The lives of people everywhere in the world seem increasingly to be shaped by events,
decisions and actions that take place far away from where they live and work. Cultures,
economies and politics appear to merge across the globe through a rapid exchange of
information, ideas and knowledge. The advent of the mobile phone, satellite television
and the Internet means that communication from one side of the globe to the other is
virtually instantaneous. Distant events are presented to us on a multitude of video
screens even as they are taking place. Newspaper and TV headlines relay to our homes,
offices, schools and libraries news of a series of crises, fears and panics, which
suggests that across the world change maybe out of control.

Our cultural and political certainties are challenged by the rise of new movements and
the emergence of new institutions. The authority of social institutions seems to be
increasingly redundant in the face of powerful and apparently dominant global forces.
Thus, we seem to be living in a world of increasing change and uncertainty, in what
Giddens (1999) has characterized as a “runaway world.” “For better or
worse,” he says, “we are being propelled into a global order that no one
fully understands, but which is making its effects felt upon all of us” (Giddens,
1999).

Developments in information and communication technologies have the power to change
the spatial frames within which we live and work. In other words, they alter the ways we
think about the relations between people and places. They alter the assumptions that we
make about where and when certain activities are permitted or expected to take place.
Instead, of having to go to a bank we shift funds about from a beach in the Caribbean and
rather than searching for shops, shops follow customers around electronically. We have
electronic connectedness.

The consumption of individuals mediates the productivity of corporate capital; it
becomes a productive force required by the functioning of the system itself, by its
process of reproduction and survival. In other words, there are these kinds of needs
because the system of corporate production needs them. And the needs invested by the
individual consumer today are just as essential to the order of production as the
capital invested by the capitalist entrepreneur and the labor power invested in the
wage laborer. It is all capital.

In an argument related to the idea of virtual communities, Turkle (1984: 1995),
Harroway (1991), Mitchell (1994: 1996) and Virillo (1986: 1991: 1997: 2003) often relate
the Internet to the idea of the 'public sphere', as developed by Habermas (1989). In an
ideal public sphere, citizens would discuss issues of concern and arrive at a consensus
for the common good. Habermas did not feel that we have an effective public sphere in
Western societies, partly because commercial mass media has turned people into
consumers of information and entertainment, rather than participants in
an interactive democratic process.

Traditionally, you needed to go someplace to do this sort of thing-to the
agora, the forum, the piazza, the café, the bar, the pub, Main Street, the mall,
the beach, the gym, the bathhouse, the college dining hall, the common room, the
office, or the club -and where you went pegged your peer group, your social position,
and your role. It also framed expectations about how you should represent yourself by
your clothing, body language, speech, and behavior and about the interactions that were
to take place. Each familiar species of public place had its actors, costumes, and
scripts. But the worldwide computer network-the electronic agora-subverts, displaces,
and radically redefines our notions of gathering place, community, and urban life. The
Net has a fundamentally different physical structure, and it operates under quite
different rules from those that organize the action in the public places of traditional
cities. It will play as crucial a role in twenty-first-century urbanity as the
centrally located, spatially bounded; architecturally celebrated agora did in the life
of the Greek polis (Mitchell, 1996).

Clearly the technological means have emerged to replace these spatial and
architectural arrangements with electronics and software, and it isn't hard to construct
plausible arguments in favor of such a substitution. For a start, political assemblies
could become virtual, with representatives connecting by computer network instead of
sitting together in chambers. This is not such a big step; assembly chambers are already
equipped with electronic systems for recording votes, and most of us watch the
proceedings - if we watch them at all - on C-Span or on local cable.

Mitchell (1996) contends, “Grizzled old operators still like to assure us that
‘all politics is local.' But in the cyberspace era, things may be very different.
You do not have to buy into Perot's appallingly reductionistic view of political
discourse to realize that cyberspace has the potential to fundamentally change political
institutions and mechanisms. It opens up ways of assembling and communicating with
dispersed political constituencies, new opportunities for instigating and formulating
issues, and mechanisms for providing decisions and feedback at a much faster pace than in
the past” (p. 12).

Classroom learning takes place not just in the stable, orderly, controlled, linear,
sequential, mechanistically "lawful" environment; but also in those situations which are
open, fluid, dynamic, ever changing - even educationally "chaotic." The classroom
environment molded on "means/ends" determinism - and pedagogically predicated on a
Modernist scientific worldview of prediction, certainty, and stability - is not the only
environment in which learning takes place. A "learning" classroom may be modeled on a
postmodern worldview in which the uncertain combination of ambiguity, randomness, and
contestable knowledge challenges the students (and teacher) to think .

This diversity is recognized not as educationally divisive, but as a learning
opportunity. In this context one public education possibility will be to use the learning
potential of personal and group political understandings - as well as misunderstandings -
to help students "come to terms with their own and other's identities and to understand
how the world shapes and is shaped by social interaction” (Tierney, 1993). Public
schools will be better able to help students understand the self and the other as part of
the continuing search for a universal and a personal politically constructed knowledge
base.

Migration of political activity to cyberspace forces us to rethink traditional
relationships between the civic and the urban - that a community is not necessarily
related to any particular place or construction. Today the Oxford (2004)
definition of a community as a "body of people living in one place, district, or country"
is eroding. A community may now find its place in cyberspace. This new site is not some
suitable patch of earth but a computer to which members may connect from wherever they
happen to be. The foundation is not one of marking boundaries, but of allocating disk
space and going online. And the new urban design is not one of configuring buildings,
streets, and public spaces to meet the needs and aspirations of the community ,
but one of textual and symbolic constructions to create virtual places and electronic
interconnections between them. Within these places, social contacts will be made,
economic transactions will be carried out, cultural life will unfold, surveillance will
be enacted, and power will be exerted.

