Media History from Gutenberg

to the Digital Age

Slides based on the Bloomsbury book by Bill Kovarik

Revolutions in

Communication

Chapter 11 -- Global networks

Web site & textbook

Textbook:

1st edition – 2011

2nd edition – 2016

http://www.revolutionsincommunication.com

This lecture is about Networks and the WWW How the vision preceded the techWho missed the ‘curve in the road’ Early attempts at wysiwyg networks

◦Particularly noteworthy: Minitel Cyberspace independence &

network neutrality Browser wars How networks are valued

Early networks

H.G. Welles, sci-fi author “Both the assembling and the

distribution of knowledge in the world at present are

extremely ineffective... [We] are beginning to realize that the most hopeful line for the

development of our racial intelligence lies rather in the

direction of creating a new world organ for the

collection, indexing, summarizing and release of knowledge, than in any

further tinkering with the highly conservative and

resistant university system.” -- 1937

Vannevar Bush, 1949 “Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library... A “memex” is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications [which] may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility....Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them... There [will be] a new profession of trail blazers... who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”

J.C.L. Licklider, 1960 “It seems reasonable to

envision, for a time ten or fifteen years hence, a

thinking center that will incorporate the functions of

present day libraries together with anticipated advances in information

storage and retrieval. … An ‘intergalactic

network’ in which … everybody could use

computers anywhere and get at data anywhere in the

world.

Martin Greenberger, 1964 “Barring unforeseen obstacles, an on-line interactive computer service, provided commercially

by an information utility, may be as commonplace by 2000 AD as

telephone service is today. By 2000 AD man should have a much better comprehension of

himself and his system, not because he will be innately any

smarter than he is today, but because he will have learned to

use imaginatively the most powerful amplifier of intelligence

yet devised.”

The Computers of Tomorrow,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1964.

Ted Nelson, 1981 “Forty years from now -- if the human species survives -- there will be hundreds of thousands of files servers. And there will be hundreds of millions of simultaneous users. All this is manifest destiny. There is no point in arguing it. Either you see it or you don't.”

(Literary Machines, 1981).

More ideas about digital impacts The Digital Revolution is

whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon. (Louis Rossetto, Wired magazine, 1993)

Changes in the information age will be as dramatic as those in the Middle Ages in Europe. (James A. Dewar, 1998)

Apple 1984 commercial

Timeline 1930s – 50s -- Visionaries

◦Welles, Bush, Licklider, Greenberger 1958 – US reacts to Russia’s Sputnik

◦Russian satellite program 1968 – First network protocol 1973 – TCP/IP, Ethernet

◦AT&T turns down network mgmt 1980s – Bitnet, NSFNet, Minitel (Fr.),

Teletext (UK), CompuServ, Prodigy, America On Line

1989 – Tim Berners Lee WWW 1993 – NCSA ‘Mosaic’ Web browser

Information utility, 1984

UK 1980s, inside TV signal

Prodigy, US late 1980s

Minitel – 1982 - 2012 France

Lessons from early networks

Navigation is important. The back button and site history lists, which became standard on web browsers in the 1990s, came from the confusion of having to navigate endless chains of numbered topics in the 1980s.

Top-down content is not enough. People wanted to be able to communicate in small groups and generate their own grass roots content. Access to news and other “top down” information is not sufficient for consumers to overcome price barriers.

Graphics matter. Users wanted a graphical display for networked communications to match new GUI interfaces on their computer desktops

Networks can help business. With enough people participating, even small businesses can use networks to efficiently sell specialized goods and services, developing what would become known as “long tail” marketing.

AOL used pre-loaded graphics

Howard Rheingold described the fun of new virtual communities

Tim Berners-Lee & the WWW

No ‘eureka’ moment -- The idea grew

over the years as he worked at CERN

“Suppose all the information stored

on computers everywhere was

linked.” WWW first proposed

in 1989, introduced over next four years.

Berners-Lee first web page 1989

Mosaic: First free browser, 1993 "By the power vested in me by

nobody in particular, alpha/beta version 0.5 of NCSA's Motif-based networked information systems and World Wide Web browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released...”

Saturday, 23.01.1993, 07:21 CST USA

From University of Illinois supercomputing center.

Marc Andreessen, leader of Mosaic development team

Mosaic (later Mozilla, Firefox)

First news web page, 1994

Note that graphics, although primitive, do not have to be pre-loaded any more.

Google dominates search engines

• Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, started research on the link structure of the World Wide Web. In the process, they created a search engine that would become Google by 1998.

• Improved browser search based not just on incidence of search terms, but rather, incidence of links to that page.

• Revenue $60 billion in 2013

“There are sound reasons for traditional media to fear Google.” Ken Auletta, 2009 book on Google.

Sergei Brin, Google founder

Browser wars 1990s – 2000s

Browser wars 2010s

Browser wars

What

New

Media

Changes

Long tail marketing

In many statistical distributions of popularities, large concentrations can be found, but they also give way to far more dispersed distributions along the “long tail.”

