How the Social Web Came to Be

Trebor ScholzDepartment of Media Studytrebor@thing.net

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0

part 1

A history of computer-mediated networked sociality

Part 1: 1945-2001

Part 2: 2002- today

Is the history of the Social Web, solely a history of mergers and acquisitions, sales, and new markets?

Whose history do we write?Whom does it serve?

This history is filtered through the lens of the following questions:

•To whom do we owe most innovation on the Social Web?

•Where was the Social Web created?

•What motivated early programmers/users of the Internet?

•How did the initial move from research to commerce take place

•What were significant milestones in the scaling up of social life on

the Internet?

•What were some preconditions for this development?

•Which content did people focus on? What were they interested in?

•What were milestones in the design on the WWW?

Pre-history

1797 optical telegraphy

1746 200 monks Jean-Antoine Nollet linked to electrical battery

The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (1989)

http://tinyurl.com/2tmou3

1844:Samuel Morse’ first telegraph message was:

“What Hath God Wrought”

http://tinyurl.com/2vgfqk

The invention of the Internet in context

1945

hyperlinked pages and the “memex”

"knowledge on call"

http://tinyurl.com/3b7h9vhttp://tinyurl.com/39mf8l

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

- Vannevar Bush; As We May Think; Atlantic Monthly; July 1945

In 1949 in his novel Heliopolis, the German Ernst Junger dreams up the communication medium "Phonophor," which connects everybody to everybody else, enabling a permanent , technically facilitated forum that also replaces the passport, watch, newspaper, library, and encyclopedia.

http://tinyurl.com/2s2zn5

[A]ctivation; authorship; community -- are the most frequently cited motivations for almost all artistic attempts to encourage participation in art since the 1960s." according to art historian Claire Bishop.

1952

John Cage 4’33”

1957

Launch of Sputnik on4 October 1957 can be compared to Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, or 9/11 in its effect on the American psyche

http://tinyurl.com/32n7hq

The Advanced Research Projects Agency

1961

Leonard Kleinrock, MIT"Information Flow in LargeCommunication Nets" (May 31 1961)

First paper on packet-switching

http://tinyurl.com/23nbat

“On Distributed Communication Networks,” March 1964c) a network without central authority or single outage point Paul Baran

http://tinyurl.com/ywq8nk

1962

Packet Switching, Paul Baran 1962 at RAND, US Airforce

All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at some other specified destination node.

http://tinyurl.com/2ry3lo

IP, or "Internet Protocol," handles the addressing, seeing to it that packets are routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple networks with multiple standards

http://tinyurl.com/3dsb7g

TCP, or "Transmission Control Protocol," converts messages into streams of packets at the source, then reassembles them back into messages at the destination.

http://tinyurl.com/2ry3lo

1965

Ted Nelson coins the term "Hypertext" in "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate". 20th National Conference, New York, Association for Computing Machinery

First email 1965

Already in 1965, Fernando Corbato and his colleagues at MIT developed a program to allow individual users to swap messages on one single computer.

1968

"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a

machine than face to face...We believe that we are entering into a technological age,

in which we will be able to interact with the richness of living information -- not

merely in the passive way that we have become accustomed to using books and

libraries, but as active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it

through our interaction with it, and not simply receiving something from it by our

connection to it. (53)"

http://tinyurl.com/2c9uaf

Louis Pouzin designed and directed the development of the Cyclades network in France, which then stopped in 1974.

http://tinyurl.com/22ykun

1969

1969: Advanced Research Projects Agency commissions ARPANET to conduct research on networking.

First ARPANET nodes connected UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and University of Utah

http://tinyurl.com/2pxazn

In 1968, ARPA sent out a Request for Quotation to build a network of four Interface Message Processors.BBN made it.

Dave Walden, Bernie Cosell, Severo Ornstein, Will Crowther, Bob Kahn

http://tinyurl.com/2ujdes

http://tinyurl.com/yuw6ho

Norm Abramson wanted to surf - so he moved to Hawaii in 1969. He wanted to network with the other islands and so he built the ALOHAnet in 1970.

From the University of Hawaii, Abramson connected computers over a network of radio transmitters using a protocol telling the computers how to share the airwaves.

http://tinyurl.com/yvvmdc

1970

http://tinyurl.com/yvvmdc

TCP/IP

http://tinyurl.com/3c64vm

With TCP/IP, the "global network" was becoming a reality. Universities and government offices were using the network for communicating with colleagues and exchanging data.

