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 3
Citizen Model for the Study of the Internet . . . . . . . . . . . Page 17
Int'l Origins of Internet and its Future. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 23
Int'l Scientific Origins of Internet and Netizens . . . . . . . . Page 33
Commodifying Usenet or Cooperative Culture . . . . . . . . Page 63
Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 74
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 Develop-
ment and the Emergence of the Netizen,” explores a paradigm different
from that of the market as the motivator of economic development. This
model is based on the practices developed in technical and scientific
research: open, collaborative, and directed toward an evolving vision or
goal.
Page 1
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 development 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 Scientific 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 understand-
ing 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 discussion
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 company Deja.com. The sale is seen as part of a commodification of
voluntarily contributed Usenet posts. The article explores this as a culture
clash and considers 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
Page 2
of the book under review consists of examples of communication theory
applied to human existence, biology and thought, along with application
to automata, machinery and animal life as well. Wiener's introduction of
the concept of cybernetics, for example the importance of feedback that
works on actual performance and not just on intended performance, had
a strong influence on the development of modern communication
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 impor-
tance 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-economic development
model. It is a model very different 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 communication 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
Page 3
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 Internet. It is a model building on the processes
of development 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 netizen and netizenship as a means of participatory empowerment
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 develop-
ing the Internet. Describing the Internet development process, Robert
Kahn, one of the pioneers who provided leadership for Internet develop-
ment, 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 dynami-
cally. Such a role for government in Internet development is very different
from relegating development 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.
Page 4
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 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, physiocrats, 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 discus-
sion is taking place? If not is there anyone else interested in
starting a conference.economics and how would I go about
doing this. This is my first time on Usenet News.
I received perhaps ten 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
responded 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 directed 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.”
1
Page 5
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 experience of
being on the Net in this period before widespread 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:
2
INET ‘93 the annual conference of the Internet Society is the
first global networking 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 develop-
ment 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 development 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.
Page 6
Part III. – The Role of Government in the Creation of the
Internet
In trying to understand the nature of the government 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.”
3
Deutsch elaborates on the significance of looking at the concept of
government as “steersman.”
“The same underlying concept,” he says, “is reflected in the double
meaning of the modern word ‘governor’ as a person charged with the
administrative control of a political event, and as a mechanical device
controlling the performance of a steam engine or an automobile.”
4
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 National Academy of Science write:
5
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 communica-
tion science that the first director of the Office, J. C. R. Licklider, had
encountered in his research and scientific 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
communication science, “was structured like no other government
research program, akin to a single, widely dispersed research laboratory
with a clear overall goal.”
6
Fano credits the director, Licklider, for establishing the program so
Page 7
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 communication 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 camaraderie 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 re-
garded as a most important and precious resource.
Licklider was part of a community of researchers who studied the
conceptual models for feedback, learning and adaptive systems. Licklider,
was a psychologist who had done pioneering brain research and had
become intrigued with the potential of the computer for the scientific
community he was part of.
In a paper he wrote with computer science researcher Wesley Clark,
Licklider set as the objective 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 informa-
tion processing.”
7
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 proposing.
Part IV. – The Scientific Technical Community
The IPTO funded researchers and encouraged them to develop
Page 8
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 collaborate 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, researchers were sent abroad when invited.
It was during a meeting in Great Britain organized by the British
Computer Society, where 10 IPTO researchers participated, that the
British researcher, Donald Davis, first began to think of the ideas for the
creation of computer networking technology that came to be known as
packet switching.
In a paper Licklider wrote with another researcher Robert Taylor in
1968, Licklider outlined a vision for a network of networks.
8
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 development. 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 considerations 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,
Page 9
analyze, argue, write, criticize, and work out each issue and
each problem until they reach consensus 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 determining 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 government. 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 government.
9
Part V. – Internet Research Community International from
Its Beginnings
Internet development started in 1973 and involved researchers in a
number of different countries. The development of a protocol to make
communication possible across the boundaries of diverse national
networks required the close collaboration of researchers in an international
community.
