Convergence? Briggs & Burke headings:

1. Convergence? Briggs & Burke headings: • Cornucopia, Choice, Crisis • Computers • Satellites • Cable • “Viewdata” • The Internet • Digitized image, sound, text, . . .

2. What is the Internet?http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.htmlWhat is the history of the Internet? • Distributed digital networking; “packet switching”; the ARPANET (1969) • Interface, Input/output • Standards and protocols • From IMPs to PCs • From ASCII to WYSIWYG • Gopher, WAIS, and World-Wide Web (1990)

3. Most common interface on the ARPANET ca. 1970

4. The Internet on its own history? • ProQuest’s “Historic” Newspapers When did the New York Times, for instance, first mention “the internet”?

5. 1854

6. The World Wide Web on its own history? • W3C’s “Little History of the World Wide Web”: http://www.w3.org/History.html • The H-Bot: http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/h-bot/ • The Wayback Machine: http://www.archive.org • Dejavu.org -- http://www.dejavu.org/

7. Recently, Web 2.0: A Video Essay “The Machine is Us/ing Us” by Michael Wesch (YouTube, March 2007). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g Is this a true story? A happy ending? Is the Web more than this, or less? What makes this essay persuasive? What makes it less than persuasive? How would you respond?

8. Democratization? • “The public will be addressed, at last, in all its variety, potentiality, and dignity rather than as an immense herd of dim-witted sheep to be delivered to the highest bidder” (pundit quoted in B&B 218) • Google “relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web.” See: http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

9. Museum of Media History: An Argument • Can you extrapolate from this history to see the future? • The future of the web? • The future of media? • The future of you? • http://mccd.udc.es/orihuela/epic/