1974: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection", which specified in detail the design of a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

Also the fax machine is only useful if many other people have it.

http://tinyurl.com/yu7g2m

Later: If the Internet would have just connected supercomputers, it would have not been as significant.

Whose Standards? Proprietary or Open Standards?

“The Internet's "anarchy" may seem strange or even unnatural, but it makes a certain deep and basic sense. It's rather like the "anarchy" of the English language. Nobody rents English, and nobody owns English. As an English-speaking person, it's up to you to learn how to speak English properly and make whatever use you please of it (though the government provides certain subsidies to help you learn to read and write a bit).”

Sterling, Bruce. "Short History of the Internet by Bruce Sterling." College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the. 1 Feb 1993. 4 Sep 2007 <http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/AIM/scale/nethistory.html>.

The TCP/IP protocol allowed different networks to connect together into one big network - the Inter-net.

http://tinyurl.com/yory85

As the use of TCP/IP became more common, it was difficult to stop people from barging in and linking up somewhere-or-other. The software TCP/IP was public-domain and the basic technology was decentralized and rather anarchic by its very nature.

http://tinyurl.com/2ry3lo

http://tinyurl.com/29vvarPowWow

Throughout the 1970s Instant Messaging began to appear

1971

1971: Ray Tomlinson of BBN creates email program to send messages across a distributed network.

1972: Tomlinson expands program to ARPANET users, using the "@" sign as part of the address.

http://tinyurl.com/34gyk2

Project Gutenberg is the"oldest digital library built on volunteerefforts to digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works."

Michael Hart

1971. Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks.

http://tinyurl.com/26zq8z

1977

1977 Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw created the first MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) leading later to MMORPG

http://tinyurl.com/35drka

http://tinyurl.com/2n5gvy

1978

CBBS (first BBS)Ward Christensen

http://tinyurl.com/38zf8q

January of 1978, Chicago was hit by the Great Blizzard of 1978

http://tinyurl.com/3a8wru

Many people did not have the Internet. They dialed in to CBSS directly via modem. Users had to take turns accessing the system, each hanging up when done to let someone else have access. Nevertheless, the system was seen as very useful, and ran for many years and inspired the creation of many other bulletin board systems.

ASCii art on BBS

http://tinyurl.com/yukqdk

1979

1979 Kevin MacKenzie e-mailed his fellow subscribers at MsgGroup, an early Internet bulletin board, with a suggestion to put some emotion back into the dry text medium of e-mail. (The eyes came later.)

Emoticons

USENET established. USENET was a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that provided mail services and file transfers. Precursor of GoogleGroups and other discussion boards.

http://tinyurl.com/2mdk3z

http://tinyurl.com/yqgc6h

Cover of COMPUTER Magazine from September 1979

1980s

What else did it take to make this WWW thing work?

http://tinyurl.com/2km2n9

This was the first IBM PC introduced on Aug 12, 1981

http://tinyurl.com/3c7suuDouglas Engelbart

The Well members could start discussion boards:the most popular one was dedicated toThe Grateful Dead.

Mid-80s computer manufacturers push proprietary protocols,

which failed

US Government pushed for ISO but TCP/IP was free, more viral

In the 1980s the PCs entered homes and offices in the United States.

The Well members could start discussion boards:the most popular one was dedicated toThe Grateful Dead.

1981 BITNET release “Because It’s There” | “Because It’s Time”Ira Fuchs (CUNY) and Greydon Freeman (Yale) Main features: email, LISTSERV

http://tinyurl.com/2cl3go

pre-www

http://tinyurl.com/2vxfbj

BITNET set expectations for free access and openness: it charged by bandwidth. Once you paid for the line, how much you use it was up to you. Others tried to establish a pay by byte system.

1985 Stewart Brand & Larry Brilliant one of the first community bulletin board systemsThe Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (The Well)

Brand used a networked PC on his houseboat in Sasalito, CA, claiming that he did so in order to experience commune living without actually moving into one.

http://tinyurl.com/374e2g

The Well members started many discussion boards.The most popular one was dedicated to The Grateful Dead.

