Ch 11 Networks

1. From the early visions of a global network to an embryonic global culture we are now experiencing, a variety of historical trends show   a social construction of communication technology. In other words, the human vision of a technology often drives its development. This idea stands in opposition to the  technologically deterministic view that people must adapt themselves to the inevitable march of progress.
2. International regulation of the internet is becoming highly contentious.   Vint Cerf, one of the early originators of open networks, had this to say about proposals to regulate the internet at the UN level:     (May 25, 2012, New York Times)

   When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash. What secret sauce powered its success? The Net prospered precisely because governments — for the most part — allowed the Internet to grow organically, with civil society, academia, private sector and voluntary standards bodies collaborating on development, operation and governance.In contrast, the I.T.U. creates significant barriers to civil society participation. A specialized agency of the United Nations, it grew out of the International Telegraph Union, which was established in 1865. The treaty governing the agency, last amended in 1988, established practices that left the Internet largely unaffected.

   

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Discussion questions

1. Replacing universities: Why did H.G. Wells say that universities are highly conservative and resistant?  How did he think they could be replaced? What do you think?
2. Curves in the road:  How did AT&T miss the curve in the  road with DARPA? What about the mass media? How did they miss the curve in the road with the World Wide Web?
3. Changes in mass media traffic patterns:  Consider the information traffic diagram (right) that shows the difference between top-down programs and other kinds of media.  List examples of other new and old media companies in each of the four categories. (Click on the diagram to enlarge it).

People & Events

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

Teletex, Minitel, Prestel, Prodigy, America On Line, World Wide Web, Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, laws of network value, Amazon, Netflix, Google

Documentary videos

1. Triumph of the Nerds 2.0 describes the early years of network development, from the Defense Department to the development of the World Wide Web at CERN. An excellent and entertaining documentary, probably too long to show in full during class.
2. Evolving Personalized Information Construct – EPIC – A  tongue-in-cheek history about the decline of real media in the face of “Googlezon.” The news wars of 2010 are notable for the fact that no actual news organizations take part… In 2014, New York Times goes offline …
   

Podcasts

• The Future of the Internet, Stanford Continuing Studies Program

Interesting links

Early history of the Internet (1960s – 2000) 

1. PBS Life on the Internet — Timeline 1960 – 1997
2. History of Minitel  – The original French internet, called Minitel, began as a government phone project in 1980. By 1990 — long before the web took off in the US –  Minitel had millions of subscribers and tens of thousands of businesses online. Also see:
   1. History of Minitel
   2. MIT article on Minitel
   3. Business Week article on Minitel
   4. Radio France International (RFI). “Minitel Lives On,” February 11, 2009
3. Library of Congress Internet history links
4. John Markoff, “When Big Blue Got a Glimpse of the Future,” article about 1970s meeting between IBM execs and network visionaries. The New York Times.
5. Roads & Crossroads of the Internet
6. David Carlson’s History of Online news 
7. Arango, Tim. “How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” The New York Times.

Emerging Networks (2000 – present)

1. Bob Metcalfe, “Metcalfe’s Law Recurses Down the Long Tail of Social Networks” 18 August 2006.
2. David Reed, That Sneaky Exponential – Metcalfe’s law to the power of community building, Context magazine, Spring 1999.
3. Rod Beckstrom, The Economics of Networks and Cybersecurity, US Dept. of Homeland Security, Dec. 12, 2008.
4. Video Game and New Media History links
5. “The Top 500 sites on the web,” www.alexa.com
6. Alpert, Jesse and Nissan Hajaj. “We Knew the Web Was Big . . . ” The Official Google Blog, 2008.
7. Anderson, Chris and Michael Wolf. “The Web is Dead,” Wired magazine, August, 2010.
8. Anderson, Janna and Lee Rainie. “The Future of the Internet,” Pew Internet and American Life Project, February 19, 2010.
9. Pew Research Center for People & the Press, “Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Outlet,” December 23, 2008.
10. Citizen Media Business Issues: Traffic Rankings, Search Engines, and Search Engine Optimization – Center for Citizen Media
11. N. Negroponte: “Being Digital”, Bits and Atoms, Chapter 1
12. FTC said to prepare review of Apple tactics in mobile ad market 
13. Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin, The Guardian, April 15, 2012.
14. Inside Washington’s high risk mission to beat web censors Oliver Berkeman, The Guardian, April 15, 2012.  
    