10
The resulting computer communication network made it possible to
send data across the boundaries of diverse technical and administrative
networks. Thousands of researchers, students and others were involved 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.
Page 10
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 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 interna-
tional 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 research-
ers, 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.
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.
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 (
.papers/SatnetPic.jpg) 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 network-
ing efforts were those known as Usenet (uucp), CSnet, NSFnet, FIDO-
NET, 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:
Page 11
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 communication
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 everyone’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
11
and
China
12
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 Develop-
ment
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
Page 12
loans themselves.
13
In place of the “structural adjustment program” that brought the
people of Africa so much trouble, Mbock proposes a “democratic
adjustment program.”
14
“No one can stop the globalization process,”
Mbock writes, “But perhaps a world of global netizens could help to
mitigate the consequences of the global economy.”
15
“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 communications technologies will encourage people
to shift from citizenry to netizenry, away from ‘geographical
national definition 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 :
A Netizen (Net citizen) exists as a citizen of the world thanks
to the global connectivity 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 Netizen 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 democratic 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-
Page 13
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, dialogue 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 citizenship to genuine
‘netizenship’ is the worldwide innovation that social scientists
should herald, and not only for Africa. This implies looking
beyond national citizen passports, to negotiate global, ‘netizen’
ones.
16
Mbock’s application of the concept of netizenship to help solve the
problems created by the structural adjustment policies of the Bretton
Woods institutions offers a mechanism to provide a watchdog over the
abuse of power in the development processes. The model of Internet
development provides a means to base development on a scientific
foundation.
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 adjustment 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
Page 14
premises, to ask what should be taken as assumptions and what should be
derived from analyses.”
17
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 development. 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.
18
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 understand the potential and problems
of these new processes. And just as other members of this panel, dem-
onstrate in their papers, the Internet Model of Socio-Economic Develop-
ment and the Emergence of the Netizen establishes the basis to recognize
that the homo neticus, or the netizen, rather than the egoistic, short-sighted
homo economicus, may provide a better theoretical role model for social
science and economics.
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
Page 15
at: http://www.ais.org/~jrh/licklider/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.columbia.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_Inno
vation/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: Perspectives from the Comprehen-
sive 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.
Page 16
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 Computing Research, The National Academies Press,
1999. On line at:
https://www.nap.edu/download/6323.
OECD, Social Science and Innovation, 2001, OECD Publications, Paris. Online at:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Social_Sciences_and_Innovation/Lnc
Fo1_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.
1
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.”
2
It was held to herald in the new millennium. Some at the
conference had just returned from the 1999 World Trade Organization
(WTO) protests in Seattle in the U.S.
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 govern-
ments to maintain the social institutions and policies so vital to the fight
Page 17
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 Democ-
racy?”
In July 2006, Finland again assumed the Presidency 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.
3
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 communication was discussed.
4
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 21
st
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 Intergov-
ernmental Conference, “The 1996 IGC: European Citizenship Reconsid-
ered,” Leszek Jesien, a researcher and advisor to the Polish government on
EU integration, explores the problem of creating a European form of
Page 18
citizenship.
5
Jesien argues that the bedrock principle of democracy is what
legitimizes a government, and that is the “principle that power can be held
and governance exercised only with the consent of the governed.”
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 partici-
pate 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 belonging 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
pioneering research which provided a conceptual foundation 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 resource 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 Euro-
pean 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 what would seem on the surface to be an unrelated
phenomenon. Jesien proposed that European “negotiators and … political
Page 19
leaders should look at this phenomenon 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 problem was identified and studied, a solution to it
was found in a model which emerged from the new technology, 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 pioneers. The breakthrough was the design and
creation of gateways to perform the functions needed to support communi-
cation across the borders or boundaries of dissimilar networks.
While the design of these gateways is only a part of the design for
the Internet, it helps to demonstrate that a significant technical model was
developed 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
Page 20
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 engineering develop-
ments, but also that the research to document these new developments will
require new models and methodologies.
