Discovering the Network (2)
Origins of Progressive Social Media
Birth of the Network (2)
The race to create a network of computers—ultimately developing into the Internet—started in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley runs from San Jose in the south to San Fransisco in the north, encompassing Berkeley and Stanford University.
In the south, the government founded and funded a lab to create the technologies required to build and connect digital computers. In the north, the Beats read their poetry, inspiring a generation of Hippies to build an entire culture around communes. The mixing of these two cultures through people like Stewart Brand created a strongly libertarian and human-centered computer culture. As Fred Turner says:
Cybernetic discourse and collaborative work styles of cold war military research came together with the communitarian social vision of the counterculture.[1]
Hippy culture moved from the physical world into cyberspace, promising a bright new future:
Information technologies . . . empower the individual, enhance personal freedom, and radically reduce the power of the nation-state. Existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software.[2]
While we tend to think the power of digital computers lies in their ability to perform mathematical magic, their real power lies in networking computers together or creating an ecosystem of digital computers.
Before the Renaissance, humans were seen as part of a culture, but plants, animals, and other natural things were largely seen as individuals. The Renaissance refocused attention on the human individual and individualism.
Ecosystems theory brings natural things and humans back into communities bound by networks. A network might be a food chain, or communication chain, or even an influence domain.
For instance, a small corner coffee shop does not “stand alone.” The shop forms an immediate social network made up of the owner, employees, regular customers, and surrounding businesses. The owner is part of a larger network of suppliers, business associations, and local government.
These relationships form networks within networks, overlapping networks, and disconnected networks. Each participant adds value in a different way:
The owner provides capital and vision
Employees provide labor and social connectivity
Suppliers provide material
Governments provide public safety
Customers provide income, marketing, and social connectivity
Every component of the network formed around a single business plays a specific role. Removing one component of the network destroys the network’s entire value.
Computer networks work in much the same way. Connecting computers into an ecosystem allows engineers to create computers specialized in solving specific problems. One computer might gather information, while another processes data, while yet another presents, receives, formats, transmits data to interested humans (users). The power of computer network was expressed by Metcalf’s Law:
The value (or influence) of a computer network is proportional to the square of the number of connected computers (n2).
A single telephone is useless. Every additional telephone added to the network, however, increases the number of reachable users, increasing the network’s value. Since every telephone user can connect to every other telephone user, the value increases exponentially rather than linearly.
The magical mathematical abilities of computers breathed new life into collected data.
Mass-scale computing power (based on the miniaturization of electronics) rapidly added new users to the network.
Mass-scale interconnected computing power added new data.
What could be done with all this new networked computing power?
Readers interested in the origins of the Internet may want to listen to these episode of the History of Networking:
Dave Farber: The Grandfather of the Internet
https://historyofnetworking.s3.amazonaws.com/internet-farber.mp3Vint Cerf: The Father of the Internet
https://historyofnetworking.s3.amazonaws.com/internet-cerf.mp3George Sadowsky: The Commercialization of the Internet
https://historyofnetworking.s3.amazonaws.com/internet-sadowsky.mp3
The Social Network
Up until the 1970s, researchers, scientists, and engineers were the primary users of these new networked computer systems. There were bulletin-board systems, where users would connect, leave messages, and exchange files, but these were difficult to use, and each bulletin-board system was an isolated world.
There were also large-scale mainframes (a name taken from the telephone network), mostly used by government and corporate funded scientists. These mainframes were connected by fuzzballs, early data routing devices built on standard computers, so researchers could exchange email, share data, and use remote these large-scale machines remotely.
There was no service designed the the “average person;” computers were the stuff of science fiction and television specials. In 1966, George W. Mitchell said:
You are not going to have a computer in your home, but you are going to have a telephone, and attached to the telephone will be a little keyboard, and that is the point at which it will go into computer language right there.
Ken Olson, the CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, is reported as saying: "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”
In the 1970s, several companies decided to fill this gap by creating large-scale communication services for average users. These services helped drive the commercialization of the Internet.
To survive, however, these services had to provide some form of value users were willing to pay for. They had to compete with televisions, newspapers, radios, and “real life” interactions. America Online (AOL) stumbled onto a service that seemed to work in drawing users’ attention—the chat room. By 1997, AOL claimed to have more than nineteen-thousand private chat rooms running on its service.[3]
The social network service, born in the chatrooms of AOL, grew rapidly.
Social networks had one particularly interesting quality—users connected to social media networks talk to one another as if the social network does not exist. Social media network operators, in other words, are like the operator in a manually switched telephone system.
They can eavesdrop on every conversation.
No-one learned how to take advantage of this interesting quality for another decade.
[1] Turner, Counterculture to Cyberculture, loc 190.
[2] Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” September 1995, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology.
[3] Wu, The Attention Merchants, 201.