Getting the naysayers on side is the answer. How is the question.

If there’s an overriding aim to what I’m doing it’s to convince people that digital forms of communication are as important as what we might call traditional ones. That communities and relationships that are formed online are as important as those formed in the real world. In fact I’d go further and say terms like “real world” are redundant as the online environment is just as capable of creating results of lasting real value as face to face interactions are, especially when the two work together.

While I know this to be true from personal experience it’s surprisingly hard to explain it. Concepts like augmenting reality can be useful to a certain point as can historical examples of emerging communications technologies like letter writing and the telephone but they create an impression that communication other than face to face is secondary in importance. I have some sympathy with this view and will, on the whole, want to meet someone in the flesh before really trusting them, but I think when you bring communities into play it gets a lot more complicated. A self organising online community of autonomous agents working towards loosely defined and overlapping goals can be much more productive than a group who meet in a pub once a week. Convincing people of this, even those who have participated in such activities, can be really tricky though because it doesn’t fit into the traditional model of how stuff is done and, more importantly, there’s a shocking ignorance of what online activity actually is.

Take this quote from an otherwise excellent rabble-rousing article by James Yarker of the Stan’s Cafe theatre group:

Electronic handshakes lack flesh and blood warmth. The fabled “interactivity” of our digital realm rarely stretches beyond banal, push-button, Prozac primate stimulation. Even absorbed in multi-million dollar console games we are mere lab rats, willing prisoners thrashing around inside a painted algorithm. It’s time to escape.

I’m not sure where to start here. This “digital realm” James is describing does certainly exist and there are certainly many people who are trapped in it. But it’s not the digital realm I operate in. I don’t play computer games for a start for the same reason I don’t take heroin – I know I’ll get hooked and never get any work done. Nor do I watch digital television with the fabled “interactive” Red Button. What James is describing here is a passive use of digital technologies, no different to the passive consumption of media he despairs of in a previous paragraph. And I would join him in decrying this. Digital is not the great panacea of our times. It will not by itself undo a century of media manipulation and make everything better. But it does allow us to fight back on our own terms.

I saw James talk at the Arts Council’s Art Of Ideas event in April, my notes from which are here. He was very inspiring and seemed to be thinking about things in a way I identified with but, along with the other panelists, Sam Jacob and Catherine O’Flynn, did not mention online communities at all. Which struck me as odd given the title of the talk was “Culture and Identity – The Role of Place in Shaping the Arts.” As I see it people define a place (or as Birmingham City Council is so fond of saying “You Are Your City”) and the best way for people to define their place is to talk about it. I think empowering people to communicate online in ways and about subjects that they define themselves is an excellent way of working towards this definition, if such a definition is even possible, and it amazes me that this isn’t considered by the intelligent forward thinking innovators on our cultural scene.

I mean, James runs a Stan’s Cafe blog. Does he think the people reading, commenting on, linking to and quoting his blog posts (if they indeed are. That stuff doesn’t just happen – like everything useful it takes a bit of work) are passive consumers? Does he think his blog merely provides “banal, push-button, Prozac primate stimulation”?

James says:

The key thing is to be there when it happens. To be part of it, up close, where you can smell the bodies and taste the air they stir.

Yes! Yes! Yes! You’re damn right. But being up close isn’t the only way to connect with someone. Stuff happens online which is just as interesting and vital, partly because it’s a different environment where people operate and think in different ways. Once you get over the prejudice that digital activity is always passive and accept that online communication is so multi-way that it makes the public meeting look positively totalitarian, once you see how the ambient immediacy of Twitter can create serendipitous ideas and actions or the way conversations across blogs are freed from constraints of time and space, once you realise that a world where everyone is potentially a publisher, a community leader and a creator of media then maybe, just maybe you’ll see how these things do not detract from your dreams for how society might be better but can, with a bit of understanding and work, help them to be realised effectively and efficiently.

The online environment is inherently neutral. It’s as useful as we make it and people like James, who understand the physical environment as well as we understand the online one, could make it very useful indeed. We need to get his sort on board. It might take a while but that’s my mission.

I’ll let you know when I figure out how.

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