Final Exam MHC Flashcards
Nicholas Negroponte, “Being Digital”
He said that “Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living.”
Nautical Navigation
- It was difficult and dangerous in the 19th century
- Machines were able to make calculations with greater accuracy than humans
- These calculations saved lives
Babbage Difference Engine
- Science Museum of London recreation of…
- 5-ton and 11 feet tall with 8,000 cams and cogwheels
- Could calculate 31 decimal places
- Solutions to polynomial equations could be printed directly and in hard copy to eliminate typos
Tabulating Machines, 1910’s-1930s
- US Census’ Hollerith Tabulating Machine, 1940
- 400 cards/minute
- 12 bits of info extracted from each card
Z3, Germany, 1941
Programmable digital computer
Used to calculate aircraft designs
Destroyed in WW2
Colossus, Britain 1943
Programmable digital computer
Used to decipher codes in WW2
Harvard Mark 1, 1944
- Huge computer
- Capability of iPhone or computer
- Something you would have to walk around / climb over
Early Computing
Note the importance of military and business to the early history of this media technology (? look more in book ‘computers’)
Gender and Computers
- Early people who worked in complex mathematics were called “computers”
- Many of this computers and technicians were women
- Myth of the male engineer
Homebrew Computer Club
- Palo Alto, CA
- Encouraged experiments
- Apple’s first demonstration
- Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs
Encouraging Experimentation
- At Apple, 20% of employee time is for free experimentation (But who owns the products of this experimentation?)
- Policy eliminated, 2013
Xerox PARC “Alto”
First working personal computer Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
(might be more on this in book “computers”)
Apple 2 Computer
- Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs
- Featured spreadsheets to help with accounting and small business finances
“Killer App”
- Function of a product presented as indispensable or far superior to rival products
- Application so powerful it prompts consumers to purchase the delivery device (comp, phone, etc.)
- Spreadsheet
- Microsoft office
IBM Personal Computer
- IBM tried to catch up to the Apple 2
- Killer App was also a spreadsheet for business
- IBM asked Bill Gates and Microsoft to develop the operating system
- contract allowed Gates to sell the software to other computer systems
- “Clone” computers were far cheaper than IBM
Apple Macintosh
Had it all..
- Mouse
- GUI
WYSIWYG= what you see it what you get
Its Killer App was desktop publishing
Missing the Curve in the Road
- IBM was not prepared for PC
- Allow microsoft to develop and operating system for “clone” computers
- Xerox didn’t use its own research
- Palo Alto Research Center lost staff and big ideas to Apple Corp.
Apple-Microsoft Incompatibilities
- Many problems were ironed out in the 80s and 90s
- By the 21st century, both apple and Microsoft used intel chips
(i think there is more in book, “computers”)
Moore’s Law
- Gordon Moore of Intel
- Computer power doubles every 18-24 months
- Slowed a bit by 2013
Media and culture share a _____ relationship
symbiotic
Digital networks _____ and are _____ by culture.
shape; shared
Vannevar Bush
- Top US science advisor during WW2
- predicted the development of personal computer
- post war hope for democratic influences on science and technology
What is the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web?
Internet: hardware infrastructure
Web: information on the internet
How did the government influence the Internet during its early years?
