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Villemard
"Parlez au Concierge" [Speak to the Concierge]
Visions de l'an 2000, 1910
Chromolithograph
* BNF, Département des Estampes et de la PhotographiePast utopias have addressed the issues of inclusion and exclusion, equality and stratification, both within the community and between the community and the rest of the world. Is the Internet the great equalizer, or does it promote stratification both within itself and among people in the real world?
Benjamin Barber (Rutgers University)
The Net can, to be sure, establish a kind of thin equality deriving from anonymity, disembodiedness (our differences are generally embodied) and isolation. But this is not an equality worth talking about since it is artificial and in no way addresses the inequalities associated with our bodies and the real communities into which they enter.
Francesco Battisti (University of Cassino)
This is actually one of the greatest problems which this century has to face. The fact is that the number of people excluded is by far greater than the number of people included in the welfare society; the number of the poor and the excluded is by far greater than the number of the rich. By fostering economic development we can give to these populations the hope (Ernst Bloch) that tomorrow will be better. They like to see progress in their life. Progress can also come with the Internet; however, it must not be forgotten that these people will evaluate their progress mainly on the basis of income, as do the citizens of the industrialised world. Nations losing the perspective and the hope in their progress plunge into desperation, into violence and war. The international community should not allow this to happen and should provide the necessary help to keep the world in peace.
Robert Fogarty (Antioch College)
At the moment the Internet seems to provide pigeon-holes for products, perspectives and possibilities. It tends to reduce the world to discrete categories and packages and to demand instant solutions. It equalizes nothing simply because at each keyboard site there sits the ultimate equalizer - a unique human being.
James Gunn (University of Kansas)
I think it's a (not the) great equalizer, and will promote even more equality when everyone is online.
Naomi Jacobs (University of Maine)
To the extent that access to the Internet depends upon access to financial and cultural resources, only a small fraction of the people in the real world can use the Internet at present. Thus, like any other technology, the Internet tends to reflect and perpetuate the hierarchies and inequities of the system that produces it. Even in the wealthier countries where many people have access, Internet communities tend to replicate real-world hierarchical practices, such as the male prerogative to determine which subjects raised are worthy of discussion (even when those men are women masquerading as men). I think it's a mistake to see the Internet as a realm of freedom. It can in no way be pure of the realities its users bring to their virtual encounters.
Ruth Levitas (University of Bristol)
The Internet doesn’t strike me as the great equalizer. There’s differential access to the Net, which is a matter of hardware, skill and time, all of which are unequally distributed not only globally but within affluent enclaves. I’m not sure I think it particularly promotes inequality either. Some effects are ambiguous. On the one hand it allows for faster and wider communication between oppositional groups, and helps organize protests like Seattle. On the other hand, there are increased possibilities of surveillance. And Bill Gates has made a lot of money, so more concentration of wealth and power. It’s probably more true to say that it reflects, reproduces and possibly amplifies stratification effects which have their main roots in the unequal property relations of global capitalism.
Elizabeth McCutcheon (University of Hawaii)
The Internet can be either inclusive or exclusive. On the one hand, it facilitates rapid communication between and among persons and groups. I think of a former student in Shanghai, who orders books through Amazon, and sends me letters and pictures by e-mail, or of a young man in Sierra Leone, whom we hosted for a conference. We can't write him (it seems that the U.S.A. has an embargo on mail sent there), but we can communicate by e-mail. On the other hand, the Internet separates those who are comfortable with it from those who aren't. It magnifies the differences. It can also magnify differences among groups, by setting up target groups that communicate only with one another, and it can isolate as well as connect, by taking time and attention away from peoples and problems in the actual world. This is hardly unique to the Internet; the proliferation of niche groups and fragmentation seems to be endemic. But I think the Internet can encourage this.
Raymond Polin (St. John's University)
The Internet tends mostly to produce inclusion, equality, and interaction both within the community and with the rest of humanity. It also makes possible the wider and more rapid spread of hatred and invidious principles and cooperation among those who do wrong, ranging from the annoying to the dangerously evil. There is a need, therefore, primarily for freedom and laissez-faire in the Internet's operation, as well as optimal accessiblity; but there is also an unavoidable secondary and more limited need for governmental and other societal restraints and sanctions for some activities that should not be tolerated by civilized and uncivilized peoples alike and may therefore even call for censorship or controllability in some areas (for example, in those that may be harmful to children or promote a crime). We should not be so foolish as to believe the Internet cannot induce great and dangerous mischief or that we should suffer those who drive on this highway to grossly and dangerously misuse it any more than we should tolerate and not try to prevent reckless and drunken driving. So far, the Internet is a splendid means of promoting equality such as Thomas Paine called for and social mobility such as Pitirim Sorokin expounded, and therefore it works, progressively, against hierarchy and its anti-democratic corollary, stasis. To keep this information highway safely and securely open to all of the world, we need some rules of the road to stipulate its proper use, plus enforcement of them, while we are not controlled by the authorities as to where we are headed, provided our destination is not off-limits. Privacy and freedom are indispensable priorities to reach a more inclusive and equalitarian community, locally, and globally, and apply at least equally to the proper functioning of the Internet, as in other walks of life in a good society.
Kenneth Roemer (University of Texas at Arlington)
The Internet has the potential to be a huge equalizer in terms of equalizing access to knowledge (human, texts, and visual sources of knowledge). But right now there are huge gaps between the haves and have-nots of computer access. The dystopian option would be similar to the drama in Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), where on Anarres a small group has access to the most powerful form of knowledge in what was supposed to be an egalitarian society.
Dan Sabia (University of South Carolina)
The truth, I think, is that the Internet can serve and to some degree has served as an equalizer while, simultaneously, it has promoted stratification within itself and among people in the real world. Like all tools that facilitate communication, the Internet can be used to spread, share and increase information and knowledge and hence forms of actual and potential power. Real communities, for example, can promote collective identity, commitment and concern and democratic processes and values such as public knowledge and discussion, transparency and accountability, by providing Internet access (and training) to all community members (as some communities have done and are doing). At the same time, there is no doubt that Internet access and use remains largely an affair for those persons and groups of persons (and nations) with considerable material resources and technical and educational skills, and thus that the Internet serves mostly the well-off as well as the interests of those mostly corporate actors, but other elites as well, who (in various ways) control and influence the Internet and the information and information flows available on it.
Lyman Sargent (University of Missouri at St. Louis)
It is hard to think of anything equalizing about the Internet except in the hype of some of its less aware advocates. Access to the Internet requires access to a computer and to a service provider, and while both are becoming easier and cheaper, it is still largely a way of separating the haves from the have-nots. In particular, it cuts off people in the Third World even more solidly from the rest of the world. Within the Internet, stratification develops from differential skills in using it, based on differential language skills and computer skills.
Brian Stableford (Freelance Writer)
It promotes stratification, but not to the same extent as literacy.
Darko Suvin (McGill University)
See previous answers. In some limited ways an equalizer (say for more or less affluent White North Americans), in most other respects a stratifier.
Wilhelm Vosskamp (University of Cologne)
On the one hand the Internet will equalize within a global world – on the other hand the Internet will divide the world into users and non-users of the Internet: a new problem of inclusion and exclusion.
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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.
*The New York Public Library provides the information contained on this website, including reproductions of certain items from other institutions, for personal or research use only. Contact the Bibliothèque nationale de France for additional guidelines regarding this image.
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