The Amateur

Computerist

http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/

March 2022

Toward a Second Netizen Book (Part 6)

Volume 34 No. 6

Table of Contents

Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Page 1

Internet Model of Socio-Economic Development. Page 2

Citizen Model for the Study of the Internet. . . . . . Page 8

Int'l Origins of Internet and its Future . . . . . . . . . Page 11

Int'l Scientific Origins of Internet and Netizens. . Page 16

Commodifying Usenet or Cooperative Culture. . Page 31

Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 36

Forward

This issue of the Amateur Computerist, Vol. 34

No. 6, is the seventh issue in a series, each containing

articles that are the basis for possible chapters for a

second netizen book. The articles in this issue provide

some models for the study of the Internet and insights

into the scientific origin of the Internet and netizens.

The first article, “The Internet Model of Socio-

Economic Development and the Emergence of the

Netizen,” explores a paradigm different from that of

the market as the motivator of economic develop-

ment. This model is based on the practices developed

in technical and scientific research: open, collabora-

tive, and directed toward an evolving vision or goal.

The second article, “Citizen Model for the Study

of the Internet,” proposes that at its essence, the

Internet is about communication – communication

across borders. A model emerges from the study of

the technology of the Internet. The breakthrough was

the design and creation of gateways to perform the

functions needed to support communication across the

boundaries of dissimilar networks. Similarly, the

netizen provides a model for a social phenomenon

that has made it possible to solve the problem of

citizenship across borders or boundaries. The article

argues that the models of gateways and the netizen

are significant new models to help open up the study

of communication.

The next article asks the question of what kinds

of policy decisions need to be made about the Internet

and by what process? It argues that the Internet’s

international origins and early vision and develop-

ment can provide a useful perspective for looking at

the contest about whether the development and

management of the Internet and its infrastructure

should be left to the market to determine or set by the

policies of governments.

The fourth article “The International and Scien-

tific Origins of the Internet and the Emergence of the

Netizens,” begins with a reference to the mythology

that surrounds the origins. A problem results from the

widespread dissemination of the myth of a military

origin. That myth stands in the way of the researchers

and the public recognizing the significant scientific

and social advance represented by the creation and the

development of the Internet. The article concludes

that by understanding the principles that made it

possible to develop the Internet, it will be possible to

understand how to create the forms needed to nourish

its continuing development.

The next article “Commodifying Usenet and the

Usenet Archive or Continuing the Online Cooperative

Usenet Culture,” tells some of the collaborative

history of Usenet, the world-wide distributed discus-

sion system that dominated early networking. It also

tells the story of the sale to Google, Inc. of the archive

of Usenet posts collected and archived by the com-

pany Deja.com. The sale is seen as part of a com-

modification of voluntarily contributed Usenet posts.

The article explores this as a culture clash and consid-

ers possible consequences.

The final article in this issue is a review of

Norbert Wiener’s 1950 book, The Human use of

Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Much of the

book under review consists of examples of communi-

cation theory applied to human existence, biology and

Page 1

thought, along with application to automata, machin-

ery and animal life as well. Wiener’s introduction of

the concept of cybernetics, for example the impor-

tance of feedback that works on actual performance

and not just on intended performance, had a strong

influence on the development of modern communica-

tion technology. The prevalence of the prefix cyber is

a tribute to Norbert Wiener’s pioneering work on

cybernetics.

We hope the articles in this issue will draw

attention to the importance of understanding the

scientific origin of the Internet.

[Editor’s Note: The following paper was presented in July 2010

at the Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE) Conference

in Bordeaux, France. It is a look at the lessons for economics that

can be learned from the building of the Internet.]

The Internet Model of Socio-

Economic Development and

the Emergence of the Netizen

by Ronda Hauben

Part I. – Preface

In this paper I want to explore a paradigm

different from that of the market, as the motivator of

economic development. This model is a model that is

scientifically oriented and based on the practices

developed in technical and scientific research. It is a

model that is open, collaborative and directed toward

an evolving vision or goal.

I will call this model the Internet socio-eco-

nomic development model. It is a model very differ-

ent from the neo-liberal capitalist oriented socio-

economic development model. It is a model based on

grassroots participation and feedback. Its theoretical

foundation is cybernetic feedback theory and commu-

nication theory.

It is a model that recognizes socio-economic

development as the development of a system, where

a change in one part of the system affects other parts

of the system. Critical to this model is the goal or

vision that provides the orientation for the processes

or practices of development. Also critical to this

model is the dynamic nature of the goal or vision as

a collaborative process.

This paper will explore how this model evolved

from the experience of the development of the Inter-

net. It is a model building on the processes of devel-

opment of the systems and technologies that we now

call the Internet.

Also this paper will explore the adaptive and

generative nature of this model which, among other

contributions, has led to the development of the net-

izen and netizenship as a means of participatory em-

powerment of the users toward a socially oriented

public policy objective.

While this model describes how it was possible

to develop the Internet, developing nations which also

want Internet development are being told they need to

follow a neoliberal model of development. Instead of

the lessons of the Internet development model being

shared with developing nations, developing nations

are encouraged to adopt a neoliberal economic model,

requiring them to liberalize their laws to be attractive

to foreign investment and loans.

But commercial or investment sectors were not

capable of developing the Internet. Describing the

Internet development process, Robert Kahn, one of

the pioneers who provided leadership for Internet

development, described how the Internet grew and

flourished under government stewardship [before the

privatization process] because 1) the U.S. government

funded the necessary research, and 2) it made sure the

networking community had the responsibility for its

operation. Also the U.S. government insulated the

early Internet community from bureaucratic obstacles

and commercial matters so the Internet could evolve

dynamically. Such a role for government in Internet

development is very different from relegating devel-

opment to the private sector.

Another critical aspect of Internet development

was the welcoming of grassroots feedback and taking

into account the feedback to make the needed changes

in the processes. The netizen and netizenship emerged

as an embodiment of this feedback process.

Part II. – Introduction

In January 1992, I was fortunate to be able to

get a connection from my computer in Dearborn,

Michigan to a computer in Cleveland, Ohio, known as

the Cleveland Freenet. This was a free connection

making it possible to access the Unix-based computer

network known as Usenet. I had heard Usenet was

filled with interesting and substantial posts and was

eager to get access to it.

At the time I was following the economic

Page 2

developments in the U.S. economy and was interested

in understanding the problems which appeared

serious. When I managed to get a connection to a

discussion group on Usenet, which was called the

misc.books.technical newsgroup, I sent a post about

my interest in economic discussion.

From: [email protected]reenet.Edu

Newsgroups: misc.books.technical

Date: 10 Jan 92 07:48:58 GMT

Organization: Case Western Reserve

University, Cleveland, Ohio, (USA)

Nntp-Posting-Host: cwns9.ins.cwru.edu

I am interested in discussing the history of

economics — i.e. mercantilists, physio-

crats, adam smith, ricardo, marx, mar-

shall, keynes etc. With the world in such

a turmoil it would seem that the science of

economics needs to be reinvigorated.

Is there anyplace on Usenet News where

this kind of discussion is taking place? If

not is there anyone else interested in start-

ing a conference.economics and how

would I go about doing this. This is my

first time on Usenet News.

[email protected]

I received perhaps 10 e-mails from different

people on Usenet telling me in various ways that my

post was not appropriate for a newsgroup discussing

technical books. Also, however, several who re-

sponded told me that my post was interesting and

directed me to the newsgroup that was appropriate for

the topic I had proposed. The newsgroup they di-

rected me to was the “sci.econ” newsgroup. One of

the responses, strikingly representative the culture of

Usenet, said: “Start discussing on sci.econ. We’re all

ears.”

The reason this was significant is that it let me

know what was wrong with what I had done, but also

that there were those on Usenet who were “listening.”

This post was done on January 10, 1992. This

was during the period that the Internet was beginning

to spread and become a worldwide network. It is

perhaps difficult for many to understand the experi-

ence of being on the Net in this period before wide-

spread access to the Internet was available.

Writing in the Introduction to the Internet

Society conference proceedings in 1993 (INET ‘93),

one of the Internet pioneers, Lawrence Landweber

writes:

INET ‘93 the annual conference of the

Internet Society is the first global net-

working conference to take place since the

existence and availability of networks and

their services have become known to the

general public … . We welcome you to

INET’93 and hope you will enjoy the

people and the look into the future that

you will encounter.

What is significant about this statement and the

conference it is introducing is that it helps to mark the

time period, 1993, when a significant new economic

development had been achieved, primarily outside of

and without any significant role being played by the

market.

Most of the discussion about the Internet in

research and academic circles focuses on the impact

of the Internet, or issues about the difficulties of

having it spread to all. It is similarly important to

focus on the understanding for economics of the

significance of the Internet development processes

which took place over more than a 20 year period of

time involving thousands of researchers, students, and

others around the world. By exploring the develop-

ment model that made it possible to create the Internet

and to spread it around the world, one can consider if

there are lessons from this process toward not only

the continued scaling of the Internet, but also toward

solving other problems of economic and technical

development.

Part III. – The Role of Government in the

Creation of the Internet

In trying to understand the nature of the govern-

ment role in the creation of the Internet, I came across

an anomaly. Indeed there had been a government role,

but this role was intimately tied up with the concept

of governance. In his book Nerves of Government, the

political scientist Karl Deutsch reminds the reader,

“Let us recall that our word ‘government’ comes from

a Greek root that refers to the art of the steersman.”

Deutsch elaborates on the significance of look-

ing at the concept of government as “steersman.”

“The same underlying concept,” he says, “is re-

flected in the double meaning of the modern word

‘governor’ as a person charged with the administra-

tive control of a political event, and as a mechanical

device controlling the performance of a steam engine

or an automobile.”

Page 3

The institutional structure at the core of the

government role in the Internet’s development was

known as the Information Processing Techniques

Office (IPTO). The IPTO was created as a civilian

office in the U.S. Department of Defense. This office

provided the protective institutional form to nurture

the early development of computer science, and then

of the Internet.

Describing this office, the authors of a study

done by the National Research Council of the Na-

tional Academy of Science write:

The entire system displayed something of

a self-organizing, self-managing system.

The explanation of the anomaly is that the

Information Techniques Processing Office embodied

the concepts of governance and communication

science that the first director of the Office, J. C. R.

Licklider, had encountered in his research and scien-

tific work as part of an international community of

scientific researchers.

“The office,” writes Robert Fano, one of the

researchers who was part of the research community

pioneering developments in computer and communi-

cation science, “was structured like no other govern-

ment research program, akin to a single, widely

dispersed research laboratory with a clear overall

goal.”

Fano credits the director, Licklider, for estab-

lishing the program so that it was “on the right track

with policies from which his successors did not

materially depart.” Licklider, acted, “as its director

and intellectual leader. He fostered close communica-

tion and collaboration among all parts of his far-flung

laboratory.” In this way he created a significant

research community.

Fano explains how Licklider:

Further instilled in that community the

sense of adventure, dedication, and cama-

raderie that he had learned to value in his

research career. He also made sure that the

availability of computer resources would

not be a limiting factor in the research

program, And that plenty of funds would

be available for the support of graduate

students, whom he correctly regarded as a

most important and precious resource.

Licklider was part of a community of research-

ers who studied the conceptual models for feedback,

learning and adaptive systems. Licklider, was a psy-

chologist who had done pioneering brain research and

had become intrigued with the potential of the com-

puter for the scientific community he was part of.

In a paper he wrote with computer science

researcher Wesley Clark, Licklider set as the objec-

tive to provide for the coupling of the general purpose

human information processing system with the

general purpose computer information system. Their

object was to “amalgamate the predominantly human

capability and predominantly computer capability to

create an integrated system for goal oriented online

inventive information processing.”

Licklider had a broad conception for what the

computer was to be able to do and the role for the

human in the close human computer partnership he

envisioned. He was able to understand the technical

and conceptual needs to start a far ranging research

program to implement this vision. Critical to the

program was the research community he created. He

started the Information Processing Techniques Office

in the Fall of 1962. He had two years to demonstrate

progress in the new form of computing he was pro-

posing.

Part IV. – The Scientific Technical Com-

munity

The IPTO funded researchers and encouraged

them to develop programs that came to be known as

Centers of Excellence. IPTO funded a program at

MIT known as Project MAC. It funded a program at

Stanford in Artificial Intelligence. At Carnegie

Mellon University, Alan Newell and Herb Simon

headed the program also in Artificial Intelligence.

Other programs were funded at other universities. Part

of the research program was for the researchers to use

different computer and software systems but to col-

laborate and share the problems and work they were

doing to find the questions they had in common, so as

to identify what were the generic issues of computer

science.

At the essence of Licklider’s quest was to gain

an understanding of the computer as a communication

device. Along with the effort to form a community of

researchers who would collaborate and work together,

was the commitment to disseminate widely the results

of the research.

Along with support for publication of research

in journals, and participation in conferences, research-

ers were sent abroad when invited. It was during a

meeting in Great Britain organized by the British

Page 4

Computer Society, where 10 IPTO researchers partic-

ipated, that the British researcher, Donald Davis, first

began to think of the ideas for the creation of com-

puter networking technology that came to be known

as packet switching.

In a paper Licklider wrote with another re-

searcher Robert Taylor in 1968, Licklider outlined a

vision for a network of networks.

Licklider’s vision

was of the creation and development of a human-

computer information utility. For this to develop and

be beneficial, everyone would have to have access.

The network of networks would be global. It wouldn’t

be just a collection of computers and of information

that people could passively utilize. Rather his vision

was for the creation of an online community of

people, where users would be active participants and

contributors to the evolving network and to its devel-

opment. To Licklider, it was critical that the evolving

network be built interactively.

Also Licklider believed that there would be a

need for the public to be involved in the consider-

ations and decisions regarding network development.

He recognized that there would be problems with

pressure put on government from other sectors of

society and that active citizen participation would be

needed to counter these pressures. Licklider, writes:

Many public spirited individuals must

study, model, discuss, analyze, argue,

write, criticize, and work out each issue

and each problem until they reach consen-

sus or determine that none can be reached

— at which point there may be occasion

for voting.

Licklider believed that those interested in the

development of the global network he was proposing,

would have to be active in considering and determin-

ing its future. He also advocated that the future of

politics would require that people have access to

computers to be involved in the process of govern-

ment. Licklider writes:

Computer power to the people is essential

to the realization of a future in which most

citizens are informed about, and interested

and involved in the process of govern-

ment.

Part V. – Internet Research Community

International from Its Beginnings

Internet development started in 1973 and in-

volved researchers in a number of different countries.

The development of a protocol to make communica-

tion possible across the boundaries of diverse national

networks required the close collaboration of research-

ers in an international community.

The resulting computer communication network

made it possible to send data across the boundaries of

diverse technical and administrative networks. Thou-

sands of researchers, students and others were in-

volved in the development processes from around the

world.

At a meeting in Sept. 1973 at the University of

Sussex, in Brighton, England, two U.S. researchers,

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf presented a draft of a paper

proposing a philosophy and design to make it possible

to interconnect different networks. The basic principle

was that the changes to make communication possible

would not be required of the different networks, but

of the packets of information that were traveling

through the networks.

To have an idea of the concept they proposed it

is helpful to look at a diagram to show what the

design would make possible.

Their diagram (

http://ais.org/~ronda/new.pape

rs/1.pdf) is from a memo by Vint Cerf, but it is not an

actual plan for the Internet.

In the gateways, changes to the packets would

be made to make it possible for them to go through

the networks. Also the gateways would be used to

route the packets.

The philosophy and design for an Internet was

officially published in a paper in May 1974. The

paper is titled “A Protocol for Packet Network Inter-

communication” by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn

with thanks to others including several from the

international network research community for their

contributions and discussion.

Describing the process of creating the TCP/IP

protocol, Cerf explains that the effort at developing

the Internet protocols was international from its very

beginnings. Peter Kirstein, a British researcher at the

University College London (UCL) presented a paper

in Sept. 1975 at a workshop in Laxenburg, Austria,

describing the international research process.

This workshop was attended by an international

group of researchers, including researchers from

Eastern Europe. Kirstein reports on research to create

the TCP/IP protocol being done by U.S. researchers,

working with British researchers and Norwegian

researchers.

Page 5

There is a diagram (http://ais.org/~ronda/new

.papers/2.pdf) that Kirstein presents showing the

participation of U.S. researchers via the ARPANET,

along with British researchers working at the Univer-

sity College London (UCL) and Norwegian research-

ers working at NORSAR.

Describing such an international collaboration

in building a packet switching satellite network as

part of the Internet, Bob Kahn writes:

SATNET … was a broadcast satellite

system. This is if you like an ETHERNET

IN THE SKY (http://ais.org/~ronda/new

.papers/SatnetPic.jpg) with drops in Nor-

way (actually routed via Sweden) and then

the U.K., and later Germany and Italy.

Networking continued to develop in the 1980s.