As these communities develop, we will need to consider not only their urban design -
the places and interconnections that they provide, and their look and feel - but also
their civic character. We will have to figure out how to make cyberspace communities work
in just, equitable, and satisfying ways. So far, there are no definitive answers to the
questions, but there are at least a few emerging models to consider.

The commercial online systems have developed, until now, as company towns - centrally
controlled enterprises that own the infrastructure and try to make money by renting space
to information and service providers, by charging access fees to subscribers, and like
broadcast media by selling advertising. Some smaller, dial-in systems belong to the
communitarian, utopian tradition. They have relied on generating a shared commitment to
the common good and on informal, barter systems of information exchange. The Internet
demonstrates the possibility of a multilayered, heterogeneous system in which the
constituent communities organize themselves.

As communities increasingly find their common ground in cyberspace rather than on
terra firma, these sites will be debated, extended, and transformed.
The fundamental questions of cyberspace's political economy will urgently be contested.
Who plays, who pays, and how is this decided? How is intellectual property to be managed
and protected? What is the role of agency? How should communities define their
boundaries, and how might they maintain their norms within these boundaries? What are
legitimate forms of power? How might political discourse be constructed?

A teacher speaks students listen and respond. The teacher has access to some body of
knowledge, beliefs, and practices, and makes this body available to students. The
underlying diagram of a school appears in its simplest form when disciples gather within
earshot of a teacher in a place made by the shade of a tree. The less sedentary Socrates
strolled in a grove, with his disciples keeping pace. The little red schoolhouse puts
students in a box with the teacher in front. Bentham proposed "Chrestomathic" monitorial
schools -a variant on the panopticon - had a single master in the middle surrounded by a
circle of six monitors to keep order, then circular tiers with seats for nine hundred
boys (Mack, 1969). Modern schools, colleges, and universities have greater spatial
differentiation and far more complex plans. Schools, colleges, and universities are
spaces that exist primarily to bring students and teachers together so that a sharing of
knowledge can take place.

They provide multiple classrooms to allow different sorts of instruction to proceed
simultaneously; they add libraries, laboratories, art and design studios, music practice
rooms, and other specialized facilities; and they link the pieces together with long
passageways. Residential institutions - like that planned by Thomas Jefferson at the
University of Virginia - integrate rooms for scholars and provide hierarchies of informal
and formal meeting places, so that the plan reads as an illustration of the dedicated
scholarly life. The demand that colleges and universities typically make is to be "in
residence" - to be part of the spatially defined community. Therefore, these communities
enforce strict compliance with academic timetables, classroom schedules, and
calendars.

Of course there have always been alternatives to making such permanent, rigidly
organized places of learning. Pre-industrial societies had their itinerant teachers and
holy men who spread the word wherever they could find audiences. By providing printed
books and efficient mail service, the Industrial Revolution made correspondence schools
possible. Two-way radio allowed a teacher in Fairbanks to instruct children living in
remote areas scattered across Alaska . Broadcast television and videotapes (in
conjunction with reasonably good mail service) creates the possibility for distance
education to flourish. Today digital telecommunication is producing a powerful resurgence
of this alternative tradition. Being online may soon become a more important mark of
community membership than being in residence.

As the digital telecommunications era dawned, some schools were very quick to begin
exploring the potential role of campus networks. At Dartmouth in the 1960s a network of
interactive terminals was put in place and heavily used. At MIT in the 1980s the
campus-wide Athena system pioneered the educational use of networked workstations with
high-bandwidth interconnections. By the 1990s campus networks were commonplace from the
elementary school to the university.

Today the Internet has begun to shake up the traditional, insular structures of
schools by creating quick, convenient, inexpensive channels for worldwide,
campus-to-campus interchange of text, images and data. Network connections quickly create
new ways of sharing knowledge and enacting practices and so force changes in the
characters of teaching spaces. At the very least, a classroom now needs a computer
workstation integrated with the old blackboards and slide projectors. And instead of
taking notes on paper, students use their laptop computers. Rooms fragment into scattered
information access points.

Increasing the numbers and types of informed Internet consumers will ensure that the
Internet does not become the domain just of the moneyed elite. Furthermore, with
increased Internet access and the skills to use, more individuals can take advantage of
the wealth of government and grassroots resources increasingly available online, which
can often be made more locally accessible than having to go across town to an office.

In its early days, the Internet was more fun for the knowledgeable few. Those were the
days when no one was determined to quantify the population, there was a perceived
consensus about what constituted netiquette, business interests were virtually silent.
However, in the aftermath of an AOL disk arriving every day in the mail and politicians
giving token nod to universal Internet access, the point and purpose of the Internet is
continually evolving.

The Internet is both useful and problematic. While the technology revolution has been
sweeping the world, there are many for whom technology has never been a significant part
of their lives. Many other issues are confronting communities, yet no one deserves being
left without the opportunities that Internet technology can bring. In many urban and
rural US communities, libraries and schools have been the only potential places to share
these technologies.

src="../../images/uparrow.gif" alt="Arrow Up" align="right" border="0" height="13" width="20" /> Author Jennifer A. Hendricks, is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program with a focus on Curriculum and Cultural Studies in the College of Education at Arizona State University. Jennifer has a B.A. in Art History and Archaeology with a minor in Studio Art. She also holds an M.A. in Art Education from the University of Maryland at College Park. Her research interests include the use of narrative methodology to empower students' life stories of school and alternative arts-based forms of research and research representation. Her current research focuses on how teens create a political curriculum outside of the increasingly anarcharistic classroom, specifically concentrating on the Internet as a site of empowerment. She may be contacted via e-mail at href="mailto:Jennifer.Hendricks@asu.edu">Jennifer.Hendricks@asu.edu.