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A history of computer-facilitated networked sociality (part1) For a History of The Social Web http://tinyurl.com/2c6vc2 ...
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How the Social Web Came to Be
Trebor ScholzDepartment of Media [email protected]
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0
part 1
A history of computer-mediated networked sociality
Part 1: 1945-2001
Part 2: 2002- today
Is the history of the Social Web, solely a history of mergers and acquisitions, sales, and new markets?
Whose history do we write?Whom does it serve?
This history is filtered through the lens of the following questions:
•To whom do we owe most innovation on the Social Web?
•Where was the Social Web created?
•What motivated early programmers/users of the Internet?
•How did the initial move from research to commerce take place
•What were significant milestones in the scaling up of social life on
the Internet?
•What were some preconditions for this development?
•Which content did people focus on? What were they interested in?
•What were milestones in the design on the WWW?
Pre-history
1797 optical telegraphy
1746 200 monks Jean-Antoine Nollet linked to electrical battery
The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (1989)
http://tinyurl.com/2tmou3
1844:Samuel Morse’ first telegraph message was:
“What Hath God Wrought”
http://tinyurl.com/2vgfqk
The invention of the Internet in context
1945
hyperlinked pages and the “memex”
"knowledge on call"
http://tinyurl.com/3b7h9vhttp://tinyurl.com/39mf8l
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
- Vannevar Bush; As We May Think; Atlantic Monthly; July 1945
In 1949 in his novel Heliopolis, the German Ernst Junger dreams up the communication medium "Phonophor," which connects everybody to everybody else, enabling a permanent , technically facilitated forum that also replaces the passport, watch, newspaper, library, and encyclopedia.
http://tinyurl.com/2s2zn5
[A]ctivation; authorship; community -- are the most frequently cited motivations for almost all artistic attempts to encourage participation in art since the 1960s." according to art historian Claire Bishop.
1952
John Cage 4’33”
1957
Launch of Sputnik on4 October 1957 can be compared to Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, or 9/11 in its effect on the American psyche
http://tinyurl.com/32n7hq
The Advanced Research Projects Agency
1961
Leonard Kleinrock, MIT"Information Flow in LargeCommunication Nets" (May 31 1961)
First paper on packet-switching
http://tinyurl.com/23nbat
“On Distributed Communication Networks,” March 1964c) a network without central authority or single outage point Paul Baran
http://tinyurl.com/ywq8nk
1962
Packet Switching, Paul Baran 1962 at RAND, US Airforce
All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at some other specified destination node.
http://tinyurl.com/2ry3lo
IP, or "Internet Protocol," handles the addressing, seeing to it that packets are routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple networks with multiple standards
http://tinyurl.com/3dsb7g
TCP, or "Transmission Control Protocol," converts messages into streams of packets at the source, then reassembles them back into messages at the destination.
http://tinyurl.com/2ry3lo
1965
Ted Nelson coins the term "Hypertext" in "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate". 20th National Conference, New York, Association for Computing Machinery
First email 1965
Already in 1965, Fernando Corbato and his colleagues at MIT developed a program to allow individual users to swap messages on one single computer.
1968
"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a
machine than face to face...We believe that we are entering into a technological age,
in which we will be able to interact with the richness of living information -- not
merely in the passive way that we have become accustomed to using books and
libraries, but as active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it
through our interaction with it, and not simply receiving something from it by our
connection to it. (53)"
http://tinyurl.com/2c9uaf
Louis Pouzin designed and directed the development of the Cyclades network in France, which then stopped in 1974.
http://tinyurl.com/22ykun
1969
1969: Advanced Research Projects Agency commissions ARPANET to conduct research on networking.
First ARPANET nodes connected UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and University of Utah
http://tinyurl.com/2pxazn
In 1968, ARPA sent out a Request for Quotation to build a network of four Interface Message Processors.BBN made it.
Dave Walden, Bernie Cosell, Severo Ornstein, Will Crowther, Bob Kahn
http://tinyurl.com/2ujdes
http://tinyurl.com/yuw6ho
Norm Abramson wanted to surf - so he moved to Hawaii in 1969. He wanted to network with the other islands and so he built the ALOHAnet in 1970.