Among the networking efforts were those known as

Usenet (uucp), CSnet, NSFnet, FIDONET, BITNET,

Internet (TCP/IP), and others.

By the early 1990s TCP/IP became the protocol

adopted by networks around the world.

Part VI. – Emergence of the Netizen

It is also in the early 1990s that the co-author of

the book Netizens: On the History and Impact of

Usenet and the Internet, Michael Hauben, did some

pioneering online research as part of class projects in

his studies at Columbia University. He explored

where the networks could reach and what those who

were online felt was the potential and the problems of

the developing Internet.

In the process he discovered that there were

people online who were excited by the fact that they

could participate in spreading the evolving network

and contributing so that it would be a helpful commu-

nication medium for others around the world. Michael

saw these users as citizens of the net or what at the

time was referred to as net.citizens

Shortening the term to ‘netizen,’ he identified

and documented the emergence of a new form of

citizenship, a form of global citizenship that is called

netizenship.

Describing these online citizens, the netizens,

Michael writes:

They are people who understand that it

takes effort and action on each and every-

one’s part to make the Net a regenerative

and vibrant community and resource.

Netizens are people who decide to devote

time and effort into making the Net, this

new part of our world, a better place.

(Hauben and Hauben, 1997)

The concept of Netizens has spread around the

world. There are many examples of users who have

identified the participatory potential of the Internet as

a means for them to try to explore how they can

contribute to a more democratic and just society.

Netizens in South Korea

and China

are particularly

active in exploring the potential of the Internet to give

them the ability to monitor those with power in their

societies.

Part VII. – Netizens Providing Hope for

Future Development

In his article “Social Science and the Social

Development Process in Africa” Charly Gabriel

Mbock, critiques the structural adjustment model of

development that has pauperized Africa. He describes

how loans were made by western countries which

benefited a small segment of African society and the

western nations that made the loans. These left a debt

of not only the loan but also continuing interest

payments which the people of Africa have to pay

back despite the fact they never benefitted from the

loans themselves.

In place of the “structural adjustment program”

that brought the people of Africa so much trouble,

Mbock proposes a “democratic adjustment pro-

gram.”

“No one can stop the globalization process,”

Mbock writes, “But perhaps a world of global neti-

zens could help to mitigate the consequences of the

global economy.”

“Will the situation improve,”

Mbock asks, “if the future brings ‘netizenship’ to

Africans?”

He writes:

Michael and Ronda Hauben are of the

opinion that the Net and the new commu-

nications technologies will encourage

people to shift from citizenry to netizenry,

away from ‘geographical national defini-

tion of social membership to the new non-

geographically based social membership

‘(Mbock referring to Hauben and Hauben,

1997, pp. x-xi) (p.165)

“The dream of worldwide ‘netizenry,’ Mbock writes,

“is the creation of a global community devoted to a

more equitable sharing of world resources through

efficient interactions.”

He writes, quoting Netizens :

Page 6

A Netizen (Net citizen) exists as a citizen

of the world thanks to the global connec-

tivity that the Net makes possible. You

consider everyone your compatriot. You

physically live in one country but you are

in contact with much of the world via the

global computer network. Virtually you

live next door to every other single Neti-

zen in the world. Geography and time are

no longer boundaries (…) A new, more

democratic world is becoming possible as

a new grassroots connection that allows

excluded sections of society to have a

voice. (Hauben and Hauben, 1997, pp. 3,

4-5) (p. 165)

“If such a global community were to become reality,

then community ways would prevail over market

values,” writes Mbock. “As an efficient and demo-

cratic breakthrough, technological innovation would

lead to deep-seated social transformations resulting in

global change … .” (p. 165)

“The hypothesis of a new world order,” he

proposes, “is an opportunity for catch-up of countries

in Africa to create,” quoting from Michael Hauben, “a

forum through which people influence their govern-

ments, allowing for the discussion and debate of

issues in a mode that facilitates mass participation.”

(Hauben and Hauben, 1997, p. 56) (p. 165)

“The outcome would be netdemocracy,” Mbock

writes, “with a three-pronged system of dialogue;

dialogue among the citizens of a given country, dia-

logue among these citizens and their local or national

government, and dialogue among ‘netizens.’ The

world as a global community of ‘netizens,’ would

then, ‘at last’ possess its long-awaited engine for

effective and social development in Africa.” (p. 165)

“To Sean Connell,” Mbock writes, referring to

a quote from Connell in Netizens, “the Net is a

highway to real democracy, ‘a means to create vocal,

active, communities that transcend race, geography

and wealth,’ a mechanism through which everybody

can contribute to the governing of his or her country”

(Hauben and Hauben, 1997, p. 249) (p. 165).

Mbock argues that:

(A)s a new paradigm shift from citizen-

ship to genuine ‘netizenship’ is the world-

wide innovation that social scientists

should herald, and not only for Africa.

This implies looking beyond national

citizen passports, to negotiate global,

‘netizen’ ones.

Mbock’s application of the concept of netizen-

ship to help solve the problems created by the struc-

tural adjustment policies of the Bretton Woods insti-

tutions offers a mechanism to provide a watchdog

over the abuse of power in the development pro-

cesses. The model of Internet development provides

a means to base development on a scientific founda-

tion.

Part VIII. – Conclusion

The question being considered in this paper, on

the contrary, is how to understand the process of

Internet research over a 20 year period of time as a

socio-economic phenomena.

There has been much criticism of the neoliberal

economic paradigm especially of the structural adjust-

ment policies carried out by the Bretton Woods

Institutions.

In his 2001 Nobel Prize speech, Joseph Stiglitz

addresses the difficulty of creating a new paradigm in

economics. “To develop a new paradigm,” he says,

“we had to break out from the long established

premises, to ask what should be taken as assumptions

and what should be derived from analyses.”

There is recognition that it is not adequate to

critique the neoliberal paradigm, but thought has to be

given to the set of assumptions and analyses that have

dominated the neoliberal economic paradigm for

several decades.

In an article on his comprehensive development

paradigm, Stiglitz considers the long standing debate

on the relationship between democracy and develop-

ment. Arguing that it is not necessary to sacrifice

democracy to achieve development, Stiglitz notes the

need for and potential of a more participatory process

in society given new developments like the Internet.

But while he is arguing in favor of the benefit to

development of more democratic processes, he also

notes how difficult it may be to achieve these.

While Stiglitz refers to some examples of

participatory processes aiding economic development,

the process of the development of the Internet and of

the various technologies it helped to bring about,

provides a significant source of experience to under-

stand the potential and problems of these new pro-

cesses. And just as other members of this panel, dem-

onstrate in their papers, the Internet Model of Socio-

Economic Development and the Emergence of the

Netizen establishes the basis to recognize that the

Page 7

homo neticus, or the netizen, rather than the egoistic,

short-sighted homo economicus, may provide a better

theoretical role model for social science and econom-

ics.

Notes

1. Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, Netizens: On the History

and Impact of Usenet and the Internet, pp. 61-62.

2. Barry Leiner, (Editor), Proceedings of INET’93 International

Networking Conference, San Francisco, California, August 17-

20, 1993, p. 8.

3. Karl Deutsch, Nerves of Government: Models of Political

Communication and Control, New York, Free Press, 1963, p.

182.

4. Ibid.

5. National Research Council, Funding a Revolution, The

National Academies Press, 1999, p. 105, Online at:

https://www

.nap.edu/cart/download.cgi?record_id=6323&file=85-1 35.

6. Robert Fano, “Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, March 11,

1915–June 26, 1990,” Online at:

http://www.ais.org/~jrh/lick

lider/lick-fano.html.

7. Wesley Clark and J. C. R. Licklider, “Online Man Computer

Communication,” AFIPS, Proceedings of May1-3, 1962, Spring

Joint Computer Conference, San Francisco, California, pp. 113-

128. Online at:

https://ia800807.us.archive.org/29/items/online-

man-computer-communication/Image072217150750.pdf

8. J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, “The Computer As a

Communication Device.” Online at: https://www.hpl.hp.com

/techreports /Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-61.pdf.

9. Ronda Hauben, “The International Origins of the Internet and

the Impact of this Framework on its Future,” talk given at

Columbia University, November 4, 2004, Online at:

http://www

.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/misc/wsistalknov2004.doc.

10. Ronda Hauben, “The Internet: On its International Origins

and Collaborative Vision, (A Work In Progress).” Online at:

http://www.co lumbia.edu/~rh120/other/birth_tcp.txt.

11. Ronda Hauben, “On Grassroots Journalism and Participatory

Democracy in South Korea,” in Korea Yearbook 2007: Politics,

Economics and Society, edited by Ruediger Frank et al., Brill,

2007. Online at:

http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/netizens

_draft.pdf

12. Shaobin Yu, “Interaction in the Information Era: Is Internet

Supervision the Panacea?”

13. Charly Gabriel Mbock, “Social Science and the Social

Development Process in Africa,” Social Science and Innovation,

OECD, 2001, p. 161. The whole book can be read for free online

at:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Social_Sciences_and

_Innovation/LncFo1_SDxcC.

14. Ibid, p. 160.

15. Ibid, p. 165.

16. Ibid. p. 166.

17. In his Nobel Prize speech, Joseph Stiglitz addresses the

difficulty of creating a new paradigm in economics. “To develop

a new paradigm,” he says, “we had to break out from the long

established premises, to ask what should be taken as assumptions

and what should be derived from analyses.” Joseph Stiglitz,

“Information and the Change in the Paradigm in Economics,”

Prize Lecture, December 8, 2001, p. 487. Video of this speech

can be viewed online at:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes

/economic-.sciences/2001/stiglitz/lecture/

18. Joseph Stiglitz, “Participation and Development: Perspec-

tives from the Comprehensive Development Paradigm,” Review

of Development Economics, 6(2), 2002, p. 169.

Bibliography

AFIPS, Proceedings of May 1-3, 1962, Spring Joint Computer

Conference, San Francisco, California.

Deutsch, Karl Wolfgang, Nerves of Government: Models of

Political Communication and Control, 1963, London,

England, Free Press of Glencoe.

Hauben, Michael and Ronda Hauben, Netizens: On the History

and Impact of Usenet and the Internet, 1997 Los

Alamitos, California, IEEE Computer Society Press.

Leiner, Barry, Editor, Proceedings of INET’93 International

Networking Conference, San Francisco, California,

August 17-20, 1993.

National Research Council of National Academy of Science,

Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Comput-

ing Research, The National Academies Press, 1999. On

line at:

https://www.nap.edu/download/6323

OECD, Social Science and Innovation, 2001, OECD Publi-

cations, Paris. Online at: https://www.google.com/books

/ e d i t i o n / S o c i a l _ S c i e n c e s _ a n d _ I n n o v a t i o n

/LncFo1_SDxcC

[Editor’s note: The Presidency of the European Union (EU)

rotates among its member states every six months. In July 2006,

Finland was to assume the presidency for the second time. In

May of that year, Ronda Hauben was at a conference on

“Technology and Rethinking European Borders” in

Lappeenranta, Finland.

The theme of the conference related to

the problem of borders and the role that technology has played

in the construction of the European Union. Following is an edited

version of her talk presented at the conference.]

Citizen Model for the Study

of the Internet

New Technology Demands New

Paradigm, Methodology

by Ronda Hauben

My previous visit to Finland was in December

1999, when Finland last had the EU presidency. I was

invited to speak at a very interesting conference of

NGOs from all over Europe that took place in

Tampere, Finland. The title of the conference was

“Citizen’s Agenda NGO Forum 2000.”

It was held to

herald in the new millennium. Some at the conference

had just returned from the 1999 World Trade Organi-

zation (WTO) protests in Seattle in the U.S.

Page 8

The Citizen’s Agenda NGO Forum 2000 put on

the table the problem that citizens in Europe, as well

as citizens in the U.S. (as shown in Seattle), were

feeling the problem of a lack of citizen power. The

EU conference demonstrated the efforts of citizens to

pressure their governments to maintain the social

institutions and policies so vital to the fight against

the harmful effects of globalization. I presented a talk

at the conference exploring the question of whether

the Internet could be helpful for citizens. The talk was

titled, “Is the Internet a Laboratory for Democracy?”

In July 2006, Finland again assumed the Presi-

dency of the EU. The problem of the citizen was

again an issue in the EU, as it was in the U.S. What,

if any, is the connection between this conference on

the history of technology and European borders and

the problem of the citizen in 2006?

The paper I submitted for this conference

discusses the history of the Internet and the role that

it has played in helping to make it possible for the

citizen to communicate across the borders of diverse

networks.

I want to propose that at its essence, the

Internet is about communication – communication

across borders. Similarly, communication is vital to

those who desire to act as citizens in these times.

The Citizen’s Agenda Forum demonstrated that

the border that citizens have to be able to cross in

their communication is the border posed by their

elected representatives, who, all too often, are not

interested in hearing the ideas and views of the

citizens. This problem – finding a way to have the

representative system recognize a means of involving

citizens in the decisions that are made – is a problem

that was identified and discussed at the workshop,

“Civic Participation, Virtual Democracy and the Net”

held during the Citizen’s Agenda 2000 Forum.

Research exploring whether the Internet could help

citizens to bridge the borders blocking such commu-

nication was discussed.

The problem of involving the citizens in the

affairs of the EU, which was the subject of the Citizen

Agenda Forum in 1999, had similarly been the focus

of research and discussion in the EU in 1995-96. The

debate over the ratification of the Maastricht treaty

“revealed that there was still a degree of skepticism

about European Integration” among the citizens of

Europe, explains the EU document “Preparing for the

Century.” The authors of this document explain

that the “Maastricht Treaty makes citizenship an

evolving concept.”

In a paper published in 1996, after the meeting

of the EU’s Intergovernmental Conference, “The

1996 IGC: European Citizenship Reconsidered,”

Leszek Jesien, a researcher and advisor to the Polish

government on EU integration, explores the problem

of creating a European form of citizenship.

Jesien argues that the bedrock principle of

democracy is what legitimizes a government, and that

is the “principle that power can be held and gover-

nance exercised only with the consent of the gov-

erned.”

A sign that there is a lack of such legitimacy, he

proposes, is when “men and women distrust the

institutions of their state.” Thus Jesien identifies as a

necessary aspect of democratic legitimacy “the need

to find modern ways for [the] proper expression of the

political will of the citizens.”

In the course of his research Jesien identified the

ability to participate in the affairs of the state as the

essential aspect of citizenship. But he still had a

problem of determining how there could be a form of

EU citizenship that was different from that of belong-

ing to a nation.

To solve the problem, Jesien proposed as a

model, the role of the netizen – Internet users who act

as citizens of the Net. Jesien recognized that the

netizen was an active participant in the affairs of the

Net. Jesien referred to the work of Michael Hauben,

co-author of the book Netizens: On the History and

Impact of Usenet and the Internet. Hauben did pio-

neering research which provided a conceptual founda-

tion for the social phenomenon of the netizen.

In his paper about European construction, Jesien

quotes Hauben’s description of the netizen:

Netizens are Net Citizens … these people

are … those who … make [the Net] a re-

source of human beings. These netizens

participate to help make the Net both an

intellectual and a social resource.

Jesien recognized that just as the EU was having

trouble determining how to develop a concept of

citizenship, a related form of citizenship was being

developed online. Jesien wrote:

At the time the European Union struggles

to shape the European citizenship with

much effort and little success, the other

citizenship – Netizenship emerges.

What a rare researcher Jesien is, able to not only

identify the significant aspect of the problem he was

pursuing, but also to see a model for a solution from

Page 9

what would seem on the surface to be an unrelated

phenomenon. Jesien proposed that European “negoti-

ators and … political leaders should look at this phe-

nomenon with sympathy and attention.”

I have taken a significant portion of the time

allotted for my talk to focus on one aspect of my

paper. I believe that this aspect is worthy of the time

for several reasons. One is that it focuses on a serious

problem of European construction and of the crisis of

democracy worldwide. A second is that once a prob-

lem was identified and studied, a solution to it was

found in a model which emerged from the new tech-

nology, from the technology of the Internet. Third is

that there is something new and significant to be

learned from paying attention to technology and to the

social phenomena which emerge as a result of the

technology.

While this example on the surface doesn’t refer

to the problem of borders or boundaries, the relevance

to the theme of this conference becomes clearer when

one considers that an essential aspect of the Internet

has to do with the problem of making communication

possible across the borders or boundaries of dissimilar

but interconnected networks.

My paper describes the means found to solve

the communication problem facing the Internet pio-

neers. The breakthrough was the design and creation

of gateways to perform the functions needed to

support communication across the borders or bound-

aries of dissimilar networks.

While the design of these gateways is only a

part of the design for the Internet, it helps to demon-

strate that a significant technical model was devel-

oped to help to solve the problem of communication

across boundaries or borders of dissimilar networks.

