= one of the main points of the lecture |
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Some
Reference Points for Discussion
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Preliminary Class Business
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Last Section of Our Course: The "State of
the Art"
(New Directions in Literature and Art of Information
Culture)
Preview of argument in the last two
weeks of the course:
- Bringing the history of information up to the present: from
information as mainframe computing to information as networking:
20th-Century Paradigms
of Information
| Paradigm |
Signature Technologies |
Logical Architecture |
Peak Epoch (Period
of Monopolistic or Cartel Dominance) |
| Information
as Communication |
Telecom, Radio, Cryptography |
Transmission Model |
1940s-70s
(ATT breakup in 1984) |
| Information
as Mass Media |
Radio, TV, Magazines |
Broadcast Model |
1950s-1970s |
Information as Mainframe Computing |
Mainframes and Minicomputers,
Databases |
Centralized information services |
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Information as Networking |
PC's, Networks, Hypertext, Graphical
User Interface (GUI) |
Client/Server Architecture |
1980s-2000s |
- Current directions in the literature and art of network culture:
- Hypertext fiction
- Virtual reality as a medium for literature and art?
- Machine art
- The everyday art of "cool"
Epigraphs for this section of the course
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"Network
culture is an othermindedness, a murky sense of a newly
evolving consciousness and cognition alike, lingering like
a fog on the lowlands afer the sweep of light has cleared
the higher prospects. The same or a like fog increasingly
seems to cling in the folds of the brain. We ache with it,
almost as if we could feel the evolution of consciousness
in the same way a sleeping adolescent feels the bone ache
of growing pains as if in a dream."
—Michael
Joyce, Othermindedness: The
Emergence of
Network Culture (2000)
"The
kaleidoscopic power of the computer allows us to tell stories
that more truly reflect our turn-of-the-century sensibility.
We no longer believe in a single reality, a single integrating
view of the world, or even the reliability of a single angle
of perception. Yet we retain the core human desire to fix
reality on one canvas, to express all of what we see in
an integrated and shapely manner. The solution is the kaleidoscopic
canvas that can capture the world as it looks from many
perspectives—complex and perhaps ultimately unknowable
but still coherent."
—Janet
H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck:
The Future of
Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)
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The History of Computing I: The Age of the Mainframe
We can begin an abbreviated history of computing by focusing on
the mainframe paradigm that dominated from the 1950's
through 1970's (and that preceded the subsequent network paradigm):
- Progenitor Developments
- Early to Mid 19th Century: Charles Babbage and
the Difference and Analytical Engines
- Early 19th Century: the Jacquard Loom and the punch-card
system
- 1880-1911: Herman Hollerith, the Tabulating Machine
Company (later IBM), and automated punch-card calculation
- 1935-43: Early computers, e.g., the IBM Harvard
Mark I
- World War II to 1952
- ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer),
EDVAC, John von Neumann, and the stored program ("memory")
concept (invention of the modern computer architecture)
- Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park military cryptography
center in England (automated code-breaking machinery)
- Post-war commercial computer development: UNIVAC,
IBM's CPC (Card-Programmed Calculator)
- The Mainframe Era: Late 1950's to late
1970's (Shoshanna Zuboff: the "informating"
era)
- 1959: IBM Model 1401 with "chain" printer (IBM
estimated sales of about 1,000 machines; 12,000 eventually
sold to businesses)
- 1964: IBM System/360
The Mainframe Paradigm:
- Hardware: central computer, dumb terminals
- Software: "vertical" applications
- Theater of Operation: the "vertically-integrated"
company
- Typical Social Organization: MIS Departments
(Management Information Services), data-entry
clerical pools
- Typical Applications: CNC (Computer Numerically
Controlled) manufacturing, database record-keeping
(see Shoshana Zuboff on "informating")
Compare
Networking Paradigm
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- Representations of the mainframe in the arts, humanities,
cultural studies:
- Colossus:
The Forbin Project (1969)
- 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968) [HAL]
[Monolith]
- Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge:
Polity, 1995), p. 86: "The population is now cognizant
of being surveilled constantly by databases and it apparently
feels ill at ease as a result. Database anxiety has
not of yet developed into an issue of national political
prominence but it is clearly a growing concern of many
and bespeaks a new level of what Foucault calls the
normalization of the population" (Poster is discussing
the database as "super-panopticon")
