Social Media week2
ARPANET, “Alternative” Networks, Counter Culture,
the Internet, and “Virtual Community”
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

What You Need To Know About This Course
week 1 Histories of the Internet
week 2 Histories of the Internet and World Wide Web
week 3
Social Media, Cyber Clustering, and Social Isolation
week 4 Participation: Benefits, Numbers, and Quality
week 5 Quality. The Wisdom or Ineptitude of the Crowd
The Web 2.0 Ideology
week 7
week 6 Art and Social Media
Spring Break
week 8
Political Net Activism
week 9
What Does It Take To Participate?
Why Participate?
week 10
Got Ethics? Labor, Work, What?
week 11 week 14
The Power of Users
week 13 Net Neutrality
week 12 Near Future Scenarios
week 15
Presentations
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Requirements
You need to post your four research posts to the blog on our Ning site before class on the day at which the
post is due (Feb 16, March 2, March 23, and April 6). The expected length of each research post is 2000 words
(about 4 pages). The instructor will provide guidelines for these posts in class. You’ll need to hand in the final
paper as hard copy on May 6 (4000 words). Lateness will be reflected in a lower final grade, half a letter for
each day late (i.e., a B+ paper late by one day will become B-, by two days C+ . . . etc.). Any papers more than
one week late will result in a failing grade. The presentation (15-20 minutes) will take place toward the end of
the semester.
Four Research blog posts on Ning 35% (Feb 16, March 2, March 23, April 6)
One presentation 15% (throughout semester)
One final paper 25% (hand-in as hard copy) May 6
In-class participation 25%
Trebor Scholz | The New School University | Eugene Lang | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Histories of the Internet
week 2
Feb 2, 4
Required Readings:
Raymond Williams, “Technology and Society,” Television (London: Routledge, 1990), 2-25.
Allen, Christopher. \"Life With Alacrity: Tracing the Evolution of Social Software.\"
Life With Alacrity. 13 Oct 2004. 12 Jul 2007
<http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/10/tracing_the_evo.html>.
Suggested Reading:
\"History of the Internet.\" the history of computing project. 19 Mar 2001. 17 Jul 2007
<http://www.thocp.net/reference/internet/internet1.htm>.
Kelly, Kevin. \"Wired 13.08: We Are the Web.\" Wired News . 1 Jan 2005. 26 Aug 2007
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html>.
Film Excerpts:
Excerpts from The Net (2003), Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), Commune (2005),
American Experience: The Summer of Love (2007), Media: Sputnik: Declassified (2007)
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

The Victorian Internet
by Tom Standage (1989)
1746 200 monks Jean‐Antoine Nollet linked to electrical battery
1797 optical telegraphy
telephone, radio, ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Braun_HF_1.jpg

Discussion:
Required Readings:
Raymond Williams, “Technology and Society,” Television (London: Routledge, 1990), 2-25.
Your questions:
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

1945

\"knowledge on call\"
hyperlinked pages and the “memex”
http://tinyurl.com/39mf8l
http://tinyurl.com/3b7h9v

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger
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.

Blog: http://blog.sfmoma.org/tag/art‐of‐participation/
Flickr set: http://www.\\lickr.com/photos/ari/sets/72157610572023159/

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Girl_listenin

1957

Excerpts from chapter 2, and 5 “Sputnik: Declassi\\ied” (2007)
http://www.net\\lix.com/Movie/Sputnik_Declassi\\ied/70086393

http://www.\\lickr.com/photos/nezitic/311892760/sizes/o/
Red Flag Over Reichstag 9th May 1945

The Advanced Research Projects Agency

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2QdEj8UjBc

1961

Leonard Kleinrock, MIT
\"Information Flow in Large
Communication Nets\"
(May 31 1961)
First paper on packet-switching
http://tinyurl.com/23nbat

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

“On Distributed Communication Networks,” March 1964
c) a network without central authority or single
outage point
Paul Baran
http://tinyurl.com/ywq8nk

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

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.

1967

Excerpts from: American Experience | Summer of Love | PBS
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/love/

People’s Park ‐‐ Excerpt from “Berkeley in the Sixties”
http://akas.imdb.de/media/rm1389337600/tt0099121

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQbEjPzfDmc&feature=PlayList&p=C97DC8509C17275A&index=2
Macy conferences 1946‐53, NYC video: 10 mins

Excerpts from: The Commune (2005)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0439511/

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

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
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/yuw6ho
http://tinyurl.com/2pxazn
http://tinyurl.com/2ujdes

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
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

The Internet in 1969
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0pPfyYtiBc&e

http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php

1970

TCP/IP
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).
http://tinyurl.com/3c64vm
http://tinyurl.com/yvvmdc

Whose Standards? Proprietary or Open Standards?
Also the fax machine is only useful if many other people have it.
Later: If the Internet would have just connected supercomputers,
it would have not been as significant.
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009 http://tinyurl.com/yu7g2m

http://tinyurl.com/29vvar
PowWow
Throughout the 1970s Instant Messaging began to appear

•There was no single inventor of the Internet.
•ARPANET, Usenet, BITNET, and BBS
•DARPA was not solely a response to the fear
of a nuclear armageddon.

1971

http://tinyurl.com/34gyk2
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.

Michael Hart
1971. Project Gutenberg is the first and largest
single collection of free electronic books, or
eBooks.
Project Gutenberg is the
\"oldest digital library built on volunteer
efforts to digitize, archive, and distribute
cultural works.\"
http://tinyurl.com/26zq8z
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

1977

http://tinyurl.com/35drka
http://tinyurl.com/2n5gvy
1977 Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw created the first MUD
(Multi-User Dungeon) leading later to MMORPG

1978

CBBS (first BBS) January of 1978, Chicago was hit by
Ward Christensen the Great Blizzard of 1978
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.
http://tinyurl.com/38zf8q
http://tinyurl.com/3a8wru

ASCii art on BBS
http://tinyurl.com/yukqdk

1979

Emoticons
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.)

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

ARPANET
http://echo.gmu.edu/usenet/images/usenet.gif
http://www.sri.com/about/timeline/images/map.gi
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

1980s

What else did it take to make this WWW work?
http://tinyurl.com/2km2n9
This was the first IBM PC introduced on Aug 12, 1981
Douglas Engelbart
http://tinyurl.com/3c7suu

The Well members could start discussion boards:
Mid-80s
the most popular one was dedicated to
computer manufacturers push proprietary protocols,
The Grateful Dead.
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 to
The Grateful Dead.
1981 BITNET release
Ira Fuchs (CUNY) and Greydon Freeman (Yale)
Main features: email, LISTSERV
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.
http://tinyurl.com/2vx\\bj
http://tinyurl.com/2cl3go

1985
Stewart Brand & Larry Brilliant
one of the first community bulletin board systems
The 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

1984

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.
http://tinyurl.com/ynkmby
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Trebor Scholz
The New School University
scholzt@newschool.edu
Twitter: trebors
Blog: http://www.collectivate.net/journalisms
This presentation is made public using the creative commons attribution, non-commercial, share alike license.
This presentation is based on my previous courses on the topic including:
http://www.slideshare.net/trebor/how-the-social-web-came-to-be-part1