Social Media week3
“How The Web Came To Be”
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 | The New School University | Eugene Lang| |Spring 2009 A | Spring 2009
LCST 2031
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A

Histories of the Internet and World Wide Web
week 3
Feb 9, 11
Required Readings:
Turner, Fred. \"Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy .\" Stanford. 1 Jan 2007. 26 Aug 2007
<http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Tech%20&%20Culture%2046%203.pdf>
Suggested Reading:
Donath, Judith. \"Sociable Media.\" Sociable Media Group - MIT Media Lab. 15 Apr 2004. 9 Jul 2007
<http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Donath/SociableMedia.encyclopedia.pdf>.
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

excerpt from “Commune” interview with Peter Coyote , 12 mins

Required Readings:
Turner, Fred. \"Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy .\" Stanford. 1 Jan 2007. 26 Aug 2007
<http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Tech%20&%20Culture%2046%203.pdf>
Jill (response to Donath): If we can agree that 'mediated communication' is not a
replacement for real-life, interpersonal contact, then why does our culture seem to be
trending towards it? Is it a matter of convenience, or do we have some kind of innate
human predilection for forms of communication that avoid face to face interaction?
Frank (response to Turner):
How is releasing knowledge to the public aligned with counter culture (in particular, as
it was commodified)?
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

http://www.wholeearth.com/issue‐electronic‐edition.php?iss=2071

Required Readings:
Turner, Fred. \"Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy .\" Stanford. 1 Jan 2007. 26 Aug 2007
<http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Tech%20&%20Culture%2046%203.pdf>
Brionna (response to Turner):
Does the potential economic profit of WELL members go against the countercultural
aims of the Whole Earth Catalog?
How did the real time aspect of the WELL change the way members interacted with
each other?
Do virtual communities of today function in the same way? Do they still promote
countercultural ideology?
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Required Readings:
Turner, Fred. \"Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy .\" Stanford. 1 Jan 2007. 26 Aug 2007
<http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Tech%20&%20Culture%2046%203.pdf>
Ellen (response to Turner):
[I]t almost seems as if people today have a hard time separating the online world
from the “real world,” or is it that the lines are blurring and everyone lives online as
much in \"real life.\" Are the two worlds really inseparable?
Arkady (response to Turner):
Turner asserts that \"[i]n both the Catalog and the supplement, [Stewart] Brand
marketed not so much goods as a way of looking at how life ought to be lived.\" (492)
Has the exchange of information about this [countercultural] lifestyle been driven well
into underground circuits of communication on the Internet? Is it even of particular
interest anymore? Or has the tool that so many imagined as an end to consumerist
pursuit of \"remotely done power and glory\" become its ultimate medium (Turner 492)?
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Required Readings:
Turner, Fred. \"Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy .\" Stanford. 1 Jan 2007. 26 Aug 2007
<http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Tech%20&%20Culture%2046%203.pdf>
Henry (in response to Turner):
The author asserts that counter culture “established a relationship between information
technology, economic activity, and alternative forms of community that would outlast the
counterculture itself” (488). He cites Howard Rheingold when talking about a “gift economy” in
which people help one another “out of the spirit of building something between them” (510). This
struck me as very interesting given the hours of time people spend improving and contributing to
forums and websites today.
to class:
Does anyone participate in a community or forum online which has characteristics similar to the
WELL? Not the subject material exactly, but more the common bond between users all interested
in a similar subject or topic?
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

1989

Large Hadron Collider
Particle Accelerator
CERN
http://tinyurl.com/yto62g

WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project, 1989/90
HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)
The British programmer Tim Berners-Lee,
CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire)
“... the WWW as an altruistic, non-proprietary, vendor-neutral contribution to society!”
http://tinyurl.com/2ntycb
http://tinyurl.com/2pxazn

the first website

1990

By 1990 ARPANET retired and was transferred to the
NSFnet (National Science Foundation) that had started
in 1988, connecting 250 non-US networks,
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 co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Stuart Brand and
Mitch Kapor in 1990, focusing on digital civil liberties.

1991

In 1991, the NSF allowed commercial use of the Internet but it
took until 1995 it decommissioned the backbone, leaving the
Internet a self-supporting industry.
http://tinyurl.com/34ket8
http://tinyurl.com/2pxazn

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

Brewster Kahle Bruce Gilliat
WAIS Incorporated:
Kahle (1992): “I 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.
p 136 how the web was born

http://tinyurl.com/yqtupv

1993

1993, Launch of Mosaic
Significant mile stone in the popularization of the WWW
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

Gopher and the World Wide Web were competing systems. In 1993,
CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone.
Two months later, Gopher announced that it was no longer free to use,
which pushed users away from gopher to the World Wide Web.
Mosaic Gopher
public domain for purchase
p 279 how the web was born
http://tinyurl.com/2pxazn

1994

1994 -- order pizza online.
Web has a 341,634 %
expansion rate.

