New Media in the 70s

1
New Media in the 70s

• 1970 -- Constituents of a Theory of the Media,
  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, pp. 259-260
• 1972 -- Requiem for the Media, Jean Baudrillard,
  pp. 277-
• 1974 -- The Technology and the Society, Raymond
  Williams, pp. 289-290
• 1974 -- From Computer Lib / Dream Machines,
  Theodor H. Nelson, pp. 301-302
• 1975 -- From Soft Architecture Machines, Nicholas
  Negroponte, pp. 353
• 1976 -- From Computer Power and Human Reason,
  Joseph Weizenbaum, pp. 367-368
• 1977 -- Responsive Environments, Myron W Krueger,
  pp. 377-378
• 1977 -- Personal Dynamic Media, Alan Kay and
  Adele Goldberg, pp. 391-392
• exercise 4

2
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Germanys most influential poet and writer
3
Constituents of a Theory of the Media

• In his essay Enzensberger is taking aim at the
  media businessthe consciousness industry.
• This industry operates to perpetuate an unjust
  society by convincing us to accept that society.
• the media is a big business where capitalists
  hope to make a lot of money
• Enzensberger argues that turning away from the
  media is a poor strategy for effecting change.
• one should work at the point of the media, where
  the unjust culture is vulnerable both in terms of
  consciousness and income and reverse the roles of
  producer and consumer (e.g., the way that the
  Internet has been used to organize and provide
  information about protests against the World
  Trade Organization.)

4
Jean Baudrillard
5
Requiem for the Media

• Jean Baudrillard's response to the previous
  selection, Enzensbergers 'Constituents of a
  Theory of the Media' is a discussion of a
  different conception of media production that
  might be called interaction.
• Baudrlard argues strongly against one position of
  Enzensherger that there is an inherent structure
  to media technologically.
• Baudrillard argues that media serve a social
  functionthe reduction of all they reproduce to
  pale models, foreclosing any possibility of
  genuine reciprocity. (It is in this sense that
  Baudrillard rereads McLuhan's maxim that "the
  medium is the message?)
• Baudrillard's position is that the situation will
  not get any better simply by making everyone a
  producera point of view that Enzensberger
  shares.
• Baudrillard goes on to say that even the
  organized reversible circuits Enzensherger
  discusses would not be enough. He
  writes.reversibility has nothing to do with
  reciprocal exchange

6
Requiem for the Media

• For Baudrillard the problem lies not in who
  transmits, or how turn-taking is arranged, but in
  our very underlying model of communicationwhich
  is reproduced in the media, in political life,
  and in economic life.
• This model, described by Ferdinand de Saussure,
  is that of "transmitter-message-receiver."
• As Baudrillard points out in this model there is
  no place for the ambiguity of true exchange,
  'This scientific' construction excludes the
  reciprocity and antagonism of interlocutors, and
  the ambivalence of their exchange"
• An alternative to this semio-linguistic concept
  ion (in which one is the transmitter and one the
  receiver, with the message always going from one
  to another) is that of joint production through
  genuine interaction.
• In this, argues Baudrrillard, lies the true
  potential for changein the refusal to accept a
  model of producers and consumers, even one in
  which these positions can be reversed.

7
Requiem for the Media

• Which brings us to more concrete questions
• How would one taking Baudrillards posit ion look
  upon the examples of media from the introduction
  to the previous selection (018?? l lov, would
  this position view Enzensherger's ideas of
  Netvorklike communications models newspaper,
  written and distributed by its readers, a video
  network of politically active groups or the uses
  of media in relation to the protests against the
  World 'Wade Organization?
• Baudrillard's reaction to Enzensbergers mass
  newspaper and video network is not to declare
  them inappropriate. he treats them somewhat
  positively. Baudrillard does not see them as
  demonstrating the reversibility of
  producer/consumer but as transgressing these
  categories.
• This might make our other examples "a start" from
  a Baudrillardian point of view as well. Yet
  examples of a phenomenon that Baudrillard
  critiquesthe absorption of response into
  meaninglessness via reversible mediaare
  significantly more plentiful. Consider how those
  who were once solely media consumers, and
  suddenly are included in production, have served
  only to cement their irrelevance on reality based
  TV on game shows, and on corporate run Web
  message boards.

