Thanks for your answer, Paul,
and thanks to Martin for filling in on networking around linguistic margins.
Guess it's my turn to explain why I questioned whether "the full effect of
the Internet" was to be counted on the "positive side". It has to do, of
course, with what the picture I'm getting when I do the background for the
development of the Xlists over time. I have been writing about how visible
the struggles of keeping the xlchc network together, technically, were
(still) in the earliest archived days, i.e. the late 80s, which has really
driven it home to me how much more standardized, and less visible to the
lay user, internetwork networking has become since then. I have also gone
back, sketchily, to XLCHC before the time of the ftp archives, and to the
ARPANET commonplaces of Net origin. So far I have not really looked as
deeply into the period of Internet consolidation, and the spread of the Web
(i.e. roughly the 90s). I'm mostly in the 80s. And, disclaimer: I am
neither a historian nor an economist, nor... gee, the list could be made
long.
It goes without saying -- but now I'm saying it anyway -- that much, if not
most, of the material I have turned to is "stuff" that I have found on the
Net. In that way I am as thoroughly Netted as can be. Coming from the Xlist
angle, it is the various academic and progressivist networks I find (though
I understand from reading Phil Agre that fundamentalists and reactionaries
were also early in using grass-roots electronic networks). So on the Xlists
I find participants expressing hopes that sound a lot like yours, about
international communication and coordination and affordances for
non-hegemonic voices, and hopes that the electronic medium of the
mailinglist could faciltiate the development of a shared research agenda in
the community of researchers interested in a cultural-historical view or
mediational view of mind and activity. (Paranthetically, in spite of
cordial informality within the xlchc user community, participants seem to
have treated the Net with more respect (veneration?) in those early days
than we do now. I wasn't "there" then, so it stands out to me. I also have
an old quote from Mike somewhere, where he explains how tha XLCHC started
as an electronic network for a pre-existing research community, but that by
now (written in 94 or 95) it is probably more like a general forum for
scholarly discussion about CHAT. Whoa, that was a long parenthesis.)
And the same guiding visions of egalitarian and collaborative networking
over the Net is what can be found "all over the place"... the WELL, studied
by Rheingold and others, the networks forming the IGC, the academic
communities going online in the 80s (and later), the early Usenet
community, as it selfdescribes in the electronic interviews and original
mailinglist material compiled by the Haubens, and (from the same source)
also the techies who developed the ARPANET, and sustained a strongly
collaborative culture within their distributed research community. Of
course thiscollaborative community spirit was also what attracted me to the
Xlists in the first place.
The Haubens (and others) present J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of
ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office, as a pioneer in
envisioning electronic networks as a way of building distributed
communities of participants self-selected on the basis of affinity and
common interest, collaborating through online conversation (although I must
confess that I didn't quite recognize the communitarian picture when I got
hold of the Licklider & Taylor paper). Anyway, I was intrigued by the way
these visions recurred both in the "center" and the "periphery", then
looked at how DARPA still presents itself to the World on the Web, and it
started dawning on me how it was from the beginning defined as an
exceptional response to an exceptional situation (Sputnik) -- to be a sort
of very flexible and mobile technical elite force, to complement the
heavier machinery of military R&D "as usual". So this, roughly, was how I
was primed when I picked up King et al., writing about the rise and fall of
"Netville" -- by which they mean the ARPANET task force that produced
email, TCP/IP, DNS (you name it). While celebrating the collaborative and
egalitarian culture of the Netville community, King et al. also point out
that it would not have been sustainable without the shelter provided by the
coalition between ARPA, the industry and the academy. Netville was funded
in a way that sheltered them from the short-term competitiveness of a
market, but as funding shifted from this coalition, beginning with ARPA
withdrawal in the beginning of the 90s, Netville has been increasingly
forced into a market economy. King et al. argue that when the main
challenge is no longer to make the network function in the first place, but
to deploy network infrastructure at a full social scale, it is very likely
that the institutional players of already estblished network
infrastructures -- electricity and telephone etc. -- will become the
central service providers. At this point I did nod my head, but also
entertained a strong YES BUT, related both to what Paul and Martin have
contributed here, and to the Xlists in general... and other "stuff" to
which we could extrapolate. King et al. seem to imply that the most
rational course would be to abandon the communitarian visions, as they are
only maintainable under privileged conditions that belong to the past.
While I would like to keep my right to regard them as still an "active
force".
Well, this is already getting too long -- even though I haven't reached the
end that I had in mind when I started. I'll have to be back with that. I'll
just take a few minutes to add some refs to this.
Eva
****
Hauben, Michael, and Rhonda Hauben. 1997. Netizens : On the History and
Impact of Usenet and the Internet. IEEE Computer Society. Information at
URL: http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/project_book.html
Licklider, Joseph Carl Robnett and Robert Taylor. 1968. "The Computer as a
Communication Device." In Science and Technology: For the Technical Men in
Management. No 76. April, 1968. Pp. 21-31. Also reprinted in In Memoriam:
J.C.R. Licklider: 1915-1990. Report 61. Systems Research Center. Digital
Equipment Corporation. Palo Alto, California. August 7, 1990. Pp. 21-41.
Electronically available at URL:
http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/publications/src-rr.html
Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier. HarperPerennial Paperback. available at URL:
http://www.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/
King, John L., Rebecca E. Grinter, and Jeanne M. Pickering. 1997. The Rise
and Fall of Netville: Saga of a Cyberspace Construction Boomtown in the
Great Divide. In S. Kiesler (Ed.) *Culture of the Internet* Mahwah NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
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