cyRev Online Journal

The board and its changing ideological orientation connect with the program activities of the center and related participation. Table 6 below charts attendance at different programs from 1997 to 2000. Computer related programs begin to grow in mid 1998 with the tech support and teaching input from campus. Tutoring and practice testing in cooperation with parents and the university began in January 1999, but figures were not incorporated into monthly reports until October 1999. This in itself is a reflection of the bureaucratization of the center, to the point where new developments were not swiftly incorporated into reporting. University volunteers had a big impact on mobilizing the community to participate. Demarcation between stage 2, state, and stage 3, university is visible.

It is important to note that the reporting that produced this record was originally mandated by the state and began in stage two of the center's history. The reporting mandates changed the way the center operated. Once state funding began, the center collected data and produced quantitative, narrative, and financial activity reports. At first these were quarterly, then every month. The center also followed guidelines from the state on procurement, personnel, financial management and other matters.

The university and the community brought expertise and training in Quicken and Excel which helped convert the center to internal bookkeeping and in other ways streamlined the reporting and record keeping, putting the center more in control of its own resources.

Table 6. Social Value: Participation in Murchison Center Programs, July 1997 to April 2000, in Number of Participants per Month

A closer look at the center's program offerings—computer classes and otherwise—allows us to identify the cyberpower that emerged from the social capital and other inputs that went into the center. Cyberpower was an outcome, but also, we will see, a further input into the center.

As soon as the center got computers, adult beginners were taught to use the computer, to type, and to produce resumes. Once educational games were available on CD-ROM, children came in to do that as part of tutoring. As computers modernized and more computer-savvy staff and volunteers were on hand, these job and/or school-related classes grew more sophisticated. For instance, one resourceful staffperson made use of the "What Color is Your Parachute" job hunters' web site and computerized the intake process for new job-seekers signing up at the center. By 1999, adults were learning Adult Basic Computing (Windows and Wordpad), Word, Excel; children were using CD-ROM games but also learning Kids Basic Computing, Word, Powerpoint, and being guided through using educational Web sites.

The individual power that resulted was seen in adult's job skills development and job hunt successes, their individual mastery over the software. It was also seen in their moving to teach others, either the student sitting at the next computer or a whole room of students, as they moved from learning to teaching a class. At this point individual cyberpower becomes social cyberpower.

Long before "community based cyberpower" was part of the Murchison Center mission, it was in evidence. The first sign of this was in 1994 when Mrs. Hamilton explained her "field promotion" from board secretary to executive director. "I had been to college and I knew computers." At that point computer knowledge was seen as something to be shared with the community. According to Mrs. Hamilton, the board at that time was not just looking for her to word process letters, but to teach others.

When the Community Math Academy began in January 1999 a local father began to volunteer at the monthly practice proficiency tests. When attendance at these was taken, it included not just name and phone but also email. His email address was piesqd@[...]. Pi is the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle. (48) Asking about this creative screen name, other volunteers learned that he was a UT student, a working engineering technician and, for the neighborhood, an early adopter of computers. Within a few months he volunteered to teach the evening Word/resume production class. Soon after he was promoted to computer lab manager. He computerized attendance records so that the monthly quantitative reports were produced by Access instead of by pencil and paper.

The Community Math Academy itself was a product of and a generator of social cyberpower. As we have said, students in the UT Poverty Seminar had found the Murchison Center's computer lab in an online listing on the CATNeT site, and the partnership that resulted came from the shared attitude that computers were a key to Black community empowerment. Where the seminar managed to show its participants the Web and perhaps get a few people Hotmail accounts, the Community Math Academy went further, using Egroups to cement its volunteer leadership core and thus build social cyberpower. This involved some private computers as well as some loaners that went into people's homes, although they then decided to return the loaned computers and get their own more powerful units. In addition, center staff and volunteers contact school officials were by email instead of phone or letter writing, which was either unsuccessful or cumbersome.

A year after first inquiring about it, the Community Math Academy was able to make use of the school's computerized automatic phone message system to notify parents about the practice proficiency tests. In this way the voice of the newly elected King PTO delivered a message to 600 King families. Just as with the loaner computers from the university, this board of education system was a case of bridging social capital and bonding social capital investing together in building the center's programs.

Perhaps the pinnacle examples of social cyberpower are the two classes, Cyberchurch and Cyberschools, which began in 1999 and 2000 respectively. Here, though, we cross over once again, as social cyberpower becomes ideological cyberpower.

The university brought to the scene the language of the digital divide, the Black liberation struggle, and the community technology movement. This language expressed, clarified, and advanced what the center was already doing to some extent. The ideology of community uplift using computers, rooted also in the concept "Knowledge is Power," was elaborated in the day-to-day work, the plans and the mission statement of the center. Embedded here was an ideological orientation towards the community as a set of assets as well as needs, best evidenced in the last sentence of the mission statement developed by the Community Math Academy (emphasized below). The goal of "ending poverty once and for all" was an early critical ideological issue.

