Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


NAME:
Alan Shaw
WHAT HE DOES:
Creates ways for communities to organize online
LATEST TRIUMPH:
Wiring a New Jersey housing project

With the Internet making the world smaller and smaller, it makes sense, says Alan Shaw, that neighborhoods shrink as well. “If technology can make it easy to communicate with people in China, why not with the person next door?”

In 1993, as a graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab, Shaw created a computer bulletin board system called the Multi-User Sessions in Community (MUSIC). With an $8,000 Wood Foundation grant, he moved Apple computers and high-speed modems into a dozen homes in his working-class Boston neighborhood of Dorchester and hooked them up to MUSIC. Within weeks, residents–some of whom had never met before–logged onto the system and organized a food co-op, a newsletter, and crime watches.

Dorchester is just the first stop. A school board used Shaw’s MUSIC plan to help outfit a housing project in Newark, N.J., with home computers, launching an online community of more than 70 people. Lynette Tucker, a 29-year-old mother of two, says, “Before, if I saw a person from the neighborhood walking on the street, carrying grocery bags, if they weren’t a family member I might just see them and keep on going. Now people will stop and help.”

More MUSIC is planned for a lower-class Chicago neighborhood, and for a statewide program reaching into rural Mississippi. “It’s exposing people to technology,” Shaw says, “and giving them a voice they might otherwise not have.”

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate