Rc 11.networks
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Chapter 11 of a university course in media history by Prof. Bill Kovarik, based on the book Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2nd ed., 2015).
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Rc 11.networks
- 1. Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age Slides based on the Bloomsbury book by Bill Kovarik Revolutions in Communication Chapter 11 -- Global networks
- 2. Web site & textbook Textbook: 1st edition – 2011 2nd edition – 2016 http://www.revolutionsincommunication.com
- 3. This lecture is about Networks and the WWW How the vision preceded the tech Who missed the ‘curve in the road’ Early attempts at wysiwyg networks ◦ Particularly noteworthy: Minitel Cyberspace independence & network neutrality Browser wars How networks are valued
- 6. H.G. Welles, sci-fi author “Both the assembling and the distribution of knowledge in the world at present are extremely ineffective... [We] are beginning to realize that the most hopeful line for the development of our racial intelligence lies rather in the direction of creating a new world organ for the collection, indexing, summarizing and release of knowledge, than in any further tinkering with the highly conservative and resistant university system.” -- 1937
- 7. Vannevar Bush, 1949 “Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library... A “memex” is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications [which] may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility....Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them... There [will be] a new profession of trail blazers... who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”
- 8. J.C.L. Licklider, 1960 “It seems reasonable to envision, for a time ten or fifteen years hence, a thinking center that will incorporate the functions of present day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval. … An ‘intergalactic network’ in which … everybody could use computers anywhere and get at data anywhere in the world.
- 9. Martin Greenberger, 1964 “Barring unforeseen obstacles, an on- line interactive computer service, provided commercially by an information utility, may be as commonplace by 2000 AD as telephone service is today. By 2000 AD man should have a much better comprehension of himself and his system, not because he will be innately any smarter than he is today, but because he will have learned to use imaginatively the most powerful amplifier of intelligence yet devised.” The Computers of Tomorrow,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1964.
- 10. Ted Nelson, 1981 “Forty years from now -- if the human species survives -- there will be hundreds of thousands of files servers. And there will be hundreds of millions of simultaneous users. All this is manifest destiny. There is no point in arguing it. Either you see it or you don't.” (Literary Machines, 1981).
- 11. More ideas about digital impacts The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon. (Louis Rossetto, Wired magazine, 1993) Changes in the information age will be as dramatic as those in the Middle Ages in Europe. (James A. Dewar, 1998) Apple 1984 commercial
- 12. Timeline 1930s – 50s -- Visionaries ◦ Welles, Bush, Licklider, Greenberger 1958 – US reacts to Russia’s Sputnik ◦ Russian satellite program 1968 – First network protocol 1973 – TCP/IP, Ethernet ◦ AT&T turns down network mgmt 1980s – Bitnet, NSFNet, Minitel (Fr.), Teletext (UK), CompuServ, Prodigy, America On Line 1989 – Tim Berners Lee WWW 1993 – NCSA ‘Mosaic’ Web browser
- 14. UK 1980s, inside TV signal
- 15. Prodigy, US late 1980s
- 16. Minitel – 1982 - 2012 France
- 17. Lessons from early networks Navigation is important. The back button and site history lists, which became standard on web browsers in the 1990s, came from the confusion of having to navigate endless chains of numbered topics in the 1980s. Top-down content is not enough. People wanted to be able to communicate in small groups and generate their own grass roots content. Access to news and other “top down” information is not sufficient for consumers to overcome price barriers. Graphics matter. Users wanted a graphical display for networked communications to match new GUI interfaces on their computer desktops Networks can help business. With enough people participating, even small businesses can use networks to efficiently sell specialized goods and services, developing what would become known as “long tail” marketing.
- 19. the fun of new virtual communities
- 20. Tim Berners-Lee & the WWW No ‘eureka’ moment -- The idea grew over the years as he worked at CERN “Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere was linked.” WWW first proposed in 1989, introduced over next four years.
- 21. Berners-Lee first web page 1989
- 22. Mosaic: First free browser, 1993 "By the power vested in me by nobody in particular, alpha/beta version 0.5 of NCSA's Motif-based networked information systems and World Wide Web browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released...” Saturday, 23.01.1993, 07:21 CST USA From University of Illinois supercomputing center. Marc Andreessen, leader of Mosaic development team
- 23. Mosaic (later Mozilla, Firefox)
- 24. First news web page, 1994 Note that graphics, although primitive, do not have to be pre-loaded any more.
- 25. Google dominates search engines • Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, started research on the link structure of the World Wide Web. In the process, they created a search engine that would become Google by 1998. • Improved browser search based not just on incidence of search terms, but rather, incidence of links to that page. • Revenue $60 billion in 2013 “There are sound reasons for traditional media to fear Google.” Ken Auletta, 2009 book on Google. Sergei Brin, Google founder
- 26. Browser wars 1990s – 2000s
- 28. Browser wars
- 30. Long tail marketing In many statistical distributions of popularities, large concentrations can be found, but they also give way to far more dispersed distributions along the “long tail.” Example: A brick-and-mortar bookstore can only hold the most popular 5,000 books, but there are millions of books in print. A service that lets users access the less popular / more specialized books is serving the “long tail” demand.
- 31. Amazon.com founded 1994 • “Long-tail” book marketing served many small niche customers. • Believed that the volume of all the low popularity items can be greater than a few highly popular items. • Near $75 billion, 2013 • Purchased Washington Post newspaper in 2013 Amazon founder, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos
- 32. Reed Hastings – Netflix A computer engineer who left the Marines for the Peace Corps, Reed Hastings founded Netflix in 1997 after being laid off from his job and worrying about overdue fees at a local video store. By 2010, most of the local video stores were out of business because of Hasting’s new business model.
- 33. Craig’s List classified advertising Craig Newmark made classified advertising free nationwide, thus depriving newspapers of billions in revenue. This does not bother Newmark, who doesn’t think much of the way newspapers were run.
- 34. Peter Omidyar
- 35. Web freedom: Reno v ACLU, 1997 US Congress passed Telecom Act 1996 -- Strict rules against web indecency Case went to court as Reno v ACLU Court sided with free expression, said the web would be fully protected like print, not regulated like broadcasting. “The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.”
- 36. Cyberspace Independence, 1996 John Perry Barlow “Declaration of Cyberspace Independence,” 1996 Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone… I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear...
- 37. Net neutrality Big companies want to provide high- speed services and slow down competitors “The Internet is simply too important to allow broadband providers to be the ones making the rules," FCC Commissioner Tom Wheeler, 2015 Net neutrality won a Feb. 2015 ruling but questions are still open about the role of common carriers that provide other services.
- 38. An international ICANN ? Originally, matching web names and numbers was just one guy in an office. In 1998, the US Dept. of Commerce created the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Transition to a United Nations ITU agency recommended by some international groups … …but controversial in the US, and still (2016) unresolved.
- 39. Laws of network value 1 Sarnoff’s law (David Sarnoff, RCA president, NBC chairman) Conventional broadcasting ◦ Value for the number of people in audience. ◦ A network of 10 is only twice as valuable as a network of 5. ◦ Linear growth model ◦ Under-values network users because it is a one-way transmission model.
- 40. Laws of network value 2 Metcalfe’s law — Quadratic model (Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet / built on Moore’s Law ) ◦ A network is valuable to the square of the number of users. ◦ A network of 10 is four times more valuable than a network of 5 (e.g., 5x5=25; 10x10=100). ◦ Theoretically, costs, in contrast, grow linearly. ◦ Although network value grows on a more than linear basis, its not quadratic growth.
- 41. Laws of network value 3 Reed’s law — Digital model (David P. Reed software engineer) ◦ A networks’ value doubles every time a user is added ◦ A network of 5 users would have a value of 32, while 6 would be 64, and 10 = 1,024 ◦ Not very intuitive – Network of 50,010 people isn’t worth a thousand times more than a network of 50,000. ◦ Over-values network users.
- 42. Laws of Network Value 3 Beckstrom’s law applied business model ◦ A network is valuable for the way it saves on the costs of transactions. ◦ The money a person saves in a network transaction is the value of that network to the user. ◦ EG - If a book costs $25, but it can be purchased for $15 on a network, then the network is worth $10 to that person based on that one transaction. ◦ The overall value of the network is how it saves money in all transactions.
- 43. Long tail marketing (2) Zipf's Law ◦ If we order some large collection by size or popularity, the second element in the collection will be about half the measure of the first one, the third one will be about one-third the measure of the first one, and so on. ◦ In general, the x ranked item will measure about 1/ x of the first one. (This is called the power law probability distribution) ◦ Ex -- out of one million books, the most popular 100 contribute a third of the total value, the next 10,000 another third, and the remaining 989,900 the final third.