6
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 paradigm 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 phenomena being observed in order to determine their
underlying principles and scientific laws. This paradigm, Duffy explains,
led to the discovery of thermodynamics 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 technology being created
require a new conceptual apparatus adequate for interpreting the new
physical and biological phenomena. I would add that a new conceptual
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 methodology 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.
Even the simplest model can affect a revolution, Duffy observes,
Page 21
referring to the importance of the application of the model of the semi-
permeable membrane from chemistry being transferred to describe the
model of the heart by diastolic and systolic action.
Similarly, the model of gateways and the netizen 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 developments, 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
Democracy,” argues:
The Internet is fundamentally different from any previous
media communications technology … . The Internet was
developed using a participatory model that has its own
democratic traditions … . The Internet itself is still evolving …
the full story has yet to be written.
7
Notes:
1. For the program of the conference see “Launch of the Tensions of Europe Research
2006/files/23.pdf.
2. The Citizens’ Agenda NGO Forum 2000 was held from the 3
rd
to 5
th
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/10024/6540
2/951-44-5186-4.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 Reconsidered.” Online at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/book 2005/LJesien.rtf.
6. Michael Duffy, “Engineering Disclosing Models,” Helvelieus, edited by Oktawian
Page 22
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.columbia.edu/~hauben/nov 4talk2.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 international
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 planned 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
Page 23
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 effort and funding. The disagree-
ment 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 previously 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.
Page 24
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 Defense 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 researchers and of making it possible to strengthen the
education available to the whole society through access to the ever
expanding world of information. He envisioned 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 researcher 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 con-
tributors to the evolving network and to its development. 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 considerations and decisions regarding network devel-
opment. He recognized that there would be problems with pressure being
put on government from other sectors of society and that active citizen
Page 25
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 consensus or deter-
mine 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 determining 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 government. 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 government.
Licklider and other computer pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s were
concerned with the public interest and how the computer and networking
developments 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 future.
Through the 1960s and into the early 1970s the IPTO pioneered new
and important computer technology 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 publica-
tions and widely distributed.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s it was recognized 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 demon-
stration by U.S. researchers that packet switching technology was func-
tional. The demonstration excited many of the researchers. Also, however,
international participation was recognized as critical to the development
Page 26
(This diagram is from a memo by Vint Cerf, but it is not an
actual plan for the Internet)
of networking technology. “International participation is no mere adorn-
ment 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 Inter-
national Network Working Group (INWG).
The great interest worldwide in computer networking was stimulat-
ing, 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 net-
works 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 articulated 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 boundaries 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 University of Sussex, in
Brighton, England, two U.S. researchers, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf pre-
sented 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 net-
works.
To have an idea of the
concept they proposed it is
helpful to look at a diagram to
Page 27
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 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 interna-
tional 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 re-
searchers from Eastern Eu-
rope. Kirstein reports on re-
search to create the TCP/IP
protocol being done by U.S.
researchers, working with
British researchers and Nor-
wegian researchers. Here is
the diagram that Kirstein pre-
sents showing the participa-
tion of U.S. researchers via
the ARPANET, along with
British researchers working
at the University College
London (UCL) and Norwe-
gian researchers working at
NORSAR.
Collaboration between the Norwegian, British and U.S. researchers
continued, demonstrated by the research to create a satellite network,
called SATNET. Later researchers from Italy and Germany became part
of this work. Describing this international collaboration, Bob Kahn writes:
Page 28
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 network-
ing efforts were those known as Usenet (uucp), CSnet, NSFnet, FIDO-
NET, 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 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 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 communication
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 everyone’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. government decided it needed to privatize the
Internet’s infrastructure. It created ICANN, the Internet Corporation 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
Page 29
2003. A number of heads of state attended. Issues raised included:
Affordable access available to all, what would be the role for Govern-
ments in Internet governance? what would be the role for others in Internet
governance?