(One could add that an aspect of the problem was that

these early computer networks were or would be

under the political ownership and administration of

diverse entities.) Similarly, the netizen provides a

model for a social phenomenon that has made it

possible to solve the problem of citizenship across

borders or boundaries, a problem Jesien identified as

relevant to EU construction.

I am proposing that the study of the origin and

development of the Internet and of the netizen is a

fruitful arena for research, as something new has been

created and the research can make it possible to learn

about the newly emerging technology and the newly

emerging social processes that it brings into being.

Not only is the study of the Internet a means of

learning about collaboration across technical and

social borders or boundaries, it is also true that the

Internet provides a platform to nourish and support

such collaborative research.

The significance of this research is highlighted

by some observations about the nature and needs of

new technology like the Internet that are presented in

the work of a British researcher writing about the

history of technology and engineering. In his article

“Engineering Disclosing Models,” Michael Duffy

argues that not only is it important to recognize the

nature of the new and emerging technical and engi-

neering developments, but also that the research to

document these new developments will require new

models and methodologies.

Duffy argues that these new engineering and

technical developments represent a change in the

conceptual paradigm as fundamental as the change

described in the book The Elizabethan World Picture

by Tillyard. This book described the changed para-

digm in the Elizabethan period that made it possible

to discard the models of the old world of fire, air,

earth, and water, and to substitute in their place a

science that would focus on the nature of the phenom-

ena being observed in order to determine their under-

lying principles and scientific laws. This paradigm,

Duffy explains, led to the discovery of thermodynam-

ics and mechanics and other scientific explanations

that made possible the industrial revolution. Duffy

proposes that the new technologies of our time are

very different from the machines and systems which

built and powered the former phases of industrializa-

tion.

Similarly, the new kinds of industry and tech-

nology being created require a new conceptual appa-

ratus adequate for interpreting the new physical and

biological phenomena. I would add that a new con-

ceptual apparatus is needed to understand and develop

the social phenomena that the new technology brings

into being.

There is, Duffy argues, a need for a new history

of engineering and technology and a new method-

ology that will focus on concepts and models as the

basis for this new history. Essential for this is a need

to focus on the actual technology and the new social

forms that emerge as part of these developments. I

want to propose that the new technologies like the

Internet also require a new research agenda to support

the study and understanding of the changes that they

have introduced into our society.

Page 10

Even the simplest model can affect a revolution,

Duffy observes, referring to the importance of the

application of the model of the semi-permeable

membrane from chemistry being transferred to de-

scribe the model of the heart by diastolic and systolic

action.

Similarly, the model of gateways and the neti-

zen are significant new models to help open up the

study of communication across boundaries or borders

of dissimilar systems. Citizens seeking to find a way

to impact the decisions made in their society may well

find that they can learn from the experiences and

models that have developed on the Internet.

Just as Duffy is arguing for a new methodology

appropriate to the study of new engineering develop-

ments, so I want to argue for such a new methodology

for the study of the Internet that will focus on what is

new, on how it was created, and on what its impact

has been. As Geoff Long, in a book chapter titled,

“Why the Internet Still Matters for Asia’s Democ-

racy,” argues:

The Internet is fundamentally different

from any previous media communications

technology … . The Internet was devel-

oped using a participatory model that has

its own democratic traditions … . The

Internet itself is still evolving … the full

story has yet to be written.

Notes:

1. For the program of the conference see “Launch of the Ten-

sions of Europe Research Programme,” Lappeenranta, Finland

May 24. Online at:

http://www3.lut.fi/eki/toe2006/files/23.pdf.

2. The Citizens’ Agenda NGO Forum 2000 was held from the 3

to 5

of December 1999 in Tampere, Finland.

3. See “Communicating Across the Boundaries of Dissimilar

Networks: The Creation of the Internet and the Emergence of the

Netizen.” Online at:

http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other

/misc/finland416.txt.

4. See, for example, see three presentations given at Citizens’

Agenda 2000 NGO Forum, 3-5/12/1999, Tampere: Seija Ridell,

“Manse Forum: a local experiment with web-mediated civic

publicness,” online at:

https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/100

24/65402/951-44-5186-4.pdf, pp.55-89; Lasse Peltonen, “Civic

forums, virtual publicness and practices of local democracy”; and

Ronda Hauben, “Is the Internet a Laboratory for Democracy?,”

online at:

http://ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACn10-2.pdf, pp. 2-10.

5. Leszek Jesien, “The 1996 IGC: European Citizenship Recon-

sidered.” Online at:

http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/book

2005/LJesien.rtf

6. Michael Duffy, “Engineering Disclosing Models,” Helvelieus,

edited by Oktawian Nawrot, University of Gdansk, 2004, pp. 22-

64.

7. From Asian Cyberactivism, edited by Steven Gan et al, 2004,

p. 72.

[Editor’s note: The following is a talk given at Columbia

University on November 4, 2004. Online at:

http://www.colu

mbia.edu/~hauben/nov4talk2.doc.]

The International Origins of

the Internet and the Impact of

this Framework on its Future

by Ronda Hauben

The research I have been doing for the past 12

years is about the origin, development and social

impact of the Internet. I want to propose that knowing

something of the nature of the Internet, of its interna-

tional origins and early vision and development can

provide a useful perspective for looking at a process

that is currently ongoing at the initiative of the United

Nations.

I want to share some of my research about the

original vision and the international origins of the

Internet and the implications of this heritage on the

Internet’s future. Just now, over the past two or more

years, and continuing through November, 2005, there

is a United Nations initiative going on in which the

world’s governments are participating, along with

NGO’s and corporate entities. Yet this high level

activity, as Wired reports, “has been largely ignored

by those not participating in it.” (Wendy Grossman,

“Nations Plan for Net’s Future,” October 11, 2004)

This process is known as the World Summit on

the Information Society (WSIS). After preparatory

activities for almost two years, the first of two plan-

ned summits was held in Geneva, Switzerland in

December 2003. Since that summit, a continuing

series of meetings are scheduled to set the foundation

for the second Summit which is planned to take place

in Tunisia in November of 2005.

Heads of state of many nations, particularly

developing nations came to the Geneva summit and

spoke about the importance of the Internet to the

people in their countries and to their present and

future economic and social development and well

being. The participants recognized that the Internet is

an international network of networks, and that it has

been built by a great deal of public and scientific

Page 11

effort and funding. The disagreement arises over the

nature of the present and future management structure

and processes for the governance of the Internet.

In 1998 the U.S. government, which had previ-

ously overseen the Internet’s infrastructure managed

as a non-commercial, scientific and educational

medium, made a decision to begin to transition it to a

private sector entity which is called the Internet

Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

(ICANN).

In the WSIS process there has been a lot of

contention over the form and processes of ICANN.

The concern is that ICANN was constructed as a

business and technical creation and that this process

marginalized governments.

Another way of describing this disagreement is

that there a contest about whether the development

and management of the Internet and its infrastructure

should be left to the market to determine or set by the

policies of governments.

Concern is being raised about what are the

issues pertaining to Internet governance. Stimulating

the spread of the Internet and who has access is one

such issue. Others include safeguarding the Internet’s

integrity, oversight of the distribution of Internet

addresses and domain names, determining the nature

of the public interest and how to protect that interest,

etc.

At the core of this dispute is the question of

what kinds of policy decisions need to be made about

the Internet and determining the process by which

they will be made.

The WSIS meetings include those who it is

claimed have an interest in questions of Internet

governance. These are called the “Stakeholders” and

thus far include representatives from:

governments

civil society (NGO’s)

private sector

Others are sometimes mentioned, such as the

scientific community, or the academic community.

In looking back at the origins of the Internet, I

feel it is helpful to start with the vision of JCR

Licklider, a psychologist, who was invited to begin a

research office within the U.S. Department of De-

fense in October 1962. Licklider called the office the

Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO).

Licklider was an experimental psychologist who

had studied the brain. For his PhD thesis he did

pioneering work mapping where sound is perceived in

the brain of the cat. Licklider was also excited about

the development of the computer and of its potential

to further scientific research.

He was particularly interested in the potential of

the computer as a communication device. He saw it as

a means of helping to create a community of research-

ers and of making it possible to strengthen the educa-

tion available to the whole society through access to

the ever expanding world of information. He envi-

sioned that increased social contact would become

available via the computer and computer networks.

Licklider created a community of researchers

that he called the Intergalactic Network. He had in

mind a network of networks. Though it was too early

to create such a network when he began at IPTO in

1962, he set a foundation that inspired the researchers

that followed him. He returned briefly to head the

IPTO from 1974-75 just at the time that the research

on the Internet was being developed.

In a paper Licklider wrote with another re-

searcher Robert Taylor in 1968, Licklider outlined a

vision for a network of networks. Licklider’s vision

was of the creation and development of a human-

computer information utility. For this to develop and

be beneficial, everyone would have to have access.

The network of networks would be global. It wouldn’t

be just a collection of computers and of information

that people could passively utilize. Rather his vision

was of the creation of an online community of people,

where users would be active participants and contri-

butors to the evolving network and to its develop-

ment. To Licklider, it was critical that the evolving

network be built interactively.

Also Licklider believed that there would be a

need for the public to be involved in the consider-

ations and decisions regarding network development.

He recognized that there would be problems with

pressure being put on government from other sectors

of society and that active citizen participation would

be needed to counter these pressures. Licklider,

writes:

… many public spirited individuals must

study, model, discuss, analyze, argue,

write, criticize, and work out each issue

and each problem until they reach consen-

sus or determine that none can be reached

– at which point there may be occasion for

voting.

Licklider believed that those interested in the

development of the global network he was proposing,

Page 12

(This diagram is from a memo by Vint Cerf, but it is not an actual plan for the

Internet)

would have to be active in considering and determin-

ing its future. He also advocated that the future of

politics would require that people have access to

computers to be involved in the process of govern-

ment. Licklider writes:

Computer power to the people is essential

to the realization of a future in which most

citizens are informed about, and interested

and involved in the process of govern-

ment.

Licklider and other computer pioneers of the

1950s and 1960s were concerned with the public

interest and how the computer and networking devel-

opments of the future would be maintained in the

public interest. Licklider writes that it is important to

not only seek to consider the public interest, but also

to make it possible for the public to be involved in the

decision making process:

[Decisions] in the ‘public interest’ but

also in the interest of giving the public

itself the means to enter into the decision-

making process that will shape their fu-

ture.

Through the 1960s and into the early 1970s the

IPTO pioneered new and important computer technol-

ogy like the time sharing of computers and then the

creation of packet switching and the ARPANET

computer network. The research was written up in

scientific and technical publications and widely dis-

tributed.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s it was recog-

nized that there was widespread interest in developing

computer networking in countries around the world.

A conference was held in 1972 at the Hilton Hotel, in

Washington DC from October 24-26. More than a

thousand researchers from countries around the world

attended and participated in the demonstration by

U.S. researchers that packet switching technology was

functional. The demonstration excited many of the

researchers. Also, however, international participation

was recognized as critical to the development of

networking technology. “International participation is

no mere adornment to the Conference,” the organizers

wrote. “It is a primary means towards achieving a

diversity of interest and viewpoint.”

At the conference, a group was formed of those

working on networking developments in different

countries. It was called the International Network

Working Group (INWG).

The great interest worldwide in computer

networking was stimulating, but also it presented a

problem. To understand the nature of this problem, it

is helpful to consider the fact that there were packet

switching networks being developed in different

countries. These included Cyclades in France, NPL in

Great Britain, and ARPANET in the U.S. These

networks were different technically and were under

the ownership and control of different political and

administrative entities. Yet networking researchers

realized the importance of making it possible for

these networks to be able to interconnect, to be able

to communicate with each other. This can be articu-

lated as the Multiple Network Problem.

There was the recognition that no one of these

different networks could become an international

network. There would need to be some means found

to make communication possible across the bound-

aries of different networks.

Collaboration among the researchers continued,

with a number of meetings and exchanges about how

it would be possible to design and create a means to

support communication across the boundaries of these

diverse networks.

At a meeting in September 1973 at the Univer-

sity of Sussex, in Brighton, England, two U.S. re-

searchers, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf presented a draft

of a paper proposing a philosophy and design to make

it possible to interconnect different networks. The

basic principle was that the changes to make commu-

nication possible would not be required of the differ-

ent networks, but of the packets of information that

were traveling through the networks.

To have an idea of the concept they proposed it

is helpful to look at a diagram to show what the

design would make possible.

In the gateways, changes to the packets would

be made to make it possible for them to go through

the networks. Also the gateways would be used to

route the packets.

The philosophy and design for an Internet was

officially published in a paper over 30 years ago, in

Page 13

May 1974. The paper is titled “A Protocol for Packet

Network Intercommunication” by Vinton Cerf and

Robert Kahn with thanks to others including several

from the international network research community

for their contributions and discussion.

Describing the process of creating the TCP/IP

protocol, Cerf explains that the effort at developing

the Internet protocols was international from its very

beginnings. Peter Kirstein, a British researcher at the

University College London (UCL) presented a paper

in September 1975 at a workshop in Laxenberg,

Austria, describing the international research process.

This workshop was attended by an international group

of researchers, including researchers from Eastern

Europe. Kirstein reports on research to create the

TCP/IP protocol being done by U.S. researchers,

working with British researchers and Norwegian

researchers. Here is the diagram that Kirstein presents

showing the participation of U.S. researchers via the

ARPANET, along with British researchers working at

the University College London (UCL) and Norwegian

researchers working at NORSAR.

Collaboration between the Norwegian, British

and U.S. researchers continued, demonstrated by the

research to create a satellite network, called SAT-

NET. Later researchers from Italy and Germany be-

came part of this work. Describing this international

collaboration, Bob Kahn writes:

SATNET … was a broadcast satellite

system. This is if you like, an

ETHERNET IN THE SKY with drops in

Norway (actually routed via Sweden) and

then the U.K., and later Germany and

Italy.

Networking continued to develop in the 1980s.

Among the networking efforts were those known as

Usenet (uucp), CSnet, NSFnet, FIDONET, BITNET,

Internet (TCP/IP), and others.

By the early 1990s TCP/IP became the protocol

adopted by networks around the world.

It is also in the early 1990s that my co-author of

the book Netizens, Michael Hauben, did some pio-

neering online research as part of class projects in his

studies at Columbia University. He explored where

the networks could reach and what those who were

online felt were the potential and the problems of the

developing Internet.

In the process he discovered that there were

people online who were excited by the fact that they

would participate in spreading the evolving network

and contributing so that it would be a helpful commu-

nication medium for others around the world. Michael

saw these users as citizens of the net or what at the

time was referred to as net.citizens.

Shortening the term to ‘netizen,’ he identified

and documented the emergence of a new form of

citizenship, a form of global citizenship that is called

netizenship.

Describing these online citizens, the netizens,

Michael writes:

They are people who understand that it

takes effort and action on each and every-

one’s part to make the Net a regenerative

and vibrant community and resource.

Netizens are people who decide to devote

time and effort into making the Net, this

new part of our world, a better place.

(Michael Hauben, 1995)

What are the implications of this background to

the WSIS process? In October 1998, the U.S. govern-

ment decided it needed to privatize the Internet’s

infrastructure. It created ICANN, the Internet Corpo-

ration for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN

provided only minimal input for governments in an

official way or for Internet users. There have been

many problems with the structure and functioning of

ICANN and lots of criticism.

The WSIS process led to holding a Summit in

Geneva in December 2003. A number of heads of

state attended. Issues raised included: Affordable

access available to all, what would be the role for

Governments in Internet governance? what would be

the role for others in Internet governance?

Page 14

In February 2004 a workshop was held to try to

determine the components of Internet governance. At

the workshop there was a proposal for netizens to be

involved in Internet governance, recommending that

netizen involvement would make it possible to

counter the self interest of corporations who were part

of the Internet governance process. The following

diagram was submitted by Izumi Aizo of Japan. It still

shows only a minimal role for governments but it

introduces a role for netizens which is in line with

Licklider’s vision of the crucial nature of citizen

participation in the network’s development.

Online, there is a forum involved with the WSIS

process. But few people who are involved with WSIS

seem to pay attention to it. However, a comment on

the forum seemed quite relevant to the problems

being raised. The contributor to the forum, Safaa

Moussa was from Egypt. Moussa, too, echoed

Licklider’s concerns, writing that the crucial issues of

Internet governance involve the issue of public access

and the issue of how to widen the scope of public

engagement in the decision making process.

In September 2004, a meeting was held in

Geneva. Many contributions to that meeting seemed

in line with the vision of Licklider expressed to guide

computer network development. But there was

contention, also. Summarizing the conflict that has

developed in the WSIS process, a representative of

Egypt, H. E. Dr. Tarek Kamal, explains that there are

two conflicting view points. One view is that Internet

governance involves primarily technical and operative

issues which can be best coordinated by technical

groups and business organizations (this is the view of

those in favor of ICANN). The other view pointed to

by Dr. Kamal is that technical resource management

and other policy matters concerning the Internet are

social and public questions needing international and

government participation.

