Yes, there are those who might advocate creating a federal bureaucracy to
force e-mail on an unsuspecting public. Forget about them - they're a dying
breed.
The question is whether we will expand upon the missions of our most
important public agencies - libraries, educational institutions and the
postal service - to keep them contemporary with an evolving culture.
The issue is what metaphor we will use to base the shape of the growing
electronic infrastructure. On the one hand, you have the post office
metaphor. Until the public post, one had to be able to pay the private
messenger to convey information over a distance. Only royalty and the
wealthy had pages and couriers. Every one else had to play it by ear. Many
didn't even know that ground up wood pulp and dye could be used to convey
information.
When the US started its post office, it went one step further - establishing
subsidies for certain kinds of communication - between legislators and
constituents, and for journals and publications. Our common culture has
benefited tremendously from these subsidies. We take them for granted.
When communities started creating community antenna systems (know known as
cable tv, then just a way to get TV into remote valleys), they began to
design in provisions for local access to this community communication
infrastructure. When these systems began to be outsourced to private
industry public access provisions were negotiated into francises. They
required free training and access for the francising public to the public
infrastructure they were allowing the companies to build a "toll road" on.
Public education is based on the belief that a universally educated populis,
one with ready access to the most vital sources of thought and research, is
essential to a vital economy and democracy.
The issue about universal access is whether it will adopt a similar universal
postal service/public access/public education model, or whether it will
embody the currently fashionable metaphors of social darwinism and the
privatization of public infrastructure (with its inherent echoes of the
feudal enclosures of the once open landscape). Will it be part of the
realization of the visions of Buckminister Fuller & Teillard de Chardin (of a
growing web of global conciousness), or will it be a device for further
division and stratification among peoples.
As many WATPA members realize, there is some kind of synergistic melding
possible between the post offices, the public librarys, and public education
that might be the basis for a healthy metaphor upon which to base the design
of such a system. Let's just get on with it.