The recent hacker attacks on the Internet and the sense of widespread alarm they have generated illustrate both the pervasive influence and the dangers of the current technological revolution.

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, there were 50 Web pages worldwide. Today, there are more than 50 million. In 1992, e-commerce did not exist; this year, its retail level will reach $50 billion.

Many view these changes as beyond human control. But in fact, human control over this revolution is precisely what needs to be reasserted. We need an ``e-Commons'' to balance e-commerce.

Last month, the Humphrey Institute's Center for Democracy and Citizenship helped organize a national conference on this topic. We explored how ordinary citizens, joining with knowledge industries and government, can use technologies to build healthy communities and improve public life, rather than fragment communities, lock us up into individual households or erode our democracy.

The range, scope and creativity of work was striking. Libraries and schools across the country are reinventing themselves as ``civic centers,'' and working with newspapers in the process. Citizens are creating neighborhood Web pages and on-line conversations about public issues. It also became clear that these efforts are part of something larger, with resemblance to the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s in which I worked as a teen-ager.

In 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation, but neither the courts nor politicians could achieve integration. Only a movement that enlisted the civic talents of citizens could accomplish this.

This meant returning to older concepts of the citizen as a ``co-creator'' of our communities, our public institutions and our democracy, ideas eclipsed by consumerism and the focus on private life in the 1950s.

When Martin Luther King Jr. described the movement (in ``Letter From a Birmingham Jail'') as ``bringing the entire nation back to the great wells of democracy that were dug deep by the founding fathers,'' he was getting at this question. The movement sought to ``realize the promise of democracy'' for African-Americans and also to recall what democracy meant.

King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference sponsored hundreds of ``citizenship schools.'' ``What is a citizen?'' was the first question asked. Leaders like Dorothy Cotton or Andrew Young posed it to those gathered in church basements and beauty parlors.

As participants struggled with the answers, they came to see themselves as ``first-class citizens.'' And that meant work on community problems like sewers and roads and dilapidated schools, as well as voting. ``Nobody is going to solve these problems for us,'' Cotton would say. Government could be a resource, but people had to take on civic responsibility.

The movement dismantled legal segregation, though it did not end America's racial divisions. Segregation's legacy remains in the ``digital divide.''

Among families earning between $15,000 and $35,000 annually, more than 33 percent of whites own computers, compared with only 19 percent of African-Americans.

Yet as important as questions of discrimination continue to be, the revolution we are in also has other dangers. And the civic legacy of the freedom movement is, itself, an enormous untapped resource to address them.

New technologies are like a genie out of the bottle. There are many positives. New technologies feed economic growth. The ``global village'' becomes ever more a reality. The spread of the Web undermines repressive governments.

Yet the new technology also feeds concern that materialistic values threaten human value, that family life and privacy are endangered by growing concentrations of wealth and power, that mass culture is producing ``more and more of less and less.''

To cite one example of the dangers, the Internet, the VCR, cable television and CD-ROMs have resulted in a explosion in the pornography industry. Revenues now total between $10 billion and $20 billion annually -- more than Americans pay for sporting events and live music combined. Political leaders and experts cannot tame this genie by themselves.

Past challenges facing our nation -- the struggle to end racial segregation, the Great Depression, the struggle against fascism -- required the energy, talents and wisdom of the whole citizenry. These were called forth by leaders with vision.

Today, again, we need leaders at every level who call forth civic agency. The technological revolution is an occasion, a challenge and a resource.

In the Humphrey Institute conference, we saw many examples of how citizens are overcoming dangers and strengthening community life. There are other signs of a new citizenship in many other arenas, from K-12 school reform and higher education to environmental restoration and public journalism.

Candidates who take up the challenge of citizenship will find a responsive audience.

Boyte is a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey Institute and co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship. E-mail him at hboyte@hhh.umn.edu .

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© 2000 PioneerPlanet / St. Paul (Minnesota) Pioneer Press