At the September 2004 meeting, supporting this

second viewpoint, a member of the Brazil delegation,

Jose Marcos Nogueira Viana, proposed the need to

create an inter-governmental forum - a meeting place

for governments to discuss Internet related issues.

Also putting public interest into the debate, was Hans

Falk Hoffman, a representative from the international

scientific institution CERN. He described how the

scientific community would continue to try to connect

universities and therefore major cities to the global

network with sufficient bandwidth at affordable

prices. A representative from the Chinese delegation

Madam Hu Qiheng, explained how “the Internet is a

resplendent achievement of human civilization in the

century.” And that “government has to play the

essential role in Internet governance … creating a

favorable environment boosting Internet growth while

protecting the public interests.” (Hu, 2004)

I want to propose that this activity as part of the

WSIS process demonstrates the importance of under-

standing the fact that the Internet is international and

that there is a demand for an international manage-

ment process and structure.

Similarly, and perhaps even more important is

the need to understand how to determine the public

interest. In connection with this goal, I want to

propose the need to seriously consider whether the

goal of netizen empowerment is one of the important

policy issues to be injected into the WSIS process.

This would imply the need to provide means for the

online community to be able to be active participants

in the WSIS process. In the online forum on Septem-

ber 9, 2004, Safaa Moussa wrote:

This online forum constitutes an important

part of mobilizing efforts for the pursued

effective outcome. But, in view of the

wide-ranging aspects that Internet Gover-

nance covers, I believe it is duly important

to make it clearer the inclusion of online

contributions into the decision-making

process.

Online interaction and feedback need to be seen

all along the decision-making and implementation

processes.

Another point I would like to underline is the

creation of online working groups to help integrate

and coordinate initiatives and efforts undertaken at

Page 15

national regional and international levels.

The Tunis Summit will take place in November

2005. Will it be able to meet the challenges of the

continuing development and spread of the Internet?

There are promising signs that the public and interna-

tional essence of the Internet as envisioned by JCR

Licklider which were so important in the origin and

development of the Internet are being taken up. But

will there be a means of welcoming the online com-

munity, the community of netizens into the WSIS

process? Will there be a convergence of netizen par-

ticipation and defense of the public essence of the

Internet strong enough for the results of the Tunis

summit to be significant?

[Editor’s Note: The following is a talk given on November 14,

2005 in Tunis at a side event at the World Summit for the

Information Society (WSIS 2005).]

The International and

Scientific Origins of the

Internet and the Emergence

of the Netizens

by Ronda Hauben

Netizens are Net Citizens … . These peo-

ple … makes [the Net] a resource of hu-

man beings. These Netizens participate to

help make the Net both an intellectual and

a social resource.

Michael Hauben

“Further Thoughts about Netizens”

Forms grow out of principles and operate

to continue the principles they grow from.

Thomas Paine

The Rights of Man

Part I. Controversies over the Origins of

the Internet

There is a controversy about the Internet and its

origins that is widespread. This is connected to the

misconception that the Internet is the result of the

desire of the U.S. department of defense to create a

network that would survive a nuclear war.

A signifi-

cant aspect of the controversy is over the origin of the

idea of packet switching for the building of the

ARPANET. Many credit Paul Baran, a researcher at

Rand Corporation.

Larry Roberts, who headed the research project

to create the ARPANET as the head of the Informa-

tion Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) in 1967-

1972, explains that Donald Davies, a researcher at the

National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the U.K., did

significant work in the early development of packet

switching, while Paul Baran’s work came to be

known as the ARPANET project developed. Describ-

ing some of the relevant events, Roberts writes:

(I)n 1965, a … meeting took place at MIT.

Donald Davies, from the National Physi-

cal Laboratory in the U.K. was at MIT to

give a seminar on time-sharing. Licklider,

Davies and I discussed networking and the

inadequacy of data communication facili-

ties for both time-sharing and networking.

Davies reports that shortly after this meet-

ing he was struck with the concept that a

store and forward system for very short

messages (now called packet switching)

was the ideal communication system for

interactive systems.

Davies subsequently invited IPTO researchers

to come to Great Britain to present the research they

were doing on time-sharing. In November 1965, ten

U.S. researchers gave a set of presentations in Great

Britain at a meeting sponsored by the British Com-

puter Society. Describing these presentations, Davies

reports, “that though most of the discussions were

about operating systems aspects of time-sharing, the

research done to show the mismatch between time-

sharing and the telephone network was described.”

Davies writes:

It was that which sort of triggered off my

thoughts and it was in the evenings during

that meeting that I first began to think

about packet switching.

“The basic ideas,” Davies continues, “were

produced really just in a few evenings of thought,

during or after the seminar.” Roberts describes how

Davies “wrote about his ideas in a document entitled

‘Proposal for Development of a National Communi-

cation Service for On-Line Data processing’ which

envisioned a communication network using trunk

lines from 100K bits/sec in speed to 1.5 megabits/sec

(T1), message sizes of 128 bytes and a switch which

could handle up to 10,000 messages/sec.” (Historical

Page 16

(Host)

( ) ( ) ( )

( NPL )-(gateway)-( CYCLADES )-(gateway)-( ARPA )

( ) ( ) ( )

/ \

(Host) (H ost)

note by Roberts: this took 20 years to accomplish).

Then in June 1966, Davies wrote a second internal

paper, ‘Proposal for a Digital Communication Net-

work’ in which he coined the word “packet,” – a

small sub-part of the message the user wants to send,

and also introduced the concept of an ‘interface

computer’ to sit between the user’s equipment and the

packet network. His design also included the concept

of a Packet Assembler and Disassembler (PAD) to

interface character terminals, today a common ele-

ment of most packet networks.

It was only after Davies did this pioneering

work developing the concept of packet switching that

he learned of related work previously done by Baran.

“As a result of distributing his 1965 paper,” Roberts

reports, “Donald Davies was given a copy of an

internal Rand report ‘On Distributed Communica-

tions,’ by Baran, which had been written in August

1964. Baran’s historical paper also described a short

message switching network using T1 trunks and a

128-byte message size … .” Roberts states the influ-

ence of Baran’s work was “mainly supportive, not

sparking its development.”

Along with the controversy over the invention

of packet switching, there is a related controversy, as

to what is the defining nature of the Internet.

Is the

creation of packet switching and the development of

the ARPANET the actual beginning of the Internet, or

is the defining characteristic of the Internet something

different? I want to propose that the defining charac-

teristic of the Internet is not packet switching, but the

design and development of the protocol that makes it

possible to interconnect dissimilar computer net-

works. A protocol in computer networking vocabu-

lary is a set of agreements to make communication

possible among entities that are different, as, for

example, entities who speak different languages.

TCP/IP is a protocol that makes it possible to inter-

connect dissimilar computer networks.

Robert Kahn, one of the co-inventors of the

TCP/IP protocol, explains that the ARPANET was “a

single network that linked heterogeneous computer

systems into a resource sharing network, first within

the U.S., and eventually it had tentacles to computer

systems in other countries. What the ARPANET

didn’t address,” Kahn clarifies, “was the issue of

interconnecting multiple networks and all the atten-

dant issues that raised.” (Kahn, E-mail, September 15,

2002)

To understand the nature of the Internet, it is

necessary to understand what could be called the

Multiple Network Problem and how it was solved.

The difficulties were not only technical.

Part II. The Internet as the Network of

Networks

By 1973 there were various packet switching

computer networks either being developed or in the

planning stages in countries around the world. To

illustrate, there is a memo which shows three of the

early packet switching research networks. The memo

is from a U.S. researcher. It is dated 1973. It shows

three different packet switching networks being

developed in 1973.

They were:

ARPANET – USA

NPL – U.K.

CYCLADES – France

Each of these networks was under the ownership

and control of different political and administrative

entities.

Consequently, each of these networks would

differ technically in order to meet the needs of the

organization or administration that controlled it. The

question being raised in this period of the early 1970s

is how to interconnect dissimilar packet switching

networks.

Considering how to solve the Multiple Network

Problem, Davies presented a paper in 1974 on “The

Future of Computer Networks.” In the paper, he

writes:

To achieve … the interconnection of

packet switching systems … a group in-

cluding ARPA, NPL, and CYCLADES is

trying out a scheme of interconnection

based on a packet transport network with

Page 17

an agreed protocol for message trans-

port… . (Davies, 1974, p. 36.)

Davies was explaining the research effort to

make communication possible among these diverse

networks. The conference where Davies presented

this paper was held at a detente era research institu-

tion. It was called the International Institute for Appli-

ed Systems Analysis or IIASA. IIASA was situated in

Laxenburg, Austria.

In October 2001, I attended a conference in

Berlin where I was fortunate to meet Klaus Fuchs-

Kittowski. He was one of the researchers who partici-

pated in IIASA in the early 1970s. Fuchs-Kittowski

was back then a Professor at Humboldt University in

the then German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.).

When I met Fuchs-Kittowski in 2001, he brought me

a copy of a publication put out by IIASA. It is the

proceedings of a workshop held in 1975. He had

presented one of the papers at the “Workshop on Data

Communications,” held on September 15-19, 1975.

Others at the workshop included researchers from

Austria, Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of

Germany, and the German Democratic Republic.

In this 1975 workshop proceedings was an

article by British researchers describing the early

development of a British, Norwegian, U.S. research

collaboration to make it possible to have the Internet.

A diagram, created just one year after the Davies

paper considering how to interconnect CYCLADES,

NPL, and the ARPANET, shows something quite

differently.

The graphic shows international collaboration to

create an implementation of the TCP/IP protocol.

Involved in this research, however, were Norwegian

researchers at NORSAR in Norway, British research-

ers at the University College of London, in the U.K.,

and American researchers developing the ARPANET.

UCL

NORSAR

ARPANET

The collaborative research on the development

of the TCP/IP protocol done by researchers from the

U.K., U.S. and Norway later included research devel-

oping a satellite packet switching network called

SATNET. Also, involved in this networking research

for shorter periods of time were German and Italian

researchers.

There is an interesting graphic of SATNET.

it you can see the German, Italian, U.S., U.K., and

Norwegian sites. There was also collaborative re-

search creating a packet radio network.

The reason I refer to this history is that it was an

international collaboration of researchers working on

developing network technology and more particularly

in developing the protocol that would make the

Internet a reality.

A key to understanding the Internet and its

origins, however, is that there is a vision that inspired

and provided the glue for such international collabo-

rative research efforts. To explore the nature and

origin of this vision helps to understand the research

processes creating the TCP/IP protocol and the

Internet’s subsequent development.

Through studies of the history of the Internet,

there is much evidence that the vision for its develop-

ment had been pioneered by JCR Licklider, an experi-

mental psychologist interested in human communica-

tion. Licklider introduced this vision when he gave

talks for the ARPA program inspiring people with the

idea of the importance of a new form of computing

and of the potential for a network that would make it

possible to communicate utilizing computers.

Part III. The Historical Origins of the

Vision for the Net and of the Science

Guiding the Development

Describing the dynamic nature of communica-

tion, Licklider in a paper written with Robert Taylor

explains:

We believe that communicators have to

do something nontrivial with the informa-

tion they send and receive. And … to

interact with the richness of living infor-

mation – not merely in the passive way

that we have become accustomed to using

books and libraries, but as active partici-

pants in an ongoing process, bringing

something to it through our interaction

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

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.

(Quoted in Hauben and Hauben, 1997, p. 5.)

To understand the influences on Licklider and

Page 18

his insight into the dynamic nature of communication,

it is helpful to look at the scientific research commu-

nity he was part of in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In the early post World War II period, there was

much interest in the research and advances in the

science of communication and in what was referred to

as self-organizing systems. Among those with such

interest were Julian Bigelow, an engineer interested in

communication technologies, Norbert Wiener, a

mathematician interested in the development of

automatic systems and about how learning about the

functions of the nervous system would provide insight

into the creation of such machine systems, Arturo

Rosenblueth a researcher and medical doctor who

worked with Wiener on similar developments, anthro-

pologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson who

studied the social systems of primitive people, and

Karl Deutsch who was interested in how looking at

political systems through a communication frame-

work would help to understand the nature of such

systems.

When considering questions related to com-

munication, the idea of an interdisciplinary research

group was considered to be desirable. That is why in

the late 1940s and early 1950s there were a number of

meetings of an interdisciplinary research group

sponsored by a medical foundation, the Josiah Macy

Jr. Foundation. This foundation was headed by Frank

Fremont-Smith. This group, one of the interdisciplin-

ary research groups established by the Macy Founda-

tion, was to study feedback systems, systems which

modified their behavior based on the information

gained from previous behavior.

Among the names for such systems were ‘self-

organizing systems,’ ‘cybernetic systems,’ ‘feedback

systems,’ ‘purposive systems.’ A group of 20 re-

searchers from different fields formed the core of the

set of scholars who would meet two times a year and

discuss their research, hoping that the content and

process of their interdisciplinary work would provide

stimulating ideas to each other.

JCR Licklider was invited to attend one session

of this interdisciplinary research group, in 1950, and

to present a paper on his research. (See “The manner

in which and extent to which speech can be distorted

and remain intelligible,” in H. Von Foerster, 1950.)

Thus Licklider had firsthand knowledge of the

methodology and practice of the Macy Foundation

group, which was to prove helpful to him in a meeting

he set up in 1954 and subsequently in his role as the

head of the computer research organization he created

in 1962 at ARPA, the Information Processing Tech-

niques Office. The processes of the Macy-sponsored

meetings were unusual, at least by the standards of

present conferences 50 years later, so I want to briefly

explain the process and rationale of the conferences.

The conference meeting would take place over

a weekend, and there would be two or three papers

presented. Participants in the conference were urged

to ask questions of the researchers presenting papers,

if there were points they didn’t understand, during the

course of the presentations. Afterwards there would

be a more general discussion, and a tape recording

would be made of the discussion which would be

published as the proceedings of the meeting.

The goal of this process was to encourage the

participants to think and explore areas that were new

to them, to think over what was being presented and

to have a discussion on the presentation. The discus-

sion process was considered as important as the paper

presentation. The process of the meetings was in-

tended to help to do research in how to encourage

communication across the boundaries of the different

disciplines and different methodologies used by these

different disciplines. The last of the ten Macy Foun-

dation Conferences was held in 1953.

Licklider and others received support from the

National Science Foundation (NSF) in the U.S. to

fund a similar interdisciplinary conference at MIT in

November 1954. They invited researchers in various

scientific and technical fields. The topics for the

conference were information theory, control theory

and communication theory. Several of the researchers

made presentations on their recent research, rather

than limiting the discussion to only two papers. But

discussion among the participants was encouraged.

The proceedings were tape recorded and a transcript

published in a bound volume by the NSF. (1954.)

Part IV. The Science of Information Pro-

cessing

Licklider had begun his scientific career not as

a computer scientist but as a physio-psychologist. He

finished his PhD thesis in 1942 before the working

computer was a reality. The subject of his thesis was

path-breaking in its time as he devised and carried out

an experiment to “place” the “frequency of neural

impulse theories” so as “to understand the perception

of pitch and loudness.” His particular experiment was

Page 19

to measure the loci of cortical electro-neural activity

in the brain of cats to understand their response to

hearing different tones of sound.

After receiving his PhD from the University of

Rochester, Licklider got an appointment at Harvard

University as a research associate and an appointment

in the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory there. This was

during WWII and one of the projects the laboratory

was investigating was how to enhance radio commu-

nication for aircraft to overcome the influence from

signal distortion and other noise.

Other research work Licklider did include his

creation of clipped speech. He explained how one

could alter speech using electronic equipment. He

discovered that the information necessary to under-

stand speech could be obtained from focusing on the

zero crossings of the speech wave form (where it

switches from negative to positive or positive to

negative values). This made it possible to create

equipment alterations to improve the audibility of

speech for pilots.

When the war ended, Licklider became inter-

ested in weekly gatherings held by Norbert Wiener to

discuss Wiener’s concept of cybernetics, of control

and communication in biological and machine sys-

tems. An interdisciplinary community of researchers

developed of which Licklider became part. The notion

that one could learn about information processing by

studying how it would be carried out in living or

machine systems was a source of inspiration to

researchers like Licklider and others in this interdisci-

plinary community.

In the process of his studies of the brain and the

nervous system, Licklider became eager to realize the

promise of the significant tools that the development

of the computer was bringing into existence. An

example of such a tool was Sketchpad created by Ivan

Sutherland for the TX-2 at Lincoln Labs. In a demon-

stration that Sutherland gave of Sketchpad, a Project

MAC graduate student, Warren Teitelman reports:

In one impressive demonstration, Dr.

Sutherland sketched the girder of a bridge,

and indicated the points at which members

were connected together by rivets. He

then drew a support at each end of the

girder and a load at its center. The sketch

of the girder then sagged under the load,

and a number appeared on each member

indicating the amount of tension or com-

pression to which the member was being

subjected.

