life).

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Please note: The views expressed on this page are those of the named individuals, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The New York Public Library.

In the ongoing search for the ideal society, the Internet has been proposed as a "place" in which a utopia could exist. Parallels to previous notions of utopian thought are discussed in "Cyber-Utopianism" and the Evolution in Utopian Thought.

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