The Community Math Academy aims to improve the math skills and change the math attitudes of young people in central city Toledo. We see math as an academic subject and a tool for social transformation. We see math as part of ending poverty once and for all.
The academy is a project of UT, the Murchison Center, and King School. We join with children and their parents to conduct educational activities in the school, the community and the home. Parents are the leaders of the academy because parents love their children and, more than anyone, determine their futures.

Operating as it did over the Internet as well as through face-to-face meetings and sessions, the Community Math Academy program was itself an instance of ideological cyberpower.

But two classes, Cyberchurch and Cyberschools, begun in 1999 and 2000 respectively, also illustrate the ideological cyberpower generated through the center.

Cyberchurch emerged as an assignment in a university course on the Black Church. When each student went to complete a web site for a local church, they came to the center to build their site. This class then took on a life of its own, with word of mouth bringing more students, one student stepping forward to teach it, and more skills and web space being applied. The course assignment originated as an idea the director of Africana Studies sold to the instructor for Black Church. The instructor, a local pastor and high school guidance counselor, had pastored in various Toledo churches for 27 years, and provided his church space to the local Black Panther chapter when it formed. While the web site building assignment in his course was a burden to him at first-he was asking students to do something he hadn't done-one day after hearing a lecture by the director he told him, "I've heard you talk about this 'eBlack' many times, and I always agreed. But now I really, really get it! I have it so much on my mind that I'm thinking of taking out all the pews in my church and using folding chairs, and getting in some computers. It can still serve on Sundays but can be a lab the rest of the time." His plans began to unfold.

The ideological content of this form of cyberpower is the vision that if the Black church is online, then a good portion of he Black public sphere can be kept intact as our personal, cultural, political, and spiritual lives move into cyberspace, as more and more Black people get online. If the Black church is intact, then the Black liberation struggle has that important institution, with all the social capital imbedded therein, to rely on.

While Cyberchurch was a class that expresses the dynamic combination of university social capital (bridging) and church social capital (bonding) within the context of the center, Cyberschools had a slightly different origin. It originated from a combination of university social capital with community social capital (bonding), again within the context of the center.

Murchison's Community Math Academy project put the center and its volunteers, especially the university students, in close proximity to King Elementary School. The CMA, especially the involved parents, who were all grandmothers, attended the school's PTO meetings, seeking more parent involvement. CMA volunteers worked in the schools as classroom teacher aides and after school as tutors. As a result, new officers were voted in as PTO leaders.

The King PTO had two members, who were a couple with one son in the school, but had been unable to organize parents to do little more than bake sales and an annual book sale. The Murchison Center began to do outreach to get more parents to the PTO meetings. Thus the annual election brought in a full slate of PTO officers with new energy and a plan to build the library up, participate in practice proficiency testing, etc.

Cyberschools was begun to support these parents and others like them. Like Cyberchurch, it meets one night a week. Cyberschools sessions are dedicated to two things: organizing to get more families to the practice proficiency tests, and helping local PTOs get their plans and contact information posted onto web pages devoted to their schools and their families, plus email.

PTOs across the country have web pages and use email to keep parents in touch and organized. But these PTOs do not often appear to be in the Black community. With computers moving into homes and workplaces, anyone can take advantage of the Internet to organize. Not only that, the web sites that Cyberschools takes people to explore include the Toledo Public Schools, the teacher's union, the University of Toledo, the Ohio Board of Education (which posts information about schools, testing, standards, the Ohio 4th Grade Guarantee (no fourth grader failing the reading test will be advanced to 5th grade), and more. So the Internet is a source of information as well as a communication tool used by parents to impact children's experience in public schools. Parent involvement is proven to be perhaps the deciding factor in student and school success.

Implications

We are now able to elaborate further the theoretical framework emerging from our analysis. We will move beyond the particularity of this case study to conceptual implications for our general research focus, community technology centers in urban poor communities, especially communities of color. First we will concentrate the lessons of this case study into several propositions that in turn can serve as guidelines for further research. Second, we will discuss the implications of this research for the public sphere, especially the Black counterpublic sphere.

The first point is that these centers are social organizations, and therefore part of the structure of social relations in a community. This understanding requires a paradigm shift from the current dominant trend to study individuals who pass through the center, to the centers themselves as social units.

A second point is that the digital divide has to be understood as a community attribute, part of a broader phenomenon called public computing. The digital divide as community descriptor can be determined by how extensive and effective are the local organizations which provide and promote public computing.

