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General Forum: Information Technology | | Welcome to the Matrix | |
| The Digital City has become more real than virtual Online world now a community in its own right
The fastest growing city in the world isn't in Mexico, China or even Southern Ontario. It's in a place that can't be defined by geography, doesn't have any concrete, bricks or mortar. Its infrastructure is fibre optic cable and wireless technology, the highways and byways of what has become the Digital City.
Millions of inhabitants enter the Digital City every minute, searching for the virtual communities and neighbourhoods that have become their home away from their physical home. Gamers, hackers, bloggers, DJs, animators, activists, chatters, designers, artists and architects have created their own virtual city, using technology that is the building block of their world.
Unlike future depictions of technology in movies like Blade Runner, Minority Report and A.I., which convey a message of gloom and doom, citizens of the Digital City find relief from the "physical" world in what has become a real-life Matrix.
It's not just pop-culture that doesn't seem to understand the upside of digital life. In his 1992 book Technopoly, communication theorist Neil Postman wrote, "(Technology) destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living."
A year later the "social relations" Postman thought would disappear began to flourish when the foundation for the Digital City was laid. Mosaic, the browser software that made the Web accessible to anyone with a connection, was released. A year after that the software developers who designed Mosaic created a company called Netscape Inc. and citizens of the Digital City were invited in from every corner of the globe.
Today, 80 per cent of North Americans access the Internet. Computers, video games, cellular phones and the Internet now occupy more of the average North American teenager's time than any other activity, including school. They shop, listen to music, do their homework, play and communicate online.
What has been created isn't the dark realm of technology predicted by pop culture and intellectuals.
"The Internet saved me," says Ejovi Nuwere, author of Hacker Cracker. "A few months after I was hospitalized for trying to commit suicide when I was 12 I was introduced to the Internet."
Nuwere was one of the presenters at Digifest 2003, an international festival of online and digital culture held recently in downtown Toronto, which focused on the future of the Electronic City.
Video game developers, digital artists, hackers and others from around the world challenged the idea that virtual environments are potentially dangerous places where people are led astray by sex, violence, bad ethics and escapist fantasies.
"The festival is an attempt to answer questions," says John Sobol, one of the event's organizers. "How is the definition of a city changing with the integration of wired technology? How do people live, what are the moral questions, how are communities formed and enhanced in a virtual wired city?"
For Nuwere, who grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, in a neighborhood dominated by housing projects and gang violence, the Internet offered a new life. His drug-addicted mother had spent most of her time in prison. His father passed away before Nuwere got to know him.
His physical environment, the city in which he lived, was a desperate place. "It was hard to see past life on the street, but the Internet and the world of hacking became a world that removed me from the desperation."
Nuwere became a self-taught programmer and hacker, learning on the computer his uncle had bought for college in 1993.
"I would sit on my uncle's computer for hours and be anyone I wanted to. I could go anywhere — it was addictive. I became immersed in the cyber-world."
Hacking has taken on an entirely negative connotation, but that was the community he entered. In 1995, when he was 15, after he breached a company's security system, gaining access to almost all of its files, instead of using his skills to do wrong, he called up the company. He told them what he had done and gave them his name and number in case they wanted to talk.
They called back an hour later and offered to set up a job interview.
He now travels the world — online and physically — consulting companies about their computer security systems and appears regularly on CNN and other networks, talking about the risks of cyber-terrorism.
"I got acceptance in the hacking culture. Technology gave me a sense of power and freedom that I felt I didn't have in my life. It's the same for millions of other kids around the world, whether they're hackers, bloggers or gamers."
Participants in virtual worlds don't accept the argument that digital lives are constructed, imaginary representations of life, realities created in violent video games such as Vice City. That type of Matrix-like paranoia may be something those on the sidelines worry about, but gamers don't.
"The popularity of gaming is a comment on the outside world," says film-maker and game designer Tim Carter, another presenter at Digifest. "People want control and accountability. But the question that should be asked is how are gaming communities and the games themselves fostering a participation in the digital world that inspires humane values?"