The internet was created by a gov agency in the context of the Cold War. Having computers communicate was necessary for defense and helpful for scientific research
ARPA/DARPA
Advanced Research Projects Agency (founded in 1958)
Renamed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1971
AT&T’s Missed Opportunity
- US Dept. of Defense’s offers AT&T and ARPA’s network at cost
- AT&T refuses
- Fears data networks would creates problems in the - phone system
Engineering for the Internet
- Not in larger corporations like AT&T
- Internet tech created by people without corporate loyalties
- Internet’s pioneers were free to create a system untethered to distinct and established corporate interests
Basic Framework of the Internet
In place in 1978
IBM began planning a personal computer (PC) that year
Designers Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart
- Sketched model enabling users to retrieve information wherever
- Vision of user empowerment shocks IBM executives
Early Internet
University Internet Systems in the 1980s
Users had emails, file transfer protocol (ftp), and text-only files
ISPs (Internet Service Providers)
- Designed for hobbyists to use emails, chat rooms, and for gaming in “multi-user dungeons”
Text-Only Internet
Pre ISP (internet service provider)
Text is only communication method possible in early days of the internet
Images, audio, and video files were too large to send through network connections
Early modems: 300 bits / second
BBC’s Teletext
- Interactive news service
- Banking, travel ticket sales
- Carried over television broadcast signal
- Conservative British politicians withdrew costly subsidies, ended in 1994
Prodigy (USA, late 1980s)
- Cut high cost of online services
- Drew revenue from advertising and not just subscription sales (IBM ; Sears Invest)
- Billed itself as family-oriented ISP (PR error!)
- Courts held Prodigy responsible for filtering adult content
- Lost expensive lawsuit
Minitel (France)
Early French network launched in 1980
Used telephone and low resolution screens (More cost effective than Teletext)
Had a phone modem that doubled as a regular telephone
Carried online phone listings replacing print phone books
By mid 1980s became world’s largest e-commerce marketplace
Lessons from Early Networks
Navigation is important
News is not enough
Graphics matter
Networks can help business
America Online
- Founded in 1992 before the Web when slow networks delivered less low-resolution graphics
- Most successful ISP
- Best graphic interface, but graphics were pre-loaded
- Circumvented slow network / low-resolution barrier
- Offered easiest email system
- 500,000 subscribers by 1993
- 27 million by 2000
Inventing the Web: (main components)
hypertext, HTTP, and URL
Hypertext
Embedded links leading away from a linear document toward references or related paths
HTTP
hypertext transfer protocol. Code that transfers users
URL
universal Resource Locator. Helped locate web pages
First Browser: Mosaic
- Marc Andreessen, leader of Mosaic development team
- University of Illinois supercomputing center
Mosaic
- First to combine text and visuals
- Navigation buttons, memory, seamless graphics
- Came with server software allowing users to read AND publish on the web
- Andreessen gave away Mosaic; founded Netscape in 1994
- Realizes Berners-Lee’s vision: People naturally want “to interact with others as part of a larger system”
- Later became Mozilla, Firefox
First News Webpage
1994
“San Jose Mercury News”
Cyberspace Independence
- John Perry Barlow, “Declaration of Cyberspace Independence”, 1996
- Declared independence from “governments of the industrial world”
- Because the “global social space we are building is naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us”
- “If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass”
- Compare to role of journalism in American and other political revolutions
Timeline: 1930s-1950 1958 1968 1973 1980 1989 1993
1930s-1950s: 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 management
1980s: Bitnet, NSFNet, Minitel (Fr.), Teletext (UK), CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online
1989: Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web
1993: NCSA ‘Mosiac’ Web browser
What is Long Tail marketing?
