Notes to Lecture 4 - The Myths of Cyberspace

History

Cold War MissileIn last week's lecture I introduced two popular models of 'cyberspace', namely the 'Gibsonian' model and the 'Barlovian' model. In doing so, I noted some of the characteristics of these models ( 'personal freedom', 'informational freedom ', 'community building') and began to take a critical view of some of their assumptions. In this week's lecture I will continue and widen this critique. I will seek to provide a historical context to the current 'new media' phenomena and in doing so challenge the ahistorical approach taken by many commentators of the Internet and computer-mediation. As Frank Kermode once noted:

"History continues to be the means by which we recognize what is new as well as what is not."(pg 671)

This lecture will be based on the work of Richard Wise (who gave this lecture two years ago). It will be demonstrate approach that focusses on the historical economic and social policies that gave birth to the Internet. In doing so, I hope to draw attention to a number of 'myths' that have grown up around the Internet and cyberspace.

Before we begin with our critique, however, we should recognise that neither Gibson's story or Barlow's tract was produced as an academic description of the historical manifestation of the Internet (Gibson's description was produced as part of a Science Fiction novel, and Barlows's description was produced as part of a satire on the US' Declaration of Independence). My approach will not, therefore, seek challenge either texts validity as literature, or as powerful social motivators. In fact, it will fully acknowledge their merits as works of art by recognising that they have come to have an iconic status within the Internet community. This lecture will, however, challenge the unquestioning and application of these visionary texts to the complex of context surrounding the contemporary Internet.

Historical Background I - The Military

In the first couple of chapters of his book, Multimedia: A Critical Introduction, Richard Wise identifies the important role that US military played in the development of every aspect of the modern multimedia computer. The hostilities World War Two (1939-1945) and the rivalries of the Cold War (1945- approximately 1990) stimulated the US military to embrace all sorts of technologically-based weapons. These weapons in turn acted as a direct stimulus for the invention and perfection of digital computers. As Wise notes

" the development of new weapons, particularly anti-aircraft weapons and the atomic bomb, made faster techniques of calculation a matter of urgency"(pg11)

As well as calculating weapon trajectories computers were also used to great effect in de-coding enemy military intelligence. In fact, by the height of the Cold War in the late 1950s the requirement for command and control was forcing the military to embrace the computer for all sorts of activities, such as the support of early warning systems and ballistic missile control. These requirements in turn stimulated further funding. In the 1960s yet more money was lavished on the 'Space Race', (in which the cold war enemies - Soviet Union and the USA - competed to put a manned flight on the Moon). These huge non-commercial budgets were vital for the development of the digital computer. Wise notes that every important function of multimedia computers (networking, graphics, microprocessor, interface etc.) were developed under a US military budget. Computer graphics, for example, were developed by US air force for flight simulators.

Budgets, both military and civil, for funding all sorts of scientific research expanded enormously from 1945 to about 1965. It is important to realise that science was held in great esteem at the time, and the pursuit of scientific knowledge was deemed to be a public good by economists and politicians. A lot of this research funding was spent through research agencies like the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) working in American Universities, in particular on MIT the east coast and Stanford University on the West Coast. The lavish provision of funds and the general feeling that all research was beneficial in the long-term meant that a lot of the funding went in highly speculative projects that did not necessarily have any direct military or even commercial application.

However not even the US military could keep expanding their research budgets forever. In the 1960s military funding came under closer scrutiny and a number of computer researchers found their funding cut. However, at about the same time a group of US corporations became aware of the economic opportunities (and threats) posed by the nascent technology. IBM and the Xerox Corporation, in particular, added to their computer expertise by hiring people the military had let go. One of the most important centres for computing research at this time was the Xerox corporations Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) where a number of technologies including the graphical interface were perfected. (See Hiltzik(1999) and the XEROX PARC website).

Historical Background II - the military origins of the ARPANET

However, despite huge budgets made available, computers were still very expensive and so rare in the early days of computing. Access to a working machine was very limited. This stimulated computer designers to change the way that they interacted with computers (and gave birth to the interface and the important study of human-computer interaction HCI). Early computers worked in a batch-processing mode (you carried a series of pre-prepared punched cards to computer building and a technician then fed them to the computer to be run). As Wise notes:

"This resulted in much frustration and inefficiency, and these methods were seen as inappropriate for the military's needs" (pg 16)

ARPA funded research at civilian research centres resulted in two very important computer developments, namely time-sharing and graphical interfaces. This allowed many people to work with the same computer at the same time (by working at their own terminal). Through development of time-sharing technologies it was recognised that a terminal and its users did not have to be in close proximity to the computer. This realisation gave rise to computer networking.