From the University of Hawaii, Abramson connected computers over a network of radio transmitters using a protocol telling the computers how to share the airwaves.
http://tinyurl.com/yvvmdc
1970
http://tinyurl.com/yvvmdc
TCP/IP
http://tinyurl.com/3c64vm
With TCP/IP, the "global network" was becoming a reality. Universities and government offices were using the network for communicating with colleagues and exchanging data.
1974: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection", which specified in detail the design of a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
Also the fax machine is only useful if many other people have it.
http://tinyurl.com/yu7g2m
Later: If the Internet would have just connected supercomputers, it would have not been as significant.
Whose Standards? Proprietary or Open Standards?
“The Internet's "anarchy" may seem strange or even unnatural, but it makes a certain deep and basic sense. It's rather like the "anarchy" of the English language. Nobody rents English, and nobody owns English. As an English-speaking person, it's up to you to learn how to speak English properly and make whatever use you please of it (though the government provides certain subsidies to help you learn to read and write a bit).”
Sterling, Bruce. "Short History of the Internet by Bruce Sterling." College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the. 1 Feb 1993. 4 Sep 2007 <http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/AIM/scale/nethistory.html>.
The TCP/IP protocol allowed different networks to connect together into one big network - the Inter-net.
http://tinyurl.com/yory85
As the use of TCP/IP became more common, it was difficult to stop people from barging in and linking up somewhere-or-other. The software TCP/IP was public-domain and the basic technology was decentralized and rather anarchic by its very nature.
http://tinyurl.com/2ry3lo
http://tinyurl.com/29vvarPowWow
Throughout the 1970s Instant Messaging began to appear
1971
1971: Ray Tomlinson of BBN creates email program to send messages across a distributed network.
1972: Tomlinson expands program to ARPANET users, using the "@" sign as part of the address.
http://tinyurl.com/34gyk2
Project Gutenberg is the"oldest digital library built on volunteerefforts to digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works."
Michael Hart
1971. Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks.
http://tinyurl.com/26zq8z
1977
1977 Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw created the first MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) leading later to MMORPG
http://tinyurl.com/35drka
http://tinyurl.com/2n5gvy
1978
CBBS (first BBS)Ward Christensen
http://tinyurl.com/38zf8q
January of 1978, Chicago was hit by the Great Blizzard of 1978
http://tinyurl.com/3a8wru
Many people did not have the Internet. They dialed in to CBSS directly via modem. Users had to take turns accessing the system, each hanging up when done to let someone else have access. Nevertheless, the system was seen as very useful, and ran for many years and inspired the creation of many other bulletin board systems.
1979
1979 Kevin MacKenzie e-mailed his fellow subscribers at MsgGroup, an early Internet bulletin board, with a suggestion to put some emotion back into the dry text medium of e-mail. (The eyes came later.)
Emoticons
USENET established. USENET was a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that provided mail services and file transfers. Precursor of GoogleGroups and other discussion boards.
http://tinyurl.com/2mdk3z
http://tinyurl.com/yqgc6h
Cover of COMPUTER Magazine from September 1979
1980s
What else did it take to make this WWW thing work?
http://tinyurl.com/2km2n9
This was the first IBM PC introduced on Aug 12, 1981
http://tinyurl.com/3c7suuDouglas Engelbart
The Well members could start discussion boards:the most popular one was dedicated toThe Grateful Dead.
Mid-80s computer manufacturers push proprietary protocols,
which failed
US Government pushed for ISO but TCP/IP was free, more viral
In the 1980s the PCs entered homes and offices in the United States.
The Well members could start discussion boards:the most popular one was dedicated toThe Grateful Dead.
1981 BITNET release “Because It’s There” | “Because It’s Time”Ira Fuchs (CUNY) and Greydon Freeman (Yale) Main features: email, LISTSERV
http://tinyurl.com/2cl3go
pre-www
http://tinyurl.com/2vxfbj
BITNET set expectations for free access and openness: it charged by bandwidth. Once you paid for the line, how much you use it was up to you. Others tried to establish a pay by byte system.
1985 Stewart Brand & Larry Brilliant one of the first community bulletin board systemsThe Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (The Well)
Brand used a networked PC on his houseboat in Sasalito, CA, claiming that he did so in order to experience commune living without actually moving into one.
http://tinyurl.com/374e2g
The Well members started many discussion boards.The most popular one was dedicated to The Grateful Dead.