Blogging, the art of pointing to each other

Justin Hall: Links from the Underground http://tinyurl.com/yjr6pq

http://tinyurl.com/29ffra
1993 De Digitale Stad (\"The Digital City\")
Amsterdam- De Balie & XS4ALL
cultural experiment bringing politics and citizens together in an online community,
attempt of staying independent in an increasingly commercial environment

1995

1996
Wiki Wiki bus at the Honolulu International Airport
Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994,
and installed it on the Internet in 1995 allowing for the emergence
of
http://tinyurl.com/2qqsbh
http://tinyurl.com/26utwb
http://tinyurl.com/ypo99

users could write
reviews and consumer
guides, an early form of
web-based self-
publishing
http://tinyurl.com/ynlwje

Feb 08, 1999
http://tinyurl.com/2fywza
http://tinyurl.com/368x5o
http://tinyurl.com/3bdyvj
http://tinyurl.com/32aweh
Mar 01, 2000

1996

Manuel Castells (1942)
Manuel Castells argued that in contemporary society dominant
functions and processes are increasingly organized around
networks.
http://tinyurl.com/39gtmv
http://tinyurl.com/2pg78k

1997

Readers can comment

1998

Feb 06, 2007
Jan 25, 1999
Indian social networking site Sulekha
http://tinyurl.com/2gu2j9
http://tinyurl.com/ysfgoq

1999

-Buzz Group Break-
What question would you most like to have answered
regarding the topic of the lecture today?
Of all ideas and points you have heard so far today, which is
the most obscure or ambiguous to you?
What is the most contentious statement you heard in the
lecture so far?

http://tinyurl.com/2dnhmy
screen shot May 10, 2000

Shawn \"Napster\" Fanning (b. 1980)
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.
Napster was the first popular peer-to-peer file sharing platform.
http://tinyurl.com/2sgcz2
http://tinyurl.com/2lhmmq

http://tinyurl.com/23t8pr
(The site started in 1999 but it was first time archived http://www.rtmark.com/
on Waybackmachine on May 23, 2003.)
“RTMark is itself a registered corporation which brings together
activists who plan projects with donors who fund them. It thus
operates outside the laws governing human individuals, and
benefits from the much looser laws governing corporations.”
http://tinyurl.com/youtse

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.”

2000

In 2004 the peer-to-peer file sharing
client LimeWire was released.
It is still possible to
download LimeWire and share
copyrighted files peer-to-peer.
http://tinyurl.com/3y5o5o

Tulip mania, 1637
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Semper_Augustus_Tulip_17th_century.jpg

1990s dotcom awe
and the crash
too much too fast
http://tinyurl.com/26ppkw
http://tinyurl.com/yrkjya
http://tinyurl.com/38zy97

2001

September 11, 2001

2000/2001: Former editor-in-chief of Nupedia and
Citizendium founder Larry Sanger (born 1968) and the
American Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales (born 1966)
create Wikipedia.
http://tinyurl.com/3y2uz8
http://tinyurl.com/2jcrmc

Bram Cohen
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing
(P2P) communications protocol, first
implementation in 2001.
BitTorrent has 135 million installs and accounts 55% of all
Internet traffic (07, Bram Cohen)
http://tinyurl.com/292zfg
http://tinyurl.com/yp6egx

2002

2002
2007
http://tinyurl.com/249uls

Folksonomy
(also known as collaborative tagging , social classification, social indexing,
social tagging, and other names) is the practice and method of collaboratively
creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to
traditional subject indexing metadata is not only generated by experts but
also by creators and consumers of the content.
folksonomy

2000
2002. Meetup 2,000,000 users (07) revitalize local communities
2003: prominence through Howard Dean

2003

The Internet as organizational tool
8-30 million people in 800 cities worldwide simultaneously showed their defiance of the
impending war in Iraq on February 15, 2003. On March 19 the first American bombs dropped on
Baghdad, Iraq. On March 20, the invasion started.
http://tinyurl.com/322lyy

Podcasting
Podcasters' web sites can be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded
automatically, using an aggregator or feed reader capable of reading feed
formats such as RSS or Atom.
http://tinyurl.com/3dbcqt

2003
The founders of Kazaa released the peer-to-peer Internet
telephony network Skype.

photo credit as \"Scott Beale / Laughing Squid\"
Sept 10, 2007
Joshua Schachter, acquired by Yahoo in 2005
3 million users, 10 million bookmarks (07)

June 2003 Google starts AdSense

http://tinyurl.com/2mbjtr

first archived: Jun 04, 2006
social networking for business
http://tinyurl.com/yey25h
http://tinyurl.com/2j43c6
http://tinyurl.com/2uqbct

PeanutButterWiki (PbWiki)- a “free” ad-supported wiki
\"Make a free wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich!\"

2004

December 09, 2004
http://tinyurl.com/38pbt2
September 10, 2007

2004
domain first switched on
Aug 06, 2005
Facebook is a social networking website that was launched on February 4, 2004.
(Started for colleges, then high schools, and now everyone.)
http://tinyurl.com/22myzy

2004
Archived: Apr 29, 2004 (http://tinyurl.com/2uh8to)
Flickr. Canada. 2004

2005

Tim O’Reilly \"What is Web 2.0?\"
Photo: James Duncan Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/2vw6cb

http://tinyurl.com/2569dr

2006

Fandom
Cingular Wireless announced today it has shattered its own record for wireless text messaging during
the fifth season of \"American Idol\" (2006) -- 64.5 million text messages throughout the show's season.
http://tinyurl.com/2m4luf
http://tinyurl.com/35omx8
http://tinyurl.com/2umdo3

Micro-blogging
users to write brief text updates (usually about 140
characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by
anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by
the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of
means, including text messaging, and the web.
Finland
status updates on FB
http://tinyurl.com/2yhpa3

(social networking site of the National Hockey League)
(social networking for pet aficionados)
(social search)
(social networking and referral grouped around fashion)
(social networking site about mental health and wellness)
(feminist social networking site celebrating friendships among women)
(social networking focused on weddings)
(social networking and referral for the entire family)
2006 (activist, youth social networking)

2007

(mobile social networking and media sharing)
(social networking around baking)
(social networking about books)
(mobile media sharing)
(mobile social networking, IM)
(social maps)
(micro-blogging)
(social news site) (Game platform)
2007

(North-American) English content
is not dominating the Internet anymore.
Women aged 25-34 spend more time online than men
in the same age group.
1.114 billion people use the Internet (2008)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2154293,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=technology

Trebor Scholz
scholzt@newschool.edu
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