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 contribu-
tions to that meeting
seemed in line with the
vision of Licklider ex-
pressed to guide com-
puter network develop-
ment. But there was con-
tention, also. Summariz-
ing the conflict that has
developed in the WSIS
process, a representative
of Egypt, H. E. Dr. Tarek Kamal, explains that there are two conflicting
Page 30
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 20
th
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.”
I want to propose that this activity as part of the WSIS process
demonstrates the importance of understanding the fact that the Internet is
international and that there is a demand for an international management
process and structure.
Similarly, and perhaps even more important is the need to under-
stand 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 September 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 Governance covers, I
believe it is duly important to make it clearer the inclusion of
online contributions into the decision-making process.
Page 31
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 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 international
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 community, the
community of netizens into the WSIS process? Will there be a conver-
gence of netizen participation and defense of the public essence of the
Internet strong enough for the results of the Tunis summit to be signifi-
cant?
[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 people … makes [the
Net] a resource of human beings. These Netizens participate to
help make the Net both an intellectual and a social resource.
Michael Hauben
“Further Thoughts about Netizens”
Page 32
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.
1
A significant 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.
2
Larry Roberts, who headed the research project to create the
ARPANET as the head of the Information 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. Describing some of the
relevant events, Roberts writes:
3
(I)n 1965, a … meeting took place at MIT. Donald Davies,
from the National Physical 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 communica-
tion facilities for both time-sharing and networking. Davies
reports that shortly after this meeting he was struck with the
concept that a store and forward system for very short mes-
sages (now called packet switching) was the ideal communica-
tion 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 Computer Society. Describ-
ing these presentations, Davies reports, “that though most of the discus-
sions were about operating systems aspects of time-sharing, the research
done to show the mismatch between time-sharing and the telephone
network was described.”
4
Page 33
Davies writes:
5
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 Communication 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 note by Roberts: this took 20 years to accomplish). Then in
June 1966, Davies wrote a second internal paper, ‘Proposal for a Digital
Communication Network’ 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 element 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 Communications,’ 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 influence 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.
6
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 characteristic of the Internet is not packet switching, but the
design and development of the protocol that makes it possible to intercon-
nect dissimilar computer networks. A protocol in computer networking
Page 34
(Host)
\
\
( ) ( ) ( )
( ) ( ) ( )
( ) ( ) ( )
( NPL )-(gateway)-( CYCLADES )-(gateway)-( ARPA )
( ) ( ) ( )
( ) ( ) ( )
( ) ( ) ( )
/ /
/ /
/ /
(Host) (Host)
vocabulary is a set of agreements to make communication possible among
entities that are different, as, for example, entities who speak different
languages.
7
TCP/IP is a protocol that makes it possible to interconnect
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 heteroge-
neous 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 attendant 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.
8
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.
9
They were:
ARPANET – USA; NPL – U.K.; CYCLADES – France
Each of these
networks was under
the ownership and
control of different
political and admin-
istrative entities.
Consequently, each
of these networks
would differ techni-
cally in order to meet
the needs of the or-
ganization or admin-
istration that con-
Page 35
trolled 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 including ARPA, NPL, and CYCLADES is trying
out a scheme of interconnection based on a packet transport
network with an agreed protocol for message transport… .
(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 institution. It was
called the International Institute for Applied 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 participated 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 intercon-
nect CYCLADES, NPL, and the ARPANET, shows something quite
differently.
10
The graphic shows international collaboration to create an imple-
mentation of the TCP/IP protocol. Involved in this research, however,
were Norwegian researchers at NORSAR in Norway, British researchers
at the University College of London, in the U.K., and American research-
Page 36
ers 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 developing 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.
11
In it you can see the
German, Italian, U.S., U.K., and Norwegian sites. There was also col-
laborative research 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
collaborative 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 development had been pioneered by JCR Licklider,
an experimental psychologist interested in human communication.
