COMM202/Origins of digital culture/Outline

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Contents

Housekeeping (2:00)

  • Reiterate Blackboard expectations

Introduce Backchan.nl (5 min)

Presentation

Recap last week (2:10)

(Encourage students to use Backchan.nl during this period.)

Use examples from Williams and Boddy to talk about Baym's theoretical frames

  • Tech determinism
  • Social constructivism
  • Social shaping

"Needs"

  • Social needs, economic needs, industrial needs, popular needs
  • ESR: "Itch", "scratch"

What is the "methodology" in these readings?

  • Story-telling
  • History

What artifacts do they consider?

  • Quote from Baym regarding technical affordances

Our task for today is to talk about the material and social features of digital culture

  • What are the affordances + constraints of the technologies of digital culture?

Division of technology and culture

  • Tech determinism suggests that tech is outside culture
  • Social constructivism indicates that it emerges from
  • Social shaping pains a complex interdependence
  • Today we begin with tech and move toward culture -- but watch how often culture appears in our discussion of tech

Take questions from Backchan.nl (5 min)

  • Assess how it's working
  • Are people having problems with system?

THE DIGITAL (2:30)

Show clip from Pirates

  • (5:00)

Why is the "digital" in "digital culture" important?

Domestication - of computing, personal, network, general purpose

  • What is lost when the novelty wears off?
  • Why is it important to recapture the novel?

Primary artifact in "digital culture":

  • The general-purpose networked personal computer
  • Talking through this will bridge the gap between Levy and Baym

Have the students hold their mobile phones + laptops in the air

  • We are going to make these everyday things STRANGE AGAIN

What is a computer?

Demo:

  • Select a student from the audience
  • Open Notepad
  • Type a "(+)"
  • This means "add all the numbers that follow"
  • Now type "(+ 1 2)"
  • Ask student to give me a response (3)
  • Now type "(+ 1 2 3)"
  • Response? (6)
  • How about this? "(+ 1 2 (+ 3 4))"

Surprise, I am programming you in LISP

  • The language that John McCarthy started writing in 1959 and became the preferred language of the 1970s AI Lab
  • No microprocessors required

We're also going to get VERY TECHNICAL

  • But this isn't a CS class
  • Your goal is not to learn programming
  • But to try and return to a time when NO ONE knew what was going on
  • Confusion is appropriate!
    • Your iPhone... not confusing. LISP? Confusing.

Historical

Technical

Bits and bytes

  • Bit: binary digit
  • Why binary? Why not decimal?
    • Early machines were analog: Bush's differential analyser
    • Numbers represented in decimal form
    • Measurement challenges, pulleys, wheels, cord

Binary representation, abstraction

  • Use Notepad to demo binary addition:
    • (+ 01 10) == 11; 1 + 2 == 3
    • (+ 01 10 11) == 110; 1 + 2 + 3 == 6
    • Yes/no, no maybe
    • Green Go/Red Stop, no yellow
    • True/false, no exception
  • Seemingly self-evident but not suggested until Shannon's 1937 master's thesis

Code

What is "personal" computing?

TX-0, Tixo

"PC"

  • Question Mac v PC marketing
  • Vastly more diverse
  • "Companion machine"
    • Mobile phone

One-to-one man-machine ratio

  • "Batch-processing" v. "Interactivity"

Amplification and Augmentation

Altair is one-to-one

  • How did the TX-0 experience contrast with the Altair experience?
    • Emphasize time lapse in interface, programming "style"

What is "networked" computing?

PLATO at U. of Illinois

Sharing data among machines

  • Carry cards from one place to the next

Time-sharing

  • Next step for the MIT hackers
  • Not really a network of machines, but dummy terminals (return to this later)
  • Large scale: Minitel in France

Hobbyist networking

Internetworking

  • Diverse machines need common protocols to interoperate
  • ARPANET, Fidonet, USENET
  • Common protocols (neither software nor hardware) enable interoperability

Lots more to say about the internet and WWW but we'll save it for next week.

Check Backchan.nl

  • Address questions

THE CULTURAL (3:00)

The tech is all well and good but why is digital culture a distinct culture

The Hacker Ethic

List the characteristics identified by Levy

  • Is there something in the "essence" of computers that inspires the hacker ethic & digital culture?
    • Copy-paste, lossless replicability
    • Mobility
    • Code, control, and power

Utopian?

  • Quote Levy re: spread of hacker ethic

Mining Levy and Turner for clues

Hints from the backgrounds of the people profiled:

  • Model railroading
  • Amateur radio
  • Telephone
  • Hobby kits
  • Boy Scouts
  • Hot-rodding
  • Role-playing Games / Wargaming
  • Science Fiction fandom
  • Anti-war movement
  • Independent music / theater
  • Back-to-the-land/ Whole Earth
  • Rock music
  • Community BBS in a cafe, infoshop

Reciprocal relationships

Williams refers to technologies that meet "social needs"

  • How did computing meet the social needs of these earlier cultures?

What are some common features among these cultures?

Use examples from Levy to talk about these

  • Social
  • Play
  • Material creativity
  • Friendly competition
  • world-building
  • Geeking out

Centrality of music

Critical computing

Geographic specificity

  • New England
  • Bay Area
  • Elsewhere in the US?
    • Albuquerque
    • Texas
    • Southern California
  • Elsewhere in the World?

"Home computing"

Many of the antecedent cultures are gendered masculine

  • Nearly all of the figures in Hackers are male

Levy's discussion of HCC frequently makes mention of garages, kitchen tables, bedrooms

  • Boddy, Williams, and Baym emphasized the power of domestic spaces
  • "Home", "mobile", "desktop", "laptop"

Access

Hacker ethic demands access

  • Picking locks, breaking down doors
  • Sneaking around
  • Stealing
  • Unauthorized duplication
  • Reverse engineering

What kind of access is foregrounded?

  • What is implicit?
  • What kinds of access are implicit in being an MIT student?

Cost & Political economy

  • MIT students access the TX-0
    • But they don't know the constraints outside of their "Xanadu" so they don't build low-cost PCs like the HCC
  • Fred Moore upset to learn about sweatshop labor in Asia

Without critical question of access

  • It seems that the TMRC hackers are geniuses
  • They are uncommonly curious but equally important -- they have uncommon access

Check Backchan.nl

  • Address questions

Fast-forward to the present (5 min)

Boddy describes the repression of the amateur TV hobbyist

  • Compare with the repression of amateur mobile telephony
  • No Homebrew Cellphone Club
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