Bloomsday Virtually Builds A Community

Virtual Bloomsday doesn’t exist.

You can’t go on-line to run this software.

This user group huffs and puffs in real time, real life.

The batteries can get low after an hour or two, but Bloomsday isn’t a cyberspace community.

It’s a real one, where the chat line extends back five blocks.

The differences between cyberspace and the Bloomsday race are important to consider right now.

Much smoke is being blown by Microsoftians about the value, the promise and the inevitability of a future world with little but Intel Inside.

In cyberspace, the vision of community begins with a bonding built around modems, our intellects stimulated by information sent via the Internet from all parts of the globe.

No need to leave home.

No need to run into people who don’t think as we do.

This, the cyberspaceologists say, will be a huge part of community life of the 21st century.

Huh? This sounds as bad as wolfing down a big plate of sausage and eggs just for the race, an idea that could make all of us really sick.

The meaning of community happens on the streets of Spokane this morning.

The computer goes dark.

People leave their houses.

Friends of the Militia of Montana will rub running shorts with federal workers who have also come to run.

The community gathers not on line and isolated, but in the streets for a common purpose.

Old and young, rich and poor, fat and skinny, Republican, Democrat, Independent, they show up to participate.

The community brings quite different people together in a public venue, where they agree to follow a few simple rules, then make their way at their own pace.

This combination of bringing diverse people together in a public place for a common purpose where a few rules guide all on individual journeys, stands as an ancient and enduring model for community.

The alternative model is being much discussed and furiously promoted.

By the year 2010, three out of every four American households will be wired for interactive computer services, according to Strategic Futures Inc..

At workshops and seminars in almost every industry and institution, this day 15 years hence is being presented as a liberated time when everyone can be their own mayor, own publisher and own at-home shopper.

Except that when everyone is a mayor, no one is.

And will this experience of going solo on all the communications, all the shared experiences of community, actually fulfill the heart, mind and soul?

Will it have the excitement of a Bloomsday morning, where real human beings press together, with real goose bumps at the sound of the gun going off?

In his book “Silicon Snake Oil,” which was reviewed recently in Time magazine, Cyberspace veteran Clifford Stoll argues that the virtual community must never take the place of the real.

“Life in the real world is far more interesting, far more important, far richer, than anything you’ll ever find on a computer screen,” he writes.

At 9 this morning you will see the living, breathing proof on the streets of Spokane.

Real community events such as Bloomsday tap into something far more emotional, far more substantial, far more lasting than a world on a screen.

The computer, of course, offers a tremendous assist to a genuine community event.

Every finishing time will be sorted on a computer and then published in the newspaper tomorrow.

Reporters covering Bloomsday this year used the computer to crunch numbers and discover that more than 4,000 runners fibbed about their estimated finish times today by subtracting an hour or more from their actual finish times last year - in order to assure a better starting place this year.

Computers assisted the reporters in discovering that runners from Boulder, Colo., and Big Timber, Mont., have the fastest average times for any townspeople in the race.

And, tomorrow, the computer will calculate the fastest 100 Spokane residents to run Bloomsday.

The hardware and software of the electronic age provide powerful, imaginative tools to a community.

Family and friends can send e-mail about the race.

As early as next year, runners will be able to look up their times on-line as this newspaper’s on-line service begins to be more active.

But to actually be part of this event in this place on the first Sunday of May, requires you to be here in a genuine, living community.

Accept no subsititute. There is none.

xxxx