News organizations have had trouble adapting to the digital world because they operate under a broadcast sensibility. They produce discrete bits of content—finished products meant for passive consumption. After all, print, radio, and television aren’t two-way media; it is hard to foster communications when only one side is able to speak.
But the Internet, like the telephone, is a two-way medium. Early telephone entrepreneurs thought that the telephone might be used to broadcast dramas and lectures into households. They were wrong. Most news organizations tend to treat the Web in a similar manner: broadcasting their articles into the receiver, unconcerned that the other party might also have something to say.
Those news organizations that would build a successful site or forge a valid online business model would do well to remember—or realize in the first place—that the Internet is a medium in the word’s truest sense. It is something that exists in the between. It is connective tissue. “Neither utopia nor dystopia,” writes Manuel Castells in The Internet Galaxy, “the Internet is the expression of ourselves—through a specific code of communication, which we must understand if we want to change our reality.”
”The Library of the Future”
Perhaps the most enduring metaphor used to explain the Internet is that of the infinite library—a limitless store of human knowledge and experience that can be accessed, modified, and disseminated by anyone with a network connection; a collaborative, communitarian information utopia that exists in order to set things free. That was J.C.R. “Lick” Licklider’s idea, at least.
There were many, many people involved in the creation and construction of what would come to be called the Internet, but most historians agree that Licklider was the conceptual mastermind behind the initial project. Licklider was an academic psychologist and MIT professor who, by the mid-1950s, was spending much of his time imagining new and edifying uses for computer technology. “The idea on which Lick’s worldview pivoted,” write Hafner and Lyon, “was that technological progress would save humanity.”
Networks were the key. By easing human access to and interaction with information, Licklider believed that networks could facilitate a sort of “man-machine symbiosis” that would make the world a smarter, happier, and more productive place. Humans would use the networked computers’ superior speed and memory to help refine and advance their own thought processes. In a 1965 book entitled Libraries of the Future, he presented his outline for what he called a “procognitive system”— a library/computer amalgam that would “make it easy to transmit information without transporting material, and that will not only present information to people but also process it for them, following procedures they specify, apply, monitor, and, if necessary, revise and reapply.”
Hired in 1962 by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), Licklider soon proposed building a network that would allow ARPA researchers across the country to share information and avoid redundancies in research. The project didn’t actually get started until 1966, when one of Licklider’s successors at ARPA, Robert Taylor, got funding for what came to be called the ARPANET. (Licklider left ARPA in 1964.)
Give people the opportunity to do something great, though, and they’ll inevitably do something human. As it turns out, people took to the ARPANET for simple purposes—like e-mail.
While people disagree about the extent to which military priorities influenced the ARPANET’s design philosophy, the network was nevertheless a system that emphasized survivability in the face of failure. A distributed network, there was no central machine that was “in charge” of the system. (You couldn’t destroy the ARPANET by destroying its mainframe, because there was no mainframe.) Decentralization improved the network’s speed and reliablility, made it easier to add new access points, and allowed computers—and computer users—to communicate without outside mediation.
In a 1998 interview with the online magazine PreText, ARPANET contractor Frank Heart further characterized the network as a supremely open system:
The project was entirely unclassified. The project had no access controls on people. Anybody who could get near it could log on. The project provided access as a free good; nobody had to make a tough cost-benefit analysis as to whether they wanted to try the network.
You state that:
"Licklider and his colleagues didn’t predict the human communicative aspect of the ARPANET, but, in retrospect, they shouldn’t have been so surprised. They had built a network infrastructure that was reliable, adaptable, scalable, and inexpensive, with no central authority controlling how it was used. Its utility was defined by its users."
But, Licklider and Taylor, The Computer as a Communication Device, 1968 states that:
"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.
What will on-line interactive communities be like? ... They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest. In each field, the overall community of interest will be large enough to support a comprehensive system of field-oriented programs and data."