Gamers say they know the difference between what's real and what's not real. And they should. After all, they grew up in — and helped build — the Digital City. Once dominated by boys, staring glassy-eyed into cathode blue monitors, while shooting anything that moved on screen, the gaming industry is now going through an adult revolution.
Role-playing games such as the Sims (20 million copies sold world-wide) and Counter-Strike (15 million copies) have become a way of life for players. The reason they play is what interests Carter.
After his presentation, a teenager, who had been lingering around to ask Carter a question — "What's the main reason you play: for the kills or the sense of community?" — seemed certain of the answer.
The look on his face — blank with his head slightly turned — revealed his surprise.
"I told him the same thing I tell others," Carter says. "Every boy who has access to a computer has played this game, some girls too. It's like a religion. They stay up till four in the morning at gaming centres, they play in their rooms, they enter tournaments, but the real experience is outside the game."
Getting to cap someone with a semi-automatic may be the draw, for some, to the Digital City, but it's not why they stay.
Carter is an avid player of Counter-Strike, a first-person shooter game with the essential goal of killing your opponent, played either online, with teams up to 50 a side, or on separate gaming consoles. His presentation was about Counter-Strike culture as a model for positive values — cooperation, advancement based on skill and merit, discipline.
"The need for a sense of community, to play a game by the rules, to be good at something, to succeed as a group is why you think shooting an opponent is fun. The sophisticated graphics and the level of programmed control over decisions is the game. But the reason kids do it for eight hours a day has very little to do with killing opponents.
"It's like a martial art, people who don't do it think it's all about the kicking and the punching."
Carter says the gaming industry is in its nascent stage. Till now most games have focussed on "High Twitch" reactions to the violent or fast paced confusion that takes place on screen. But as programming and artificial intelligence get more sophisticated, the gaming industry will change, just as Hollywood did.
"Action movies, westerns, that was the easy way to attract an audience. You still have them, but you also get films about real life, that represent the whole spectrum of what their audiences relate to. A game like The Sims, using artificial intelligence, gives players an interactive ability to `play' the game of life, hard decisions and all. The industry is becoming more responsive to the demands of digital communities."
Gamers aren't the only digital community drawn to virtual worlds because of the potential to express things they can't in the real world, says Sobol.
"Blogging (Web logging) is a reaction to the way the mainstream media works. Young people expect that communication is interactive — every event invites multiple perspectives, multiple directions. Others have become used to responding passively to fixed descriptions of events."
Matt Jones, an information architect who has worked for the BBC, the Times of London and other companies, says the key for virtual environments to flourish is access. And ultimate access means not being tied down to a time and place. The Digital City is open 24/7.
"Wireless technology, the ability to use hand-held devices anywhere, any time to connect with online communities, is the future," says Jones, who was part of the "warchalking" movement. The idea behind warchalking was to create an awareness of wireless urban spaces, virtual bubbles that could be created and used by people to connect online: No wire, no fee.
"The idea of free wireless spaces scared telcom companies and media companies that have been buying up the platforms for bandwidth delivery. They have it all backwards."
Wireless technology is used by 80 per cent of the teenagers in downtown Tokyo today, members of a "Thumb Tribe" that use cell phones to send text messages any time of the day. Successful Japanese Web sites use text in the same clipped, shorthand that one-hand typists can easily send back and forth to friends.
"In Japan, companies realize that if you give people access, they will create digital communities that become important to them. Once the demand is created, without prohibitive connection fees, companies can come up with a number of creative ways to profit," Jones explains.
"In South Korea, professional gamers are respected and revered as sports stars. They're able to attract huge numbers. The idea of society is changing. South Korean gamers have more in common with Canadian gamers than they do with people from their own culture.
"Digital Cities are only just starting to influence the way a younger generation defines their idea of what a community is.
"I hope they get to shape the future of what Digital Cities will look like."
Posted by: Mr. Sreedhar Venkata Sunkara At: 10, Apr 2003 7:56:16 PM IST
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