Networking was also interesting to the military planners responsible for maintaining communications during a missile attack on the US. They needed to develop a system that would carry on working over the huge distances of continental America, even when parts of it were damaged. This meant developing a system that was decentralised, and which had no single, vulnerable command centre. The solution devised was the ARPANET (the direct forerunner of the Internet)

.

Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation developed a system known as 'packet-switching'. Packet-switching is still very important to the Internet. The breaking up of messages into fragments (that can find their own way to the receiver by what ever route available) allows the Internet to be decentralised, and so is technicall-capable of routing around blockages such as damage and censorship. One of the other benefits of the ARPANET was it allowed scientific researchers spread all over the US to communicate and share files ( though e-mail and ftp). This kind of traffic actually came to dominate the ARPANET. A culture of sharing and communication grew up that as we see later still characterises parts of the computing community. Research workers communities from all over the world wanted to join the net. In the 1980s, the military finally recognised that and the military and civil system needed to be split. The new university-based system was known as the Internet.

Historical Background III - US Universities and the Counter-culture

It is something of a talking point amongst historians of computing that the two most opposed parts of American society in the 1960s were both instrumental in the development of the modern multimedia computer. As Tim Jordan notes:

There are two main forces that have driven the Internet to its present position. The first is the military-industrial complex, which has provided the main funding for some of the more grandiose projects that make up cyberspace and which provides an important cultural background to certain technological choices that have been made. The second influence is a grassroots and populist attempt to create networks … that place the power of computing in the hands of the individuals (pg45)

These grassroots activists grew out of the rejection of the values of post-war America. They represented a broad range of activist from civil right, gay rights, women's rights, anti Vietnam war etc., to interests in 'other consciousness' and drugs culture and were more like a continuum of alternative collectives than a single coherent movement. At first this 'counter-culture' was technophobic, but it came to regard the computer as being a tool for self-empowerment and an instrument to bring about its community-based agenda. As early as 1974 Resource One, a counter-culture computer group set up the Community Memory Project (an early type of Bulletin Board program). The idea was to create electronic public space. The Community Memory Project was short lived, however the lessons learned help to stimulate the extremely influential WELL ( The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) the child of the Whole Earth Catalogue

The Whole Earth Catalogue was an extremely important icon of 60s counter-culture, which aimed to provide alternatives to the consumerist goods and services provided by main stream commerce. The WELL was conceived as a way of allowing the counter-culture movement to communicate and to support it's widely spread community. The WELL went on to be one of the most studied sites of the Internet and forms the backdrop to Howard Rheingold's book Virtual Community.

It is important to not that one of the focal centres of the counter-culture movement were University campuses ( in particular on the US West Coast ). Researchers and students working on militarily funded computer projects often also had first hand experience of the revolutionary politics going on about them. Some of them absorb and contributed to its cultural development.

Historical Background IV - the Home Brew Club

Networking was clearly an important step for the development of the Internet as a new media. However, it was mainly a tool for academics in the early stages simply because they were the only ones who had access to computer terminals. The phenomenal growth in the 1990s also depended upon the development of 'personal computers'.

The first Personal Computer was conceived and built by counter-culture veteran Ed Roberts- It cost $420. However, it was sold without a keyboard, a printer, a display screen or any software. These omissions help to stimulate a very important movement, the software clubs, where hobbyist computer fans got together and hacked together code. One of the more famous clubs was the Homebrew Club some of who's younger members have gone on to be very rich and (in)famous.

Some of this younger generation of computer people did not share the counter-culture view of the other members of the clubs and went on to try and commercialised their ideas. Some of the most famous names in computing today, such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniac of Apple got their start in these clubs. Gates once told his fellow club members that sharing code was theft. Gates' ideas of the ownership of code has become a huge commercial industry and is normally refer to as being 'proprietary code' in which the source code for a program is kept a secret from its users.

However, the counter-culture has lived on in other parts of the computing community. One of the most important non-corporate developments in computing has been the open-source software movement. This movement is characterised by its desire to share computing code and to resist corporate giants like Microsoft. It has develop different models of rights, generally known as copyleft ( a hacker pun on the intellectual property right known as 'copyright').

It is worth checking out texts produced by this movement such as Rebel Code (Moody 2001), The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Raymond 2001) and also looking at Richard Stallman's website (which deals with some of the ethical issues behind his ideas of GNU 'free software').

Historical Background V - the Apple Mac

Arguably the most important personal computer ever developed was the Apple Mac. Apple hired some of their staff from Xerox PARC and brought together the expertise to produce a seminal multimedia desktop computer. As Wise notes

The Apple/Xerox deal marked the convergence of the ARPA research of the 1960s and 1970s with the Homebrew Club culture at Apple ( Wise pg 49)

The Apple Mac set the standard and price that other computer manufacturers had to copy. In making multimedia PCs affordable and desirable they helped to spark the boom in PC ownership. One of the chief drivers of the Internet revolution still going on is the huge number of machines in the homes of private individuals.