In 1993:The Well as paradigm of ``virtual community''people meet, collaborate, argue, support each other emotionally
http://tinyurl.com/33h4ulhttp://tinyurl.com/33jt6z
Tom Grundner - prof. family medicinemaking community health information publicfounder of the Cleveland Free-Net became National Public Telecomputing Networkinfluential ... community-oriented, free-nets
http://tinyurl.com/2739fahttp://tinyurl.com/3akjec
Late-1980s: Networking took first steps outside academia
1984
http://tinyurl.com/ynkmby
Francois Lyotard and Thierry Chaput’s exhibition "Les Immateriaux” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. 30 artists collaboratively respond to 50 terms related the topic of the "immaterial." Lyotard and Chaput pointed out that they were mainly interested in the way, in which this collaborative writing changed the experience of the act of writing itself.
1987
LucasFilm's Habitatearly and technologically influential online role-playing gamefirst attempt to monetize a large-scale virtual community
http://tinyurl.com/29vvar
1989
http://tinyurl.com/yto62g
CERN -- a place where scientist do incomprehensible things with tiny bits of matter out of pure curiosity, a lab
specializing in the most esoteric form of research imaginable
The British programmer Tim Berners-Lee, CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire)
WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project, 1989/90
http://tinyurl.com/2pxazn
HTML (HyperText Markup Language)URL (Uniform Resource Locator)HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)
... the WWW as an altruistic, non-proprietary, vendor-neutral contribution to society!
Keeping the software free is what allowed the WWW to take off.
http://tinyurl.com/2ntycb
1990
Cailliau, Robert, and James Gillies. How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. p90New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2000.
1990:30,000
1991: 100,000
1992:500,000
Internet sites in Europe
http://tinyurl.com/3bqudr
ARPANET retired and transferred to the NSFnet(National Science Foundation) that had started in 1988, connecting 250 non-US networks by 1990
Vint Cerf: “Requiem for the ARPANET”
“And so, at last, we knew its course had run,Our faithful servant, ARPANET, was done.It was the first, and being the first, as best,But now we lay it down to ever rest.”
Cailliau, Robert, and James Gillies. How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2000.
John Perry Barlow, worked with Grateful Dead, was part of The Well, and co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Stuart Brand and Mitch Kapor in 1990, focusing on digital civil liberties.
1991
August 1991: CERN releases WWW December 1991: 600,000 users connected to Internet
http://tinyurl.com/kn8fr
http://tinyurl.com/ysj22q
The early nineties were marked by the increasing use of the term "social software" in expert circles and
Benjamin Anderson's book "Imagined Communi t ies"(1991) inspired In t erne t en t husias t s who just started to believe in a world wi t hou t borders. In his book Anderson describes t he na t ion s t a t e as an imagined communi t y t ha t is mainly constructed by print media.
http://tinyurl.com/2yul9f
In 1991, the NSF allowed commercial use of the Internet, however, for the first time, and in 1995, it decommissioned the backbone, leaving the Internet a self-supporting industry.
http://tinyurl.com/2pxaznhttp://tinyurl.com/34ket8
Official policy for the Internet forbid anyone from using the network for personal gain or anything that didn't have a job-related function.
http://tinyurl.com/29m2wb
Launch of Gopher, the "infoserver that can deliver text, graphics, audio, and multimedia to clients." Search and retrieval network protocol designed for the Internet. Its goal is to function as an improved form of Anonymous FTP, with features similar to that of the World Wide Web. The University of Minnesota.
1992
1992 Marc Andreessen (b. 1971, 6’4”) undergraduate University of Illinois
protocols for the WWW from CERN
created more fun and user-friendlygraphical interface for PC and Mac. together with other students Andreessencreated the Mosaic browser
1994 Andreessen founded Netscape to market it as the university did not approve of commercial spin-off
http://tinyurl.com/yo24huhttp://tinyurl.com/282qw8
1.5 years later: 65 million users (see also: Linux)
(the most rapidly assimilated product in history)
Brewster Kahle
WAIS Incorporated:“It wanted to prove that you could make an Internet company.”
After selling WAIS to AOL in May 1995 for $15 million, Kahle and Gilliat founded the Internet Archive and then Alexa Internet.