Anti-trust law and the networked world

1. The Apple – Amazon – Justice Dept. anti-trust suite of 2012 “is not about saving literature or the sanctity of the literary world, it is about the publishers’ business model,” says  Hoyt Hilsman in the Chicago Trib (April 26).   “Since the advent of digital technology, the book business — along with the music business, the film business and a slew of other traditional businesses — has been broken.”
2. European Union competition watchdogs began an investigation into Google in November, 2010 and the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened its own probe into the company’s lucrative search and advertising business in June, 2011. Google under scrutiny.  Reuters, Sept. 20, 2011.
3. US Senate Judiciary Committee, September 21, 2011:   “The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?”  See especially testimony of Jeff Katz, founder of Orbitz:

“In 2002 this openness and competitive aspect of the internet was also available to the founders of Nextag. They began to invest around Google’s ideas, and technology. But what Google engineering giveth, Google marketing taketh away. Google abandoned these core principles when they started interfering with profits and profit growth. Today, Google doesn’t play fair. Google rigs its results, biasing in favor of Google Shopping and against competitors like us.”

Cool  net stuff

1.  Ten Unforgettable Web Memes — Fail, cats, dancing baby, flash mob, jump the shark and others we’ll probably find embarrassing in 10 years.   Also, Memes and the spread of ideas — Smithsonian magazine.
2. Just for fun:  Dog tease.  Hilarious. The ultimate viral video.

Data Visualization – Discussion and Examples

Wikipedia

Complex data visualization is one of the most interesting developments in networked publishing.  Using maps, charts and other graphics, it is possible to communicate large amounts of statistical or geographical information quickly and efficiently.  Unfortunately, it is also possible to create  “chart-junk“  as  Yale Prof. Edward Tuftenotes.  Informative displays take careful thought and good design, Tufte says.

Kenya, 2008.

Ushahidi platform  – A free open-source software platform allows citizen reports into a google map.  An early example of this  civic technology was when  Kenyan bloggers  showed where rioting and looting had erupted in presidential elections in 2008 to circumvent a government-imposed media blackout.  Ory Okolloh,  a Kenyan political  blogger,  asked readers to e-mail information about about incidents they had seen.  The large number of enthusiastic responses led a team of Kenyan and European programmers –  Eric Hersman, David Kobia, and Juliana Rotich — to assemble an application now available for free as Crowdmap.   Other uses or similar crowd-sourced mapping projects  include:

• The  Christchurch (NZ) earthquake recovery map
  
• The Libya Crisis Map
• The Japan recovery Map
• The Haiti relief map
  
• Safecast  crowd-sourced radiation readings from the Fukushima nuclear power disaster.

Email from a corrupt culture (left) and honest culture (right).

The Design of Deceit– Brandy Aven at Carnegie Mellon University found an interesting pattern while studying business communication in the corrupt corporate culture of the now bankrupt – Enron Corp. of Houston, TX. Legitimate Enron projects (right) involved e-mails that were reciprocal and widely shared, but emails about Enron’s illicit projects (left) were configured in a sparse network with a central clique and isolated external players.

 China food safety problems.

Throw it Out the Window — Problems with food poisoning in China led history student Wu Heng to create a website in June 2011 called Throw It Out  the Window (Zhi Chu Chuang Wai).  The site maps food scandals nationwide from 2004 through mid-2011.  It  was created with the help of 33 volunteers from all over China and involves over 2,000 news reports.  The crowdsourcing is open-ended, with an “I want to add” link inviting further contributions.

US newspaper growth

Growth of American newspapers — An intriguing historical visualization that plots over 140,000 newspapers published over three centuries in the United States using data  from the Library of Congress’ “Chronicling America” project. Designed for the Stanford University Rural West Initiative by Dan Chang, Krissy Clark, Yuankai Ge, Geoff McGhee, Yinfeng Qin and Jason Wang. Note the drop-off of foreign language papers right after WWI.

From Appalachia ENE towards the Atlantic coast, the map matches coal mine sites and user-generated locations. 

Empathy upgrades and new environmental data visualization — This is an article about new Google mapping techniques for connecting mountaintop removal mining with individual use of electricity.  The project was developed by Matt Wasson and Jeff Deal of Appalachian Voices  and Mary Anne Hitt of the Sierra Club.

Making the complicated enivronmental issues clear through graphics.

Envisioning fixes to the US federal budget by NY Times.com

Top Secret America  — an extraordinary datamap of US secret agencies and their activities done by the Washington Post.