COMM202/Origins of digital culture

From Driscollwiki

Goals

• Draw out significance of the clubs
• Contrasts between them?
• Role of institutions?
• Connections to earlier cultures
• Detailed discussion of Turner
  • Assume some students haven't read
• Investigating the key technological artifact "networked personal computer"

Random thoughts

Digital culture

• What do we mean by culture?
• What do we mean by digital?

What is a computer?

• Emblematic object
• What do they look like?
• Critical pieces
• Example of (+ 1 2)
  • Abstraction
  • Memory
  • Loop
  • Conditional
• Human computer
  • What if you put a person in a box? Passed notes to them through a slot?
  • This is what the experience of early mainframe programming would be like
• Mainframe computer
  • Mil applications
• "General purpose computer", programmable
• Calculator
  • Desk, pocket, programmable
• Minicomputer
• Microcomputer
• Portable computer (laptop, palmtop, mobile)

Access to machines

• Who? Where? When? Why?
• Show me the Money

Contrasting the personal computer with previous media forms

• Storage/playback
  • Print
  • Hi-fi home stereo
  • VHS
• P2P transmission
  • Telegraph
• Broadcast
  • Radio, TV, cable

Intersecting discourses, cultures

• Hobbyists
• Academics

Social networks

• Clubs
• Contra isolation, lone hacker
• Fanzines, magazines, newsletters, books, journals
• Conferences, conventions, trade shows

Making social networks material

• Whole Earth Catalog becomes WELL

Imagining the networked personal computer

• Bush, Memex
• Engelbart, SRI
• Alan Kay, Xerox PARC
• Susan Kare, Andy Hertzfeld
• WardTom Jennings, Fidonet; USENET
• Ted Nelson, Xanadu (1965); Tim Berners-Lee, WWW (1991)
• Richard Stallman, GNU (1985); Linus Torvalds, Linux (1991)