- 44. Network neutrality Different rates & access was a major issue with telegraph & telephones Laws in EU prohibit discrimination but allow various costs under “Five directives” US – ISPs wanted to control services but in June 2016 a federal court upheld the FCC's net neutrality rules. According to the FCC, broadband access is a public utility, rather than a luxury, and can be regulated for fairness.
- 45. Networks Most users can’t take advantage of entire network. ◦ User value tends to plateau ◦ Then users divide up into sub-networks Networks must facilitate innovation ◦ Or they will face circumvention Closed networks fail ◦ (MySpace.com, for example) Open generative networks have a better chance of success
- 46. Review: people Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, H.G. Wells, Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Martin Greenberger, Ted Nelson, Len Klienrock, Vint Cerf, John Perry Barlow, Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings, Larry Page, Sergei Brin
- 47. Review: Concepts Teletex, Minitel, Prestel, Prodigy, America On Line, World Wide Web, Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, laws of network value, Amazon, Netflix, Google, crowdsourcing, social capital, Striesand effect, Laws of network value, Long tail, Zipf’s law
- 48. Next: Chapter 12 Global culture
Hinweis der Redaktion
- The basic idea of a technology often precedes the hardware. People dreamed about flying, about riding in horseless carriages and exchanging instant audio-visual communication long before the airplane, the automobile, the television were possible. Visionaries, engineers and software nerds with dreams also blazed the first conceptual pathways into the internet and World Wide Web.
- Among the early problems that early visionaries wanted to overcome was information overload — the storage and retrieval of large volumes of reference information.
- In case of a nuclear war, a digital network could be more flexible and durable than a centralized analog network. Networking could also solve other technical problems, according to J. C. R. Licklider, the legendary computer information chief at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). First, digital networks would allow computers to work in real time, continuously rather than processing batches of instructions on cards; and secondly, a network could allow “time sharing” on computers to maximize their efficiency. As a bonus, networks could also create an advanced library, according to Licklider.
- As it took hold, the networking revolution was unusual in the history of technology. It did not just replace top-down content generating companies with new content generating companies. Instead, networking allowed bottom-up, user- to-user communication. It was an “enabling” or “generative” technology. It let people do things that had never been done before, and its capabilities quickly stretched far beyond the original idea of a giant reference library.
- Two major types of network activity emerged in the 1980s: 1) University internet systems, linked through the National Science Foundation network, where users had email, ftp (file transfer protocol) and text-only files accessed through “gopher” servers; and 2) Commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like CompuServe, again, a text-only system, designed for non-academics and hobbyists to exchange email and use chat rooms, and for games played in “multi-user dungeons.”
- Systems that never caught on included television based teletext in the UK
- Early graphics and limited choices characterized the Prodigy network
- Interactive networks caught on in Europe much more quickly than the United States, since they were backed by governments that had a tradition of running subsidized and more reliable telecommunications services. French Minitel featured a small, low- resolution terminal that could be hooked up to a telephone line at little or no cost to the consumer. In the beginning, Minitel carried online phone listings and saved the cost of publishing phone directories. But by the mid-1980s, Minitel blossomed into the world’s largest e-commerce marketplace, with banking, shopping and all kinds of services. At its height around 2000, Minitel had about 9 million terminals in operation.
- Valuable lessons came out of Prestel, Minitel, Viewtron and other early experiments in the 1980s:
- America Online, founded in 1992, was the most successful of the many ISPs in part because it had the best graphical user interface (GUI), which was helpful in navigating a new and complex internet system. It wasn’t easy to deliver graphics at this time. Given the large size of even low-resolution pictures, and low speed of the internet in handling anything but text, AOL came up with interesting “workaround.” The company distributed monthly packages of updated graphics data through the US mails, and these put permanent frames and navigation buttons around the interactive text windows to make it seem more user friendly.
- Journalist and author Howard Rheingold was so fond of his first experiences with social networks in the 1980s that he described the excitement in his book The Virtual Community: “Finding the WELL was like discovering a cozy little world that had been flourishing without me, hidden within the walls of my house; an entire cast of characters welcomed me to the troupe with great merriment as soon as I found the secret door. Like others who fell into the WELL, I soon discovered that I was audience, performer, and scriptwriter, along with my companions, in an ongoing improvisation. A full-scale subculture was growing on the other side of my telephone jack, and they invited me to help create something new.”