In 1993:The Well as paradigm of ``virtual community''people meet, collaborate, argue, support each other emotionally

http://tinyurl.com/33h4ulhttp://tinyurl.com/33jt6z

Tom Grundner - prof. family medicinemaking community health information publicfounder of the Cleveland Free-Net became National Public Telecomputing Networkinfluential ... community-oriented, free-nets

http://tinyurl.com/2739fahttp://tinyurl.com/3akjec

Late-1980s: Networking took first steps outside academia

1984

http://tinyurl.com/ynkmby

Francois Lyotard and Thierry Chaput’s exhibition "Les Immateriaux” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. 30 artists collaboratively respond to 50 terms related the topic of the "immaterial." Lyotard and Chaput pointed out that they were mainly interested in the way, in which this collaborative writing changed the experience of the act of writing itself.

1987

LucasFilm's Habitatearly and technologically influential online role-playing gamefirst attempt to monetize a large-scale virtual community

http://tinyurl.com/29vvar

1989

http://tinyurl.com/324z9a

http://tinyurl.com/yto62g

CERN -- a place where scientist do incomprehensible things with tiny bits of matter out of pure curiosity, a lab

specializing in the most esoteric form of research imaginable

The British programmer Tim Berners-Lee, CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire)

WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project, 1989/90

http://tinyurl.com/2pxazn

HTML (HyperText Markup Language)URL (Uniform Resource Locator)HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)

... the WWW as an altruistic, non-proprietary, vendor-neutral contribution to society!

Keeping the software free is what allowed the WWW to take off.

http://tinyurl.com/2ntycb

1990

Cailliau, Robert, and James Gillies. How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. p90New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2000.

1990:30,000

1991: 100,000

1992:500,000

Internet sites in Europe

http://tinyurl.com/3bqudr

ARPANET retired and transferred to the NSFnet(National Science Foundation) that had started in 1988, connecting 250 non-US networks by 1990

Vint Cerf: “Requiem for the ARPANET”

“And so, at last, we knew its course had run,Our faithful servant, ARPANET, was done.It was the first, and being the first, as best,But now we lay it down to ever rest.”

Cailliau, Robert, and James Gillies. How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2000.

John Perry Barlow, worked with Grateful Dead, was part of The Well, and co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Stuart Brand and Mitch Kapor in 1990, focusing on digital civil liberties.

1991

August 1991: CERN releases WWW December 1991: 600,000 users connected to Internet

http://tinyurl.com/kn8fr

http://tinyurl.com/ysj22q

The early nineties were marked by the increasing use of the term "social software" in expert circles and

Benjamin Anderson's book "Imagined Communi t ies"(1991) inspired In t erne t en t husias t s who just started to believe in a world wi t hou t borders. In his book Anderson describes t he na t ion s t a t e as an imagined communi t y t ha t is mainly constructed by print media.

http://tinyurl.com/2yul9f

In 1991, the NSF allowed commercial use of the Internet, however, for the first time, and in 1995, it decommissioned the backbone, leaving the Internet a self-supporting industry.

http://tinyurl.com/2pxaznhttp://tinyurl.com/34ket8

Official policy for the Internet forbid anyone from using the network for personal gain or anything that didn't have a job-related function.

http://tinyurl.com/29m2wb

Launch of Gopher, the "infoserver that can deliver text, graphics, audio, and multimedia to clients." Search and retrieval network protocol designed for the Internet. Its goal is to function as an improved form of Anonymous FTP, with features similar to that of the World Wide Web. The University of Minnesota.

1992

1992 Marc Andreessen (b. 1971, 6’4”) undergraduate University of Illinois

protocols for the WWW from CERN

created more fun and user-friendlygraphical interface for PC and Mac. together with other students Andreessencreated the Mosaic browser

1994 Andreessen founded Netscape to market it as the university did not approve of commercial spin-off

http://tinyurl.com/yo24huhttp://tinyurl.com/282qw8

1.5 years later: 65 million users (see also: Linux)

(the most rapidly assimilated product in history)

Brewster Kahle

WAIS Incorporated:“It wanted to prove that you could make an Internet company.”

After selling WAIS to AOL in May 1995 for $15 million, Kahle and Gilliat founded the Internet Archive and then Alexa Internet.