Bruce Gilliat
p 136 how the web was born
http://tinyurl.com/2rencwhttp://tinyurl.com/yqtupv
1993
For a brief period, gopher and the World Wide Web were competing
systems. In 1993, however, CERN projected that the World Wide Web
would be free to anyone (no fees). Two months later, Gopher announced
that it was no longer free to use, which pushed users away from gopher
to the World Wide Web, which experienced a 350% growth rate that
year (mainly in US).
http://tinyurl.com/2pxazn
WWW Gopherpublic domain for purchase
p 279 how the web was born
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=447183492&size=l
1993 most significant milestone in the popularization of the WWW
launch of Mosaic web browser (this was possible because WWW was public domain)
early versions of Mosaic: collaboration feature to allow annotations, which could be shared with a well-defined team of collaborators
http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/dinos/dinos.1.html
1994
You can now, finally, order pizza online.
Web has a 341,634 % expansion rate in 94
In 2007, one billion people are online.
http://tinyurl.com/3xpdne
Woodstock of the Webfirst web conference at CERN in 1994
http://tinyurl.com/2uz4bd
1994CERN does not sufficiently support WWW.Europe’s bureaucracy makes funding difficult and standards harder to establish.Berners-Lee moves to MIT where he heads the W3 consortium.
http://tinyurl.com/yrjmy8
W3C AmericaW3C Europe
1995 1/5 of all Internet traffic is caused by WWW, taking over ftp’s leading role
p 258 How the web was born
http://tinyurl.com/29ffra
1993 De Digitale Stad ("The Digital City") launched (De Balie & XS4ALL)
publicly accessible (free-net) system
goal: bringing politics and citizens together in an online community
“a social experiment in Internet freedom“ (Geert Lovink)
the attempt of staying independent in an increasingly commercial environment
Justin Hall (b. 1974 in Chicago) is an American freelance journalist who is best known as a pioneer blogger
http://tinyurl.com/yjr6pq
1995
Dec 26, 1996
http://tinyurl.com/25dhkl
The Thing BBS Feb 08, 2004
The Thing, NYC
http://tinyurl.com/2y5yt8Wolfgang Staehle
http://tinyurl.com/32awehhttp://tinyurl.com/3bdyvj
Feb 08, 1999
http://tinyurl.com/368x5o
Mar 01, 2000
Founded 1995, First successfully archived: Jan 25, 1999 Online Dating, 15 million users, 37 countries
Security breachesBilling scandals
http://tinyurl.com/2fywza
Wiki Wiki bus at the HonoluluInternational Airport
Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and installed it on the Internet in 1995 allowing for the emergence of
http://tinyurl.com/ypo99http://tinyurl.com/26utwbhttp://tinyurl.com/2qqsbh
1996
http://tinyurl.com/ynlwje
users could write
reviews and consumer
guides, an early form
of web-based self-
publishing
“Amazon was founded in 1994, spurred by what Jeff Bezos refers to as his "regret minimization framework," i.e. his effort to fend off late-in-life regret for not staking a claim in the Internet gold rush.”
In 2007, worldwide, Amazon has "over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs (http://tinyurl.com/q7zfe)
http://tinyurl.com/33tmd8
http://tinyurl.com/38w7n5http://tinyurl.com/2ll4ffhttp://tinyurl.com/2ll4ffhttp://tinyurl.com/2rgezy
http://tinyurl.com/3dq7l8
http://tinyurl.com/2vd94j
first archived, Nov 29, 1999 searchable user classifieds, open
http://tinyurl.com/2vd94j
Craigslist site: first archived, Nov 29, 1999 searchable user classifieds, open
dated: 29 December 1999
Our policies ... taking it personally and very seriously. We take every kind of abuse very seriously, and in every case Craig will contact the abusive party and ask them to cease.
1995 School, Work, Military Connections
1996
1996 Sweden, Denmark, UK teens, tweens open Lunarstorm1,200,000 users. 2007: closed
Social Networking
http://tinyurl.com/3x8xt6http://tinyurl.com/3c69yf
first archived Apr 08, 2000
Manuel Castells (1942) http://tinyurl.com/39gtmvhttp://tinyurl.com/2pg78k
The “most decisive historical factor accelerating, channeling and shaping the information
technology paradigm, and inducing its associated social forms, was/is the process of capitalist restructuring undertaken since the 1980s, so that the new techno-economic system can be
adequately characterized as informational capitalism” (p18)
Castells argued that in contemporary society dominant functions and processes are increasingly
organized around networks.