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 communication, Licklider in a
paper written with Robert Taylor explains:
We believe that communicators have to do something
nontrivial with the information they send and receive. And …
Page 37
to interact with the richness of living information – not merely
in the passive way that we have become accustomed to using
books and libraries, but as active participants in an ongoing
process, bringing something to it through our interaction with
it, and not simply receiving from it by our connection to it …
. We want to emphasize something beyond its one-way trans-
fer: 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 his insight into the
dynamic nature of communication, it is helpful to look at the scientific
research community 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 tech-
nologies, 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, anthropologists 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 framework would help to understand the nature
of such systems.
When considering questions related to communication, 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 interdisciplinary research groups
established by the Macy Foundation, was to study feedback systems,
systems which modified their behavior based on the information gained
from previous behavior.
Page 38
Among the names for such systems were ‘self-organizing systems,’
‘cybernetic systems,’ ‘feedback systems,’ ‘purposive systems.’ A group
of 20 researchers 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 interdisciplin-
ary 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 Techniques 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 discussion
process was considered as important as the paper presentation. The
process of the meetings was intended to help to do research in how to
encourage communication across the boundaries of the different disci-
plines and different methodologies used by these different disciplines. The
last of the ten Macy Foundation 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 confer-
ence at MIT in November 1954. They invited researchers in various
Page 39
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 Processing
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 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 communication 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 understand
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 interested in weekly
gatherings held by Norbert Wiener to discuss Wiener’s concept of
cybernetics, of control and communication in biological and machine
systems. 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
Page 40
Licklider and others in this interdisciplinary 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 demonstration that Sutherland gave of Sketchpad, a
Project MAC graduate student, Warren Teitelman reports:
12
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 compression
to which the member was being subjected.
Sutherland was able to use the modeling program he had created to
add to the support the computer 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 computers, 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 computer 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
collaborative 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
Page 41
researchers working on diverse research will benefit from determining
how they can work together. This early support for “Members and
Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network” demonstrates the
inspiration and conceptual foundation for creating first the ARPANET and
then the Internet.
13
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 helpful and where individual concessions
to group advantage would be most important.
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 of
excellence that Licklider set up, at Project MAC at MIT, Warren
Teitelman, wrote his thesis on creating a computer programming language
that would encourage interactivity between the scientist and the program-
mer. His thesis was titled “Pilot: A Step Toward Man-Computer Symbio-
sis.” 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 concerned 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.”
14
He wrote:
In such a situation the means of making programs often
involved a trial and error process ‘write some code, run the
program, 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 environ-
ment for demonstrating the power and dynamism of modeling. Licklider
and Taylor write:
15
By far the most numerous, most sophisticated and most
important models are those that reside in men’s minds. In rich-
Page 42
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 communicating which we now
define concisely ‘cooperative’ modeling – cooperation in the construction,
maintenance and use of a model.”
16
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 emphasize the need for a
common medium “that can be contributed to and experimented with by
all.”
17
The prospect is that, when several or many people work
together within the context of an online interactive, community
computer network, the superior facilities of the network for
expressing ideas, preserving facts, modeling processes, and
bringing two or more people together in close interaction with
the same information and the same behavior – those superior
facilities will so foster the growth and integration of knowl-
edge that the incidence of major achievements will be mark-
edly 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
discoveries, that charts courses, formulates problems, guides solutions.
Page 43
The heuristic part is the creative part of information power.”
18
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 Chicago program established in 1965.
They explained:
19
The information sciences deal with the body of knowledge that
relates to the structure, origination, transmission and trans-
formation 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 transmission, and the study of information
processing devices and techniques, such as computers and their
programming systems.
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 con-
vinced 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 interdis-
ciplinary science.
20
This new interdisciplinary science, would include, “Planning,
management communication, mathematics 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 development
of each.
Page 44
Licklider’s research into what would be the role of the human and
the role of the computer, i.e., a symbiotic 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.
