HOME SWEET HABICON

Originally published in Quill and Quire, 2000

Canadian media guru Paul Hoffert evokes the long-delayed promise of networked communities

By Mark Shainblum

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It’s one of the central paradoxes of Internet culture. In the medium’s earliest, pre- e-commerce days, the vast majority of activity on the net was social and community-oriented. Non-commercial (even anti-commercial) sites like The Well and local incarnations of the FreeNet movement sprouted like wildflowers. The explosive growth of this new medium was supposed to mark the death-knell of centralized, industrial culture. It was supposed to help us rebuild our alienated neighbourhoods and our fractured family life. It was supposed to usher in a new era of true, grassroots democracy.

Instead, according to its critics, rather than building community the Internet seems to drive people ever deeper into hyper-individualistic cocoons, as they commune online with other lost souls scattered across the globe. In their view, Utopia has been pre-empted by banner ads, e-casinos and online infidelity with partners in different time zones.

Nonsense, says Canadian media guru Paul Hoffert, founder of the legendary 70’s rock group Lighthouse and Executive Director of York University’s CulTech Collaborative Research Centre. All Together Now - Connected Communities: How They Will Revolutionize the Way You Live, Work, and Play is Hoffert’s insightful and essentially upbeat overview of how the next generation of technologies which gave us the Internet can fulfill their early promise.

Author of 1998’s best-selling Bagel Effect: A Compass to Navigate Our Wired World, Hoffert spends the entire first chapter of his new book dissecting the neo-Luddite ramblings of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. According to Hoffert, we don’t live in Kaczynski’s Orwellian dystopia (a vision so frightening that it drove him to murder and terrorism), but on the edge of its exact opposite, a post-industrial techno-culture that possesses the means to undo the scars of industrialism. It’s Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village made real, emphasis on the “village.”

Hoffert believes that networking can undo the alienation fostered by of industrial culture, and he backs up his assertions with hard facts derived from his own studies. In particular he championed “Cities on the Information Highway” a mid-90’s study of community networking carried out in Stonehaven West, a housing development in the Toronto suburb of Newmarket. Hoffert’s premise is simple: The Internet is too vast, contains too much information and is still too difficult to use. True local networking must be easy to use, provide true local benefit and somehow be hived off from the global Internet. To start, says Hoffert, at the very least neighbours must know each others’ e-mail addresses.

Hoffert’s own studies in Newmarket reinforced his contentions. Connected by a sophisticated ultra-high-speed local computer network and isolated from the vaster Internet by a private Intranet accessible only to the neighbourhood – Stonehaven residents almost immediately started using the technology to fulfill the early promise of networking. Residents suddenly knew most of their neighbours, children collaborated on homework online, and impromptu neighbourhood barbecues and gatherings became the norm. Pre-industrial, rural communalism suddenly flourished in a classic alienating industrial suburb like Newmarket. Unfortunately, the study came to a premature end when the industry lurched towards cable and DSL technologies, faster and cheaper high-speed solutions that do not permit the one-on-one relationships of the Stonehaven network.

Hoffert goes much deeper than the Stonehaven example to prove his point. In clear, lucid and often funny prose he explores the landscape of available technologies and introduces us to a whole new lexicon of the networked community. Most important, perhaps, is his notion of the Habicon – the resurgent, bonded community exemplified by Stonehaven.