Sutherland was able to use the modeling pro-

gram he had created to add to the support the com-

puter simulation showed was needed. Then the bridge

was, according to the computer program, able to

maintain its shape. This is the kind of potential that

Licklider envisioned for the research community if

they could acquire adequate modeling programs.

They would be able to rely on the computer to process

data and to demonstrate how the change in one

parameter would affect changes in others. But to

make such a potential advance possible, a new form

of computing would first be necessary. This would be

interactive online computing. Licklider not only had

a vision for how scientists might find significant

support for their research in partnership with comput-

ers, he also had an understanding of the kinds of

research that would be needed to achieve the technical

goals he had identified as desirable.

Along with Licklider’s interest to create a com-

puter modeling tool for researchers, he had another

objective which was to prove even more inspiring. He

recognized the need for a community of researchers

to work together if they were to make progress in the

hard challenges they faced. He also envisioned how

the computer would help to facilitate such collabora-

tive activity. Licklider describes this goal in a memo

written in 1963 encouraging the researchers being

supported by the Information Processing Techniques

Office (IPTO) at centers of excellence around the

U.S. to collaborate with each other. He describes how

he hopes the researchers working on diverse research

will benefit from determining how they can work

together. This early support for “Members and Affili-

ates of the Intergalactic Computer Network” demon-

strates the inspiration and conceptual foundation for

creating first the ARPANET and then the Internet.

In the memo, Licklider wrote:

But I do think that we should see the main

parts of several projected efforts, all on

one blackboard, so that it will be more

evident than it would otherwise be, where

network-wide convention would be help-

ful and where individual concessions to

group advantage would be most impor-

tant.

Licklider’s interest in explaining how computer

modeling would serve researchers helped in another

important way. It helped to set the foundation for the

ARPANET. A graduate student at one of the centers

Page 20

of excellence that Licklider set up, at Project MAC at

MIT, Warren Teitelman, wrote his thesis on creating

a computer programming language that would en-

courage interactivity between the scientist and the

programmer. His thesis was titled “Pilot: A Step

Toward Man-Computer Symbiosis.” In his thesis

Teitelman set out to contribute to solving the problem

of using computers more effectively for solving very

hard problems. The kinds of problems he was con-

cerned with were those which “are extremely difficult

to think through in advance, that is, away from the

computer. In some cases, the programmer cannot

foresee the implications of certain decisions he must

make in the design of the program.”

He wrote:

In such a situation the means of making

programs often involved a trial and error

process ‘write some code, run the pro-

gram, make some changes, write some

more code, run program again.’

Thus there was a need to be able to have the person -

designing the program continually interact with the

computer to make the needed changes.

Licklider believed that thinking is intimately

bound up with modeling, and that the human mind is

an unmatched and superb environment for demon-

strating the power and dynamism of modeling.

Licklider and Taylor write:

By far the most numerous, most sophis-

ticated and most important models are

those that reside in men’s minds. In rich-

ness, plasticity, facility and economy, the

mental model has no peer, but in other

respects it has shortcomings. It will not

stand still for careful study. It cannot be

made to repeat a run. No one knows just

how it works. It serves its owner’s hopes

more faithfully than it serves reason. It

has access only to the information stored

in one man’s head. It can be observed and

manipulated only by one person.

As Licklider and Taylor note, however, “society

rightly distrusts the modeling done by a single mind.”

Thus, there is a need to transform the individual

modeling process into a collaborative modeling

process. Licklider and Taylor explain, “society

demands … [what] amounts to the requirement that

individual models be compared and brought into

some degree of accord. The requirement for commu-

nicating which we now define concisely ‘cooperative’

modeling – cooperation in the construction, mainte-

nance and use of a model.”

To make cooperative modeling possible,

Licklider and Taylor propose that there is the need for

“a plastic or moldable medium that can be modeled,

a dynamic medium in which processes will flow into

consequences … .” But most important, they empha-

size the need for a common medium “that can be

contributed to and experimented with by all.”

The prospect is that, when several or

many people work together within the

context of an online interactive, commu-

nity computer network, the superior facili-

ties of the network for expressing ideas,

preserving facts, modeling processes, and

bringing two or more people together in

close interaction with the same informa-

tion and the same behavior – those supe-

rior facilities will so foster the growth and

integration of knowledge that the inci-

dence of major achievements will be

markedly increased.

At the foundation of this relationship between

the human and the computer that Licklider recognized

as so important is his understanding of the importance

of combining the heuristic capability of the human

with the algorithmic capability of the computer.

Heuristic activity, according to Licklider, is “that

which tends toward or facilitates invention or discov-

eries, that charts courses, formulates problems, guides

solutions. The heuristic part is the creative part of

information power.”

For Licklider, the goal of the research he was

doing was to help catalyze the development of a new

science, a science of information processing in

biological and machine systems. A helpful definition

of information science was created by the Committee

on Information Sciences for the University of Chi-

cago program established in 1965.

They explained:

The information sciences deal with the

body of knowledge that relates to the

structure, origination, transmission and

transformation of information in both

naturally existing and artificial systems.

This includes the investigation of informa-

tion representation, as in the genetic code

or in codes for efficient message transmis-

sion, and the study of information pro-

cessing devices and techniques, such as

computers and their programming sys-

Page 21

tems.

This new science included biological and

machine systems as part of its scientific study.

Licklider was hopeful that the computer would “help

us understand the structure of ideas, the nature of

intellectual processes.”

“Although one cannot see clearly and deeply

into this region of the future from the present point of

view,” Licklider believed, “he can be convinced that

information processing,” which now connotes to

many “a technology devoted to reducing data and

increasing costs,” will one day be the field of a basic

and important science, which will be an in interdisci-

plinary science.

This new interdisciplinary science, would in-

clude, “Planning, management communication, math-

ematics and logic, and perhaps even psychology and

philosophy will draw heavily from and contribute to

that science.”

“One of the most important present functions,”

Licklider writes for the “the digital computer in the

university should be to catalyze the development of

that science.” A first step for this new science was to

determine what was the most appropriate role of the

computer and the human in the relationship between

them, and what was the desirable interaction leading

to the most advanced mutually beneficial develop-

ment of each.

Licklider’s research into what would be the role

of the human and the role of the computer, i.e., a sym-

biotic relationship, helped to set a foundation for the

research program he instituted when he was chosen

by ARPA to head the IPTO in 1962.

As computer networking developed and spread,

Licklider observed that creative users emerged.

Licklider recognized that the creative users developed

uses of the network which became catalysts for the

development of new and desirable forms and pro-

cesses that other users would benefit from. Licklider

called these creative users ‘socio-technical pioneers’

and he encouraged the support of their explorations

and online activity. Licklider recommended putting

off as long as possible the general use of the develop-

ing network by other users who would not be explor-

ing its potential. He felt that it was important not to

kill the goose who laid the golden eggs of the network

and that it was crucial to protect the access of creative

users to an exploratory and creative online environ-

ment. Licklider defined these ‘socio-technical pio-

neers’ as not only the creative users who explored

how new online forms and processes could be devel-

oped and utilized, but he also recognized the impor-

tance of the programmers who were creating the

software and the forms of making the software public

and something to which many could contribute.

Part V. The Role of Scientists and

Decision Makers in New Technology

Decisions

After the Macy conferences and the NSF confer-

ence modeled on it, Licklider participated in other

similar experiences. Another conference Licklider

participated in which has been transcribed into a book

version was held at MIT on the occasion of the 100

anniversary of MIT. A series of talks was held and the

talks, along with the discussion, were transcribed and

published in an edited volume by Martin Greenberger,

then a young faculty member at MIT.

While there were a number of talks included in

this volume about the vision for the future develop-

ment of the computer and for the science that would

develop alongside the computer development and the

science of information processing, the keynote talk

was particularly significant. This keynote was by Sir

Charles Percy Snow (C.P. Snow), a scientist and civil

servant from Great Britain. The topic of Snow’s talk

was “Scientists and Decision Making.”

Snow spoke about the important public policy

issues that would accompany the development of new

computer technology, and about the difficulty govern-

ment officials would have determining how to make

decisions about the technology which took into

account the public interest. In his talk, Snow de-

scribed why there would be a need for many people to

be involved in the decision making process. He

proposed the need for broad based public discussion

on the issues relating to new computer development.

Snow explains:

I believe that the healthiest decisions of

society occur by something more like a

Brownian movement. All kinds of people

all over the place suddenly get smitten

with the same sort of desire, with the same

sort of interest, at the same time. This

forms concentrations of pressure and of

direction. These concentrations of pres-

sure gradually filter their way through to

the people whose nominal responsibility it

is to put the legislation into a written

Page 22

form.

“I am pretty sure,” Snow continues, “that this

Brownian movement is probably the most important

way in which ordinary social imperatives of society

get initiated.” (Greenberger, 1962, pp. 6-7) Snow

referred to this broad based public discussion as a

political form of the physical phenomenon known as

Brownian motion. He proposes that, based on such

discussion, better decision making processes would

result than if the issues were restricted to secret

behind-the-scenes government processes. In his talk,

Snow characterizes the limited process of decision-

making of government in the U.S.:

We all know that even in non secret

decisions, there is a great deal of intimate

closed politics … . In (the U.S.) you elect

a President; he initiates legislation (that is,

he takes a decision as to which legislation

to produce), and then the Congress takes

the decision as to whether this legislation

is to go into action.

(Greenberger, 1962, p. 6.)

Snow explained how government decisions

were made in Great Britain, involving a similarly

limited number of people as in the U.S. Such a narrow

set of people being involved in making decisions was

for Snow a sign of a serious problem.

If we follow the explosive development in com-

puter technology that followed C. P. Snow’s talk in

1960, we will see that not only was there foresight

about the magnitude of change in computer develop-

ment that would occur in the next 40 years, but also

about the technical changes that would result in

significant changes in society in general and in the

economy in particular. Similarly, the nature of the

new technical and scientific developments would

require greater social understanding. The social fer-

ment that comes from involving some broader strata

of the people in the discussion about the policy issues

that are needed to encourage technical development

was identified as the process to develop this social

understanding.

Shortly after the MIT anniversary programs on

the “Future of the Computer,” Licklider was invited

to create an office for research in computer science

and another office for research in behavioral science,

within the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). He

formed the Information Processing Techniques Office

in ARPA which was under the U.S. Department of

Defense. Licklider was not a computer scientist. He

was invited to ARPA to focus on the needs of the user

and to create a computer that would serve the user.

At ARPA Licklider began a research program

that would fundamentally change not only the archi-

tecture of computers but the architecture of how

computers were used. Not only did the research done

under his leadership make a great impact on the type

of computing available in the world, but also he

identified the need for computer networking and put

forward the vision that would inspire computer

scientists to develop time-sharing, packet switching

and the ARPANET.

Licklider’s first term as director of IPTO put the

office on a firm foundation that served to fundamen-

tally influence the nature and direction of computer

science. He created an intergalactic network of

researchers who were supported in their work.

Part VI. The Politics of Science and

Technology

Licklider returned to IPTO more than a decade

later, in 1974-1975. He found, however, that a signifi-

cant change had occurred. The kind of basic research

he had pioneered was no longer welcome. Instead

there was pressure to do research that would meet

prescribed outcomes and would be oriented to pro-

duce defense specific products.

Licklider challenged these changes both in his

second term at IPTO and in talks and articles pub-

lished after he left. These articles help to provide a

guidepost for how the computer and networking

development that Licklider envisioned can be practi-

cally achieved.

The problem Licklider discovered was the same

problem that C. P. Snow had anticipated. The prob-

lem was that there were government officials who

needed to make decisions about the new technology,

but were not able to understand the depth of the issues

involved. The difficulty of this problem led Licklider

to propose the need to have citizens participate in the

process of determining how government would

support new technology.

Licklider advocated that the networks them-

selves be used by those online to influence govern-

ment policy regarding the continuing development of

the networks. Licklider was not proposing that citi-

zens rely on voting as the way to influence govern-

ment. To the contrary, Licklider writes:

That does not mean simply that everyone

Page 23

must vote on every question for voting in

the absence of understanding defines only

the public attitude, not the public interest.

It means that many public-spirited indi-

viduals must study, model, discuss, ana-

lyze, argue, write, criticize, and work out

each issue and each problem until they

reach a consensus or determine that none

can be reached – at which point there may

be occasion for voting.

(Licklider, 1979, p. 126)

Licklider also felt that “many public-spirited

individuals must serve government – indeed must be

the government.” (Licklider, 1979, p. 126) This is

because, whether or not all citizens would have net-

working access, was a problem which would require

government initiatives to solve. And the active

involvement of public-spirited individuals was need-

ed. Licklider saw that people in the U.S. were frus-

trated with the government. To change this situation,

Licklider advocated making it possible for citizens to

participate in government decision-making via the

developing computer networks. Licklider writes:

Computer power to the people is essential

to the realization of a future in which most

citizens are informed about, and interested

and involved in, the process of govern-

ment. (Licklider, 1979, p. 124)

Licklider saw the problem that the current

“decision makers and opinion leaders see computers

in terms of conventional data processing and are not

able to envision or assess their many capabilities and

applications.”

He maintained that not only must the decisions

about the development and exploitation of computer

networks be made “in the public interest,” but also in

“the interest of giving the public itself the means to

enter into the decision-making processes that will

shape their future.” (Licklider, 1979, p. 126) Here

Licklider expresses the goal that citizens communi-

cate with each other and with the officials and design-

ers of a social policy or plan. The importance of such

online developments identified in the 1960s and

1970s by Licklider and others, was demonstrated in

the 1990s.

Part VII. The Emergence of the Netizen

In 1992-1993, Michael Hauben, was in his

second year as an undergraduate student at Columbia

University in New York City. Hauben relates how he

first got online in 1985 using what were known as

local hobbyist computer bulletin board systems. At

the time he was living in Michigan, where research

for the development of the Internet was being carried

out.

Describing the experience he had online and the

research that he did which revealed the emergence of

Netizens, of the online net.citizens that Licklider

identified as needed for the continuing development

of computer technology, Hauben writes:

I started using local bulletin board sys-

tems (called BBS’s) in Michigan in 1985.

After several years of participation on

both local hobbyist-run computer bulletin

board systems and the global Usenet, I

began to research Usenet and the Internet.

This was a new environment for me. Little

thoughtful conversation was encouraged

in my high school. Since my daily life did

not provide places and people to talk with

about real issues and real world topics, I

wondered why the online experience

encouraged such discussion and consider-

ation of others. Where did such a culture

spring from? And how did it arise? During

my sophomore year of college in 1992, I

was curious to explore and better under-

stand this new online world. (Hauben and

Hauben, 1997, “Preface,” p. ix

)

Hauben explains how, “As part of course-work

at Columbia University I explored these questions.

One professor encouraged me to use Usenet and the

Internet as places to conduct research. My research

was real participation in the online community,

exploring how and why these communication forums

functioned.” He continues, “I posted questions on

Usenet, mailing lists and Freenets.

Along with my

questions I would attach some worthwhile prelimi-

nary research. People respected my questions and

found the preliminary research helpful. The entire

process was one of mutual respect and sharing of

research and ideas, fostering a sense of community

and participation.” (Hauben and Hauben, 1997, p. ix)

Through this research process, he “found that on

the Net people willingly help each other and work

together to define and address issues important to

them.” This was the experience people had on

Internet mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups in the

early 1990s, before the web culture had developed

and spread. What one found was a great deal of

Page 24

discussion and interactive communication online.

This was like the computer bulletin board culture that

flourished in the 1980s and early 1990s. While the

computer bulletin boards put users in contact with

local computer users, Usenet newsgroups and Internet

mailing lists put users in contact with other computer

users from around the world. When Hauben posted

his early research questions on Usenet and the Inter-

net, he received about 60 responses from around the

globe. A number of these responses were detailed

descriptions of how people online had found the Net

an exciting and important contribution to their lives.

Not only did the Internet make a difference in the

range of experiences and in contacts people could

reach, but also, and sometimes more important, it

made possible a more satisfying, broader experience

of communication.

Elaborating on the progression of his research,

Hauben writes:

My initial research concerned the origins

and development of the global discussion

forum Usenet. For my second paper, I

wanted to explore the larger Net, what it

was, and its significance. This is when my

research uncovered the remaining details

that helped me recognize the emergence

of Netizens.

(Hauben and Hauben, 1997, p. x)

While people answering his questions were

describing how the Internet and Usenet were helpful

in their lives, many wrote about their efforts to

contribute to the Net, and to help spread access to

those not yet online. It is this second aspect of the

responses that Hauben received which he recognized

as an especially significant aspect of his research.

(See Appendix.)

Describing the characteristics of those he came

to call Netizens, Hauben writes:

The world of the Netizen was envisioned

more than twenty-five years ago by JCR

Licklider. Licklider brought to his leader-

ship of the U.S. Department of Defense’s

ARPA program a vision of the ‘intergalac-

tic computer network.’