21
Licklider recognized that the creative users
developed uses of the network which became catalysts for the develop-
ment of new and desirable forms and processes 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 developing network by other users who would not be exploring
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 environment. Licklider
defined these ‘socio-technical pioneers’ as not only the creative users who
explored how new online forms and processes could be developed and
utilized, but he also recognized the importance 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 conference 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
th
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.
22
While there were a number of talks included in this volume about the
vision for the future development 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
Page 45
servant from Great Britain. The topic of Snow’s talk was “Scientists and
Decision Making.”
23
Snow spoke about the important public policy issues that would
accompany the development of new computer technology, and about the
difficulty government officials would have determining how to make
decisions about the technology which took into account the public interest.
In his talk, Snow described 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 pressure gradually filter their way through to
the people whose nominal responsibility it is to put the
legislation into a written 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 phenome-
non 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
Page 46
a sign of a serious problem.
If we follow the explosive development in computer 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 development 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 ferment 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 fundamen-
tally change not only the architecture 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.
24
Licklider’s first term as director of IPTO put the office on a firm
foundation that served to fundamentally 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 significant change had occurred. The kind of
basic research he had pioneered was no longer welcome. Instead there was
Page 47
pressure to do research that would meet prescribed outcomes and would
be oriented to produce defense specific products.
Licklider challenged these changes both in his second term at IPTO
and in talks and articles published after he left. These articles help to
provide a guidepost for how the computer and networking development
that Licklider envisioned can be practically achieved.
25
The problem Licklider discovered was the same problem that C. P.
Snow had anticipated. The problem 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 themselves be used by those
online to influence government policy regarding the continuing develop-
ment of the networks. Licklider was not proposing that citizens rely on
voting as the way to influence government. To the contrary, Licklider
writes:
That does not mean simply that everyone 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 individuals must study, model, discuss,
analyze, 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 networking access,
was a problem which would require government initiatives to solve. And
the active involvement of public-spirited individuals was needed. Licklider
saw that people in the U.S. were frustrated 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
Page 48
a future in which most citizens are informed about, and
interested and involved in, the process of government.
(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 applica-
tions.”
He maintained that not only must the decisions about the develop-
ment 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
communicate with each other and with the officials and designers of a
social policy or plan. The importance of such online developments
identified in the 1960s and 1970s by Licklider and others, was demon-
strated 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.
26
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 systems (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 conver-
sation 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
Page 49
encouraged such discussion and consideration 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 understand this new online world.
(Hauben and Hauben, 1997, “Preface,” p. ix
27
)
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.
28
Along with my questions I would
attach some worthwhile preliminary 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
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 Internet, 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 signifi-
Page 50
cance. 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
leadership of the U.S. Department of Defense’s ARPA
program a vision of the ‘intergalactic computer network.’
There are people online who actively contribute to the devel-
opment of the Net. These are people who understand the value
of collective work and the communal aspects of public
communications. 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 telling 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 restricts someone to a
more local or geographical orientation. (Hauben, 1996)
Hauben was not referring to all users who get online. He differenti-
ates between Netizens and others online:
Netizens are not just anyone who comes online. Netizens are
Page 51
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 everyone’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
development 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:
29
The virtual space created on noncommercial computer net-
works is accessible 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 computer nets
overcomes limitations inherent in non computer social net-
works. 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 conceptual vision Hauben
developed matched that of the vision of JCR Licklider. Hauben’s views
Page 52
were influenced by his experience online, his study and the comments he
received in response to his research questions from people around the
world.
30
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 technology. 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 interesting and novel new ways. Both staunchly maintained that users
had to be participants in making the decisions 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 development.
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.
31
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
understand what will be the future form of political participation.
32
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.
Page 53
One article is an editorial by Hunter Crowther-Heyck titled “Mind
and Network.”
33
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 technology.
34
Duffy maintains that
modern engineering developments are a change in a conceptual paradigm
as fundamental as the change described in the Elizabethan World Picture
35
by E. M. W. Tillyard. In his book, Tillyard describes a paradigm change
that took place in science in the 16
th
and 17
th
centuries. This 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 determine 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 revolution. 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,
Page 54
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 technology.” (Duffy, 2004, p. 22) He is
proposing the need to identify the model that engineers use, the ‘concep-
tual apparatus,’ (p. 29) that helps to understand a technological 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 chemistry 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,”
36
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
Page 55
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 technology.
