Interview With Howard Rheingold

By the producers of PBS Frontline, Fall 1995

Howard Rheingold: My name is Howard Rheingold. I am the author of the Virtual community which is a study of how people use computer networks to build communities.

Howard Rheingold: The information superhighway talk I think makes most people believe that there's some new technology looming out there that's going to change their lives. It's unfortunate because there is a technology that already changed their lives that millions of people have used for decades now, known as the Internet. If we're lucky that's what the superhighway will be.

Frontline: How do you build a community on the Internet?

Howard Rheingold: A virtual community is just like any other kind of community. It consists of people who have some common cause and who have some reason to care about each other. On computer networks people who share interests, whether those interests are butterfly collecting or being an Alzheimer's care giver or political activism can connect with each other, even if they are in very different places. Those connections between the people not the technology is what creates the community. It's just that the technology makes it possible for communities of interest to find each other more easily. The revolution really doesn't have to do with technology as much as it has to do with the way it changes relationships between people. I don't really care how my words travel through the telephone wires. I do care that I can pick it up and call the fire department if the house is on fire or call my mom. I think the same thing is true with the new media. We're talking about all the nuts and bolts. We really should be talking about the social relationships and the political implications of that.

Frontline: Why is everyone talking about the nuts and bolts...

Howard Rheingold: The dialogue about the information superhighway has really been set by the big companies and big governments who see billions and maybe trillions of dollars at stake in this whole new industry. Of course their interest is in expensive technological infrastructure. They want to use it to sell us more product. Of course the technological infrastructure wouldn't be there in the first place if the internet had not been the fastest growing communications medium in history. And it grew quickly not because of the nuts and bolts of it or because of any kind of sexy new media it grew because it was a new way for people to communicate with each other.

Frontline: You were there at the beginning...

Howard Rheingold: Well the Internet started as the ARPANET which was a government project for researchers who were working for the defense department, very quickly those researchers discovered what millions have discovered since--that you can use the computer networks not just to do research but to conduct conversations among groups of people. That grew so wildly far beyond the dreams of people who created the original network that eventually it, it dawned on the people who were running the big communication companies that this was the next communications medium. It really was not originally planned in the board room. It was something that just grew because people wanted to connect with each other. The same thing by the way was true of the telephone which was originally conceived as a broadcast medium, where somebody would play a violin in Carnegie hall and everyone would listen through their telephone. And actually it was humans wanting to communicate with each other. The same thing is happening with the new media.

Frontline: Is there a feeling among the original...

Howard Rheingold: The people who really built the Internet which is becoming this information superhighway thousands and hundreds of thousands of people who have voluntarily put information out there and, and moderated discussions with each other are worried about the way the big companies are pushing it as just another conduit for pumping out the same old product whether it's news or entertainment or home shopping. But that's not what made the medium valuable in the first place. What made the medium valuable is that every desktop can be a broadcasting station or a printing press. You no longer have to rely on a central authority. Everybody can communicate with everybody else: Many-to-many media. It's not really the vision we're seeing with 500 channels and video on demand. Do we really need to save the trip half a block to the video store and therefore spend billions of dollars for a new infrastructure. Or are there educational and democratic and social uses for this technology that we're really not hearing about because that's really not in the big profit picture?

Frontline: What is important?

Howard Rheingold: Most of the people who built the Internet to be valuable enough to create a new medium from it are worried not so much about commercialization but that the original norms that made the Internet valuable might be lost in the rush to sell it to us. Those norms involved cooperation among people to create something that's valuable to everyone. That means you look out not just for how you can make a buck off it but can everyone contribute to it. It grew from a thousand to 20 million because many people spent many hours voluntarily adding to its value. Will those norms continue to grow as tens and millions of new users come in to something that looks not like a village or a town square but a shopping mall.

Howard Rheingold: The primary way that the spirit of cooperation and really democratic discourse could be damaged would be in the architecture of the new network. If they put these new cable boxes in our homes and we can get 10 million bits per second into our homes so that we can get video on demand, but we can only put a hundred bits per second back out onto the network in, in other words, just a channel clicker that will enable us to chose between packages that are sold to us, then we will lose that capability of the medium that makes every person a publisher. If the architecture is two way and I can put video out from my home or I can set a little computer bulletin board system or a news service or other people can then we might have a kind of platform that hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs can build on similar to the way that original personal computers enable people in garages like Bill Gates to build on that platform and create their own industries. If the big companies that sell the content and own the conduits that come into our home tell us that they're the only authorized people to put content on this medium, then it will really kill that spirit of cooperation that has made this medium valuable.

