{fb1000000A digital city does not consist of bricks, concrete and cobblestones, but of telephone lines and electronic connections. Can such a city work? Last year, the 'Balie' cultural centre started such an experiment, together with the 'xs4all' foundation. Anyone who's got a phone, a modem, and a computer can log into the digital city host computer and walk around town like a digital spirit: she can visit the central station, the digital cafe, and the electronic town hall. Marleen Stikker is the 'mayor' of Amsterdam Digital City (DDS), and she looks back at one year of promises fulfilled and unfulfilled.
"Well, of course, sometimes the level of discussion in a particular newsgroup is no higher than on chatterboxes; and you do have the occasional rabid rightist spreading racist smut on the net, but generally speaking, life in the DDS is pretty much OK. It's just like an ordinary city" says Stikker, "everything you'd come across in ordinary life, we get here too."
It was one year ago that DDS opened her doors. Council elections were just coming up, and the new electronic medium looked just like the thing to bridge the gap between citizens and the authorities. The Amsterdam Municipality decided to subsidize the experiment, together with the (national) ministry of economic affairs and that of the interior. For the first time, DDS enabled Amsterdammers to look on-line into the council's minutes, to consult official policy papers and to request information from the digital town hall. But there were other activities, too. The 'Central Station' offered access to the entire Internet, one could patronize a digital cafe, browse through a digital kiosk, enter the digital house of culture and the arts, or pay a visit to a digital sex-shop, complete with a digital darkroom in the back. "All those ideas you had heard so often from the US about the new information society, tele-democracy, electronic citizenship, suddenly became a reality on DDS." Marleen Stikker is project manager at the 'Balie' and initiator of DDS, and she envisaged the set-up known in the US as Freenet, a kind of virtual city where homeless people managed to demand via computer, and obtain in reality from the town's authorities, public showers and dressing-rooms so they could wash and dress appropriately when going to a job interview.
Stikker, however, had never really envisaged that the interest for the Amsterdam experiment would take such a flight. Within a week of DDS's inauguration, no modem could be obtained in Amsterdam for love or money. The phone lines providing access to the DDS computer were overloaded at any hour of the day or night, but the rush has somewhat stabilised now. The daily number of users now hovers around 4000. One million 'pages' are being requested a month. A new configuration has been installed, the primitive menus of the beginning have now been replaced with a lot of graphics (photos, maps), and DDS looks poised to evolve into a truly virtual community.
"In the beginning we were really afraid that the response would come only from that small band of 'computer- hackers' and BBS types you always encounter in this sort of project" says Stikker, who adds, "what you call the 'early adapters', very young kids mostly, who have grown up without a push button syndrome." Fortunately, it soon turned out that was not the case. 'Ordinary' people too, purchased a modem and went online. Yet Stikker is still far from satisfied about the rate of participation to DDS. "The digital population has a long way to go before being a true representation of the public at large." There are still far too few women, senior citizens and minority groups. A newsgroup that was set up especially for women was invaded in no time by men. Stikker: "You wouldn't believe it, all these guys were sitting there discussing women's issues. Till one of them said: look folks, if I was a woman, I wouldn't dig that!"
Women are anyway something of a rarity in the virtual community. Stikker: "That's not surprising when you see how few women are sitting in front of a computer-screen. The rot is in the education system. You just go and have a look in the terminal rooms at Eindhoven technical university (Holland's largest); out of 400 users, you'll see 2-3 females. It is only recently that news items about the Internet and the Digital Highway made inroads into the columns of magazines like 'Opzij' (a large Dutch feminist monthly) and ELLE."
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We Are No Moralists
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Stikker did not feel like interfering when the women's newsgroup became a male territory
