This document summarizes the key developments in networked communications and their social impacts from the 1940s to present day in 3 sentences or less: The earliest computer networks in the 1940s-1960s such as ARPANET laid the foundations for digital connectivity, leading to the development of the internet in the 1990s and social media platforms that transformed how information and ideas are shared online in the 2000s. Debate continues over issues of control, freedom of information, privacy and the impacts of new technologies on society, politics and culture as new forms of online connection and communication emerge and evolve at an increasingly rapid pace. The trajectory of technological change has been shaped both by innovators seeking to open access to information and connect people as well as

1. Debating the
networked
society: technical
roots of social
change
Mathias Klang @klang67

2. Overriding them: Freedom and
control
Technology challenges copyright, integrity, democracy, rights, culture,
autonomy, thought…

3. Neither prophets
nor luddites

4. Technolibertarians
& technopaternalists

5. hollerith

6. Birth of
computing 1940s

7. Generation zero

8. memex
Vannevar Bush; As We May Think; Atlantic Monthly; July 1945

9. Generation 1 & 2

10. Generation 3 (1964-72)

11. It was the first, and being first, was best,
but now we lay it down to ever rest.
Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.
For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years
of faithful service, duty done, I weep.
Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.
"Requiem of the ARPANET” Vinton Cerf
Arpanet: connections with
redundancy (1969-1990)

12. Bulletin board system (late 1970s)

13. Starting this Thanksgiving I
am going to write a
complete Unix-compatible
software system called
GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix),
GNU Project, posted by
and give it away free to
Richard Stallman on everyone who can use it.
September 27, 1983.

14. On the one hand
information wants to be
expensive, because it's so
valuable… On the other
hand, information wants to
be free, because the cost of
getting it out is getting
lower and lower all the
time.
Stewart Brand (1984)

15. Information Wants To Be
Free. Information also
wants to be
expensive. ...That tension
Steward Brand (1985) will not go away

16. The Well: Whole Earth 'Lectronic
Link (1985) stewart Brand & Larry Brilliant

17. Freedom 0: The freedom
to run the program for any
purpose.
Freedom 1: To study &
change the program
Freedom 2: To redistribute
copies
Freedom 3: Improve &
publically release the
program
Stallman’s Free
software definition
(1986)

18. I believe that all generally useful information should
be free. By 'free' I am not referring to price, but
rather to the freedom to copy the information and
to adapt it to one's own uses... When information is
generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity
wealthier no matter who is distributing and no
matter who is receiving.
Stallman (1990)

19. 1994, the first spam is sent over usenet
From jesus to green cards

20. World wide web
(an open standard)
Hypertext in the wild - Tim Berners-Lee (1990/91)

21. The Net interprets censorship as
damage and routes around it.
John Gilmore (December 1993 quoted in TIME Magazine)

22. Julian Dibbell (1993) A
Rape in Cyberspace
Is database society?

23. Mosaic web browser (1993)

24. Killer apps 1995: Browser wars

25. Dot-com bubble
(1995-2000)

26. Governments of the Industrial
World, you weary giants of flesh
and steel, I come from Cyberspace,
the new home of Mind. On behalf
of the future, I ask you of the past
to leave us alone. You are not
welcome among us. You have no
sovereignty where we gather.
John Perry Barlow (1996) A Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace

27. The rise and fall of edemocracy
(1995-2000)

28. Code and other laws of cyberspace
Lawrence Lessig (1999)

29. Information wants to be free – the radical
approach

30. Napster 1999 (sued 2000)

31. From User
generated
content to
Social Media to
user
entertainment

32. Wikipedia all the worlds
information 2001

33. Bittorrent
Bram Cohen (2001)

34. The pirate bay (2003)

35. Imagine a world in which every single
person on the planet is given free access to
the sum of all human knowledge. That's
what we're doing.
Jimmy Wales (2004)

36. Facebook (2004)

37. What do the people who control what
we can do, think?

38. Neo-optimists vs neo-pessimists

39. 2006

40. Social media…At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in
how people discover, read and share news, information and
content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming
monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is
the democratization of information, transforming people from
content readers into publishers.
(Wikipedia, May 2009)

41. "Out of this anarchy…
what was governing
the infinite monkeys
now inputting away on
the Internet was the
law of digital
Darwinism, the survival
of the loudest and most
opinionated.”
Andrew Keen: Cult of the amateur
(2007)

42. Device driven development

43. meaning

44. Up to 3500 books
Shop and download books in less than 60 seconds

45. Is there meaning in this madness?

46. Blogger 1999
Google 1999
End of communications monopoly

47. Normalizing the abnormal

48. The facebook/twitter revolution

49. Tweets don't topple governments, people
do
E. Morozov: The Net Delusion: The dark side of internet freedom (2011)

50. Morosov is critical to the “technology brings
democracy” approach and is concerned that we are
“amusing ourselves to death” (Postman 1985)

51. Social media creates silos & do not allow
users to port data from one site to another.

52. Power is Profitability

53. Coming debates

54. iTunes, Facebook, Amazon, Google….
Walled gardens

55. Personalization, end
of personhood & the
Sapir–Whorf
hypothesis

56. Autonomy &
Regulation by proxy

57. IBM  Windows  Browser wars  Google  iPhone
Being the user interface

58. The final interface: We have your money –
now we want your mind

59. THANKS!

60. Mathias Klang
klang@ituniv.se or @klang67
www.digital-rights.net
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