Frontline: So you're saying that the danger is...

Howard Rheingold: The, the old broadcast paradigm made a few people very rich, if you control a centralized medium like television and you can broadcast to millions of people and capture their attention, you can make a lot of money. The many to many medium that's really the foundation of the Internet is not one that a single centralized source can easily control. Now with this new superhighway being put in with these big cables being put into our houses, that may all change. Will only a few people control what content can go onto this medium or will it be open to hundreds of thousands of people. That's I think the most important question about the medium.

Howard Rheingold: There are two things that it's important to safeguard in order to keep this medium open. First of all the architecture of the medium, the way the technology is created has to enable people to send information out from their homes as well as to receive it and secondly the companies that own the conduit the means of sending information from place to place, should not be able to tell people what kind of content to send through it. What if a company that owns a lot of cables also owns a lot of entertainment news media. Will they favor their content over your content and my content. If there were rules that prevented them from being favorable to theirs against mine, I don't' care whether the company that provides the conduit also sells content. I just don't want them to be tempted to prevent me from competing with them or you or any other American citizen.

Howard Rheingold: Well you know the railroads had an opportunity to know that they were really in the transportation business and not in the business of running great big metal things from place tao place and they may have bought the airplanes when that was a tiny industry and of course Western Union lost the opportunity to buy the telephone for $20,000. Old industries always tend to drive into the future looking into the rear view mirror. It's as if we're arguing about will this new highway be good for buggy whip manufacturers. We're not thinking about all of those service stations and road builders and all of the other industries that will go along with a whole new way of doing things. You know personal computers were created by some teenagers in garages because the, the wisdom of the computer industry was that people didn't want these little toys on their desk. Well the wisdom of the communications industry now seems to be that they know what's best for us, they're going to give it to us and forget this amateur stuff that the Internet used to be. I think that they'll be surprised the way the computer giants were surprised when Apple came along.

Howard Rheingold: I'm really not anti big business. I think that we really need the economies of scale that these big companies can bring but looking back at the way previous communication technologies have been misjudged by the companies that first try to sell them, I think the lesson is people want to communicate with each other, sell that to them and stop worrying about concocting some content. What's the content of the telephone network. If the conversations that citizens have with each other. I contend that those who recognize this whether they're a giant company or a little entrepreneurial company, are going to succeed in the new medium. And those who see it as just an extension of the old let's broadcast some more of the same old product are probably going to fail.

Howard Rheingold: Well I think if you think of the new communication technology as a platform that many could innovate on the way the personal computer was a platform that a lot of kids in their garages built software industries on, you don't really need for the central communication companies to invent ways to use the network. All they need to do is make it accessible and inexpensive and easy to use and hundreds of thousands of citizens will invent new reasons for using the network. You know when film came along Tom Edison just nailed the camera down and filmed plays. A few years later D.W. Griffith came along and showed that there's a whole new medium here and he got close ups and montages and things that didn't exist before. It's the things that didn't exist before that will create this new medium and if history proves to be an accurate indicator, it wouldn't be created in the board rooms of the major companies, it will be invented by all kinds of American entrepreneurs that used to be what we relied on in this country, not the giant monopolies, but yankee ingenuity. And I'd like to see us give ordinary Americans a chance to create this medium before we're sold a big sanitized crippled package.

Howard Rheingold: I think that those big companies who recognize what I'm saying, that if you empower your customers, they will make you rich, they're going to have a competitive advantage over those companies that cling to the old paradigm of we know what's good for you and we're going to sell it to you and you passively consume it. So as long as it is a market place and not a monopoly, I really believe that the market place is going to prove these predictions to be accurate.

Howard Rheingold: Now I think we forget with all this talk of fiber optics and giant superhighways that if you connect people to computer, you can buy a PC a hundred dollars these days, $50 that's ten years old and a hundred dollar modem and connect it to a telephone. You now have a tool that a poor community can use to organize food buying coops, that they can use to organize information about employment opportunities and health care. This is something that could benefit our entire society including the poorest members of it. We need to create something that's accessible enough and inexpensive enough that those opportunities are not blocked out.

