As Hafner and Lyon note in Where Wizards Stay Up Late, ARPANET e-mail was immediately popular—the network’s first “killer app.” “It just happened,” wrote Henderson and Myer, “and its early history has seemed more like the discovery of a natural phenomenon that [sic] the deliberate development of new technology.”
While the ARPANET was still used for transacting “serious” scientific business, its users eventually realized that these incidental communications were a serious business, too. As Ian R. Hardy notes in “The Evolution of ARPANET email”:
Electronic mail over the ARPANET quickly became an integral component in institutional communications patterns. Primarily for this reason the ARPA community began to view the ARPANET as an essential utility on a par with the telephone system, electricity, or jet transportation. “People began to depend upon it,” Frank Heart recounts. “Especially as electronic mail became an important component of the use of the system, people began to assume it was going to exist.” This general assumption demonstrates a profound reliance on email within the ARPA community. The ARPANET came to be viewed as an indispensable resource precisely because it carried network mail.
The world does not operate under monastic rule, with its inhabitants locked in their cells, reading and learning only for purposes of quiet contemplation. When most people learn or read something interesting, they want to take that material and pass it along.
Usenet was, in its way, just as important as e-mail in the role it played in the development of the Net. Dubbed “the poor man’s ARPANET” by early users, Usenet consisted of a collection of discussion groups devoted to single topics—the programming language Unix, to start, but later involving a cornucopia of topics ranging from koala bears to the Chicago Cubs. Before Usenet, online communications had been primarily restricted to scholars, students, and scientists with access to ARPANET terminals—a fairly limited group. But Usenet was open to anyone with a Unix machine. In “The Social Forces behind the Development of Usenet,” Michael Hauben observed that Usenet became popular among “people who didn’t have access to the ARPANET [but] were hungry for similar opportunities to communicate.”
The appeal—one that will seem familiar to modern Internet users—was in chatting with people who shared your intense interest in certain topics, and participating in distinct communicative groups. “The ideas that exist on Usenet come from the mass of people who participate in it. In this way, Usenet is an uncensored forum for debate—where many sides of an issue come into view,” writes Hauben. More so than e-mail and listservs, then, Usenet used the Internet as a medium for unexpected yet engaging communications—an important step in the development of any human communications system.
In his ICCC ’72 paper “Three Characterizations of Communications Revolutions,” Bell-Northern researcher Gordon Thompson noted Jane Jacobs’s characterization of the city sidewalk as a communications medium: an environment that “permits interesting and unexpected messages to be exchanged at a low level of commitment.” Usenet was, initially, the sidewalk of the Internet.
Although Usenet still exists, it has largely been made obsolete by the World Wide Web, which is what most people now mean when they discuss the Internet. (“Internet” is simply a term for the infrastructure through which network data are transferred—Web sites, e-mails, instant messages, file transfers, and so on. “World Wide Web” specifically refers to the hyperlinked pages generally accessed by a browsing utility like Firefox or Internet Explorer.)
When the World Wide Web debuted in 1991, it seemed that we were finally at the point of a true procognitive system, where people would be edified and improved by virtue of the information with which they were now able to freely interact. (In his book Weaving the Web, Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee echoed J.C.R. Licklider when he wrote that “the Web will be a place where the whim of a human being and the reasoning of a computer coexist in an ideal, powerful mixture.”) But the information itself wasn’t the point.
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