Marketing to under-served parts of the market with special needs
Amazon.com and the “Long Tail”:
- Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos
- Long tail: selling less of more
- Long tail book marketing served many small niche customers
- Volume of many niche items can be greater than a few highly popular items
- Decentralized networks help make this happen
Amazon and Washington Post:
- Bezos purchased Washington Post in 2013 for 75$ billion
- They purchased it bc they could use it to advertising, promoting
Google:
- Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin researched the structure of the WWW
- Created google in 1998
- Searches based not only on incidence of search terms, but links to pages
- “Sticky” - created search results that get you to patronize those results and the links they present
$110 billion revenue in 2017- ad driven
The Power of the Browser and Search Engine:
- Browsers are not merely portals onto the web
- They also serve distinct interests and direct searches accordingly
Net Neutrality:
- Different rates and access was a major issue with telegraph and telephones
- Laws in Europe prohibit discrimination but allow various
costs - ISPs in US are not supposed to slow services to particular sites
- These regulations are under threat
Networks:
Most users can’t take advantage of an 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 tend to fail
- (only the most prominent can afford to charge subscriptions)
Free Software Movement:
- Richard Stallman = leader of hacker culture, programmer at MIT
- Stallman saw Apple & corporate culture as bad influence on free computing
Open Source Software (major examples)
- PhP and MySQL: used in content management systems like Wordpress and Drupal
- FireFox web browser
- Open Office software (similar to MS Office)
New standards opened questions:
- Video, audio, and photo compression allowed more and easier exchange of information
- Raised legal questions (mostly surrounding copyright)
Napster:
Audio file sharing service
Federal Court found Napster was infringing on copyright and shut it down in 2001
- Rebooted as a media player
Copyright:
US copyright laws have led to harsh penalties for minor infringements
Most settle out of court by paying huge sums
Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig:
- Harvard law professors
- Believe strict laws to enforce copyright are counterproductive
- Web as “generous culture”
- Copyright stifles creativity
Tethered formats
Apps that let you consume media, but do not let you create it
Generative formats:
allow you to consume and create content (insta, youtube)
Cognitive Surplus:
Collaborative, Crowd-sourced sites
- Free software movement
- Information: Wiki
- Home sharing: Airbnb
- Ride Sharing: Uber and Lyft
Decreased transaction costs:
- But…also impacts on the economy, government, and consumers
Wiki:
- Programmer Ward Cunningham (creator)
- 1995: first “wiki” allows many contributions to one software repository
- “Wiki” = Hawaiian for “fast”
- Quick and simple way to make changes on web pages
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales:
Wanted to make knowledge accessible
Created Nupedia, online curated encyclopedia, in 2000
- Too many layers of review
Began a “wiki” to help contributors
This “side hustle” became one of the world’s most important web projects
- 30 million articles, 287 languages
- 18 billion page views/month
Wikipedia pros
Free
Accessable
Current
portable
Wikipedia cons
Misinformation
Cheapen the value of information
Does Wikipedia Empower or Cheapen?
Wikipedia puts print encyclopedias out of business
- Accuracy
Citizen Journalism:
Increasingly, news outlets are turning to consumers to provide news content
- Prosumer (pro-consumer)
- ProAm (pro-amature)
Advantages
- Immediacy/ access
- Diversity
Disadvantages
- Accuracy
- Exploitative
- Allows cuts to new budgets
- Diversity
Wikileaks:
- Launched in 2006 by Julian Assange
- Leaks information from governments, corporations, etc.
- Leaked diplomatic dispatches that contributed to Arab Spring
- 2010 fled prosecution
- Lives in Ecuadorian embassy in London
Edward Snowden:
- Leaked information about National Security Agency (NSA) and global surveillance
- Leaked documents to Guardian reporter Glen Greenwald in 2013
- Massive controversy
- Criminal charges
What did Snowden leak?