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage, 1979)
- Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham,
vol. 4 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843) (on the Panopticon)
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The History of Computing II: The Age of Personal
Computing & Networking
Tthe landscape of information was altered in the 1980s and 1990s
when the convergence of the personal computer and networking created
a new kind of computing:
- 1975-Present: The Personal Computer
- 1975: Altair 8800 (first microprocessor computer);
Bill Gates and Paul Allen decide to develop a BASIC programming
system for the machine; Microsoft formed in 1975; contracts
with IBM in 1980 to create MS-DOS operating system
- 1975: Creation of the Homebrew Computer Club in
Menlo Park, CA (near Palo Alto and Stanford U.); Steve Jobs
and Stephen Wozniak attend the Club meetings, create the
first crude "Apple" in a few weeks; Apple II in 1976-77;
Jobs visits Xerox Parc in 1979 and sees the future of the
GUI interface; Apple's Macintosh computer in 1984
- 1978-80: Creation of the early "killer apps" (applications)
for the personal computer that would soon make it de rigeur
in the business world: the spreadsheet (VisiCalc), word-processing
(WordStar)
- 1981: IBM's PC Personal Computer introduces personal
computing to the workplace (by 1984, 35% of the business
information technology market is captured by PCs)
- 1981-Present: increasing power and speed of personal
computers; dominance of GUI (Graphical User Interface) operating
systems such as Windows (Windows 1 appears in 1985, Windows
3 in 1990)
- 1970-Present: The Network
- Key developments of the 1970's:
- Upgrading of telecom networks with electronic
switches/routers and broadband transmission capabilities
- 1970: Creation of the ARPAnet or ancestral
Internet (one of the original four nodes of the net
is UCSB)
- 1973: Invention of Ethernet
- 1974: Invention of TCP/IP
protocol
- Appearance of the modem
- Key developments of the 1980's
- Dominance of "client/server" paradigm in the office
(as opposed to "dumb terminal/mainframe"); rise of LANs
(Local Area Networks)
- Rapid extension of WANs (Wide Area Networks),
especially the Internet
- Increase in modem speeds
- 1990s: The Decade of Convergence (convergence of personal
computing and WAN/telecom networking)
- 1991: Commercial use of the Internet (previously
a military and educational domain); privatization of the
Internet "backbone" by 1995
- 1992: Invention of World Wide Web
- 1993-94: Mosaic and Netscape Web browsers. Key
feature: brought navigation by GUI "windows" and
by hypertext links together to create the now dominant information
interface in the network age
- Five million Internet hosts (servers) by 1995
- TCP/IP used for the Internet now used in the LAN
context to create "intranets"
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The Networking Paradigm:
- Hardware: client/server (powerful personal computer
or workstation networked to a microprocessor-based server);
routers, switches, name servers, etc. connecting between
networks
- Software: applications and processing distributed
between client and server machines; interface uses GUI
"windows" and/or hypertext links
- Theater of Operation: the horizontal, cross-departmental,
and global company networked to its suppliers, distributors,
regional and global allies, and customers
- Typical Social Organization: "flat organizations"
staffed by "work teams"
- Typical Applications: networked document, spreadsheet,
or database work, increasingly tied together by TCP/IP
and the Internet
Compare
Mainframe Paradigm
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Definition
of TCP/IP (the Internet protocol for "packet-switched" information
transmission) from Microsoft Press Computer
Dictionary, 3rd. ed. (Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press,
1997):
- TCP: "The protocol within TCP/IP that governs
the breakup of data messages into packets to be sent via
IP, and the reassembly and verification of the complete
messages from packets received by IP"
- IP: "The protocol within TCP/IP that governs
the breakup of data messages into packets, the routing
of the packets from sender to destination network and
station, and the reassembly of the packets into the original
data messages at the destination."
- Packet-Switching: "A message-delivery technique
in which small units of information (packets) are relayed
through stations in a computer network along the best
route available between the source and the destination.
A packet-switching network handles information in small
units, breaking long messages into multiple packets before
routing. Although each packet may travel along a different
path, and the packets composing a message may arrive at
different times or out of sequence, the receiving computer
reassembles the original message correctly [ . . . ].
The Internet is an example of a packet-switching network."
- Packet: "In packet-switching networks, a transmission
unit of fixed maximum size that consists of binary digits
representing both data and a header containing an identification
number, source and destination addresses, and sometimes
error-control data."