1997
Rob Malda , aka. CmdrTaco
(1976)
photo:"Scott Beale / Laughing Squid"http://tinyurl.com/ngdkjhttp://tinyurl.com/dr92g
readers can comment
http://tinyurl.com/2f9axa
John Barger(1952, blogger,
Ohio)
Blogging: the art and science of pointing at each other
http://tinyurl.com/2q7yawhttp://tinyurl.com/2erjhvhttp://tinyurl.com/2hstek
blogging: the art and science of pointing at each other
Massification of voice
In 1995, the Asian American community site AsianAvenue.com kicked off (without social networking features). First waybackmachine entry for AsianAve.com 1998. http://tinyurl.com/2nk74m
Pierre Lévy
http://tinyurl.com/yvb4alIn Collective Intelligence, Lévy investigates the affordances of networked sociality http://tinyurl.com/2de683
“Through the intermediary of virtual worlds, we can not only exchange information but think together, share our memories and our plans to produce a cooperative brain." -- Pierre Lévy, from Collective Intelligence
http://tinyurl.com/yuo2ba
http://tinyurl.com/2zgpxh
Eric S. Raymond presented his essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar (CatB) at the Linux Kongress in Berlin.
1997. 2nd largest auction site http://tinyurl.com/34pkl5
1998
Indian social networking site Sulekha was set into motion.
http://tinyurl.com/ysfgoq
Jan 25, 1999
Feb 06, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/2gu2j9
http://tinyurl.com/24aws2
1998. DMOZ, founded as GnuHoo involves geographically dis t ributed individuals to evalua te websi t es, crea t ing a user-powered search engine.
http://tinyurl.com/35w5ej
Apr 17, 1999 Sept, 2007
1999
http://tinyurl.com/2dnhmy
May 10, 2000
http://tinyurl.com/37zrsrhttp://tinyurl.com/33n692
Relational Aesthetics Nicolas Bourriaud engages with the possibility of "relational art"
based on the practices of artists who became visible
during the 1990s.
Peter Hoschka introduces the term Social Web, Peter Merholz coined the term “blog,” and Rusty Foster (below)created Kuro5hin.
http://tinyurl.com/2deegjhttp://tinyurl.com/2yu6w7
http://tinyurl.com/ytggb5
a collaborative weblog where users votefor what goes to the front page
http://tinyurl.com/2sgcz2
Shawn "Napster" Fanning (b. 1980)
Napster was the first popular peer-to-peer file sharing platform.
http://tinyurl.com/2lhmmq
the 18-year-old college student whose school nickname was "Napster," along with his friend Sean Parker first released the original Napster on June 1, 1999.
African-Americans, 16,000,000 users (2007) http://tinyurl.com/k2jhx
Oct 11, 1999http://tinyurl.com/2lqxfe
http://tinyurl.com/353pmk
Pyra Labs creates Blogger.com
2000
http://tinyurl.com/2madla
Commercially the Internet started to catch on in 1995 with an estimated 18 million users. This untapped international market made speculators ecstatic about the “new economy.”
http://tinyurl.com/38zy97
too much too fast
http://tinyurl.com/yrkjya
http://tinyurl.com/26ppkw
To whom do we owe most innovation on the Social Web? (Where are the women?)
Yahoo
Paypal YouTube
http://www.slideshare.net/beppe/saul-klein-at-the-next-web-conference
photo:"Scott Beale / Laughing Squid"http://tinyurl.com/ngdkj
Slashdot
Conclusion Part1
Permanently beta
Research out of pure curiosity led to Internet
While the Social Web is available worldwide, sites like Piczo, Orkut, Fotolog, or Faceparty attract a majority of members in particular geographic regions and of a specific age group.
their contactsProd/users want control over their content
Interoperability through openID and content export features
as competitive edge
The rich get richer
Silos everywhere(prod/users wantfree-range data)
Young innovators (often still in college or barely graduated and mostly white and male) create commercial software and then join up with large capital to facilitate large-scale sociality.
People want to be where many other people are.
The WWW started up mainly on European ideas, but was exploited best in the US.
Expectations were shaped by early free and openly accessible software.
- end part1 -
please direct comments, additions, etc to [email protected]