Bruce Gilliat

p 136 how the web was born

http://tinyurl.com/2rencwhttp://tinyurl.com/yqtupv

1993

For a brief period, gopher and the World Wide Web were competing

systems. In 1993, however, CERN projected that the World Wide Web

would be free to anyone (no fees). Two months later, Gopher announced

that it was no longer free to use, which pushed users away from gopher

to the World Wide Web, which experienced a 350% growth rate that

year (mainly in US).

http://tinyurl.com/2pxazn

WWW Gopherpublic domain for purchase

p 279 how the web was born

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=447183492&size=l

1993 most significant milestone in the popularization of the WWW

launch of Mosaic web browser (this was possible because WWW was public domain)

early versions of Mosaic: collaboration feature to allow annotations, which could be shared with a well-defined team of collaborators

http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/dinos/dinos.1.html

1994

You can now, finally, order pizza online.

Web has a 341,634 % expansion rate in 94

In 2007, one billion people are online.

http://tinyurl.com/3xpdne

Woodstock of the Webfirst web conference at CERN in 1994

http://tinyurl.com/2uz4bd

1994CERN does not sufficiently support WWW.Europe’s bureaucracy makes funding difficult and standards harder to establish.Berners-Lee moves to MIT where he heads the W3 consortium.

http://tinyurl.com/yrjmy8

W3C AmericaW3C Europe

1995 1/5 of all Internet traffic is caused by WWW, taking over ftp’s leading role

p 258 How the web was born

http://tinyurl.com/38qa3s

http://tinyurl.com/29ffra

1993 De Digitale Stad ("The Digital City") launched (De Balie & XS4ALL)

publicly accessible (free-net) system

goal: bringing politics and citizens together in an online community

“a social experiment in Internet freedom“ (Geert Lovink)

the attempt of staying independent in an increasingly commercial environment

Justin Hall (b. 1974 in Chicago) is an American freelance journalist who is best known as a pioneer blogger

http://tinyurl.com/yjr6pq

1995

Dec 26, 1996

http://tinyurl.com/25dhkl

The Thing BBS Feb 08, 2004

The Thing, NYC

http://tinyurl.com/2y5yt8Wolfgang Staehle

http://tinyurl.com/32awehhttp://tinyurl.com/3bdyvj

Feb 08, 1999

http://tinyurl.com/368x5o

Mar 01, 2000

Founded 1995, First successfully archived: Jan 25, 1999 Online Dating, 15 million users, 37 countries

Security breachesBilling scandals

http://tinyurl.com/2fywza

Wiki Wiki bus at the HonoluluInternational Airport

Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and installed it on the Internet in 1995 allowing for the emergence of

http://tinyurl.com/ypo99http://tinyurl.com/26utwbhttp://tinyurl.com/2qqsbh

1996

http://tinyurl.com/ynlwje

users could write

reviews and consumer

guides, an early form

of web-based self-

publishing

“Amazon was founded in 1994, spurred by what Jeff Bezos refers to as his "regret minimization framework," i.e. his effort to fend off late-in-life regret for not staking a claim in the Internet gold rush.”

In 2007, worldwide, Amazon has "over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs (http://tinyurl.com/q7zfe)

http://tinyurl.com/33tmd8

http://tinyurl.com/38w7n5http://tinyurl.com/2ll4ffhttp://tinyurl.com/2ll4ffhttp://tinyurl.com/2rgezy

http://tinyurl.com/3dq7l8

http://tinyurl.com/2vd94j

first archived, Nov 29, 1999 searchable user classifieds, open

http://tinyurl.com/2vd94j

Craigslist site: first archived, Nov 29, 1999 searchable user classifieds, open

dated: 29 December 1999

Our policies ... taking it personally and very seriously. We take every kind of abuse very seriously, and in every case Craig will contact the abusive party and ask them to cease.

1995 School, Work, Military Connections

1996

1996 Sweden, Denmark, UK teens, tweens open Lunarstorm1,200,000 users. 2007: closed

Social Networking

http://tinyurl.com/3x8xt6http://tinyurl.com/3c69yf

first archived Apr 08, 2000

Manuel Castells (1942) http://tinyurl.com/39gtmvhttp://tinyurl.com/2pg78k

The “most decisive historical factor accelerating, channeling and shaping the information

technology paradigm, and inducing its associated social forms, was/is the process of capitalist restructuring undertaken since the 1980s, so that the new techno-economic system can be

adequately characterized as informational capitalism” (p18)

Castells argued that in contemporary society dominant functions and processes are increasingly

organized around networks.