Example: A brick-and-mortar bookstore can only hold the most popular 5,000 books, but there are millions of books in print. A service that lets users access the less popular / more specialized books is serving the “long tail” demand.

Amazon.com founded 1994

• “Long-tail” book marketing served many

small niche customers.

• Believed that the volume of all the low

popularity items can be greater than a few highly

popular items.

• Near $75 billion, 2013 • Purchased Washington

Post newspaper in 2013

Amazon founder, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos

Reed Hastings – Netflix A computer engineer who left the Marines for the Peace Corps, Reed Hastings founded Netflix in 1997 after being laid off from his job and worrying about overdue fees at a local video store. By 2010, most of the local video stores were out of business because of Hasting’s new business model.

Craig’s List classified advertising Craig Newmark made classified advertising free nationwide, thus depriving newspapers of billions in revenue.

This does not bother Newmark, who doesn’t think much of the way newspapers were run.

Peter Omidyar

Web freedom: Reno v ACLU, 1997 US Congress passed Telecom Act 1996

-- Strict rules against web indecency

Case went to court as Reno v ACLU Court sided with free expression, said

the web would be fully protected like print, not regulated like broadcasting.

“The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.”

Cyberspace Independence, 1996

John Perry Barlow“Declaration of Cyberspace Independence,” 1996

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone… I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear...

Net neutrality Big companies want to provide high-

speed services and slow down competitors

“The Internet is simply too important to allow broadband providers to be the ones making the rules," FCC Commissioner Tom Wheeler, 2015

Net neutrality won a Feb. 2015 ruling but questions are still open about the role of common carriers that provide other services.

An international ICANN ? Originally, matching web names and

numbers was just one guy in an office. In 1998, the US Dept. of Commerce

created the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Transition to a United Nations ITU agency recommended by some international groups …

…but controversial in the US, and still (2016) unresolved.

Laws of network value 1 Sarnoff’s law (David Sarnoff, RCA

president, NBC chairman) Conventional broadcasting

◦ Value for the number of people in audience.

◦ A network of 10 is only twice as valuable as a network of 5.

◦ Linear growth model ◦ Under-values network users because it is

a one-way transmission model.

Laws of network value 2 Metcalfe’s law — Quadratic model

(Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet / built on Moore’s Law ) ◦ A network is valuable to the square of the

number of users. ◦ A network of 10 is four times more

valuable than a network of 5 (e.g., 5x5=25; 10x10=100).

◦ Theoretically, costs, in contrast, grow linearly.

◦ Although network value grows on a more than linear basis, its not quadratic growth.

Laws of network value 3Reed’s law — Digital model (David P.

Reed software engineer) ◦ A networks’ value doubles every time a user

is added ◦ A network of 5 users would have a value of

32, while 6 would be 64, and 10 = 1,024 ◦ Not very intuitive – Network of 50,010

people isn’t worth a thousand times more than a network of 50,000.

◦ Over-values network users.

Laws of Network Value 3Beckstrom’s law applied business model

◦A network is valuable for the way it saves on the costs of transactions.

◦The money a person saves in a network transaction is the value of that network to the user.

◦EG - If a book costs $25, but it can be purchased for $15 on a network, then the network is worth $10 to that person based on that one transaction.

◦The overall value of the network is how it saves money in all transactions.

Long tail marketing (2) Zipf's Law

◦ If we order some large collection by size or popularity, the second element in the collection will be about half the measure of the first one, the third one will be about one-third the measure of the first one, and so on.

◦ In general, the x ranked item will measure about 1/ x of the first one. (This is called the power law probability distribution)

◦Ex -- out of one million books, the most popular 100 contribute a third of the total value, the next 10,000 another third, and the remaining 989,900 the final third.

Network neutrality Different rates & access was a major

issue with telegraph & telephonesLaws in EU prohibit discrimination but

allow various costs under “Five directives”

US – ISPs wanted to control services but in June 2016 a federal court upheld the FCC's net neutrality rules. According to the FCC, broadband access is a public utility, rather than a luxury, and can be regulated for fairness.

Networks Most users can’t take advantage of

entire network. ◦User value tends to plateau◦Then users divide up into sub-networks

Networks must facilitate innovation ◦ Or they will face circumvention

Closed networks fail ◦ (MySpace.com, for example)

Open generative networks have a better chance of success

Review: people Tim Berners-Lee, Marc

Andreessen, H.G. Wells, Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Martin Greenberger, Ted Nelson, Len Klienrock, Vint Cerf, John Perry Barlow, Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings, Larry Page, Sergei Brin

Review: Concepts Teletex, Minitel, Prestel, Prodigy,

America On Line, World Wide Web, Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, laws of network value, Amazon, Netflix, Google, crowdsourcing, social capital, Striesand effect, Laws of network value, Long tail, Zipf’s law

Next: Chapter 12 Global culture