There are people online who actively contribute

to the development of the Net. These are people

who understand the value of collective work

and the communal aspects of public communi-

cations. These are the people who discuss and

debate topics in a constructive manner, who e-

mail answers to people and provide help to

newcomers, who maintain FAQ’s, files and

other public information repositories. These are

the people who discuss the nature and role of

this new communications medium. These are

the people who as citizens of the Net I realized

were Netizens.

(Hauben and Hauben, 1997, pp. ix-x)

Later Hauben elaborates:

Net.citizen was used in Usenet … and this

really represented what people were tell-

ing me – they were really net citizens –

which Netizen captures. To be a ‘Netizen’

is different from being a ‘citizen’. This is

because to be on the Net is to be part of a

global community. To be a citizen re-

stricts someone to a more local or geo-

graphical orientation. (Hauben, 1996)

Hauben was not referring to all users who get

online. He differentiates between Netizens and others

online:

Netizens are not just anyone who comes

online. Netizens are especially not people

who come online for individual gain or

profit. They are not people who come to

the Net thinking it is a service. Rather,

they are people who understand that it

takes effort and action on each and every-

one’s part to make the Net a regenerative

and vibrant community and resource.

(Hauben and Hauben, 1997, p. x)

Several of the articles Hauben wrote about the

history and impact of the Net were posted online and

then collected into a book. In January 1994 the book

was put online at an FTP site documenting the origins

of the online network and culture it gave birth to. In

his preface to the book Hauben wrote:

As more and more people join the online

community and contribute toward the

nurturing of the Net and toward the devel-

opment of a great shared social wealth,

the ideas and values of netizenship spread.

By 1995, Hauben’s research was recognized

internationally, and he was invited to Japan to speak

at a conference about the subject of Netizens. In his

talk, he describes his early investigation of Usenet

and the Internet and what he learned from his research

and experience online. He writes:

The virtual space created on noncommer-

cial computer networks is accessible

Page 25

universally. This space is accessible from

the connections that exist; whereas social

networks in the physical world generally

are connected only by limited gateways.

So the capability of networking on com-

puter nets overcomes limitations inherent

in non computer social networks. Access

to the Net, however, needs to be universal

for the Net to fully utilize the contribution

each person can represent. Once access is

limited, the Net and those on the Net lose

the full advantage the Net can offer.

Lastly the people on the Net need to be

active in order to bring about the best

possible use of the Network.

Part VIII. The Online Community

It is interesting to see how closely the concep-

tual vision Hauben developed matched that of the

vision of JCR Licklider. Hauben’s views were influ-

enced by his experience online, his study and the

comments he received in response to his research

questions from people around the world.

Licklider

had recognized the need for an online community that

would encourage users to contribute to be able to

develop computer and network science and technol-

ogy. This collaborative environment is what people

found online on Usenet and the Internet even into the

early 1990s.

Licklider and later Hauben advocated support

and protection of the creative users online who were

eager to explore how to utilize the Internet in interest-

ing and novel new ways. Both staunchly maintained

that users had to be participants in making the deci-

sions that would develop and spread the Internet to

all. Both warned that commercial entities could not

develop a network that would spread access to all or

that would encourage user participation in its devel-

opment.

The conscious netizen, the net.citizen that

Hauben identified online in the 1992-1993 period

when he was doing his initial research about the

history and social impact of the Internet coincided

with Licklider’s ideas that there was a need to have

creative users online to help the Internet to develop

and to care for its continuing development.

The concept and consciousness of oneself as a

netizen has since spread around the world. By the mid

1990s, people online had begun to refer to themselves

as netizen, in the fashion of how ‘citizen’ was used

during the French Revolution.

There have been significant achievements of

netizens in countries around the world. The netizens

of South Korea, however, deserve particular mention.

They are helping to shape the democratic practices

that extend what is understood as democracy and

citizenship. Their experience provides an important

body of practice to consider when trying to under-

stand what will be the future form of political partici-

pation.

Part IX. Methodology

What are the implications of Licklider’s ideas

about models and about the brain and modeling, for

the study of the Internet and the creation of a research

agenda for this study? Recent articles in the “Annals

of the History of Computing” and other engineering

publications provide a perspective toward what

methodology and framework are needed for such

study.

One article is an editorial by Hunter Crowther-

Heyck titled “Mind and Network.”

The author

proposes that the Internet is attractive as a ‘new

model.’ He recognizes that this is not an accident, but

the result of the interest in models and modeling by

those in the cybernetic community that Licklider was

a member of in the 1940s and 1950s. This community

was also interested in how the human mind worked.

They wondered what they could learn about the

human brain from learning about the computer, and

what they could learn about the computer, from

learning about the brain.

Licklider and Taylor’s article “The Computer as

a Communication Device,” however, takes this

relationship one step further. By focusing on the

human-computer system as a network, they are able

to consider the implications for the augmentation of

the human capability that being part of a collaborative

communication network would make possible.

The article, “Engineering Disclosing Models,”

by the British historian of science, Michael Duffy

makes the argument why a new methodology is

needed for the history of engineering to support the

new advances made possible by information technol-

ogy.

Duffy maintains that modern engineering

developments are a change in a conceptual paradigm

as fundamental as the change described in the Eliza-

bethan World Picture

by E. M. W. Tillyard. In his

book, Tillyard describes a paradigm change that took

place in science in the 16

and 17

centuries. This

Page 26

was a change from the metaphysics that took as its

fundamental basis the four elements of fire, air, earth

and water, to a science that would focus on the nature

of the phenomenon being observed in order to deter-

mine the scientific laws and underlying principles.

The changed paradigm led to the discovery of

thermodynamics and mechanics and other scientific

explanations that made possible the industrial revolu-

tion. Duffy proposes that there is a need to create a

new conceptual framework by which to understand

the history of engineering and by which to help

inspire support for its future development.

He explains how the new technologies of our

time “are very different from the machines and

systems which built and powered the former phases of

industrialization, and their raw material is more likely

to be a living organization, the nervous system or

information … .” Because new kinds of industry are

being created as consequences of this development,

he argues, the new technologies require a conceptual

apparatus adequate for interpreting the physical and

biological phenomenon.

Duffy is calling for a change from looking at

engineering as artifacts as has been common in the

past. The “history of technology is too often focused

on industrial [artifacts],” he writes. He points out that

there is a need for a new history of engineering and a

new methodology to develop that history. The history

he is proposing is one that will focus on the concepts

and models of engineering activities. Duffy defines

engineering as, “The science which includes technol-

ogy.” (Duffy, 2004, p. 22) He is proposing the need to

identify the model that engineers use, the ‘conceptual

apparatus,’ (p. 29) that helps to understand a techno-

logical process and to explore how to develop it.

Duffy argues that there is a need to create “imaginary

models or analogies of the phenomenon” being

developed. Then “these models can be abstracted,

generalized and idealized.” (p. 27)

“All design,” he writes, “must of course be

subjected to practical tests.” Duffy identifies what he

calls “disclosing models,” as a means to provide this

new conceptual framework to reinterpret and deepen

understanding of engineering in the past and to

provide a new conceptual apparatus for the future.

(pp. 22-23, see p. 29) “Even the simplest model can

effect a revolution,” he observes. An example he

offers is the advance that came from borrowing the

model of the “semipermeable membrane” from chem-

istry to describe “the actions of the model of the heart

by the ‘diastolic and systolic action’.” (p. 28)

Part X. Research Questions

In his article, “How Did Computing Go Global:

the Need for an Answer and a Research Agenda,”

James W. Cortada raises a series of questions about

how computer developments have occurred and

spread so rapidly in just the past 50 years. “How this

class of technology dispersed so quickly … remains

little understood,” he observes. Considering “why this

is a useful question,” he concludes that, “In short this

story is too big and too important to ignore.” Cortada

then asks “what is it critical to examine” and “how to

do so.” (Cortada, 2004, p. 53)

While Cordata is making a set of observations

about the rapid spread of computer technology,

similar observations about the rapid spread of the

Internet could be made which would be even more

striking. Cortada proposes that the question of “what

to examine” is a question to ask about how to study

the rapid development and spread of computer tech-

nology. “What to examine?” is similarly an important

question to help to formulate a research agenda on the

history and development of the Internet.

Part XI. Conclusion

This paper began with a reference to the mythol-

ogy that surrounds the origins and development of the

Internet. A problem that results from the widespread

dissemination of this mythology is that it stands in the

way of the researchers and the public recognizing the

significant scientific and social advance represented

by the creation and the development of the Internet.

It is not that the Internet has grown and spread

as an accidental side effect of some obscure U.S.

military project, as the mythology would lead one to

believe. To the contrary, the Internet is the result of a

significant scientific collaboration among an interna-

tional group of researchers to solve the problems,

technical and political, of making communication

possible across technical and political boundaries.

Not only was there international collaboration to

create the TCP/IP protocol, but this technical research

had a scientific foundation in the ferment among an

interdisciplinary community of researchers in the

1940s and 1950s who were interested in the science

of information processing, of communication, and of

control systems.

Along with the scientific interactions of these

Page 27

researchers, there was a concern about the social

problem that the new technology would encounter. A

primary concern was how to deal with the problem of

government officials who would not understand the

depths of the issues involved, but who would have to

make decisions about the future of the new technol-

ogy.

To help solve this problem, Licklider recognized

that there was a need for increased citizen participa-

tion in the decisions that would be made with respect

to the new technology. He also recognized that the

new computer networking technology would help to

make a new form of participatory citizenship possible.

The creation of mailing lists and online discus-

sion groups like Usenet newsgroups have provided

support for grassroots participation in networking

development. This in turn has helped to create and

define the broad ranging social and technical vision

that has helped the online community create and

develop a significant new social institution, often

referred to as ‘the Net’.

Even more profoundly, in the early 1990s, just

when a number of networks around the world were

becoming part of the Internet, research revealed that

a new form of social identity and consciousness had

emerged within the online community. The identity of

oneself as a ‘netizen’, i.e., a net.citizen, was embraced

as a way to refer to the new social consciousness that

participation online made possible.

Reviewing Licklider’s interest in the brain and

the modeling feature of the brain and his understand-

ing that the individual nature of this modeling was a

limitation that needed to be overcome, one is struck

by how precious and important is the online collabo-

rative and interactive activity that the Internet makes

possible.

While there has been much political and finan-

cial attention given to the creation of so called new

models for Internet governance, there has been little

attention or institutional interest in trying to learn the

lessons of how the Internet grew and spread and how

the netizen emerged. As Thomas Paine in The Rights

of Man observed, almost three centuries ago, “Forms

grow out of principles and operate to continue the

principles they grow from.”

By understanding the principles that made it

possible to develop the Internet, it will be possible to

understand how to create the forms needed to nourish

its continuing development. The Internet and the

netizen provide a means to carry on this process. That

is why there is a serious need for the formulation of a

research agenda to support this much needed study.

Notes:

1. “Packet Switching,” Wikipedia, online at:

http://en.wikipedia

.org/wiki /Packet_switching.

2. Paul Baran wrote an 11-volume set of booklets On Distributed

Communication in 1964. Baran’s research was sponsored by the

U.S. Air Force and proposed a military communication system

for voice and data. (Baran, 1964)

3. Lawrence G. Roberts, “The Evolution of Packet Switching,”

1978, online at:

http://www.ece.ucf.edu/~yuksem/teaching/nae

/reading/1978-roberts.pdf. (Roberts, 1978)

4. Ronda Hauben, “The Birth of the Internet: An Architectural

Conception for Solving the Multiple Network Problem,” online

at:

http://umcc.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/birth_internet.txt.

5. “An Interview with Donald W. Davies,” conducted by Martin

Campbell-Kelly, on 17 March 1986, National Physical Labora-

tory, “Actually, most of the discussions tended to be about the

operating system aspects, but certainly the mismatch between

time-sharing and the telephone network was mentioned. It was

that which sort of triggered off my thoughts, and it was in the

evenings during that meeting that I first began to think about

packet-switching.” (online at: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bit

stream/handle/11299/107241/oh189dwd.pdf, p. 6) See also

Thomas Marill and Lawrence G. Roberts, “Toward a Coopera-

tive Network of Time-Shared Computers,” Proceedings-Fall

Joint Computer Conference, AFIPS 29, pp. 425-431, Washing-

ton, D.C., Spartan Books, 1966, online at:

https://dl.acm.org/doi

/abs/10.1145/1464291.1464336.

6. Ronda Hauben, “A Closer Look at the Controversy Over the

Internet’s Birthday!,” CircleID, January 15, 2003. Online at:

http://www.CircleID.com/posts/a_closer_look_at_the_contro-

versy_over_the_internets_birthday_you_decide.

7. These networks can differ significantly. To transport packets

among dissimilar networks meant a whole set of issues had to be

understood and resolved, according to Robert Kahn, one of the

co-inventors of the TCP/IP protocol. Among the issues listed are:

packets on different networks would be of different sizes, there

would be different decisions made regarding timing, flow

control, error checking and so forth. There would need to be a

means of having all the different networks recognize how to

route packets to their destination address. A form of addressing

was needed which would be recognized by all the networks of

the Internet.

8. See Ronda Hauben, “The Internet: On its International Origins

and Collaborative Vision (A Work in Progress).” Online at:

http://umcc.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/birth_tcp.txt.

9. Vinton Cerf. See:

http://umcc.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/1.pdf

10. Sylvia B. Kenney and Peter Kirstein, “The Uses of the ARPA

Network via the University College London Node,” Workshop

on Data Communications Sep 15-19, 1975, CP-76-9, IIASA

Laxenburg, Austria, 1975, p. 54, online at:

http://www.ais.org

/~ronda/new.papers/2.pdf.

11. See graphic of SATNET at:

http://umcc.ais.org/~ronda/new

.papers/4.pdf from an E-mail between the author and Horst

Claussen and Hans Dodel.

12. Warren Teitelman, “Pilot: A Step Toward Man-Computer

Page 28

Symbiosis,” September 1966, Project MAC, MIT, MAC-TR-32

(Thesis), p. 11. Online at: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle

/1721.1/6905/AITR-221.pdf.

13. JCR Licklider, “Memorandum For Members and Affiliates

of the Intergalactic Computer Network, Subject: Topics for

Discussion at the Forthcoming Meeting, April 23, 1963,” Ad-

vanced Research Projects Agency Washington 25, D.C. Online

at:

http://docplayer.net/4287863-Memorandum-for-members-

and-affiliates-of-the-intergalactic-computer-network-subject-to

pics-for-discussion-at-the-forthcoming-meeting.html.

14. Ibid., Teitelman, p. 1.

15. JCR Licklider and Robert Taylor, “The Computer As a

Communication Device,” In Memoriam: JCR Licklider, 1915-

1990, Digital Systems Research Center Palo Alto, California,

1957. Online at:

http://memex.org/licklider.pdf, p. 22.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Carl F. J. Overhage and R. Joyce Harman, The On-Line

Intellectual Community and the Information Transfer System at

MIT in 1975, p. 25.

19. See for example Licklider, JCR “Computers: Thinking

Machines or Thinking Aids?” Mgmt. Rev. 54 (July 1965) pp. 40-

43.

20. “In order to understand the wonder that the Internet and

various other components of the Net represent, we need to

understand why the ARPANET Completion Report ends with the

suggestion that the ARPANET is fundamentally connected to

and born of computer science rather than of the military. Chapter

7, Behind the Net: The Untold Story of the ARPANET and

Computer Science, by Michael Hauben, in Hauben & Hauben,

1997, p. 96. … The developers of the ARPANET viewed the

computer as a communication device rather than only as an

arithmetic device. Such a shift in understanding the role of the

computer was fundamental in advancing computer science.”

Ibid., p. 109.

21. Ronda Hauben, “Computer Science and the Role of Gov-

ernment in Creating the Internet: ARPA/IPTO (1962-1986)

Creating the Needed Interface,” Online at:

http://www.columbia

.edu/~rh 120/other/arpa_ipto.txt.

22. Greenberger, 1962.

23. Ibid., C. P. Snow, “Scientists and Decision Making,” pp. 3-

13 (Talk given at MIT, March 1961)

24. Ronda Hauben, “Computer Science and the Role of Gov-

ernment in Creating the Internet,” online at:

http://ais.org/~ronda

/new.papers/arpa_ipto.txt.

25. JCR Licklider, “Computers in Government,” in Michael

Dertouzos and Joel Moses, The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year

View, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1979, pp. 87-126.

26. This was under a contract between ANS, the University of

Michigan, and IBM.

27. Hauben and Hauben, 1997.

28. In the 1990s, community networks called Freenets were just

springing up which provided local users with free access to the

Internet.

29. From “The Netizens and Community Networks,” presented

at the Hypernetwork ‘95 Beppu Bay Conference on November

24, 1995, online at:

http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/text/bbc

95spch.txt.