- Global surveillance program called “Five Eyes”: US and UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to collaborate on global spying
- Secret court orders requiring US phone companies to hand over all phone records everyday
- Back doors in corporate computing systems
Censorship:
- Internet Freedom.org reports China has 40,000 web police
- Tiananmen Square, Dali Lama, Falun Gong - all results heavily censored in Chinese search engines
- Some US companies have cooperated
Greenberger, “The Computers of Tomorrow”
v
ENIAC, USA 1946
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator
- 17,468 Radio Tubes
- 100 feet long, 8 feet high, 30 tons
- 100,000 calculations/second
- 2 hours = 100 humans working one year
- “Instead of holding a computer this computer held you” - Harry Reed
Microcomputing: Tube, Transistor, Chip
- Triode tube, radio telephony, 1905-1918
o Allows continuous wave - Transistor: Bell Labs, 1947
o Lighter, cheaper, more durable - Chip: 1958
o Billions of transistors printed onto an “integrated circuit”
Univac and 1952 Election
Debuted on election night on CBS tv
Predicted landslide victory by Eisenhower
- less than 1% off
- CBS talked at election since it contrasted most expectations
IBM 360
Standard commercial unit: The Model T of computers
- banks, insurance, science
IBM business culture = strict conformity
failed to explore possibilities of the tech it dominated
Anxieties about Computers and Society: George Orwell’s
Totalitarian state where inconvenient history is erased and where people are constantly monitored by Big Brother
web freedom
- cases for and against
v
The digital divide
v
Myths about the internet and social media
v
The Arab Spring (2010-2011)
- Wave of (violent and nonviolent) demonstrations in North Africa and the Middle East against oppressive government regimes
- started in Tunisia
- Wikileaks exposed political corruption that contributed to the uprising
The Arab Spring and social media
Social media played a key role in the Arab Spring
a. allowed protesters to organize
b. spread information about the injustices against which they were protesting
c. circumvented state control
d. use of social media nearly doubled during protests
Information on the internet
More information is available, and more sources are able to create and spread information, BUT…this volume of information does not ensure accuracy
The internet and news
- There are credible news sources online
- There are also deceitful new sources online
- The Internet and Social Media’s business / advertising model lends itself to provocative and salacious news
- Click-bait, listicles, etc.
- Facebook is now a primary way that consumers get news online
How news arrives:
- Interest
- Post
- Creator
- Type
- “Recency”
- Facebook puts “friends” above publishers in determining news feeds
- Facebook privileges “engagement” as opposed to google, which prioritizes relevance to search terms
- Confirmation bias
- “Silos”
Facebook and “fake news”
Spread of fake news on the internet (not a new phenomenon)
Facebook blamed in part for not regulating fake news
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves”
- Editorial judgement critiqued as partisan
- But algorithms have difficulty detecting fake news and fake news gets increasingly sophisticated
Accountability for this fake news?
Facebook?
Media producers?
Internet users?
Identifying fake news:
Read past headline Outlet? Date and time of publication? Author? Links and sources? quotes and photos? - Reverse image source Confirmation bias Are other news outlets reporting the story? Share carefully
inventors of the transistor
John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain of Bell Labs won Nobel prize in physics
Synchronic Invention
Shockley was Bell Labs’ manager
- attempts to commercialize new transistor led to California’s “Silicon Valley”
Anxieties about Computers and Society: Stanley Kubrick
2001: “A Space Odyssey” (1969) Computer (HAL) takes over a spaceship and kills most of the crew
Anxieties about Computers and Society: William Gibson
“Neuromancer” (1984) Totalitarian control over human-computer interface
Information on the internet
More information is available, and more sources are able to create and spread information, BUT…this volume of information does not ensure accuracy
The internet and news
There are credible news sources online
There are also deceitful new sources online
The Internet and Social Media’s business / advertising model lends itself to provocative and salacious news
- Click-bait, listicles, etc.
Facebook is now a primary way that consumers get news online
how news arrives
interest
post
creator
“Recency”
Facebook puts “friends” above publishers in determining news feeds
Facebook privileges “engagement” as opposed to google, which prioritizes relevance to search terms
confirmation bias
“Silos”
Facebook and “fake news”
Spread of fake news on the internet (not a new phenomenon)
Facebook blamed in part for not regulating fake news
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves”
Editorial judgement critiqued as partisan
But algorithms have difficulty detecting fake news and fake news gets increasingly sophisticated
Accountability for fake news?
facebook?
media producers?
internet users?
identifying fake news
- read past headline
- outlet?
- date / time of publication?
- author?
- links and sources?
- quotes and photos?
- reverse image source - confirmation bias
- are other news outlets reporting the same thing?
- share carefully
news feed visibility =
interest x post x creator x type x recency