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The Aesthetic Impact of Hypertext
- Early hypertext development and
theory
- Hypertext on the personal computer (standalone hypertext
environments)
- Hypertext on the Internet
- From FTP and Gopher to Tim Berners-Lee's WWW, 1991
- The Mosaic browser from the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), 1993
- Netscape Navigator browser, 1994
- Hypertext Literature
- Some early influential works:
- Michael Joyce, afternoon, a story (Watertown,
MA: Eastgate Systems, 1986) (purchase
from Eastgate)
- Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden
- Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl (Watertown,
MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996) (Eastgate)
- Mark Amerika, Grammatron
- Migration of hypertext writers to the Web
- Experimentation with Flash and other graphical means of
presenting hypertext online
Questions We Ask of a Work of Hypertext Literature
(A Handlist)
|
Question |
Type of Question |
| 1 |
How does it work? |
Technology/Rhetoric
(on rhetoric of hypertext, see Espen Aarseth,
pp. 90-92, and Gunnar Liestal, pp. 98 ff.) |
| 2 |
What kind of work is it? Like what other
works?
(cf., Aarseth, p. 71) |
Genre/Form/Media |
| 3 |
How do we know where to go? How do we know
where we are? Where have we been? |
Navigation/Structure |
| 4 |
Why keep going (from lexia to lexia)? |
Motive |
| 5 |
How do we know we have reached the end? |
Navigation/Structure + Motive |
| 6 |
What do we get out of it (the work as a
whole)? |
Value |
| 7 |
Is it literature? |
?
|
| 8 |
Is it good literature? |
Aesthetic value |
| 9 |
How can we bookmark, quote, or excerpt it?
How can we talk about it? How can we talk about it together?
(return to question #1) |
Critical/Pedagogical |
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= questions commonly posed bythe
theory and criticism of hypertext literature; roughly corresponds
to the domain of traditional poetics and narratology |
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References
- Martin Campbell-Kelly and William
Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information
Machine (New York: BasicBooks / HarperCollins, 1996)
- Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History
of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1998)
- Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer
from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1993)
- Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon,
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996)
- Ken Polsson, Chronology
of Events in the History of Microcomputers
- Robert H'obbes' Zakon, Hobbes
Internet Timeline 4.2
- Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1:
A Brief History of the Internet (New York: TV Books,
1998)
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Some Influential, Early Primary Works:
- Michael Joyce,
afternoon, a story (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems,
1986) (purchase
from Eastgate)
- Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden
- Shelley Jackson, Patchwork
Girl (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996) (Eastgate)
- Mark Amerika, Grammatron
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Some Notable Recent Primary Works:
- Carolyn Guertin and Marjorie Coverley
Luesebrink, The
Progressive Dinner Party (2000) ("tour of
the works of women who write hypertext and hypermedia
literature on the WWW")
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| Home Pages of Some Leading Hypertext Authors/Critics:
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| Selected Publishers and Journals for Hypertext Literature:
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| Hypertext Literature Organizations, Programs, Events:
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Secondary Resources (Bibliographies, Theory, Criticism):
- Indexes, Bibliographies, Chronologies
- Formative
Early Theory and Criticism
- Vannevar Bush, "As
We May Think," Atlantic Monthly, July
1945
- Ted Nelson, Literary
Machines (1981) (online excerpts published
by Feed) | "Ted
Nelson and Xanadu" (Electronic Labyrinth)
- George P. Landow, Hypertext
2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory
and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1997) [first version of this book published
1992] For online excerpts, see: Hypertext:
The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology (chap. 1) &
"Hypertext: An Overview"
- Jerome McGann,
"The
Rationale of Hypertext"
- Stuart Moulthrop,"You
Say You Want a Revolution: Hypertext and the Laws
of Media," Postmodern Culture 1 (May 1991)
- Selected Later Theory and Criticism
- Espen J.
Aarseth, Cybertext:
Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Johns Hopkins
UP, 1997)
- J. Yellowlees Douglas, The
End of Books–Or Books without End?: Reading Interactive
Narratives (Ann Arbor, MI: U. Michigan Press,
2000)
- Michael Joyce,
Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture
(Ann Arbor, MI: U. of Michigan Press, 2000)
- George P. Landow, Hyper/Text/Theory
(Johns Hopkins UP, 1994)
- Janet H. Murray,
Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative
in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)
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| M. D. Coverly (Marjorie Luesebrink)
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Other Works
- Michel Foucault, Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Vintage, 1979)
- Jeremy Bentham, The Works
of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: William Tait,
1843) (on the Panopticon)
- Mark Poster,
The Second Media Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1995)
- Shoshana Zuboff,
In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work
and Power (New York: Basic Books, 1988)
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Supplementary
links for this class on Study Materials page
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Califia
and the Ethos of Networking