30. It is remarkable how the ideas about democracy and com-

munication that Hauben recognized from his research and the

ideas that Licklider had about citizens being involved in the

decisions that would influence the future of the net coincide with

the ideas that Jurgen Habermas had conceptually described as a

public sphere. In an article describing Habermas’s theory, Mark

Warren explains the aspects of discursive democracy that

Habermas has identified. The importance of Habermas’s work is

that he focuses on communication and the procreative quality of

communication (the transformative quality), in a way that is

similar to that of Licklider and Hauben. On the other hand, the

difference is that Hauben and Licklider consider the importance

of an actual technological support for this human communicative

activity, while Habermas speaks more abstractly and focuses on

the human activity in a more philosophical (or normative)

framework.

31. Ronda Hauben, “The Information Processing Techniques

Office and the Birth of the Internet: A Study in Governance,”

online at:

http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/misc/lick101

.doc.

32. Ronda Hauben, “The Rise of Netizen Democracy: a Case

Study of the Impact of Netizens on Democracy in South Korea.”

Online at:

http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/Era_of_the_Net

izen/PDF/Part_II_Netizen_Democracy_in_South_Korea.pdf.

33. Hunter Crowther-Heyck, “Mind and Network,” Volume 27,

Issue: 3 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, July-Sep-

tember 2005, p. 104.

34. Duffy, 2004.

35. Tillyard, 1943.

36. James W. Cortada, “How Did Computing Go Global? The

Need for an Answer and a Research Agenda,” IEEE Annals of

the History of Computing, January 2004, pp. 53-58.

37. In this context I want to point to the Asian networking

association online Internet history museum as one project with

has been created to document how networking has developed in

the countries in Asia.

38. This reflects the fact that the pre-Internet forms like Usenet,

BITNet, mailing lists, and a number of other networking

developments in the 1970s and 1980s prepared the ground for the

Internet which enveloped all these other networks by the mid

1990s.

Bibliography

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aran_DistributedRM3420.pdf.

Cortada, James W. “How Did Computing Go Global? The Need

for an Answer and a Research Agenda.” IEEE Annals of

the History of Computing. January 2004. Pp. 53-58.

Crowther-Heyck, Hunter.“Mind and Network.” Volume 27,

Issue: 3. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.

July-September 2005.

Davies, Donald. “The Future of Computer Networks.” IIASA

Conference on Computer Communications Networks.

October 21-25, 1974.

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Book 2, edited by Oktawian Nawrot, University of

Gdansk, Poland, 2004. Pp. 22-64.

Greenberger, Martin ed. Computers and the World of the Future.

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MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1962.

Hauben, Michael. “The Netizens and Community Networks.”

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http://www.columbia.edu

/~hauben/text/bbc95spch.txt.

Hauben, Michael “Webchat with Michael Hauben.” January 25,

1996. Online at:

http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/pap

ers/jr_gii_summit-webchat.txt.

Hauben, Michael, and Ronda Hauben. Netizens: On the History

and Impact of Usenet and the Interent. IEEE Computer

Society Press. 1997.

Hu, Qiheng. WGIG. First Open Consultation Meeting. 20-21

September 2004. Geneva, Switzerland.

Licklider, JCR. “Computers in Government.” In Michael

Dertouzos and Joel Moses. The Computer Age: A Twenty-

Year View. Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Press. 1979.

Licklider, JCR and Robert Taylor. “The Computer As a Commu-

nication Device.” In Memoriam: JCR Licklider, 1915-

1990, Digital Systems Research Center. Palo Alto, Cali-

fornia. 1957. Online at:

http://memex.org/licklider.pdf.

NSF. Problems in Human Communication and Control. MIT

Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1954.

Roberts, Lawrence. “The Evolution of Packet Switching.”

Proceedings of the IEEE. Vol. 66, No. 11. November

1978.

Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of

the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare. London,

England. Chatto & Windus. 1943.

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Transactions of the Seventh Conference. New York:

Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation.

Appendix

Examples included Steve Alexander who compiled and

distributed a list of gas prices at particular gas stations in

California to which many people contributed and kept up to date.

(He started this in a newsgroup ca.driving). His effort was to

work with others to counteract the collusive price-gouging

behavior of the oil companies. (Hauben and Hauben, 1997, p.

11.)

Another response was from Declan McCreesh who wrote

about how the most up-to-date sports information was available

online. It had been contributed to by different people about the

Grand Prix.

Godfrey Nolan wrote about how a newspaper about

Ireland distributed online by Lian Ferrie who worked in Galway

helped Godfrey to keep up with what was happening in his home

country.

Malcolm Humes wrote how the kind of conversation

online was about substantial issues rather than “how’s the

weather” type of small talk.

There are numerous other descriptions in the paper

Hauben wrote which he titled, “The Net and Netizens: the

Impact the Net is having on People’s Lives.”

Hauben’s paper is online as chapter 1 of Netizens: On the

History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. The URL is:

http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/.

Specific examples of netizen activity to help spread the

consciousness of the netizen:

A netizen from Ireland, Cal Woods put the online book

into html to help it to spread more widely.

A review of the book was done by a Rumanian researcher,

Boldur Barbat. He recognized that netizenship is an important

new democratic development and acts as a catalyst for the

development of ever more advanced Information Technology.

In his review of Netizens, the Rumanian researcher

summed up Chapter 13, the chapter about the effect of the Net on

the news media. He wrote: “Chapter 13 investigates the effect of

the Net on the professional news media, under the metaphor of

‘Will this kill that?’; its conclusion is rather optimistic: the user

masses becoming ‘netizen reporters’ will force the acknowledged

news media – to avoid being increasingly marginalized – to

evolve a new role, challenging the premise that authoritative

professional reporters (almost always biased, consciously or not)

are the only possible ones.” From Boldur Barbat, “Book Review:

Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet,”

Studies in Informatics and Control, Vol. 7, No 4 (December

1998). Online at:

http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/Era_of_the

_Netizen/resources/Review_of_Netizens-BBarbat.txt.

A Japanese sociologist, Shumpei Kumon, gathered a

series of articles into a book in Japanese titled The Age of

Netizens. The book begins with a chapter on the birth of the

netizen.

Also in the mid 1990s, a Polish researcher, Leszek Jesien,

was doing research about what form of citizenship would be

appropriate for the European Union (EU). Looking for a model

that might be helpful to understand how to develop a European-

wide form of citizenship, he found the work about netizens

online. He recommended that EU officials would do well to view

the phenomenon of netizenship with sympathy and attention as

a model of a broader than national, but also a participatory form

of citizenship.

The Polish researcher’s paper: “The 1996 IGC: European

Citizenship Reconsidered,” by Leszek Jesien, Instituets fur den

Donauraum und Mitteleuropa, March 1997. Online at:

http://

www.columbia.edu/~hauben/Era_of_the_Netizen/resources/E

uropean_Citizenship_Reconsidered-LJesien.doc. See also: http://

www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/misc/citizenpap.html.

Notable events showing the impact of netizens around the

world include:

A Netizen art contest seeking online art that helps to build

the online community was sponsored by a gallery in Rome.

A Netizens Association to keep the price of the Net

affordable was organized in Iceland.

A lexicographer in Israel composing a dictionary defini-

tion for a Hebrew dictionary wanted to be certain that she de-

scribed a netizen as one who contributes to the Net, not only as

anyone online.

A Congressman in the U.S. introduced a bill into the U.S.

House of Representatives called the Netizen Protection Act to

penalize anyone who sent spam on the Internet.

Along with individual efforts to develop and spread the

consciousness of netizenship, there have been online discussions

which have demonstrated the power of the Net and Netizen to

impact society. One such example is a discussion about an

editorial in an Indian newspaper about whether or not India

should help the U.S. to invade Iraq. The discussion had more

than a thousand entries.

Page 30

[Editor’s Note: The following article appeared in 2002 in Science

Studies, Vol. 15, No.1, pp. 61–68. It can be seen online at:

http://www.columbia.edu/~rh 120/other/usenetstts.pdf.]

Commodifying Usenet and

the Usenet Archive or

Continuing the Online

Cooperative Usenet Culture?

by Ronda Hauben

This article explores the conflict between the

cooperative online culture of users who have created

Usenet and the corporate commodification of Usenet

posts by companies archiving the posts. The clash of

decision-making processes is presented through the

details of how Usenet users choose to petition a

company to provide protection for the public archives

it had collected. The company disregarded the petition

and the archives were sold to another company. The

new company has begun to put its own copyright

symbol on the posts in its archives. How will such a

commodification affect the cooperative nature of

Usenet itself and the continuing vitality of Usenet’s

cooperative culture? The article explores this culture

clash and considers possible consequences.

Keywords: commodification, electronic communica-

tion, Usenet

Commodification of knowledge is a trend in

modern societies (Suarez-Villa, 2001). A close look

at individual cases shows, however, that this process

is contentious. The transformation of a public into a

private good provokes resistance by those who con-

tributed to the production of that good. If they are

now prevented from using it free of charge and from

having free access to that good, they may even regard

commodification as expropriation. The collaboration

that produces a public good in science or technical

research is an important process to understand and to

protect. Such collaboration has made it possible to

create the Internet and Usenet. Researchers creating

these important online developments needed the input

and contributions from as many people as possible.

An example from the Usenet world illustrates the

tensions and conflicts which result when corporations

become involved and begin to commodify a public

good.

Usenet is a worldwide distributed online news-

group and discussion forum. Contributions to it

consist of short or long opinions, comments, articles,

questions, or answers typed into the system through

computers and then distributed from host site to host

site until they have traversed all sites that subscribe to

the newsgroup to which they are directed. Each such

contribution is called a “post.” (Hauben & Hauben,

1997) Contributors are sometime called posters. This

article examines the corporate archiving of Usenet

posts, which then become subject to commodification.

These posts are contributed freely by Usenet users. A

corporation doing the archiving put its copyright

notice on the posts in this archive. It is unlikely that

most contributors have agreed to have their posts

archived or to have the copyright of a company

appear on the posts.

A Public Good in Corporate Hands

On February 12, 2001, those accessing the

archive of Usenet posts collected and archived by the

company Deja.com (Deja), learned the archive had

been transferred to another company, Google, Inc.

(Google). In a press release announcing the acquisi-

tion, Google indicated that the archive would be made

available to the public in a few months. Google said

it “bought” the archive but the price was not indi-

cated. It is likely that Google expected acclaim for

acquiring the archive from Deja. The archive had

many users and Deja was going bankrupt at the time

and either selling or auctioning off its assets.

Among those in the online Internet community,

some users welcomed the Google purchase and urged

patience to see what would develop. There was also

another response. A number of people online were

concerned that Google had taken offline the five years

of Usenet posts that Deja had collected and substi-

tuted a much smaller archive that Google had been

collecting on its own. An article appeared in “The

13, 2001. The article expressed concern that Google

had not maintained the Deja interface and the online

availability of the archive until they perfected their

own interface. Subsequent articles on February 14 and

February 15, 2001 included comments by the then

chief executive officer (CEO) of Google, Larry Page,

promising that some of the archive would be back

online in a month and the rest in three months.

There were other concerns expressed both by

Page 31

users online and in the online press during this period.

Among these were references to a petition that even-

tually contained almost 4000 signatures and many

comments. The petition had been initiated a few

months earlier to appeal to Deja to safeguard the

Usenet archive. After collecting Usenet posts from

1995 to 2000 and making them available online, Deja

cut back access from five years of posts to only the

past year. Included in the petition were several com-

ments describing the archive as a public good that had

somehow fallen into private hands. One comment in

the petition urged that the, “USENET archive …

should *never* have been in private/corporate hands

… give it to an appropriate educational establish-

ment” (comment by Brian McNeil).

To understand the controversy around the

corporate archiving and copyrighting of Usenet posts,

it is necessary to know something about the origins of

Usenet and of archiving Usenet. The collaborative

process was crucial for the origins and development

of Usenet. A distributed form of archiving was

developing as Usenet developed. The open and col-

laborative process that marked the development of

both Usenet and the Google search engine, which was

originally developed as a research project, is a process

that facilitates the development and implementation

of new concepts in technology. Cooperation and

collaboration are the processes that generate new

knowledge and ways of developing technical pro-

cesses. The give and take among researchers in the

open process where they share knowledge and prob-

lems, makes possible ever new developments and

improvements.

A proprietary process, is the opposite. It limits

the source of input. This tends to narrow the develop-

ment and change to incremental changes, rather than

qualitative leaps. Eventually a proprietary process

freezes what is developed for various reasons,

amongst which is the need to realize the profit to pay

for previous development. When technical pioneers

are forging a brand new process or technology, they

need the input and support of all who can contribute

to the new development. This article will not only

explore the collaborative process essential to the

development of qualitatively new technologies like

Usenet and the Internet, but it will also consider the

nature of the efforts to commodify these new develop-

ments, such as the archiving of Usenet posts by

corporations or the transformation of a publicly

funded search engine research project into a private

company, like Google.

Unix, Usenet, Internet

Usenet grew up as part of the Unix community.

Unix was created in 1969 at Bell Labs, the research

arm of the U.S. publicly regulated phone company,

AT&T (cf. Holtgrewe & Werle, 2001). Researchers

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, among others at

Bell Labs had been part of a broader research project

working with Project MAC at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology (MIT). They experienced the

close communication that was possible through the

new form of programming environment being devel-

oped at MIT known as time-sharing. At MIT this was

originally the Compatible Time Sharing System

(CTSS), and subsequently research was begun to

create a more advanced system called MULTICS.

AT&T, however, withdrew from the MULTICS

collaboration at MIT. Its Bell Labs researchers set out

to create their own version of a time-sharing system

to be used at AT&T. They called their system Unix

(Hauben & Hauben, 1997, pp. 131-134).

Dennis Ritchie, one of the creators of Unix,

wrote that Unix was created at Bell Labs by program-

mers hoping that a “fellowship would form” (Hauben

& Hauben, 1997, p. 51). AT&T (the home of Bell

Labs) was a government-regulated corporation

subject to the 1956 Consent Decree that restricted it

to the telephone business. It was therefore not allowed

to commercialize software. The researchers at Bell

Labs who created Unix were able to make it available

to other researchers and academic institutions for a

minimal fee for the tape. There was, however, no

technical support from AT&T. Unix users were on

their own to solve any problems. From this situation

a community grew up to support each other. They

formed an association of academic and research users

of Unix called USENIX.

By 1979, UUCP (Unix to Unix CoPy Program)

was being distributed with the Unix code. UUCP

allowed computers using Unix to communicate with

each other over telephone lines. From this context

Usenet evolved. Usenet was conceived in 1979 by

Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and

Jim Ellis. They were active in the Unix community

and wanted to contribute a means to create an online

Usenix newsletter. In collaboration with others, they

developed early versions of the Usenet software and

explored its capability. In the January 1980 Usenix

meeting, the software was made available to those

Page 32

who were interested.

Usenet was a grassroots network. The users

would contribute “posts.” Each post would circulate

to other users via Usenet software using UUCP. In

this way the users created the content and the form of

the developing Usenet. It soon spread from the U.S.

to Canada, and then to Europe and Australia (Hauben

& Hauben, 1997, Chapters 2, 3 and 10).

An important aspect of the contributed posts

was that they circulated until their expiration date.

Each site could set its own date for the expiration of

the posts, but they all expired. Consequently, a user

would contribute a post and it would be sent out

across the globe, but it would expire and disappear

from each node on the network on different but set

dates.

On Usenet, the posts would be grouped accord-

ing to particular topics in “newsgroups.” A news-

group like sci.econ was the place where a user would

post about an economics topic. News.misc was a

newsgroup about Usenet. By the early 1990s, individ-

ual Usenet participants archived the posts of some

Usenet newsgroups. An index was maintained online

which provided the addresses of the sites for the

archived newsgroups. A Canadian Usenet pioneer,

Henry Spencer, maintained an archive of most Usenet

posts through the 1980s. The earliest two or three

years of these posts were made available online on

certain occasions.

Increasingly, Usenet was being transported via

the Internet rather than predominantly via UUCP and

phone lines. For a period in the 1980s and into the

early 1990s, the U.S. National Science Foundation

(NSF) provided support for an NSF backbone for the

U.S. portion of the Internet. Traffic on this backbone

was required to adhere to the NSF’s Acceptable Use

Policy (AUP) until 1995 when the NSF backbone was

privatised (Hauben & Hauben, 1997, pp. 219-220).

There was an AUP because the NSF backbone was

initially founded and for many years financed by

public funding. The AUP was the means of protecting

the public interest in the network. The AUP explained

(NSF, 1992):

NSFNET Backbone services are provided

to support open research and education in

and among U.S. research and instructional

institutions, plus research arms of for-

profit firms when engaged in open schol-

arly communication and research. Use for

other purposes is not acceptable.