Howard Rheingold: You don't really need a fancy expensive superhighway to create some real important social change. If you take a cheap computer, you can buy them for $100 now and a modem for a hundred dollars and plug it into a telephone you could give the poorest communities an opportunity to create food coops, they can get food cheaper. An opportunity to centralize information about employment opportunities and health care opportunities. If you have a one room school house out in an Indian reservation in North Dakota or in Saskatchewan in the winter time, you can now connect those bright students to the library of congress, these are things that could help our society in many ways other than just delivering entertainment to our homes more conveniently. It's important that we recognize that this has potential for leveraging a lot of the very difficult social problems we're trying to change. We need to simply make this technology available at an accessible price so that people can use these tools for things other than commercial entertainment. I don't believe we need to have the government spending money to subsidize this. All we need to do is make sure that the commercial vendors make it available at an affordable price.

Howard Rheingold: I don't think a commercial vendor necessarily has to give cheap computers to poor people so that they can communicate with each other. It simply needs to make its system open enough so that a neighborhood could run a BBS, a computer bulletin board system with a job line on this conduit, whether you call it a superhighway or the Internet and not lock it out. What if we had a company that said you've got to buy in for a hundred thousand dollars in order to run a service here. Well that locks those people out. Let's not make the government do it, let's not make the big companies do it. Let's not cripple the entrepreneurs who want to go out and do it themselves, just keep that barrier now enough. Don't be greedy, it's going to be good for your business, it's going to be good for our democracy.

Howard Rheingold: You know I think if you lower the bar and you enable hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs to take their shot at making a fortune, they're going to make you rich as well. So if you're too greedy at the beginning by charging ten dollars when you could charge $1, you're going to lose an opportunity to make a hundred dollars when those customers create a reason to use the medium.

Howard Rheingold: Many to many media I think are a revolution in the way the printing press was a revolution. Before the printing press there were a few tens of thousands of hand picked people who could read and write. After the printing press, there was a literate population in Europe of millions. You can't have an industrial revolution, you can't have democracies, you can't have populations who can govern themselves until you have literacy. The printing press simply unlocked literacy. What's important is not how you put those words together in a machine, what's important is what a population does with it. When you collect computers and telecommunications together, you created a global many to many medium that unlocks the access to other peoples' minds. You no longer have to be a television network or own a newspaper, take a little computer bulletin board system and publish a manifesto or an eyewitness report, you could be in Tienamen square, you could be anywhere in the world where news is happening and broadcast that news to the world. I believe that as fundamental a power as the printing press was. And I think ultimately if you believe in democracy, it, it's a very important step forward.

Howard Rheingold: You know democracy is not just voting for your leaders, it's really premised upon ordinary citizens understanding the issues, that means getting good information and being able to communicate with each other. Well in the mass media as we have it today we're not getting good information, we're getting sound bites and we're not talking with each other, we are passive consumers of what is told to us. We have 70,000 little bulletin board systems in the United States alone, that's grass roots democracy, that's people talking about what are they going to do about the city council or how can they organize politically. I believe that that is a way that we could revitalize citizen interest in democratic institutions. There's nothing really more important at the end of the 20th century than keeping citizen involvement in democratic institutions alive. Let's not lose an opportunity to revitalize democracy on our way to make a buck.

Howard Rheingold: I think the, the biggest pitfall of this new telecommunications revolution is that people don't really understand what it is about and those who would seek power or profit are manipulating that ignorance. The congress of the United States is passing laws that would censor the Internet in ways that the Supreme Court does not allow us to censor speech or writing. Most people don't understand what's going on. We're not being told about it in all of the commercial advertisements and our journalists have failed to explain that this important to democracy. So what I fear is not the revolution of the people with new tools in their hands, what I fear is that we are ignorant about a major change in our lives and the people who are getting the ears of congress are those who have millions to spend, not the citizens who don't understand what's at stake.

