Personal communications

Overview

The explosion of communication options that occurred during the 1990 has been of enormous impact on person to person communications (both one to one, and one to many). The arrival of the Internet, and with it e-mail, websites, blogs, search engines, pod-casting etc has massively increased access to information gathering and dissemination.

The parallel (and converging) technology and techniques of the mobile phone have added to this potential. Since the time when this explosion occurred is still very close, it is reasonable to assume that the evolution of society in response to the Internet/WWW and all pervasive, cheap, mobile messaging, and the specific media uses of them, is yet to plateau.

It is interesting to note that while many writers, thinkers and designers imagined and predicted the broad potential of these systems, none accurately foreshadowed its specific uses or nature.

Vannevar Bush wrote "As We may Think" in 1945, and is often credited as the first person to describe the potential of immediate access to and control of masses of information, though the technology did not exist at the time.

Theodor Nelson described a kind of World Wide Web called "The Xanadu Project", and coined the term "hypertext".

Douglas Engelbart produced "Augmenting Human Intellect: A conceptual Framework" in 1962, and actually demonstrated a working prototype of every aspect of modern computer software and hardware interfaces (including networking) in 1968.

Alan Kay produced what is possibly the first ever   personal computer.l

Tim Berners-Lee is credited with actually creating the World Wide Web in 1991, unaware of the full effect it would have.

The technology we use is dependant upon often highly technical methods, and is evolved over time by many people. It is often the case that these technologies are modified in the nature of their use by people in ways unanticipated by the designers eg: blogs. Another good example is the way mobile phone technology has been "hacked" to other purposes for the organisation and dissemination of information.

Primary Reading

The personal blog of Nikita Kashner

  http://kitta.net/

"The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future"

By Tim Berners-Lee August 1996

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1996/ppf.html

The Futuresonic04 conference website

http://www.futuresonic.com/futuresonic/conference/

"The Blogging Revolution - Weblogs Are To Words What Napster Was To Music"

by Andrew Sullivan in Wired magazine on-line. May 2002

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.05/mustread.html?pg=2

"The Blogging Phenomenon: Who? How? Why?" by Cedar Pruitt in the Digital Divide Network (January 6th, 2005)

http://www.digitaldivide.net/            

More

"Workstation History and the Augmented Knowledge Workshop" by Douglas C. Engelbart

http://www.bootstrap.org/augdocs/augment-101931.htm

Audio interviews with Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson and Alan Kay

in "Multimedia Pioneers, Fall 1996 Lecture Series at San Francisco State University"

http://msp.sfsu.edu/Lectureseries/archive96/welcome.html

"As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush, orignialy published in "The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.

  Available on-line at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush/2