The AUP then explained in more concrete terms how

this applied in specific situations. For example, with

regard to uses by the international research commu-

nity, the AUP stated that among the “specifically

accepted uses were: … . Communication with foreign

researchers and educators in connection with research

or instruction, as long as any network that the foreign

user employs for such communication provides

reciprocal access to U.S. researchers and educators.”

Because the AUP required that the international

research community could use the NSFNET backbone

as long as networks created in their countries pro-

vided reciprocal communication access, the protec-

tion provided to the U.S. research community for non-

commercial use of the NSFNET extended to other

countries. The AUP forbade commercial use of these

networks except under certain specified circum-

stances that would serve the research community.

Privatization and the Clash of Cultures

With the privatisation and commercialization of

the U.S. portion of the Internet, companies like Deja

were created which began to archive Usenet posts.

Several users report discontinuing their own archiving

when it appeared that these companies were maintain-

ing a large archive. Some users, however, did not

want their posts archived. They were concerned about

the effect on the continuing development of Usenet

from archiving by private companies. The entities that

have done archiving like Alta Vista and Deja and now

Google are private companies. The decisions about

the nature and goals of their archiving activity have

been and are under their control. This differs from the

practice on early Usenet, when the online community

determined the important aspects to be considered

when a policy decision was needed (Hauben, 2001).

Private corporate decision-making and cooperative

online decision-making represent two different

cultures. For example, in the early development of

Usenet, new software was being created to transport

Usenet. Mark Horton and Matt Glickman were

creating the new software and Horton considered

changing the name of Usenet. He explained his

intentions to the online community of Usenet users,

asking them for their consideration of his proposal.

There was extensive discussion of the reasons that

Horton proposed to justify such a change. As a result

of the discussion, the decision was that the name

Usenet should remain and that Horton’s reasons for a

change were not adequate. This was an example of

Page 33

how decision-making can be enhanced through an

online cooperative process.

Corporate decision-making, on the contrary, is

often centralized and focused on short-term goals. It

is also often difficult to have divergent opinions

expressed in an unprotected corporate environment

where one can lose one’s position or even job if one

speaks in a way that is not appreciated by senior

management. Often the views of all involved are not

heard or even if they are heard, they can only take a

secondary place to the more immediate profit ori-

entation or fiduciary requirements of management. In

such a situation, as with Deja and the Usenet archives

created from the contributed postings of users, the

users have little ability to affect the corporate decision

making process. On the surface, it may seem an

anomaly to have Usenet users write a petition to a

corporation. Petitions are most often thought of as

being the right of citizens with regard to their govern-

ment officials. Usenet users, however, accustomed to

be participants, acted to express their views, signing

and writing comments in a petition to the company

Deja. The request of a number of users to have the

archive put into a public repository received no

response from Deja, the corporate holder of the

archive.

What is the effect on the online community and

what are the legal implications of the clash of cultures

that results from a private company collecting and

then maintaining an archive of public and contributed

posts? To gain some grasp of the issues, it is helpful

to stress the public origins of the private company

Google. Graduate student researchers funded by

public research funds under the Digital Libraries

Initiatives (DLI) developed the Google search engine.

In a paper presented in 1998, Sergey Brin and Law-

rence Page, who worked in a DLI initiative at Stan-

ford University in the U.S., describe the harmful

effects of the commodification of search engine

technology and emphasize the need for public tech-

nology research and development. They write:

Up until now most search engine develop-

ment has gone on at companies with little

publication of technical details. This

causes search engine technology to remain

largely a black art and to be advertising

oriented … . With Google we have a

strong goal to push more development and

understanding into the academic realm.

They continue explaining their strategy to de-

commodify such research:

Another goal we have is to set up a Space-

lab-like environment where researchers or

even students can propose and do interest-

ing experiments on our large-scale web

data. (Brin & Page, 1998)

Their plan was to create a public research database as

a laboratory for web search engine research. In their

article they acknowledge the public funding in the

context of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library

Project in which industrial partners are also involved.

The plan of Brin and Page was not imple-

mented. Instead of creating the public web search

engine laboratory, those working on the Google

search engine were encouraged to create a private

company, which would become part of the “black art

of proprietary search engine technology” that Brin

and Page critiqued. The incentives were set by the

funding agency, the NSF, which at the time of the

creation of Google, testified to the U.S. Congress that

the “transfer to the private sector of ‘people’ – first

supported by the NSF at universities – should be

viewed as the ultimate success of technology trans-

fer.”

For the NSF, Google is the company which

provides “an excellent example of knowledge transfer

from NSF investment in people.” As a consequence,

the search engine Google, originally created as part of

a public research project, was transformed into the

product for a private company. The private com-

pany’s mission “to organize the world’s information,

making it universally accessible and useful” was

generally welcomed. But how does this corporate goal

compare with the goal of Usenet users to communi-

cate?

Toward a Commercial Usenet Culture?

Usenet was created to facilitate communication.

There is an unwritten agreement that people who post

on Usenet are willing to cooperate in effecting that

communication (Hauben & Hauben, 1997, 52).

Archiving the posts was not explicitly intended. It

was seen by some users as a means of dealing with

people’s contributions to Usenet in a way that differed

from their intentions. This may be tolerated as long as

the archive can be accessed by the Usenet community

free of charge and without any copyright restricting

the use of the archive. In the Google archive the posts

are initially individually presented separate from the

discussions. There is a provision for viewing the

discussion, but that is an option not the default. Some

Page 34

users even welcomed archives because they could

help to preserve Usenet’s heritage: the cooperative

and communicative tradition of the community.

But how long will users tolerate the fact that

their contributed posts are copyrighted by a company?

Google is moving exactly in this direction. Google is

no longer only the private holding company for a

Traditionally under the Berne Convention, which the

ownership of their creations, as soon as they are

created. Google has not requested that users turn over

their copyrights to Google, yet the company is copy-

righting the posts. Google’s CEO expressed some

concern about the copyright of the posts in its archive.

Since Google did not ask Usenet users before its

decision to put its copyright on users’ posts, it did not

have a way to take into account users’ views. If

Google does not create a means for the Usenet com-

munity to discuss or to be involved in decisions

regarding how the archive is handled who will be

responsible for safeguarding the public nature of the

archive? (Hauben, 2001) Any company declaring that

it has the right to the ownership of these posts, or to

buy or sell a compilation of such posts, presents a

serious challenge to Usenet’s cooperative culture.

Such actions can have a chilling effect on users.

Usenet, as a cooperative culture, requires a process

with provisions for public discussion and decision

making to determine and then safeguard the public

interest.

Already the archiving of Usenet and the com-

mercialization of the Internet has changed Usenet in

subtle ways. In the past diverse views were cherished

and discussion between those with differences was

welcomed. If there was any harassment of those with

a minority point of view, other users would speak up

in support of the person being abused. More recently,

with the archiving of posts, there is less defense being

provided for minority or unpopular views on some

newsgroups. Consequently, there is less interest in

these newsgroups when the range of discussion is nar-

rowed in this way. Traditionally, Usenet provided an

environment that welcomed differences. This is the

treasure that Usenet has provided to users. If archiv-

ing interferes with this environment, it becomes a

serious problem for the continued development of

Usenet. In the past posters would add their ideas to a

discussion, no matter how brief often saying this was

their two cents. With the archiving presenting posts as

individual works, there is less of an incentive to make

a small contribution.

Usenet has been affected by the archiving of its

posts. Some users who know about the archiving have

chosen to write “x-no-archive: yes” in the first line of

the post, with nothing else on the line to prevent them

from being made available to others in the archive.

Other users, however, do not know about this possi-

bility, nor about the archiving of their posts in gen-

eral. Usenet itself can be affected in a serious way if

the problems that develop with archiving are not

treated cooperatively and sensitively. Google created

a place for users to post comments on its web page,

but how Google will respond to these comments is

not yet known. Various decisions made by Google in

the past differ significantly from the way Horton

made a proposal to users, and solicited their input

before making a decision that would affect them.

There are users who stress that Usenet is more impor-

tant than any archive of Usenet posts and that if the

archiving hurts Usenet, it is a serious loss.

In the short term, Google may seem to be

providing a valuable service in gathering and making

available an extensive Usenet archive. But in the long

term – given Google’s copyright policy and their

method of decision-making – the continued develop-

ment of Usenet and of the ability of users to

communicate is jeopardized. It appears to be essential

that public entities provide for the safeguarding of the

Usenet archive and of the Usenet decision making

process, and that Google learn to understand the

importance of responding to the needs of Usenet and

the Usenet community in a way that they don’t

perceive of as in competition with but as comple-

mentary to Google. Hopefully, this article will help

serve as a catalyst for discussion and research in this

vein.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Raymund Werle for his helpful

comments.

Notes

1. Dr. Rita R. Colwell, Director, National Science Foundation

before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on VA/HUD

and Independent Agencies May 4, 2000, online at:

http://www

.nsf.gov/od/lpa/congress/106/rc00504sapprop.htm.

2. After writing an earlier article about the commodification of

public goods, I was invited to give a talk, both at Stanford Uni-

versity and at Google headquarters about the cooperative culture

Page 35

which made it possible for Usenet to grow and flourish. While in

California, visiting the Internet Archives project, I also inquired

about the efforts to make a substantial archive of Usenet posts

available which was gathered by Henry Spencer. Several months

later, Google announced that they were making this archive

available on Google. While visiting Google headquarters, I also

inquired about whether Google would make a copy of all the

archives it had available to nonprofit or academic or public

institutions. The response was that such institutions desiring a

copy could contact them, but no information has been provided

of any further development in this area.

References

Brin, S. & Page, L. 1998. “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale

Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” WWW7/Computer

Networks 30(1-7). Pp. 107-117. Also, online at:

http://

infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html.

Hauben, M. & Hauben, R. 1997. Netizens: On the History and

Impact of Usenet and the Internet. Los Alamitos, Cali-

fornia: IEEE Computer Society Press.

Hauben, R. 2001. “Usenet and the Usenet Archives: The Chal-

lenge of Building a Collaborative Technical Community,”

Paper presented at the conference “Innovations for an e-

Society.” October 17-19, Berlin, Germany. Online at:

h t t p s : / / w w w . r e s e a r c h g a t e . n e t / p u b l i c a t i o n

/268199158_Usenet_and_the_Usenet_Archives_The_C

hallenge_of_Building_a_Collaborative_Technical_Com

munity.

Holtgrewe, U & Werle, R. 2001. “De-Commodifying Software?

Open Source Software Between Business Strategy and

Social Movement.” Science Studies 14 (2). Pp.43-65.

NSF. 1992. “NSFNET Backbone Acceptable Use Policy.”

Online at:

http://www2.nmcc.edu/pages/information-tech

nology/policies/nsfnet-aup.php.

Suarez-Villa, L. 2001. “The Rise of Technocapitalism.” Science

Studies 14 (2). Pp.4-20.

[Editor’s Note: The following book review was written during an

independent study in Theories of Communication at Teachers

College in NYC in Spring 1998.]

Norbert Wiener’s

Cybernetics in The Human

Use of Human Beings

by Michael Hauben

Norbert Wiener wrote several books about the

science of cybernetics, which he introduced. Central

to the science, whether discussing people or ma-

chines, is the passing of messages between two

entities. As such, cybernetics is a theory of communi-

cation defining the passing of information between

communicators. Wiener was visionary in understand-

ing the importance of applying this engineering

theory of messages to society as a whole, the broad

field of humanities, and working toward understand-

ing its value to all domains of human knowledge.

His second book about cybernetics first written

in 1950, The Human use of Human Beings: Cybernet-

ics and Society (Wiener, 1954), consists of Wiener’s

understanding that society must be studied and

understood by looking at the messages exchanged and

the modes of communication available to those who

comprise society (Wiener, 1954, p. 25). Wiener’s

definition of society included man and machine and

thus it is important to study the development of the

passing of messages or communication between man

and man, man and machine and all possible combina-

tions thereof. Wiener also relates the theory of con-

trol, whether of man or machine, as a part of the

theory of messages. Control comes down to be a

particular communication mode, and is particularly

important in understanding the man/machine dynamic

or interaction. In order to affect control, it is neces-

sary to receive a response that the command has been

acknowledged and acted on. Communication is also

necessary for the intended action to be achieved.

In understanding cybernetics, Wiener devotes

time to describing entropy in nature as theorized by

physicist Willard Gibbs. Cybernetics develops as part

of the struggle against the constant motion toward

degeneration or disorder in nature. As such communi-

cation is an effort by individuals to find and make

order in a disorderly world. Communication of

information helps to bring people together as part of

a shared world or society. “To live effectively,”

Wiener writes, “is to live with adequate information.”

He continues, “Thus, communication and control be-

long to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they

belong to his life in society.” (Wiener, 1954, p. 27)

Much of The Human Use of Human Beings

consists of examples of communication theory ap-

plied to human existence, biology and thought, along

with application to automata, machinery and animal

life as well. Examples of exchange of messages in

machinery include the automatic photoelectric door

openers, where a sensor is activated when a light

beam is interrupted by someone passing through its

path thus blocking the beam. The door is then opened

for a period of time after the light beam is blocked.

Another useful application of communication to

control of machinery comes in the example of con-

trolling anti-aircraft guns. In order to function, the

Page 36

artillery device must work in conjunction with both

radar which senses the aircraft and its trajectory and

some computing machinery which factors in weather

conditions, and possible changes in flight path. Such

feedback mechanisms are important to the working of

such an operation and one which tracks prior firings

to see what other changes need to be done to make

corrections to calculations because of tracking errors

from past shots.

Wiener’s most direct commentary on higher

level communication comes in chapter four of The

Human Use of Human Beings discussing the mecha-

nism and history of language. He begins by describ-

ing language as another name for communication as

well as how we name the codes with which communi-

cation occurs. Both humans and animals communi-

cate using their own language, but Wiener defines the

complexity of human communication and its greater

ambiguity over that of other animals. Wiener also

makes a point of saying people communicate with

machines in the form of language. Language is just a

common shared code that is used in the exchange of

information. As such, Wiener defines a machine’s

reporting of system status in a form that people can

understand as language. Usually this requires some

translation from the electrical outputs of sensors to a

form understood by people. Unfortunately informa-

tion can be lost in the translation, but that is where

feedback plays a role again in further checking of data

against real results and changes over the course of

time. Wiener even goes as far to describe how the

human communication system works as a kind of

machine – the ear, the part of the brain which is in

connection with the ear, and how this deals with the

phonetic aspect of language.

While dwelling on the scientific analysis of

language, Wiener also differentiates between man and

animal and examining how only man has speech

beyond guttural utterances. He continues to examine

the scientific basis of language by examining ques-

tions such as how language could be a genetically

natural aspect of human development versus a so-

cially learned behavior. The history of language is

examined from ancient beginnings such as Hebrew,

Greek, Latin and Chinese to the development of

English, and so on. Wiener continues by exploring

how the size of communities have been defined by the

ability for communication to occur. The advancement

of transportation methods and technologies further

expanded by the growth of communication methods

and technologies make larger effective communities

possible. This was seen in the emergence of commu-

nities ruled centrally as in empires and future growth

as is yet to be seen. To end the discussion of lan-

guage, some review of entropy and possible loses or

control of meaning is explored. Wiener highlights two

varieties of language, one where information is

desired to be shared and another where the desire is to

force a particular understanding.

In addition to obvious speaking and writing,

human communication and feedback occurs at a

lower level in the functioning of the human body.

Moving arms and legs use muscles to walk or to pick

things up by working unconsciously with the body

using the sense organs of sight, touch, smell and

hearing as feedback to correct actions. The impor-

tance of feedback is that it works on actual perfor-

mance and not just on intended performance. If

everything worked perfectly the first time there would

not be the need for sensory correction.

Wiener is critical of the overlooking of the role

of communications by sociologists and engineers

alike at the time of his writing. Cybernetics did much

to introduce communication as an important field of

study which affected many other disciplines. And

while cybernetics might not readily be on the tongue

of today’s academic community, it did have the

profound effect of beginning the study of communica-

tion and raising communication issues as important to

society. The prevalence of the prefix cyber used when

discussing new technologies is a tribute to Norbert

Wiener’s pioneering work on cybernetics.

Reference

Wiener, Norbert. 1954. The Human Use of Human Beings. New

York. Avon Books.

The opinions expressed in articles are those of their

authors and not necessarily the opinions of the Amateur

Computerist newsletter. We welcome submissions from

a spectrum of viewpoints.

Page 37

EDITORIAL STAFF

Ronda Hauben

William Rohler

Norman O. Thompson

Michael Hauben (1973-2001)

Jay Hauben

The Amateur Computerist invites submissions.

Articles can be submitted via e-mail:

jrh29@columbia.edu

Permission is given to reprint articles from this issue in a non

profit publication provided credit is given, with name of author

and source of article cited.

ELECTRONIC EDITION

ACN Webpage:

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All issues from1988 to present of the Amateur Computerist

are on-line at:

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