8
Raymond Williams
http//sunsite.queensu.ca/memorypalace/parlour/Wil
liams02/
9
Technology and Society

• the social processes that bring technologies
  innto widespread use, as well as those embodied
  in technologies, may not always be those that are
  most admirable or just.
• None of those who worked to perfect the
  technology of television in its early years and
  few of those who brought televsion sets into
  their homes ever intended the device to become
  employed as the universal babysitter.

10
Technology and Society

• Similarly. if anyone in the 1930s had predicted
  people would eventually be watching seven hours
  of television each day the forecast would have
  been laughed away as absurd. But recent surveys
  indicate that we Americans do spend that much
  time. roughly one third of our lives staring at
  the tube.
• Those who wish to reassert freedom of choice in
  the matter sometimes observe 'You can always turn
  off your TV In a trivial sense that is true....
  But given how central television has become to
  the content of everyday life. how it has become
  the accustomed topic of conversation in
  workplaces, schools. and other social gatherings
  it is apparent that television is a phenomenon
  that, in the larger sense, cannot be "turned oft
  at all.

11
Theodor H. Nelson
12

• Theodor Holm Nelson, born 1937, obtained his BA
  in philosophy from Swarthmore College.
• In 1960, he was a masters student in sociology at
  Harvard.
• Shortly after enrolling in a computer course for
  the humanities, he was struck by a vision of what
  could be. For his term project, he attempted to
  devise a text-handling system which would allow
  writers to revise, compare, and undo their work
  easily. Considering that he was writing in
  Assembler language on a mainframe, in the days
  before "word processing" had been invented, it
  was not surprising that his attempt fell short of
  completion.
• Five years later, he gave his first paper at the
  annual conference of the Association of Computing
  Machinery (ACM). It was around this time that he
  coined the term "hypertext."

13
Nelson

• Ted Nelson invented the term 'hypertext' in 1965,
  and is a pioneer of information technology.
• Ted Nelson is admired as a modern philosopher who
  worked in the fields of information, computers,
  and human-machine interfaces.
• He founded Project Xanadu in 1960 with the goal
  of creating such a system on a computer network,
  further documented in his 1974 book Computer Lib
  / Dream Machines and the 1981 Literary Machines.
• The Xanadu project itself failed to take off, but
  its vision is in the process of being fulfilled
  by Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide
  Web that owes much of its inspiration to Xanadu.
• Nelson hates the World Wide Web, the Internet,
  XML and all embedded markup, and regards
  Berners-Lee's work as a gross over-simplification
  of his own work.
• He is currently working on a new information
  structure, ZigZag, information about which can be
  found off the Xanadu project home page, which
  also contains two versions of the Xanadu code.

Nelson (left) talking to Doug Englebart
He is the son of the Academy Award-winning
actress, Celeste Holm.
14
Nelson as prophet

• Ted Nelson wrote Computer Lib at a time when IBM
  dominated computer sales and computer thinking.
  People saw computers as cold and impersonal.
  Professionals in authoritarian computer
  information departments controlled access to
  computers owned by large businesses and
  universities. Computer Lib was a revolutionary
  manifesto calling for the liberation of computers
  and for the liberation of people through
  computers.
• He proposed all of that in 1974 before the Web,
  before Windows, before IBM dreamed of building a
  computer that wasn't a main frame, before Bill
  Gates left Harvard to found Microsoft, before the
  two Steves built the first Apple, even before the
  world's first personal computer (the Altair) was
  advertised on the cover of Popular Electronics.

15
Computer Lib

• Computer Lib /Dream Machines is the most
  important book in the history of new media
• Nelson argued that computer experiences were
  media to be designed and that this design should
  be both a creative process and undertaken with
  the audience (users) in mind.
• Nelson proposed that these new designed media
  experiences be placed in a radical, open
  publishing network

16
Computer Lib

• For Ted Nelson, computers were "All-Purpose
  Machines" that could control almost any other
  machine.
• Their use should be limited only by our own
  imaginations.
• Ted Nelson saw that potential, as well as
  dropping prices of computer equipment, and he had
  the temerity to advocate personal ownership of
  computers.