Howard Rheingold: The biggest pitfall of this communications revolution is that citizens don't understand it. The news media have failed to explain it, the hype from the big companies doesn't talk about the democratic aspects of this and consequently the lobbyists with a lot of money to spend are the ones who have influenced congress. Laws are being passed now that the American people are ignorant of. That give law enforcement opportunities to commit surveillance on citizens far beyond anything that's been known before. Censorship of the Internet is proposed in laws that would prevent people from speaking in ways that, that are protected by the first amendment. If you were to go out on the street corner and say it or if you were to write it in a book. We really need to explain the democratic aspects of this technology to citizens. The biggest pitfall is that we're not going to understand it. It's going to be regulated and censored and monitored and back to us before we get a chance to know what it is we lost. (Change tape) (New tape)

Howard Rheingold: Well we're being sold a vision of a future that a lot of money has been invested in by very big companies. It's estimated that PACs have contributed over $40 million to congress people over telecommunications issues. Citizens don't understand that democracy is at stake, that our opportunity to get a little piece of that pie as entrepreneurs is at stake so we are not talking to our congressional representatives about what we want. So who are they going to listen to, the citizens who don't understand and aren't talking to them or the big companies who have a lot of stake, who understand and who are spending tens of millions of dollars. It's not really conspiratorial as a failure of the news media to inform citizens and the failure of citizens to understand that this is not just a technology issue. This is a citizen issue. The way we communicate with each other as citizens, the kind of democracy we live in, the kind of speech we will be allowed to make and the kind of businesses we will be allowed to engage in being determined right now in the halls of the U.S. congress and the board rooms of major corporations, we need to hear the citizens side of this and we need to talk about where the public interest lies in these very sweeping regulations.

Howard Rheingold: Forty years ago television came along and it really changed the political process. We get presidents, we get representatives and we get issues that are attractively packaged and sold to us just as any other commercial good is sold to us. We no longer gather as citizens and talk about issues and candidates. We sit there an we watch what the tube passively sends us. We now have an opportunity to break that passivity, communicate with each other, to have debates and town hall meetings and to question whether what that senator just said on television matches the voting record that we can get right up on the same screen. I think democracy really is at stake, are we going to have a medium in which citizens communicate with each other and have an ability to have access to complex information we need to run our society. Or is this just going to be another way to sell us more entertainment, more news, and we don't have any way of talking back to it. Are we going to have a healthy democracy if we just sit here as couch potatoes or is it going to be a healthier democracy if millions of people can let their opinions be known.

Howard Rheingold: We see these ads about a future information superhighway that's going to bring us all kinds of goodies that we can buy and of course that's free enterprise. What worries me is that that's the only image people are getting of this technology, we're not understanding that it's not just an opportunity to buy goods and services. It's an opportunity to revitalized democracy that... (noise break)

Howard Rheingold: Communication media are political tools. Forty years ago the television came along and really changed democracy. Our candidates and our issues are packaged and sold to us like other commodities and we passively sit there. We no longer talk to each other as citizens the way we used to about candidates and issues. Now we have an opportunity to have a new medium in which people are not just passive consumers of what's sold to us. We can run bulletin board systems and town hall meetings and talk with each other about the issues and the candidates. When a candidate comes up on the television and says one thing, well we can call up the voting record and see whether they really mean that. Are we going to have that opportunity to revitalize democracy by communicating with each other or will monopoly and the wrong kind of regulation of this medium lock the citizens out and once again we're going to have to buy what the big companies and the big political parties have to sell us. We have an opportunity here to break that lock on democracy by the mass media and have many, many, many media and I think that's what democracy is supposed to be about. It's about many opinions, many citizens, it's not just 3 or 4 wealthy and powerful organizations.

Howard Rheingold: Well these images of the future that are being sold to us on these commercials about the information superhighway, they're not really mentioning the important part. And then I think it's a danger. If most people get the idea that this is something that these big companies are going to sell us with this new technology we don't understand and we will consume it as passive consumers, rather than a new communication medium that could enable citizens to put up their business, create their own entertainment and have their own political platforms, then I think that's a real disservice. The mind space of the American public is being occupied by a commercial, it's not being occupied by a debate about the public interest communication media, democracy and the future.

