week1

Strange Lines and Distances :

We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.

Francis Bacon – A New Atlantis 1626

Vannevar Bush proposes the Memex idea 1947 Atlantic Monthly.

Consuming and publishing and annotating media enshrined from the outset.

Also enshrined the decentered, unmanageable, un-owned, unpredictable nature of the network made up of networks – The Internet.

The diagram above is the first map of the internet. Through three universities/research centres in California to a fourth in Utah. It was scrawled in 1969. The social nature of the network (initially thought of as a way to distribute computational jobs remotely) became evident with the unexpected popularity of email. The first test message was sent in 1971 and by 1973 made up the majority of network traffic.

In 1975 the uses and social function of email was extended by the introduction of Usenet. Essentially a way of grouping email into subscribed lists around themed discussions distributed to servers around the world. Usenet traffic flows below in 1993, the year before the widespread popularisation of the web browser.

Usenet was eventually brought under the control of Google in 2001. And Google has brought the archive of posts going back to 1981 online. Usenet was the first online “community” to be brought to its knees by spam (by the early nineties) and was widely abused for filesharing and porn. It brought us many of the words we use for dysfunctional online behavior including, flaming, trolling and cyberstalking.

While the web was invented in Switzerland in the late 80s its popularity didn’t really take off until the first easy to use web browser Mosaic was released in the early 90s. Most of the basic functionality of modern browsers is clearly there in Mosaic, notice the Add button on the right hand side for annotating and creating pages. Conceptually this didn’t make a comeback till web 2.0.

Online web design has always had tensions between graphic sophistication and clear navigation and usability (as exemplified by Jakob Neilsen and proponents of the Grid). Similarly there could be seen to be a historical tension between minimalism and trying to do everything in one page as well as between the corporate and the independent, the highly technical and the technically accessible and collaborative.

Many of the technical and social properties of the internet can be seen to exist from early in its development in a continual boom bust cycle of utopian enthusiasm and reinvention, perhaps this can be linked to the particularly Californian flavour of much of online history and development.