There are countless avenues of critical approach to the Internet society. The two issues I would like to comment on at the moment are so evident, so clearly there in front of us, that they can all too easily become invisible. One of them has to do with the Internet as a transactional medium famed for its efficiency. Many of you will recall that the praises for this efficiency were from the beginning so extreme, so exhilarated, so full of revolutionary expectation (“frictionless capitalism”!)—and, in their own narrow terms, so undeniably justified—that we should have been alarmed.

It is not hard to see that a single-minded drive toward transactional efficiency always puts the meaning and value of the transactions at risk. Not that efficiency and meaning are brutely opposed to each other. Rather, they stand in necessary creative tension with one another. This prevents us from making a goal of efficiency. If we have no aim separate from efficiency, we have no way to tell whether we are going in the right or wrong direction, and nothing by which to gauge our efficiency. So considerations of efficiency must always be linked to our goals and values. We can only be efficient if we have something to be efficient about.

The concern with efficiency alone reminds me of the airline pilot who announced to the passengers, “I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that our electronic instruments have failed, there’s solid cloud cover beneath us, and we have no idea where we’re headed. But the good news is that we’re making record time.”

Anyone who says “efficiency is everything” is saying “there are no goals and values in this enterprise (and therefore no meaningful efficiency either).” And anyone who does have goals and values must recognize that they necessarily lead away from perfect efficiency. Perfect efficiency would reflect the fact that there is no resistance to be overcome, no work to be done—and therefore no meaningful goal to be attained. In sum: we cannot achieve efficiency by aiming for it, but only by being as clearly focused on our goals as we can possibly be. At the same time, such a focus will always lead us to do things that look inefficient to a more narrowly calculating mentality.

So trying to be efficient is rather like trying to be happy. If you aim for happiness, you will be disappointed. But if instead you take on some worthwhile task in the world—a task that will doubtless require you at times to assume burdens you are not particularly happy about—you may be surprised to discover in your work and sacrifice and achievement a degree of happiness. In the same way, efficiency is an elusive, indirect, and never absolute consequence of keeping your eyes on an intrinsically meaningful goal that may demand many “inefficiencies” of you.

In more concrete terms: any two spouses and any two friends can testify that the drive for mere efficiency is the quickest way to dissolve a worthwhile human bond. If you make a goal of efficiency, people will have the unpleasant habit of distracting you and getting in your way.

This is trite. Everyone knows it. Everyone already knew it when the Net was coming along and being celebrated for its efficiency. So why were the praises of efficiency not more effectively counterbalanced by expressions of concern for the “inefficient” goals and values that might be lost sight of? It appears there are some dots we just prefer not to connect.

As for the values that are easily lost sight of amid the transactional efficiencies of the Net, let me mention just one: the value of leaving your neighbor in relative peace. The spammer could not so easily ply his trade among the neighbors on his block—not, at least, without unpleasant consequences and many jarring impacts upon whatever conscience he has. But within the sphere of frictionless capitalism, where neighbors are replaced by transactions, and marginal costs are near zero, it’s a different matter altogether.

What the psychologist Adolf Güggenbuhl-Craig has written of marriage is true in a degree of all human relationships. Marriage, he says, is

More generally, it is in the nature of all of us that we can’t avoid or ignore each other. It’s impossible. This truth is subtly expressed in all circumstances, but becomes obvious when you pass someone in an otherwise lonely place: you can’t not respond; ignoring is itself a vivid, if negative, response. There’s no escape from having to do with each other, which is our torment and also our salvation.

Nevertheless, the transactional efficiency of the Net can be seen as giving us practice in ignoring. We learn to conduct ourselves as if no one were there on the other end of the transaction—no one we needed to reckon with. And, in fact, more and more it’s a machine on the other end, or might as well be. In numerous formerly human contexts we have no choice but to adapt our responses to the machines we are dealing with; it would be silly if we did otherwise.

Digital networks continue and dramatically accentuate a longstanding trend toward depersonalized transactions in modern society. The trend is inescapable in an ever more complexly organized world. But this is not to say we’ve managed it healthily. Everything depends on our ability to find occasions for more deeply personalized transactions to counter the ever more pervasive mechanized ones, thereby keeping a grip upon our humanity. I can imagine three tracks upon which this effort might run:

Strategies such as these, I believe, offer the most straightforward answer one can give to the question, “How can we make the Net a healthy part of society?”

All this relates intimately to a second problem in the online society: the radically limited ability of the digital “landscape” to ground real communities. As a medium cultivated for its efficiency, the Net lacks most of the qualities that give people a place to dwell. It does not embody the history and tradition, it does not possess the kind of stability and social structure, and it does not present the distinctive cultural and natural contexts within which people can adequately work out their profound destinies among one another.

Again, this is trite. No theme has been more thoroughly flogged over the past decade than “place versus cyberspace.” We know by now, or should know, that there is nothing in the online world that can stand in for place. That’s just not what digital networks are for.

When, a couple of years ago, a Florida man was arrested for routing children to pornography sites on a large scale, a U.S. attorney said, “Few of us could imagine there was someone out there in cyberspace, essentially reaching out by hand to take children to the seediest corners of the Internet.” On the contrary, this is exactly what was imagined by every Net commentator worth his sociology degree in the early 90s—except that no one framed it in terms of children and seedy corners. Rather, they kept it at a clean, safe, abstract level: “the entire world at your and my fingertips.” But, of course, that meant children’s fingertips, too. How reluctant we were to connect the dots!

