OLD FREEDOMS AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES - THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY NETWORKING

Unparalleled in human experience, the Internet, or simply the Net, is the code word for the technosocial accident that gives large numbers o f people the means by which they can speak for themselves in public. T his is an ironical reversal of the historical social patterning of asy mmetrical, centralizing communicating technologies that have molded al l of the social relations of modern society. The problematic for this distributed communication capability will be manifest in struggles aro und the legitimacy of self-expression, assembly and privacy, in all of their forms. However, unlike the mass mediated discourse where, as th e ''audience'' object, we observed these externalized struggles by a n arrow other, encounters with distributed media are palpable and subjec tive, and will be increasingly played out on the common terrain of loc al community. In initiating unconditional public access to the Net, co mmunity networks, or FreeNets, began the long process of blurring the distinction between the public and private terrain, of undoing that di chotomy that mass media technologies in this century have systematical ly rebuilt and fortified. Nudging along the process of democratic self -representation is the central issue for the Net, and the epochal proj ect for community networks.