SUBJECT: The Computer as a Communications Device.
 
I have the following questions in mind as I am writing this post:
 
What is the advancement that the computer as a communications
device has introduced to society as a whole and computer science?
 
                          or
 
What new capability or role or utility can the computer
(facilitating communications) help fulfill?
 
I feel that by tracing the evolution of the computer as a
communications device should prove helpful to answering this
question. As I point out later in the post, there have been
people who have seriously thought about this during the
development of timesharing and the computer networks. There have
been some, but compared to computer science as a whole, this
field has not been given the attention it deserves.
 
I am interested in the capabilities that the computer as a
machine has facilitating communications. I am focusing on
communications as opposed to computation. In addition I am
focusing on Human Communication rather than Man - Machine
Communication. 

Following are some thoughts that I would be interested any
discussion about or comments on:

A) Often the computer is painted as a multi-function machine.
However this multi-fuctionality often rests on the ability of the
computer as capable of making arithmetic computations at a high
rate.
 
B) Material has been written by various people about the computer
as a communications device. However, only individuals or a small
community seem to concentrate on it. As such it does not seem to
have been a topic which has ever been expanded beyond a few.

C) Academic institutions seem avoid concentrating on the topic,
and the majority of the computer industry only delves into the
technical possibilities in order to make a profit.  Both field
seem happy to focus on the technical applications, without
sitting down to study and think about the social implications.

D) People have seriously written about the use of computers to
facilitate human communications in the manner I am thinking about
it. Some have been from those who were involved with developing
and thinking about Timesharing in the 1950s and 60s. (John
McCarthy, Christopher Strachey, R. M. Fano, F. J. Corbato, John
Kenemy, among others.) Others have been by people who were
involved with the experimentation and developing of
interconnecting computers using the Department of Defenses
ARPANET, and other computer networking pioneers. (J.C.R.
Licklider, Larry Roberts, Paul Baran, among others.)

These people have written about the ability of the computer to
help facilitate human communication. However, these articles seem
to be non-connected. There has not been a continual study of the
effects that computer communication has had on society. This is a
topic which deserves study to better understand what is happening
in our society today, and for the future.

E) The works on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) seem to
have little to do with what I find revolutionary about this
medium. Much of the CMC literature I have looked at seem to be
specific case studies of centralized isolated systems. The Net as
such is worlds different from these case studies. In addition
these studies often seem to look very narrowly at technologies
which are less used compared to the Usenet/Netnews and Mailing
Lists which go around the World.

F) The studies which focus on the social and political significance
and effect of computer facilitated communication on social relations 
and the rearrangement of political power in our society are what I am
interested in.

Many of us On-Line (but not all!) today seem to be aware of the
role the computer helps in human communication. However the
greater mass of people outside of our community are only just
being introduced to the possibilities. And this includes others
who use computers. Thus I am interested in hearing people's
thoughts and observations on how and why computers help to
facilitate communication between people.

---- Cut ----
Lastly, here are a few interesting quotes getting at what I am
talking about and why I feel it is important to study the
computer as a communications device:

People have a fundamental need to communicate and Usenet News
aptly fills the bill. (See, e.g., Gregory G. Woodbury's "Net
Cultural Assumptions" - available online)

     "I think/feel that computer communications (done between 
humans via computers) lie somewhere between written and verbal 
communications in style and flavor. There is an ambience of 
informality and stream-of-consciousness style that pervades it 
but coupled with ideas that are well thought out (usually) and 
deeper in insight than average verbal communications. Does this 
make any sense to anyone  'sides myself?"
(From the Human-Nets mailing list, circa from 5/15/81 by
FFM@MIT-MC with the subject "English Murdering & flame about
human telecommunications" )

pg. 21 -"Our emphasis on people is deliberate. A communications
engineer thinks of communicating as transfering imformation from
one point to another in codes and signals.

	But to communicate is more than to send and to receive.
Do two tape recorders communicate when they play to each other
and record from each other? Not really - not in our sense. We
believe that communicators have to do something nontrivial with
the information they send and receive. And to interact with the
richness of living information -- not merely in the passive way
that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but
as active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something
to it through our itneraction with it, and not simply receiving
from it by our connection to it... We want to emphasize something
beyond its one-way transfer: the increasing significance of the
jointly constructive, the mutually reinforcing aspect of
communication - the part that transcends 'now we both know a fact
that only one of us knew before.' When minds interact, new ideas
emerge. We want to talk about the creative aspect of
communication."

"The Computer as a Communication Device" 
from "In Memoriam: J.C.R. Licklider 1915-1990," Aug. 7, 1990,
p. 40; reprinted by permission from Digital Research Center; 
originally published as "The Computer as a Communication Device," 
in "Science and Technology", April, 1968, p. 40)