It might be fair to say Licklider did not envision school children forming social networks, but he clearly saw it happening for intellectual and work collaboration. Licklider was also instrumental in funding Doug Engelbart's work at SRI which was comparable to the ARPANet in its influence, and, support of collaboration and communication is central to that work as well.
#1 Posted by Larry Press, CJR on Tue 8 Sep 2009 at 02:35 PM
You're right: Licklider knew that networks were powerful communications tools, and he knew that they derived much of their power from the way they made it easier for users to connect to and work with one another. But it seemed to me that he expected these communications to be productive, to occur in the pursuit of some common end; that, when people connected online, there'd always be a goal in mind -- a project to be finished, a hypothesis to be tested, etc. I couldn't find much to suggest that Licklider predicted the network would be used so heavily for undirected, sociable communications.
#2 Posted by Justin Peters, CJR on Tue 8 Sep 2009 at 03:01 PM
Those of us who hung around the PLATO lab at the University of Illinois back in the 1972-1973 timeframe couldn't fail to notice the compelling nature of online chat (and online gaming, for that matter).... the PLATO system (mainframe-based, although that fact was relatively transparent to the users) attracted night owls from all over the campus who kept the PLATO terminals (this was the system for which plasma panel displays were invented!) at the various labs packed with night owl devotees, 24/7. Surprising at the time, (when playing games and chatting using computer terminals would have been widely considered terminally (ahem!) geeky!) but a good predictor of usage patterns that continue to this day.
#3 Posted by Gordon E. Peterson, CJR on Tue 8 Sep 2009 at 10:10 PM
The expansion of sociability alone is inherently demotic, not democratic. Democracy seems to me to rely on a mix of sociability and edification. In other words, you've got to read Luther or Paine or Desmoulins or Ho Chi Minh rather than, say, Phineas Lickspittle's Anti-Mason, -Papist & -Mormon Quarterly in order to find whatever hierarchy it is that is crying out for a good smashing. Twitter worked (amazingly well) in Iran because the population that took to the streets of Teheran was pretty seriously informed about a world beyond the tweets.
In general, though, I think I agree with the gist of the piece: there's more grain where there's more chaff. And we've got our hands on a big old thresher.
#4 Posted by Sergei Plum, CJR on Thu 10 Sep 2009 at 12:48 PM
Everyone talks about what is going on RIGHT NOW. What will happen if they get tired of hearing/reading other people's stories that are very much like informal memoirs or diaries?? Tweeter is already losing some of its desire. Teens have told writers it's too old; it's for adults--like their parents. Things happening now get very old very fast. Look at the slower actions on Facebook and Youtube. Many people--myself included--put things up there but most of my partners seldom response. Some ignore it for weeks on end.
The problem I see and it has been mentioned at least twice in two different standard news items--newspaper and magazine-- is what both authors called "serendipity"--seemingly the ability to look for things but find some thing(s) totally different that catches one's attention and he/she becomes interested or engrossed in it just because it's there. That was an activity I used in wandering through libraries and bookstores. I do it now when I can but I can't do it on the Internet. I have to know the topic or the author or the precise source. These last items are fine if one's doing professional research and must remain on one topic. But even that researcher loses out on other valuable sources only because they are not titled in the same way. Or the better items are in the 9000's or 100,000's and the reader doesn't go that far to look The idea mentioned in the earlier part talks about groups interested in bears of all kinds and that is a start in that direction. But it can still be too restricted. I have started with copies of articles on old-fashioned paper on a variety of topics that will be important in years to come but most of my grandchildren won't know many exist since they will be left out of the school text books and most libraries won't have anything in detail. Hopefully, they snoop and then go look further. Maybe I am dreaming. But I like serendipity!! One should never stop broadening his/her mind. But the Internet can.
#5 Posted by Patricia Wilson, CJR on Thu 10 Sep 2009 at 07:48 PM
You forgot to mention that the internet is for porn.
#6 Posted by surlybastard, CJR on Tue 15 Sep 2009 at 11:49 AM