Yes, the world—the Internet world, with all its undoubted and now essential marvels—is at our fingertips. But, as I have already mentioned, to be a keystroke away from everywhere amounts to being nowhere in particular, and this means that making the Internet a healthy place for children is not for the time being a realistically achievable goal. There is no “place” to make healthy, no place where the way people relate to each other, where the design of houses with their private and common rooms, the layout of streets, the location of businesses, schools, and parks, the long-evolving structure of family and community relationships, the rhythms of work, study, commerce, dining, recreation, and conversation, the grounding reality of sun, breezes, rain, and mosquitoes—no place where these and a thousand other factors can come together to say, “Here you are. Your name is written into this place. You belong here, and you are safe.”

Real places become safe and healthy by virtue of an infinite material complexity of the right sort. On the Internet, by contrast, we are forced to protect children through clever technical devices whereby we may indeed contrive “streets” and “homes” and “parks.” But within this technical sphere, every clever device functions primarily to call forth a cleverer counter-device. Whereas real streets, neighbors, and watchful eyes do not disappear when a few bits are twiddled, Internet real estate is instantly movable facade.

Such is the “world” to which so many have been eager to transfer our society’s workplaces, town halls, schools, and places of recreation. I have no doubt that some transfer of function is inescapable and proper in our day. But the equivalent of a mad land rush—in this case, a government-encouraged, tax-assisted, consumer-tolerated rush to landlessness— will be catastrophic, if only due to the two causes I have cited: the destructive impact upon human affairs of mechanisms whose primary recommendation is their efficiency; and the disorientation resulting from the loss of real place, with its complex grounding and structuring role in our lives.

Real places with their social institutions allow the embodiment of endlessly varying values in different contexts— and do so in a way that encourages people to take up their position along these “value gradients” wherever they feel most comfortable. Yet all these different places can coexist as part of a larger society—a coexistence that begins with the underlying fact that the land itself is, in the end, one land, and that attempts to compromise this integrity lead to ecological calamity. Issues such as deforestation and global warming unite Amazonian Indian and Arctic Inuit in a single community of interest, even as the different character of the land also calls forth radically different local cultures.

In a real landscape, friction must be overcome in getting from here to there. This helps to explain how “here” can preserve its own character, different from “there.” Because exchange between the two places requires work and a certain dissipation of energy, the one place cannot so easily overwhelm the other.

An historical succession of ever more powerful communication technologies has progressively disturbed this delicate interweaving of local value and global diversity. The Internet promises a nearly perfected culmination of the historical trend. When screens are inserted at countless points within the differentiated cultural pattern, becoming part of the experience of most members of society, and when every one of these screens delivers anything and everything with indifferent efficiency, then the entire ordered, place-based pattern is at risk of chaotic dissolution.

When I referred above to the “catastrophic” consequences of one-sided efficiency and landlessness, I did not mean we will necessarily experience events widely recognized as catastrophic. Whatever happens will no doubt be hailed by many as “progress.” The catastrophic elements I refer to are already there for those willing to see them: for example, the ongoing scientific reconceptualization of the world and the human being as some sort of computational machinery, and the inability of children, by the time they have grown up, to experience an organic and deeply motivating connection between themselves and the larger society, or between themselves and the physical world.

Let me give one other example of what I mean by “catastrophe.” There is a relatively new world of pay-to-play Internet gaming where players can win (or lose) cash. Chris Grove, director of YouPlayGames (http://www.YouPlayGames.com), claims that the novelty of playing for money is attracting many people who were never interested in video games. “We’re taking gaming into adulthood.” That quote is from a New York Times story, which describes the games this way:

The gaming sites are designed to keep minors out, but everyone acknowledges that the barriers to admission for minors are less than perfect.

Now, I have no intention of climbing onto a moral high horse to denounce gambling. I know full well that gaming activity will appear largely innocuous to many and will be debated and defended forever, just as the effects of television upon children are. The more dramatic, potentially catastrophic point, for me, is not the gambling as such, but rather the fact that we will have so easily and casually invited young people around the world into this new activity—and no actual community will have done anything at all of the sort that was once required to create a place, the conditions, the cultural surroundings, the human context within which the activity occurs. The young people will have been lifted out of their communities and into this new recreation, not because some sort of rooted and coherent evolution of the communities is taking place, but simply because a worldless world is now at our fingertips and someone sitting alone in front of a screen came up with a workable combination of digital bits. The levity of it all—the ease and thoughtlessness and disconnection and vapidity and grave cultural consequence—these are what worry me. We have gotten ourselves into a situation where a teenager, with no real sense for what he is doing, can to one degree or another reprogram every community in our society.

So what am I suggesting? Only that it is time, finally, to bring certain long-recognized truths into our social and personal decision making. There are always trade-offs in the pursuit of efficiency, and this implies a tremendous burden of responsibility for those engaged in the pursuit; and, likewise, every time we dissolve a place into placelessness, we also dissolve an incalculable amount of materially incarnated social and cultural capital.

When we take these truths seriously, we will no longer so easily conclude that “more efficient” or “cheaper” signifies “better.” Nor will we take it for granted that using investment and tax policy to encourage rapid adoption of networking technologies is an obvious and unqualified good for society; we will be more inclined to look for massive hidden costs. And we will not stigmatize as “backward” a school that opts out of computer-based curricula—especially if this school is focused upon fashioning vibrant places where kids can belong.

Most of all, we may rediscover within ourselves a new soil in which the delicate flower of idealism can thrive. The problem with the rank idealism of the Net’s early days was that it was vested in the redemptive powers of the technology itself. This was bound to disappoint. A true idealism is voiced in the expression of our own ideals as we find within ourselves the resources to put them into practice. And we can put them into practice, on the Internet as elsewhere. To the degree we do this, we may hope to discover a pathway through our present discontents and make the Internet a worthy, if presumably limited, expression of a healthy society. The alternative is to watch society become an unhealthy expression of the Internet.