It8217;s a big Third Place

In December 1969, ARPANET went online with four connected computers. The US defence establishment, which threw large wads of notes at it, ex...

In December 1969, ARPANET went online with four connected computers. The US defence establishment, which threw large wads of notes at it, expected it to become the backbone of its battle communications and computing system. But by the end of 1970, it was obvious that no one was doing much programming on it. On the contrary, its servers were full of personal notes, news, gossip, jealousy, sick jokes and plain gas, just like the email logs that were stolen by hackers from the Bhaba Atomic Research Centre recently. There was little computing going on, but a lot of communication.

ARPANET had failed to live up the expectations of the brass hats. It would never become the backbone of a battle system. It would, instead, be the backbone of the loud, raucous, gratuitously voluble Internet, a living thing forged out of the impersonal strategic calculations of the Cold War.

The Internet became the most perfect example of McLuhan8217;s global village, for it organised itself precisely on the lines of the village societythat the military-industrial machine created by World War II was slowly snuffing out all over the world. From the earliest days, it tried to replicate the village chuapal. And the forum, Latin for marketplace. In an accurate reflection of the most important function of any marketplace, the word forum8217; now refers to a place where people congregate to talk.

The first mailing list in the world which relayed an email from any member to all his peers, rather like a conference table where everyone can address everyone else was born on ARPANET and was called SF-LOVERS. Its members discussed Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose Farmer and A.E. Van Vogt on government time and money. They had, in effect, slunk away from their workstations and were goofing off at the chaupal. The brass hats were very thin-lipped and rapier-eyed, but there was little they could do about it. They were up against a basic force of human nature: the urge to form communities.

Today, that urge has created what Ray Oldenburg would call aThird Place. Oldenburg8217;s theory divides the social sphere into three places8217;. The First, the workplace, is ruled by a tight set of corporate rules over which the individual has no control. The Second Place, the home, is equally rigidly defined by tradition. To find escape, you need a Third Place, a space that is defined by its users, is characterised by declassed horizontal linkages and a lack of central authority, and where the primary art and the primary mode for expressing personality is that of conversation. In physical terms, it could be a cafe table, a village square or a park bench. Or it could be the Internet, the biggest Third Place of all.

The Internet has gone beyond Oldenburg and back to the ancient village society in reaction to a very modern stimulus: corporate downsizing. The world over, people are finding fewer opportunities in the organised sector.

The very definition of work has changed with the invention of the time-specific contract and teleworking. Today, most people are constantlyon the lookout for short-term work. That calls for a lot of networking, which the Internet facilitates rather well.

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Sites like Jobengine.com are only the most widely advertised operations. Most of the action is in the Third Place the mailing lists, forums and newsgroups which carries job-related material. People on the Net are surviving downsizing because theirs is a horizontal community. Just like it was in the village, in the undefined Third Places the marketplace, the crossroads or the publican8217;s establishment where a sharecropper could bat the breeze with a corn factor in the evening and land a job with him the next morning.

Thanks to man8217;s defining urge to congregate, the most hitech community in the world has imitated the most primitive.