https://www.theguardian.

com/commentisfree/2020/mar/29/coronavirus-fears-rediscover-
utopian-hopes-connected-world

Amid our fear, we’re rediscovering utopian hopes of a connected world

Sun 29 Mar 2020 09.00 BSTLast modified on Mon 30 Mar 2020 14.34 BST

The coronavirus blitz spirit has focused our interest on networks that
make us stronger – the NHS, the BBC and the internet itself

If this is the worst of times, it is also the best of times. In our anxiety we are drawing deep reserves
of strength from others. In our isolation we are rediscovering community. In our confusion we are
rethinking whom we trust. In our fragmentation we are rediscovering the value of institutions. To
each their own narrative or metaphor. If this feels like the blitz spirit to you, all well and good. Others
find it helps to imagine a world recast through virtual networks.

But what it amounts to is this: there is such a thing as society and we are all interdependent. And if
it sometimes takes a grave crisis to remind ourselves of these truths, then this moment may well be
historic for the possibilities of hope as well as for all the tragedy and turmoil.

Nearly 200 years ago, the French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the power we
have been re-experiencing over the past few weeks: “In democratic countries knowledge of how to
combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the
others.” At least three forms of combination have blossomed in the present crisis: the NHS,
the BBC and the internet itself.

It is difficult to see how the NHS will not emerge stronger from this pandemic, however traumatic
and stressful the coming months will be. We get the service we pay for. It would take an unusually
obtuse future government to be blind to the signals sent by three quarters of a million volunteers or
the echoing applause of people across the nation in the past few days.

The BBC is having its moment, too. Only a month ago it seemed on the ropes – the bizarre target of
the obsessional figure who sits at the prime minister’s right hand. Dominic Cummings had long
nursed a loathing for the corporation, with his thinktank willing its demise more than 15 years ago.
The aim was to replace it with a “Fox News equivalent”, along with talk-radio shows and bloggers
“to shift the centre of gravity”.

Today such aspirations look like lunacy, as they did even then. Fox News has shown its true
colours during the Covid-19 emergency, parroting the wildly erratic line from an increasingly
dangerously deluded White House. Fox is these days less a news company than an oligarchically
owned state broadcaster.

The BBC, meanwhile, has been doing what it does best: providing reliable and trustworthy
information to a huge audience – both broadcast and online, both young and old. On any surveys of
trust it towers over other news organisations as well as other institutions in society.

Again, it is difficult to imagine any sane administration wanting to diminish the national, international
and local reach of the BBC for the foreseeable future – far less hand over our national spine of
communication and conversation to the Murdoch family and a bunch of talk-radio hosts.

Three and a half years ago we’d apparently had enough of experts. They seem to be back. More
understandably, many were convinced the original dream of the world wide web was dead and
buried. Maybe, today, not so much.

In our self-isolation, many of us have rediscovered some of the things that inspired such cause for
hope when the web first demonstrated the power of combination. How many of us have relied on it
for friends, food, family, education, health, fitness, worship, ideas, culture, ideas and knowledge
over the past week or more?

Think of all the other utopian words that were associated with this new form of self-organisation
barely a decade ago. Here are some: generosity, community, participation, sharing, openness,
cooperation, sociability, learning, assembling, imagination, creativity, innovation, experimentation,
fairness, equality, publicness, citizenship, mutuality, combinability, common resource, information,
respect, discourse, conversation, contribution.

All these things seemed within our grasp. And then a kind of darkness stole over that shared space
and we gradually began to give up on what, we soon convinced ourselves, had only ever been a
lovely dream.

Well, maybe. And of course – unlike the NHS or the BBC – there is a genuine malign aspect to the
way in which so many people have twisted the web’s capabilities into an engine of hatred,
misinformation and bleakness. That will not wither away: there is a different kind of virality in play
there.

But, in the end, the internet simply amplifies who we are. As the New York academic Clay
Shirky wrote in his 2010 book, Cognitive Surplus: “Human character is the essential component of
our sociable and generous behaviours, even when coordinated with high-tech tools. Interpretations
of those behaviours that focus on the technology miss the point: technology enables those
behaviours, but it doesn’t cause them.”

Surveys of trust since Covid-19 began to bite show people re-evaluating whom to believe. They,
overwhelmingly, trust the NHS and – still – the BBC. They absolutely trust experts. They rely on
mainstream news organisations while proclaiming low levels of trust in journalists as a category.
They are inclined to trust their own employer – but not as much as they trust “a person like
yourself”.

In Shirky’s 10-year-old analysis, trust in the world today is dependent on perceptions of motive. Why
is this person telling me this? Is it for money, power or some kind of personal or political advantage?
Or is it out of genuine disinterest? A respect for evidence? A feeling, in Shirky’s words, that “by
treating one another well (fairly, if not always nicely) we can create environments where the group
can do more than the individuals could on their own”.

There will be much stress and sorrow in the months ahead. But a kind of better future feels quite
tangible. Love, humanity and combination may yet win.

Alan Rusbridger

Chair of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and is a senior adviser to WATATAWA
communications consultancy