New communication systems always raise questions about relationships. Will the nature of our relationships change? We suggest that use of cyberspace raises two different kinds of question: one about relationships, discussed more fully in Chapter 5, and another about our view of people, discussed here.
In 'the old days' a tribe was a geographically gathered group of people. The word often has overtones of ignorance, because most tribes were isolated and therefore appeared out of touch. In the modern world, people, most noticeably young people, find an identity for themselves by creating shared and distinctive conventions, that in a sense substitute for the community roles of the old geographical tribes. Cyberspace extends these neo-tribes in new ways: someone can completely and immersively participate in a tribe inside cyberspace, yet even that person's close family or physical neighbours have no knowledge of their other life. Nobody comes and knocks on the door wearing the same sort of clothes. Instead, the neo-tribe member wears distinctive cyberspace 'clothes'. They may feel less understood in the real world than they do with their friends in cyberspace who all, apparently, understand each other. Like everything else to do with people, if the communities people find in cyberspace are supportive and constructive, they become a lifeline and an excellent resource; on the other hand, if they are negative and isolationist, they can become very destructive. Examples of the two extremes would be mutual support groups for people with medical conditions, and, at the other end of the scale, racial hate groups.
In cyberspace we can choose our 'neighbours' - those we bump into in the course of living. This is good, because we can find sympathetic support and expert advice. For example there is a cyberspace group for people with knee injuries, who exchange medical insights, comfort and understanding. In the physical world, however, we have much less choice about our neighbours, whether this is in our churches, in the pub, or with neighbours living on the same floor. Neighbours in real life are alive, and can disagree more readily, and have needs.
Unfortunately, the ease of finding people via the Internet who have common interests and agree with each other makes it easy for them to imagine that more of whole world is like them than is the case. In consequence their thoughts and actions can have a spurious validity.
As more and more personal information is available and accessible online, it can be easy to forget that data describe actions or parts of people, rather than inanimate objects. For the people working with personal information about others - in marketing, planning, research, security, etc. - there is always the danger of sliding from describing what people do, to imagining that is what, and all, they are. This is called 'objectification' because it changes perceptions of people from individuals, with the capacity for change, into objects. Politicians have used this process to turn others into enemies or to exclude people from an in-group. Overcoming the dehumanizing features of objectification is one central aspect of the Christian gospel, which offers the hope of a full realization of our humanity.
The problem arises when there is a temptation to treat other people impersonally. Treating people as abstract data objects is just one way of doing this. Data can 'eclipse' the real person, and then decisions may be made about him or her which are inappropriate. Unfortunately, computers happen to encourage this treatment - it is all data to them - so that reliance on them can provide the subtle basis for a 'slippery slope' that eases relationships into the automating and dehumanizing sort.
A large company can use computers to keep track of all its customers. Naturally the company does not want to confuse one customer with another, so each will have a unique identification, usually a serial number, and often supplemented by other information such as postcodes. Now you can ring them up or visit a branch of the company, and within seconds they know as much about you as if you were an old friend.
What goes wrong is that the person working for the company may not have the real freedom to treat you like an old friend. Imagine going to the bank to ask for a loan of some money. The bank clerk knows your name, and maybe asks about your family, even your health. But they can't give you a loan, because the computer has been programmed to treat everyone in a certain data category the same way. Somebody in head office decided that people like you were bad risks, and the computer enforces this blanket decision. The bank clerk, who a moment ago seemed so familiar and affable, is now powerless to act like the friend he or she seemed.
The advantage for the bank is that their business becomes more predictable. At head office, they are interested in the statistics of millions of customers, not in the needs of any one individual. Also, by programming the computer so that the decisions it makes are beyond the clerk's influence, they can run their bank with less skilful clerks who can therefore be paid less. There are more reasons: if the company has enough customers, even tiny gains will add up to significant savings for the company as a whole. Most of these tiny gains will come about by avoiding special cases, so simplifying the company's procedures (as well as their staff training). Large companies have always been able to do this, but now small ones can too, and staff find that the consequence of the introduction of computers is the removal of discretion over their decisions. The result is that relationships are altered, for they are now based on particular categorizations of data held in the bank's information store.
It is surprisingly easy to categorize, and subconsciously relate to, people on the basis of a prior assessment. You read the description of a person and think you know what he or she is like, but they may turn out to be very different when you meet - even a full curriculum vitae gives little indication as to what the person is like. Your surprise on meeting demonstrates that you have already formed some sort of image of them. There is probably a good reason why human beings needed to develop that capability in a large society - quick judgements could be made about who would be reliable, likely to return favours in survival conditions, or prove to be a competitor. The 'natural man', to use St Paul's expression, does indeed classify efficiently and quickly on the most slender of information. For example, since it is unlikely that someone from a competing tribe in the Middle East (say a Samaritan) would help a Jew in need, it makes some kind of resource-efficient sense not to help them - indeed to treat them as 'other'. But these expectations do not exhaust reality, since the guess may be wrong. When confronted by an 'other' who does help, or who needs help, we are called to act as neighbour to them (Luke 10.30 ff.) - to change our attitudes towards them, to transcend our own prejudices and guesses about them.
The point is that in cyberspace, people will leave an accumulated 'data shadow' behind them, but however complete it is, it is still an incomplete picture of the person. Since the temptation for those who have access to the data will be to use it for some purpose, say marketing or some other consumer activity, or for political decision-making, they will ignore the differences among those whom they choose to group together. This could easily reflect a false understanding of people and their situation. The question which needs to be asked is: what is the appropriate form of power relationship when people deal in the personal information of others, and can affect their lives?
Information is seen to be good and useful in many areas of life. But it can change relationships between people and between organizations, and has already done so.
Doctors in the USA have complained that patients are coming into their surgeries with amazing knowledge of all the latest research, the effect of all the possible drugs to do with their illness and information on who the top specialists are. They have obtained all this information from the web. The doctors say they feel somewhat diminished because they do not have the time to do the same for all possible diseases. The patient-doctor relationship is changing.
Another example is the use of satellites. Coffee-growing Third World countries could rely on some good years of crops to balance bad years' revenue. This was changed when the richer buying countries (primarily the USA) monitored the growth of the crops by satellite and therefore knew whether or not the crop was going to be plentiful. The price of forward buying was lowered and the Third World country received less revenue. And all this happened without the country even having access to the very same information about how their crops were doing. The relationship had moved and the producer was disadvantaged. This is a good example of the point of the phrase 'information is power'. Of course, satellite pictures are also used for other reasons - finding people and areas affected by the Honduran floods, observing what was happening in Tiananmen Square and feeding it back to the reporters on the ground in China for them to do their TV news reports when they were excluded from the Square, and in scientific research on our changing climate.