17
hypergrams

• Nelson's conception of hypertext is a rich one.
  Dream Machines describes hypergrams (branching
  pictures), hypermaps (with transparent overlays),
  and branching movies, such as the film at the
  Czechoslovakian Pavilion at Expo '67 (44). The
  modular layout of this book attempts to impart
  the interconnectedness of knowledge which
  hypertext can convey. Its large format,
  hand-drawn illustrations, and irreverent tone
  were inspired by Stewart Brand's Whole Earth
  Review. Flip the book over, and you'll find a
  second polemic--Computer Lib. The book sold a
  total of 50,000 copies.

18
hyperbooks

• In Dream Machines, Nelson provides three
  categories of hypertext (45). The first, basic or
  chunk hypertext, supports what we have been
  calling reference and note links. The second,
  stretchtext, is a full implementation of
  expansion links. The third, collateral, stems
  from his work in 1971 with the Parallel Textface,
  which provides a view of two documents on one
  screen, with full support for versioning. Nelson
  also distinguishes between "fresh" or original
  hyperbooks on one topic, "anthological"
  hyperbooks linking different works, and "grand"
  systems
• These consist of "everything" written about the
  subject, or vaguely relevant to it, tied together
  by editors (and NOT by "programmers," dammit), in
  which you may read in all the directions you wish
  to pursue. There can be alternate pathways for
  people who think different ways. (Dream Machines
  45)
• This vision obviously owes a lot to Vannevar
  Bush. Indeed, Nelson reprints the entire text of
  "As We May Think" as a chapter in Literary
  Machines.

19
CAI

• One of the important sections of CL/DM details
  his version of Computer Assisted Instruction.
• His Modest Proposal is Instead of devising
  elaborate systems permitting the computer or its
  instructional contents to control the situation,
  why not permit the student to control the system.

20
hypercomics

• In his typically irreverant manner, Nelson
  suggests the instruction might include
  hypercomics used to explain things.
• What is important about this insight is the
  recognition of visual communication in teaching.
• He notes that writing and diagramming are
  basically a continuum.

21
Fantics

• Nelson writes By fanatics I mean the art and
  science of getting ideas across, both emotionally
  and cognitively.
• In 1974, the notion that teaching should draw on
  students emotions as well as their minds was NOT
  a common view.

22
thinkertoys

• Another example of Nelsons playful approach to
  computer assisted instruction is thinkertoys.
• He anticipates the changes in education that
  attempt to make learning fun.
• Most importantly, he notes that our greatest
  problem is the visualization of complexity.

23
Xanadu

• Xanadu, Ted Nelson's dream project. Nelson
  envisioned, in 1974, an affordable computer
  service that would deliver information and
  entertainment into people's homes. According to
  Nelson (Dream Machines, p. 144), Xanadu would
  "give you a screen in your home from which you
  can see into the world's hypertext libraries...
  offer high-performance computer graphics and text
  services at a price anyone can afford... allow
  you to send and receive written messages... and
  make you a part of a new electronic literature
  and art, where you can get all your questions
  answered..."

24
Xanadus history

• Since the mid sixties, Nelson has been pursuing
  his dream, a software framework he named Xanadu,
  after Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (he came up with
  the name while working for a publisher). This he
  describes at length in Literary Machines, calling
  it a "magic place of literary memory" (1/30).
• The Xanadu software is as mythic as the place
  after which it was named. In Dream Machines,
  published in 1974,
• Nelson announced that it would be ready for
  release by 1976 (56).
• In the 1987 edition of Literary Machines, the due
  date was 1988 (0/5).
• The development of Xanadu was given a large boost
  in early 1988 when Autodesk (the company which
  made their fortune from AutoCAD) bought the
  Xanadu Operating Company.
• Code for a prototype of part of the system was
  made public later that year. In an article
  published in Byte in January 1988,
• Nelson expected to be fully completed by 1991
  (299).
• Then, nothing. Autodesk has since relinquished
  interest in Xanadu.