A third point is that the CTC as community organization is the locus for the concentration of resources. These resources can be conceived as different forms of capital:

A sixth and final point is that the success and sustainability of a center is a function of whether point five loops back and feeds into the capital resources of the organization. The organization produces bonding social capital or it fails the litmus test of success and sustainability.

On the basis of these six points it is critical to raise the issue of democracy and social inclusion of people who are living in the social isolation of the poor part of the dual city. The existence of a democratic system is not merely the actions of individuals at the polls. Democracy requires informed citizens who are socialized and live in a complex set of overlapping social networks. Each network is an interest group, and multiple memberships mean multiple interests, sometimes congruent and sometimes in conflict. This complexity is the basis for democratic discussion and compromise. We argue and compromise because while we have differences with others, on other issues we share common interests.

Building sustainable democratic equality in the information age means more than how many individuals are online. The key is to stabilize and support people working with information technology in the form of social organizations rooted in the legitimate social capital of the community. The key is to invest all forms of capital to produce social capital for the socially isolated inner city Black poor. In turn, this investment should be utilized to produce Black cyberpower. Powerlessness, especially the lack of cyberpower, is anathema to democracy in the information society.

Footnotes

1 In an earlier publication we discussed continuing social inequalities in the information revolution. See Alkalimat, Gills, and Williams (1995).

2 Benton Foundation, http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org; U. S. Department of Commerce. http://www.digitaldivide.gov. These and other URLs are listed under references.

3 Department of Commerce press release, July 8, 1999. On the web at http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/press/fttn070899.html.

4 Telephone penetration rate from James McConnaughey, personal communication; other data from Department of Commerce (2000).

5 See Bertot and McClure (2000) for the use of library computers to access the Internet; Williams (2000) presents data on Internet service being provided by libraries in Ohio.

6 See references for URLs for CTCNet, OCCCN, and CATNeT.

7 Williams and Alkalimat (2001 forthcoming).

8 Alkalimat (1986).

9 Landry (1987).

10 Wilson (1987).

11 Ibid, pp 56-58.

12 Landry, op cit., pp 116-122.

13 Castells (1998) pp 162, 164.

14 Castells (1999) p 27.

15 Orr (1999) presents a useful case study of Black social capital in a historical study of Baltimore school reform in which he discusses bonding and bridging social capital as intergroup and intragroup relations of Blacks and whites.

16 For definitions and literature review on social capital see Resnick (2000), Feldman and Assaf (2000), and Putnam (2000).

17 Putnam (2000) pp 22-23.

18 Ibid, p 32.

19 Habermas (1991), Calhoun (1992), Negt and Kluge (1993).

20 Dawson (1994).

21 Ibid, p 206.

22 Ibid, pp 213-214.

23 Ibid, p 215.

24 Morris (1984).

25 Ibid, p 279.

26 Landry (1987), p 71.

27 Morris, op cit., pp 282-283.

28 Jordan (1999).

29 Walch (1999) p 23.

30 Mark et al (1997), Chow et al (1998, 2000).

31 Breeden et al (1998).

32 Department of Commerce (2000).

33 Bertot and McClure (2000). Previous studies were released in 1994, 1996, 1997, and 1998.

34 Lentz et al (2000).

35 Bishop et al (2000).

36 Hudson (2000).

37 Department of Trade and Industry (2000), p 6 of executive summary.

38 Gurstein (2000) and Loader (1998).

39 Dyer-Witheford (1999) pp 145-164.

40 Mele (1999).

41 Cleaver (1998) and Ronfeldt and Martinez (1997).

42 Vari (2000) and Tabb (2000).

43 Clarke (1989).

44 Kretzmann and McKnight (1993).

45 McAdam (1999).

46 Piven and Cloward (1979), p 231.

47 Putnam (2000), p 61.

48 Piesqd translates into pi squared. The symbol p, or pi, is mathematical notation for the irrational number 3.14159.... Found in Egyptian and Babylonian science, pi is a 2500-year-old constant.

References (links current as of December 1, 2000)

Webliography

Benton Foundation. http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org

CATNeT. http://uac.rdp.utoledo.edu/docs/catnet/catnethome.htm

Community Connector. http://www.si.umich.edu/Community

CTCNet. http://www.ctcnet.org
Murchison Center. http://www.murchisoncenter.org

OCCCN. http://www.occcn.org

U. S. Department of Commerce. http://www.digitaldivide.gov

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This book chapter is posted at the University of Michigan by the Alliance for Community Technology. It will also appear in Community Informatics: Community Development Through the Use of Information and Communications Technologies, edited by Leigh Keeble and Brian Loader, London: Routledge, 2001. The authors acknowledge the support of the Alliance for Community Technology, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the University of Toledo Africana Studies Program and the UT Urban Affairs Center.

Article posted December 1, 2000