by Thursday next week (January 24), each of you will post here with your own thoughtful response(s) to our readings for weeks 1 and 2. this post is an example to get things started. I invite you to shape your own blog writings in ways that suit your own learning/thinking styles, and to create discussion by commenting on and extending others’ ideas as well.
Our first two weeks’ of readings provide a variety of views on a few important things that came before the internet: global military and academic research endeavors, analog and digital computers, various forms of programming, phone networks, the concept of information as measurable quantity… and more. These readings begin to give us at least a glimpse into how far the roots of the internet (and the roots of all the digital cultures it has facilitated) reach back towards older practices, older hardware and software, older ideas, and pre-existing communities.
One of my favorite connections between computers and older technologies comes up in the Stanford overview—the detail about Charles Babbage having been inspired by the 1700s Jacquard loom. If you’ve ever seen a large loom in action, or thought about how a loom + thread + a pattern can create dozens of differently intricate woven rugs, then it makes pretty good sense that all those analog interlocking pieces and colors = a machine very like a computer (albeit one with a very focused range of input and output).
The loom is likely not the only relatively ancient technology that prefigures the modern computer. After reading Gleick’s book excerpt in the NYT, I want to see numbers and coins as pseudo-digital technologies, too. If, as I’ve heard many scholars talk about, numbers and accounting were the impetus for the first written language ever, then we owe those technologies quite a lot in terms of culture and the humanities.
Along with this central idea of history/historical precedent, another theme I felt throughout many of these readings was that of speed. The Standford history overview references speed as a prime value for almost everyone involved in developing early computers. The TIME magazine tribute and the in-depth O’Reilly essay both mention how fast things changed (and continued changing) once the web became part of the average person’s life. Speed and change seem to be key ideas. I wonder how those themes might show up in our other readings later in the semester.
A third theme that I feel might be important to keep in mind is one of public vs. private, and the spectrum between the two extremes. The timelines and milestones of digital history we’ve looked at so far focus largely on government-sponsored projects, military projects, and academic projects. For the most part these are motivated by public good. As McCracken writes in his TIME magazine piece, the network that Tim Berners-Lee proposed in 1989 was something that he “gave to the world.” But as we see in Anderson’s article on The Long Tail, there are plenty of private, capitalist interests online now, making money and changing the world in their own ways. Many of the biggest influences on digital culture today are commercial companies: Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.
Whether we’re talking about public organizations (like governments, universities, or non-profits) or private companies (like businesses, start-ups, service providers, etc), it’s never as simple as “public” or “private,” with no in-between. Even public institutions need financial stability, and even for-profit companies should (hopefully) be thinking at least a little bit about the public good. How do public and private entities work together and influence each other in relation to digital practices, policies, and cultures?
Somewhat related to these questions: I started watching National Geographic’s The Valley of the Boom this week. I wish I’d seen more about this series before I finalized our reading list this semester, but the timing just didn’t work out for me to add it as required viewing. The show adds yet another historical perspective on the internet—this time from a corporate angle. If you’re at all curious, I’d definitely recommend it.
Finally, I have to comment on how many acronyms have cropped up just in these first few readings. Maybe another mini-class-project we could undertake is a short glossary of acronyms and accompanying explanations. So far I’ve noted P2P, HTTP, HTML, XML, XHTML, CSS, AJAX, PHP, MySQL, RSS, NNTP, and I’m sure many more will cross our paths as we continue through the semester. Which of these acronyms are you already familiar with? Which are new to you? Thinking about when and why you’ve learned some of these but not others could help as you brainstorm and plan for our first assignment, the digital literacy narrative.