“What to examine?” is similarly an important question to help to
formulate a research agenda on the history and development of the
Internet.
37
Part XI. Conclusion
This paper began with a reference to the mythology 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 international 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 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 technology.
To help solve this problem, Licklider recognized that there was a
need for increased citizen participation 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.
Page 56
The creation of mailing lists and online discussion 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’.
38
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 conscious-
ness that participation online made possible.
Reviewing Licklider’s interest in the brain and the modeling feature
of the brain and his understanding 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 collaborative and interactive
activity that the Internet makes possible.
While there has been much political and financial 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
Page 57
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 Laboratory, “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/bitstream/handle/11299/107
241/oh189dwd.pdf, p. 6) See also Thomas Marill and Lawrence G. Roberts, “Toward a
Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers,” Proceedings-Fall Joint Computer
Conference, AFIPS 29, pp. 425-431, Washington, 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_controversy_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 Symbiosis,” September
1966, Project MAC, MIT, MAC-TR-32 (Thesis), p. 11. Online at:
/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,” Advanced Research Projects Agency Washington 25, D.C. Online at:
Page 58
http://docplayer.net/4287863-Memorandum-for-members-and-affiliates-of-the-
intergalactic-computer-network-subject-topics-for-discussion-at-the-forthcoming-meet
ing.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 communica-
tion 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 Government 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 Government in Creating the
Internet,” online at:
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/bbc95spch.txt.
30. It is remarkable how the ideas about democracy and communication 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
Page 59
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
/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_Netizen/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-September 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
Baran, Paul. “On Distributed Communication.” The Rand Corporation. 1964. Vol. 1.
Online at:
https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4205015/mod_resource/con
tent/1/PaulBaran_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.
Duffy, Michael C. “Engineering Disclosing Models.” Helvelius Book 2, edited by
Oktawian Nawrot, University of Gdansk, Poland, 2004. Pp. 22-64.
Greenberger, Martin ed. Computers and the World of the Future. MIT Press. Cambridge,
Massachusetts. 1962.
Hauben, Michael. “The Netizens and Community Networks.” Presentation. Hyper-
Page 60
network ‘95 Beppu Bay Conference. November 24, 1995. Online at: http://www
.columbia.edu/~hauben/text/bbc95spch.txt.
Hauben, Michael. “Webchat with Michael Hauben.” January 25, 1996. Online at: http://
www.columbia.edu/~hauben/papers/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 Communication Device.” In
Memoriam: JCR Licklider, 19151990, Digital Systems Research Center. Palo Alto,
California. 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.
Von Foerster, H. (Ed). Cybernetics – Circular, Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in
Biological and Social Systems. 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
Page 61
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 Reconsid-
ered,” by Leszek Jesien, Instituets fur den Donauraum und Mitteleuropa, March 1997.
Online at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/Era_of_the_Netizen/resources/European
_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 definition for a Hebrew
dictionary wanted to be certain that she described 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 Representa-
tives 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
Page 62
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.
[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/usenet stts.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 commodifica-
tion 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 communication, 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 contributed to the produc-
tion 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 commodi-
fication as expropriation. The collaboration that produces a public good
in science or technical research is an important process to understand and
Page 63
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 newsgroup 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 copy-
right 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 acquisition, 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 indicated. 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 substituted a much smaller archive that
Google had been collecting on its own. An article appeared in “The
Register,” a British online publication on February 13, 2001. The article
Page 64
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 users online and in the
online press during this period. Among these were references to a petition
that eventually 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
comments 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 establishment” (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 collab-
orative 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
processes. The give and take among researchers in the open process where
they share knowledge and problems, makes possible ever new devel-
opments and improvements.
A proprietary process, is the opposite. It limits the source of input.