1997

Rob Malda , aka. CmdrTaco

(1976)

photo:"Scott Beale / Laughing Squid"http://tinyurl.com/ngdkjhttp://tinyurl.com/dr92g

readers can comment

http://tinyurl.com/2f9axa

John Barger(1952, blogger,

Ohio)

Blogging: the art and science of pointing at each other

http://tinyurl.com/2q7yawhttp://tinyurl.com/2erjhvhttp://tinyurl.com/2hstek

blogging: the art and science of pointing at each other

Massification of voice

In 1995, the Asian American community site AsianAvenue.com kicked off (without social networking features). First waybackmachine entry for AsianAve.com 1998. http://tinyurl.com/2nk74m

Pierre Lévy

http://tinyurl.com/yvb4alIn Collective Intelligence, Lévy investigates the affordances of networked sociality http://tinyurl.com/2de683

“Through the intermediary of virtual worlds, we can not only exchange information but think together, share our memories and our plans to produce a cooperative brain." -- Pierre Lévy, from Collective Intelligence

http://tinyurl.com/yuo2ba

http://tinyurl.com/2zgpxh

Eric S. Raymond presented his essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar (CatB) at the Linux Kongress in Berlin.

1997. 2nd largest auction site http://tinyurl.com/34pkl5

1998

Indian social networking site Sulekha was set into motion.

http://tinyurl.com/ysfgoq

Jan 25, 1999

Feb 06, 2007

http://tinyurl.com/2gu2j9

http://tinyurl.com/24aws2

1998. DMOZ, founded as GnuHoo involves geographically dis t ributed individuals to evalua te websi t es, crea t ing a user-powered search engine.

http://tinyurl.com/35w5ej

Apr 17, 1999 Sept, 2007

1999

http://tinyurl.com/2dnhmy

May 10, 2000

http://tinyurl.com/37zrsrhttp://tinyurl.com/33n692

Relational Aesthetics Nicolas Bourriaud engages with the possibility of "relational art"

based on the practices of artists who became visible

during the 1990s.

Peter Hoschka introduces the term Social Web, Peter Merholz coined the term “blog,” and Rusty Foster (below)created Kuro5hin.

http://tinyurl.com/2deegjhttp://tinyurl.com/2yu6w7

http://tinyurl.com/ytggb5

a collaborative weblog where users votefor what goes to the front page

http://tinyurl.com/2sgcz2

Shawn "Napster" Fanning (b. 1980)

Napster was the first popular peer-to-peer file sharing platform.

http://tinyurl.com/2lhmmq

the 18-year-old college student whose school nickname was "Napster," along with his friend Sean Parker first released the original Napster on June 1, 1999.

African-Americans, 16,000,000 users (2007) http://tinyurl.com/k2jhx

Oct 11, 1999http://tinyurl.com/2lqxfe

http://tinyurl.com/353pmk

Pyra Labs creates Blogger.com

2000

http://tinyurl.com/2madla

Commercially the Internet started to catch on in 1995 with an estimated 18 million users. This untapped international market made speculators ecstatic about the “new economy.”

http://tinyurl.com/38zy97

too much too fast

http://tinyurl.com/yrkjya

http://tinyurl.com/26ppkw

To whom do we owe most innovation on the Social Web? (Where are the women?)

Yahoo

Google

Paypal YouTube

Facebook

http://www.slideshare.net/beppe/saul-klein-at-the-next-web-conference

photo:"Scott Beale / Laughing Squid"http://tinyurl.com/ngdkj

Slashdot

Conclusion Part1

Permanently beta

Research out of pure curiosity led to Internet

While the Social Web is available worldwide, sites like Piczo, Orkut, Fotolog, or Faceparty attract a majority of members in particular geographic regions and of a specific age group.

their contactsProd/users want control over their content

Interoperability through openID and content export features

as competitive edge

The rich get richer

Silos everywhere(prod/users wantfree-range data)

Young innovators (often still in college or barely graduated and mostly white and male) create commercial software and then join up with large capital to facilitate large-scale sociality.

People want to be where many other people are.

The WWW started up mainly on European ideas, but was exploited best in the US.

Expectations were shaped by early free and openly accessible software.

- end part1 -

please direct comments, additions, etc to trebor@thing.net