Digital counter-culture chapter 4 gere Flashcards
Alvin Toffler (book - future shock)
proclaimed the need to understand the future as much as the past and predicted that culture would be increasingly mediated by technology.
the technological means to realize the post-industrial information society were developed.
firstly with the simultaneous appearance of the minicomputer and of networked computing, then with the development of the personal computer.
The last, in particular, became the technology that, simul- taneously, enabled the development of a paradigm of computing congenial to a new generation of users with new needs and cultural
perceptions, but also fit for the new realities of a restructured capitalism.
possibilities arising out of military-funded research
including real-time, graphical computing and networking, as well as the tendency, inspired also by military needs, towards miniaturization, which in turn enabled the development of cheaper, smaller computers.
the problem with the possibilities arising out of military-funded research
was that such developments were firmly embedded in the technocratic, cybernetic context of Cold War computing, which, in the light of the use of computers in the Vietnam War, was a target of opprobrium for many of those opposing the status quo.
effective shift in the paradigm through which computers were perceived required cultural trans- formations as much as technological ones.
this shift was accomplished through -
1) the set of adjustments and changes in the information discourses that had emerged after the War, which re-oriented them in directions appropriate for new ways of thinking.
- including the emergence of ‘second order’ Cybernetics and of the beginnings of new discourses such as Complexity and Artificial Life in the late 1960s.
2) the circumstances that brought these disparate elements together, in particular the coincidental proximity of one of the centres of the microelectronics industry, Silicon Valley in Northern California, to San Francisco, a little further to the north, which had itself become, by the late 1960s, a centre of the counter-culture.
William Shockley
Bell labs engineer set up a company to exploit the invention of transistors.
his management skills were unequal to his engineering brilliance, and within three years eight of his most important engineers, including his most gifted employee, Robert Noyce, had left to start their own company, Fairchild Semiconductors.
the transistor
did the electronic switching work of the valve far more efficiently, as well as being far smaller and consuming far less electricity. It was almost immediately adopted by producers of consumer electronics, such as televisions and radios, and by the late 1950s was starting to be used in computers.
Robert noyce
started Fairchild Semiconductors
they concentrated on producing transistors to make money, Fairchild also put a lot of research into trying to solve the problems inherent in the technology.
- Some of the systems used for guidance in military planes had up to 20,000 transistors, and, with the kinds of usage associated with such systems, the connections between transistors often came loose.
- the more complex machines became and the more wiring they involved the slower they became.
what was the solution to the problems presented in relation to military uses
the solution was to make the entire circuit out of one block of a semi- conducting material, such as silicon or germanium,
San Francisco
roughly 80 kilometres to the north, was becoming a centre of the so-called counter-culture.
youth culture came as a result of
The combination of high employment resulting from post-war economic prosperity, and the coming of age of the ‘baby boom’ generation born in the 1940s and 1950s, meant that young people wielded an unprecedented degree of economic and, by extension, cultural power.
a dominant perception was such that issues were the result of the mismanegement of previous generations
the late 1960s saw the development of movements opposed to the previous generation’s ways of thinking and acting.
these movements included
black panthers
militant groups
the feminist movement
Counter-culture
an alternative society based on values other than those supposed to be dominant at that time, found expression in various ways and places.
largely white phenomenon, among whose most notable characteristics were an interest in self-realization, often involving the use of drugs, LSD or ‘acid’ in particular, a devotion to rock music and performance
Whole earth project (founded by Stewart Brand)
a non-profit alternative education organization, which had been started by Bob Albrecht, who had originally worked for the Control Data Corporation. It was a venture aimed at giving people access, through regular ‘catalogs’, to the tools and ideas with which to lead counter-cultural or alternative lifestyles, and as such was a great success.
The Last Whole Earth Catalog
It presents a valuable insight into the broad and heterogeneous sources of alternative thinking. As well as sources for agricultural implements, building and craft tools, musical instruments, aids to physical and mental self-help, and for the care of animals, it also contains
a great deal of philosophy of various sorts.
Autopoiesis
An autopoietic system is one that is organized so that the components from which it is composed work towards maintaining its composition. Such systems produce the components by which they are defined and then recursively regenerate these components in order to maintain their identity.
John Conway
a mathematician at Cambridge, England, developed what he called the ‘Game of Life’. This was a rule-based cellular automaton, which, through the application of a number of simple but subtle rules, could generate complex and fascinating states over time. This seemed to demonstrate that complexity and order could be generated out of sets of simple rules.
the Whole Earth Catalog
also helped to create the context in which the personal computer was realized, and in which interactive multimedia became available as a consumer product.
the counter culture opened up a space in which the personal computer could be developed
spacewar
original computer game built by hackers at MIT,
‘augmentation of human resources in Command and Control through Multiple Media Man-Machine Interaction’.
This was intended as a kind of three-dimensional virtual space that a user could interact with.
Theodor holm (Ted) Nelson
Nelson was a philosophy graduate who had come into contact with computers while studying for a sociology masters degree at Harvard in 1960. His remarkably prescient, and at the time, eccentric, perception of their possibilities, led him to try to build a word-processing system before either the name or the concept existed.
he laid out his vision for what he called ‘hypertext’, by which he referred to non-linear, linked texts. Nelson attempted to realize his ideas by developing ‘Xanadu’. This was a software framework, greatly influenced by Vannevar Bush
