would be via television cables, and the terminals would be built around television sets augmented with, at the very least, keyboards for input to the computer, and ·~framegrabbers' would freeze still pictures on the screen." ("Arguments for a Moratorium on the Construction of Community Information Utilities"). • The National Technical Information Search (N.T.l.S.), providing access to government agency publications of a technical nature, and E.R.I.C. (Educational Resources Information Center) with its huge curriculum information memory bank, have both been precedents for mega-computers systems. Community projects like Resource One, Inc., in San Francisco go one step further by introducing user-oriented computer systems where people enter their own names and interests by simple procedures. Critics of CIU point out that unless public computer literacy is introduced along with the information utility, computer systems will be subject to dangerous centralized controls. • The development of neighborhood videocable projects like Community Focus ~n Portland's Corbett-Terwilliger neighborhood points to the potential of decentralized neighborhood information video networks. C. THE ENVIRONMENTAL BASIS It is obvious that information networking can substitute for transportation in an energy-conserving society. On the grassroots level, this means that neighborhoods can use telephone trees to call meetings and make ad-hoc decisions. On another level, the substitution means that people at home may not have to travel away from home to the office, but can work at home through communication. On still another level, networks like Jaybird (Republic, Washington) and the Rural Resources Information Network (Toppenish, Washington) can save agricultural resources by sharing information on the best products to buy and where to market. II. MODELS-THE ECO-CONNECTION ... If Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated into the larger system ofyour thought and experience. Gregory Bateson Steps to an Ecology of the Mind Networking, as we have said before, describes the wa in which information is transmitted, and the principles of.networking are lodged inextricably in all living things. The universe of creation is full of models by which we can understand them and- as McLuhan suggested when he said that "computers constitute an extension of the human nervous system" (The Medium is the Message)- new models are constantly being created through the medium of old ones. Buckminster Fuller adds that we are moving from a world governed by the laws of matter to a "metaphysical" world, whose events are the "impinging of information on information" (No More Secondhand God). Cybernetics was described by Norbert Wiener back in 1946 as the study of the way living systems are regulated through a non-linear self-organizing system which informs them with purposes and goals (Cybernetics, 1946). In a sense, the original model is the nervous system, charging the muscles to action and being recharged by the lactose which is distributed into the bloodstream. In Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, Bateson discusses the idea of "climax ecology." Living systems are continually evolving toward maximum complexity. When pathology enters the cell, or when deviance bre~ks out in a society, or when the acquatic temperatures are altered by industrial pollutants, the system falls apart. The "circuit" is essential to system adaptation and adjustment- but there are limits to the capacity of the "circuit." These models have tremendous social and organizational applications. Organizations, for example, tend to be selfperpetuating, and tend to find the influence from outside ideas to be damaging. Hence, in human systems, hierarchies become, in many cases, defenses against the invasion of other people's purposes. Anthony Judge, in the "Harmony of Interaction and the Facilitation of the Networking Process," delivered at the Expo Environmental Symposium in 1974, calls the related tendency of organizations to isolate themselves from outside influences "organizational apartheid." There's a paradox here, however, because without collaboration and inter-communication and cross-pollination of ideas, the social organism lacks integration, sanity and stability. During 1974, Eco-Net initiated a series of conferences designed to strengthen and extend the Northwest Environmental Information Network. Only through relaxation of an agenda and an "opening up" of the format could these purposes in fact be accomplished. Interested environmental education and information resource people were invited to a conference in fairly neutral territory-not on turf too strongly identified with any group. The conference facilitator did not impose an agenda of preplanned events upon the group but instead allowed plenty of time for. each organization to establish its ground by sharing interests and problems. Participants did not leave the conference with a "big plan" to consider but rather with a sense of commonness and mutual interaction. Similarly, intra-organizational communication can be distorted by bureaucratic or top-down decision-making patterns. In an information rich system, a degree of control and selfdetermination is felt by all elements of the system. Bureaucracies, on the other hand, stifle individuals by imposing comprehensive plans, developed by the "experts." New ideas and
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