This tends to narrow the development 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
Page 65
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 developments,
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 Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology (MIT). They experienced the close communi-
cation that was possible through the new form of programming environ-
ment being developed 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 programmers 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.
Page 66
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 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 according to particular topics
in “newsgroups.” A newsgroup 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, individual 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 Cana-
dian 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
Page 67
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 scholarly 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 community, 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 provided reciprocal communi-
cation access, the protection 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 circumstances 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 maintaining 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
Page 68
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 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 orientation or fiduciary requirements of manage-
ment. 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
government officials. Usenet users, however, accustomed to be partici-
pants, 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 Lawrence Page, who worked in a DLI initiative at
Stanford University in the U.S., describe the harmful effects of the
Page 69
commodification of search engine technology and emphasize the need for
public technology research and development. They write:
Up until now most search engine development 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 Spacelab-like environment
where researchers or even students can propose and do
interesting 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 implemented. 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 sup-
ported by the NSF at universities – should be viewed as the ultimate
success of technology transfer.”
1
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 company’s mission “to
organize the world’s information, making it universally accessible and
useful” was generally welcomed. But how does this corporate goal com-
pare with the goal of Usenet users to communicate?
Toward a Commercial Usenet Culture?
Usenet was created to facilitate communication. There is an
Page 70
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 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 public archive
but has started to put a © Google 2002 copyright notice after each post in
its Usenet archive. Traditionally under the Berne Convention, which the
U.S. joined in 1989, users are accorded copyright 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 copyrighting 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 community 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 commercialization 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
Page 71
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 archiving 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 possibility, nor about the archiving of their posts
in general. 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 de-
cisions 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 important 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 development 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 under-
stand 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 complementary to Google. Hopefully, this article will help serve as a
catalyst for discussion and research in this vein.
2
Page 72
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 Ap-
propriations 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 University and at Google headquarters about the coopera-
tive culture 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:
Hauben, M. & Hauben, R. 1997. Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the
Internet. Los Alamitos, California: IEEE Computer Society Press.
Hauben, R. 2001. “Usenet and the Usenet Archives: The Challenge of Building a
Collaborative Technical Community,” Paper presented at the conference
“Innovations for an e-Society.” October 17-19, Berlin, Germany. Online at:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268199158_Usenet_and_the_Usenet_
Archives_The_Challenge_of_Building_a_Collaborative_Technical_Community.
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-technology/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.]
Page 73
Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics in
The Human Use of Human Beings
by Michael Hauben
Norbert Wiener wrote several books about the science of cybernet-
ics, which he introduced. Central to the science, whether discussing people
or machines, is the passing of messages between two entities. As such,
cybernetics is a theory of communication 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
understanding its value to all domains of human knowledge.
His second book about cybernetics first written in 1950, The Human
use of Human Beings: Cybernetics 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 combinations
thereof. Wiener also relates the theory of control, 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 necessary 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 communication 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 belong to
Page 74
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 applied 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 controlling anti-aircraft guns. In order
to function, the 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
mechanism and history of language. He begins by describing language as
another name for communication as well as how we name the codes with
which communication occurs. Both humans and animals communicate
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 information 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 communica-
tion 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
Page 75
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 questions such as how language could be
a genetically natural aspect of human development versus a socially
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 communities ruled centrally as in empires and future growth
as is yet to be seen. To end the discussion of language, 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 understand-
ing.
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 importance
of feedback is that it works on actual performance 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 communication and raising commun-
ication 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.
Page 76
Reference
Wiener, Norbert. 1954. The Human Use of Human Beings. New York. Avon Books.
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:
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.
The opinions expressed in articles are those of their authors and not neces-
sarily the opinions of the Amateur Computerist newsletter. We welcome
submissions from a spectrum of viewpoints.
ELECTRONIC EDITION
: http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/
All issues of the Amateur Computerist are on-line.
All issues can be accessed from the Index at:
http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/NewIndex.pdf
Page 77