Historical Background VI- CERN, Berners-Lee and the world-wide-web

No history of the Internet would be complete without mentioning the world wide web. The WWW was originally developed in the late 1980s/ early 1990s at CERN, the International physics laboratory based in France and Switzerland The Englishman Tim Berners-Lee working with an international team developed the important protocols ( such as html) that enable website and browsers( see Berners-Lee 2000).

In his history of its development Robert Cailliau ( Berners-Lee's notional boss at the time) describes the unlikely development process of this famous technology (Cailliau and Gillies 2000). CERN was a basic physical research institute that was not aware that one of its workers was developing a world changing killer-app. However, the basic research culture of CERN, that allowed people to get on with what interested them, and its large budgets, gave Berners-Lee the time to develop his ideas.

It is significant that CERN's basic research background also gave it a culture that was not focussed towards the aggressive exploitation of the knowledge and technologies it had developed. As a consequence the www has developed as a non-corporate entity. It is also important to note that Berners-Lee is more than just a whizz-kid technician and his philosophical ideas have shaped the way the institutions that support the www have been formed.

When CERN decided that it did not want to operate the www, Berners-Lee and colleagues at MIT were instrumental in forming the W3C, the non-corporate consortium that runs the world wide web. As its website notes:

"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. W3C is a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding."

This does not mean that Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C control the Internet or are the sole forces shaping its development, however.

Historical Background VII- The Media and the State and the Private sector

At this point in our historical sweep of the Internet it is important to note that there was an important change in government policies, which had a dramatic effect on the birth new media. Industries such as telecommunications and broadcasting were deregulated and passed into private hands. The aim was to encourage competition and so create benefits to the economy (for example, increased efficiency, technological innovation such as multimedia, customer choice, and a synergistic convergence between the media and telecommunications sector). Formally the telecommunications industries had been regarded as being what economists called 'natural monopolies'. A natural monopoly is said to exist when a product or service can only be delivered most efficiently by one organisation. Now they were regarded as being competitive market sectors. The changes have important effects. As Wise notes:

"Monopolistic telephone companies, under state ownership or supervision, promoted social equity since the elimination of competition ensured that all users had equal access to the telephone irrespective of their location or economic status" Pg 88

Private companies on the other hand are subject to the short-term profit-motive. Considerable worry has been expressed at the equity of access to the Internet and other new media. A number of mergers have taken place, (e.g. AOL Time Warner) which have also raised issues of market share and lack of competition. As Wise notes:

"The institutional effect of communications privatisation and deregulation has been to initiate a process by which an industry which once consisted of a few large state regulated and /or institutions has been transformed into a market controlled by a few large private companies" Pg 118

There has also been a realisation of the role of content in the new media. The large media oligarchs are buying up the rights to everything they can lay their hands on. Bill Gates' private company Corbis has been quietly buying up the rights to a number of important collections such as the National Gallery of London and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington( see Corbis website). Far from seeing the de-massification of the media predicted by Nicholas Negroponte ( Negroponte 1996) , Wise argues that we are seeing the formation a series of global media giants.

There are similar worries about the provision of access. The cost of laying fibre optic cable to support broadband is consider. At moment in the UK there are only a few companies involved in this activity and they are only laying cables in areas they have identified as being economic. This effectively leaves BT with a monopoly over the rest of their customers. Internet provision is arguable a 'natural monopoly' without the protection of state control and regulation.

Questions therefore have been raised about the applicability of the market model. As we have seen one of the key drivers of the new technologies since their inception has been a huge investment in research and development (mainly through US military and civil research budgets). Wise and others argue that industry is unwilling and unable to commit similar levels of funds to the new media project.

Control of the Internet

In the 1990s the control of the Internet also passed out of state control. The US Universities lost their 'unofficial' control which passed instead to a US not-for-profit corporation called the 'Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN). As ICANN note they have been

" recognized by the US and other governments as the global consensus entity to coordinate the technical management of the Internet domain system, the allocation of IP address space, the assignment of protocol parameters, and the management of the root server system." ICANN website

ICANN members comprise technical, business and academic users. ICANN deliberations have been subject of a number of power plays and squabbles since its conception.

So who does control the Internet?

APPENDIX

Some Myths of Cyberspace

Richard Wise noted in 2000 that there were a number of myths surrounding cyberspace. The following represent a list comprising of his ideas (with a few from me as well). This is list is not meant to be definitive, but instead a point for starting a discussion about cyberspace.

Bibliography