Howard Rheingold: We've lost a lot of the aspect of community in America. We've literally lost the places where it happened, the old town squares and friendly drug store lunch counters where people used to gather have been replaced by malls and fast food outlets. We commute for hours to work. We live in these big impersonal cities. We're a rootless society and we move around alot more than we used to. It's hard to form communities. What the computer network does it not to create an artificial community, but to create an opportunity for people to find others who share their interests. I work at home alone, as a writer. This gives me an opportunity to meet people through the computer who can then become part of my real community. So I've been to a couple of weddings of people who met through the computer network. I've been to a couple of funerals. I've sat by the, the sick beds of members of the community who are dying. I've passed the hat and raised a few bucks for people in the virtual community who've lost their jobs and need a little help. People I meet in the virtual community baby sit my kids, I can't trust anybody more than that. They're real communities, don't mistrust the potential just because we've been sold a phony vision of us. There are Alzheimer's care givers and AIDs and breast cancer patients or political activists there are people who are in remote school houses, all over the world who are using this technology to connect people with each other. If the connections between the people not the technology that creates the community. So when you say that this is alienated and that sitting in front of the screen is a way of distancing yourself from other people, I can tell you that those people who had 30 or 40 people sitting by their death bed, or those people who went through life threatening illnesses with their hands being held by people they met through the computers, it's real to them. Don't deny them an opportunity to make connections and create communities.

Howard Rheingold: There's a misconception that using a computer to communicate with people is kind of a sterile way of distancing yourself from them. We're already distanced, we're living in these concrete boxes and watching the tube 7 hours a day. For a lot of reasons we live in alienated society. We now have an opportunity for butterfly collectors or Alzheimer's care givers, local activists, teachers and students to make connections with each other. Instead of just passively sitting there watching the tube. There's a real potential for computers to connect people together. It's not an instant utopia. It's a tool that humans can use to build communities, just as the telephone is a tool that humans can use. It's a relationship between the people, whether they reach out through that to help each other in real life that determines the communities. To deny that this is possible and to dismiss people who use computer networks as soulless nerds is really to deny a life line to people with life threatening illnesses who are isolated in their apartments because of disability or old age or if they live in a bad neighborhood. To deny educational opportunities to people just because they don't live in big cities, to deny the opportunity for small businesses to do global business. The image of a superhighway versus the image of a community. Don't let anybody convince you that that image of a community is totally phony. Because that information superhighway is just as phony in its own way.

Howard Rheingold: You can pick up the telephone and if you've got the right numbers to punch in you can talk to anyone of a half billion telephones on earth. But it's difficult to pick up the telephone and say I want to talk to another Alzheimer's care giver or I've got a 53 Hudson, where the heck can you find parts for that. Or how do I teach my kids to have good sense about watching television and getting on the Internet. What computer networks do is enable people to have discussions about common interests. I can go to the Alzheimer's care givers news group or I can go to the computer bulletin board system where people are talking about butterfly collecting. It's those common interests that computers enable people to use as a way of making connections with each other. The connections happen between the people. The computer makes it easy to find people to have discussions with.

Howard Rheingold: To not be conspiratorial at all, if you look at....

Howard Rheingold: Ok if you look at the kind of laws that are being passed, the digital telephony bill last year that gave the FBI very broad powers to build surveillance capabilities into telecommunications networks, the comm, communications decency act which is giving the U.S. federal government the power that ought to reserve for families, that is the power to determine what information ought to come into our homes and when you look at the debate over whether systems can use encryption tools to keep their communications private, and you look at the way the regulatory changes are giving a lot of favors to big monopolies, there's really a three pronged attack going on here, surveillance, there's monopoly and censorship. Now I think that if Americans understood the changes that are happening because we don't know the potential of the technology, that they would really unite across the political spectrum to say what a minute, if these technologies are so important to law enforcement and to business and to citizens, let's have a public debate about it. Let's understand what it's about. Let's not pass these laws with haste and regret them at leisure. I guess that's the last...

Howard Rheingold: There's really a three pronged attack on the foundations of American democracy that's happening because of our ignorance about the technology. Surveillance capabilities are being built into all communications technologies, the digital telephony bill that was signed into law last year guaranteed that. Very few Americans understand that the FBI now has very broad technical surveillance powers over citizens. Censorship. The internet is being censored by legislation now in ways that Americans have never been uh permitted to censor speech or, or writing and our privacy is being invaded and our means of protecting ourselves as citizens using encoding methods to have private conversations are being prevented by the government. So if you look at those three things, censorship, surveillance, and monopoly, the regulations that that favor very large businesses and don't' favor smaller businesses then I think American democracy is really under attack and we need to understand this.

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