Writers and urban planners for years have mapped and envisioned the ideal society through designing utopian metropolises. This is my own interpretation and glimpse into a version of a “webtopia,” a re-imagining meant as a prompt for discussing democracy and citizenship on the Web.

We might begin to think of the Internet as a public infrastructure or a spatial experience akin to walking a city’s streets. We navigate through the vague surrealism of unexplained flashing images and flash graphics; however, without the same binding of civic infrastructure and citizenship, without our ties to the streets, we comparatively navigate a corporate labyrinth—an endless mall. It is a spectacle of passive engagement, wherein we consume information, commodities, and products while hardly holding a stake in its architecture. As Google strives to unleash infinite knowledge at our fingertips and YouTube and other Web services promote do-it-yourself content creation, our productive capabilities are exploited. We might question if the intellectual value of a Web-user really drives these companies or whether they instead mean to attract our passive gaze into the corporate consumer spectacle, only interested in the activity of our wallets. These applications and services are by no means free; we pay by submitting ourselves to billions of dollars in advertising spent to follow and manipulate our habits. Furthermore, the content we generate through “free” e-mail, social networking, Web applications, etc. is scanned, exploited, and sold as marketing analytic research. Is our content, then, really our own?

Can we begin to maybe imagine a Web experience prefaced upon citizenship before consumerism? If we ever intend to renegotiate the intellectual foundation and potential of the Web, one option might be its decommercialization. The free-use Internet of the public is hinged and supported by advertising dollars. A new public space could be founded via one of two avenues: a not-for-profit Wikipedia approach or socialization, an Internet owned, financed, and governed by the people.

The illustration above is a vision of a new interface, a “citizen portal” akin to Google’s centralized “iGoogle”. These would be the new public-domain passages and highways of the Web, owned and operated by the people and designed to encourage and praise democratic participation. Currently, the Internet, as a public space, and its Web-architecture are owned and regulated by only a handful of corperations—Google, Microsoft, Yahoo (much like the big three in television broadcasting). Google’s own page layout and interface (its line weights, color schemes, etc.) are designed to optimize its advertising revenue.  A noncommercial, government-sponsored  provider seems worthy of experiment—a PBS alternative to the Internet.

Now imagine how e-learning might be better respected if its platform, the Internet, became a nexus of civic pride. I’m twenty years old, and my peers and I remain skeptical of online learning because of its highly commercial platform—the Web. Education seems diluted into a material good for consumption, rather than active engagement, when a Web-forum discussion on Plato is a click away from penis-enlargement pills. Furthermore, e-learning presents the prospect of increased hours spent online by youth, a goldmine for commerce and advertising, as students can be easily distracted from any academic essay to Walmart.com within seconds.

When re-imagining the Internet, we must seriously consider and reflect upon how we navigate physical space, how we embed our values into the infrastructure and organization of our cities. Knowledge and education are often perceived as pillars of democracy not as IPOs or aisles in the mall. But perhaps the disorderly nature of the Web allows for the unexpected positioning of otherwise segregated forms of information. A platform coupling Penis enlargement and Plato might liberate higher education from its pedestal—its perceived irrelevancy trapped behind the gates of academia.