- Berners-Lee was aware of a previous attempt at network building called Xanadu by Ted Nelson. Like many projects, it was too early and too complex, but it had valuable ideas. One of these was “hypertext,” the now-familiar idea that text could have embedded links, and that those links could lead away from a linear document toward references or related paths. Berners-Lee called the basic protocol for the web a “hyper-text transfer protocol,” also known as “http.” Another important idea was the Universal Resource Locator, “URL,” that would help locate web pages.
- It was originally developed for scientists to collaborate on high-energy physics projects as they worked at different universities and institutes all over the world, but Berners-Lee believed it could also be useful for all kinds of communication. The program could read pages of text which had special commands or “tags” that automatically brought pictures into the browser window. Several different kinds of tags were used initially, but HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) was what caught on. Berners-Lee shared his idea freely with users around the world and a number of early browsers emerged.
- http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1610/mf_chrome_browser_wars_975.jpg
- http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304830704577494860177520268
- Digital networks allow virtual marketplaces, and their effect has been disruptive on traditional businesses, especially once the idea of long tail marketing took hold.
- By 2013 the company was bringing in $4.37 billion in revenue and providing on-demand video movie service that had become a threat to the major cable providers.
- Craig’s list is a buyer-to-buyer service without a lot of adult supervision. Still, since it is free, it replaced classified advertising in newspapers. With sites for 570 cities in 50 countries, Craigslist is by far the largest job and community bulletin board in the world. But the site is prone to spam and uses a minimalist design reminiscent of the earliest web pages. Despite profits that probably range into the hundreds of millions per year, Craigslist has a light management style with only 32 employees (in contrast, eBay has 15,000 employees).
- The world’s largest garage sale is an online auction site founded by Pierre Omidyar, a computer programmer who worked at an Apple Computer subsidiary in San Jose, CA. He was inspired to write the basic code for what was first called AuctionWeb over a long weekend in 1995. According to some accounts, the first item sold on eBay was an apparently useless broken laser pointer at the price of $14.83. Worried about the transaction, Omidyar emailed the buyer to explain that the pointer was broken. But the buyer explained that he wanted it -- he collected broken laser pointers.
- In 1997, the US Supreme Court endorsed the idea of free speech and struck down portions of the CDA in the Reno v. ACLU case. They said: “. . . Unlike the conditions that prevailed when Congress first authorized regulation of the broadcast spectrum [for radio and television], the Internet can hardly be considered a “scarce” expressive commodity. It provides relatively unlimited, low cost capacity for communication of all kinds. Through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox. Through the use of Web pages, mail exploders, and newsgroups, the same individual can become a pamphleteer . . . ”
- The idea that the web would become just another channel for externally generated content was not what many of the original visionaries had in mind. They wanted a more inclusive future, and they disagreed with the idea of a marriage between the internet and traditional media. They also strongly disagreed with government regulation that became law in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, especially the portion called Communications Decency Act (CDA), which attempted to impose heavy content restrictions on indecent language and images on the internet and Web. Under the law, the word “breast” could have been illegal, even if it referred to cancer research, while other potentially indecent words and ideas could have also been criminalized. Reacting to the restrictive vision inherent in the CDA, John Perry Barlow, a Grateful Dead lyricist and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:”
- Longstanding customs, along with communication law, obliges telecommunications companies to serve without discrimination. However, when the Internet and Web started to become available to the average person, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 with the idea of opening up a variety of markets to competition in areas ranging from value-added network services to content creation. Companies like Verizon that were providing neutral “common carrier” telephone service were encouraged to invest in all kinds of content-related businesses that would be separate from their status as common carriers. But the question concerning net neutrality is how far into network services the common carrier obligations extend. Could Verizon legally block content from sites it does not prefer, or slow the delivery speed (throttle back) content from providers who did not pay what Verizon demanded? According to some tech analysts, this was already happening, as Verizon took advantage of the 2014 ruling and slowed down Netflix and other services Net neutrality advocates won an important Feb., 2015 ruling by the FCC that placed broadband internet services into the common carrier category. “The Internet is simply too important to allow broadband providers to be the ones making the rules," FCC Commissioner Tom Wheeler said prior to the vote.
- A long time ago, when the Internet was very young, one guy in an office in southern California assigned all the internet domain names and numbers. Things started getting pretty busy for computer science researcher Jon Postel around 1996, and in 1998, the US Dept. Of Commerce created the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
- Zipf’s law was originally an observation on statistical distribution of most frequently used words, but also roughly describes population densities, income distribution and the patterns of other natural phenomena. -- Briscoe, Odlyzko, Tilly, IEEE Spectrum, 2006 http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-is-wrong