25
Nelsons predictions

• It makes sense to own your own computer.
• Rigid and inhuman computer systems are the
  creation of rigid and inhuman people.
• Beware of "cybercrud" (computer-related
  terminology and practices used to fool,
  manipulate, and control people).
• Remember Herb Grosch's Law No matter how
  clever the hardware boys are, the software boys
  "p-s" it away!
• IBM is run by and for people who really believe
  in authority.
• A computer center has a Director and assistants,
  with jobs and an empire to defend. It has a
  bureaucracy with vested interests and rules.
• Using a computer should always be easier than not
  using a computer.
• Any system which cannot be well taught to a
  layman in ten minutes, by a tutor in the presence
  of a responding setup, is too complicated.
• Whatever chance remains for the survival of
  anything good may be in the preservation and
  availability of information, the only commodity
  that will be cheaper and more convenient.
• Knowledge, understanding and freedom can all be
  advanced by the promotion and deployment of
  computer display consoles.
• Not the nature of machines, but the nature of
  ideas, is what matters.
• Everything is deeply "intertwingled."

26
Nicholas Negroponte
http//web.media.mit.edu/nicholas/
Founded the architecture machine group at MIT
and Founded the Media Lab at MIT
27
Soft Architecture Machines

• The idea that the user should be empowered by
  computers, rather than browbeaten into complying
  with a machine, is one particularly important
  idea that has been furthered by Negroponte
• The key idea in his essay is computer-aided
  participatory design.
• The Media Lab explores technologies far too
  advanced for businesses to consider

28
Computer Aided Participatory Design

• Negropontes general thesis is each individual
  can be his own architect.
• He argues that the persons who are to inhabit a
  house need to participate in its design.
• Computer graphical interfaces make such
  participation possible

29
Concepts in SAM

• Indigenous architecture
• Citizens designing and building their own homes
• Design amplifiers
• Software that creates an interaction between the
  computer and its users in which home owners
  discover what they really want in their homes by
  debugging their ideas.
• Inner and outer Loops
• Matching the private interests of potential home
  ownders with public interests
• Plan recognition
• A software that draws inferences from a users
  plan for a home that raises issues about the plan.

30
Joseph Weizenbaum
http//i5.nyu.edu/mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html
31
Computer Power and Human Reason

• It wasn't until the early 1960 that word
  processing began to take shape in 1963, for
  instance, an early program for writing on the
  computer was developed by hackers at MIT.
• developed the first computer program of the sort
  that Alan Turing envisioned named Eliza
• Eliza, ran a set of scripts called Doctor and
  impersonated a psychotherapist, which became
  notorious, leading Weizenbaum to profoundly
  reassess his ideas about computing.
• The concern that machines will take over not just
  the jobs that provide to income, but also those
  cognitive and emotional functions we closely
  associate with humanity is a particular worry of
  the computer eraone that was highlighted for
  Weizenbaum by the way some suggested that Doctor
  should be employed as an actual therapist.

32
Myron W Krueger
http//www.siggraph.org/artdesign/gallery/S98/pion
e/pione3/krueger.html
http//www.mat.ucsb.edu/g.legrady/academic/course
s/01sp200a/students/enricaLovaglio/VRsite/authors/
C.html
33
Responsive Environments

• he is often called the father of virtual
  reality"
• his assertion that 'Response is the medium! have
  not found as comfortable a home within computer
  science.
• as Kristine Stiles writes, "as of 1971 no art
  department had its own computer, and computer
  scientist-artists like Myron W Krueger ... were
  all but ignored in the visual arts"
• In 1976 a new interface, the first glove to
  monitor hand movements, was developed at the
  Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the
  University of Illinois at Chicago (a
  collaboration between the College of Engineering
  and the School of Art and Design)
• http//www.evl.uic.edu/intro.php3
• http//www.ccr.buffalo.edu/anstey/

34
Adele Goldberg
35
Personal Dynamic Media

• The imagination and boldness of the mid-1970s
  Dynabook vision, and the accuracy with Alan Kay
  and Adele Goldberg foretold, in Personal Dynamic
  Media, what notebook computing has become is
  striking.
• Almost all the specific ideas for the uses of
  notebook computing developed in the group that
  Kay directed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
  (PARC) proved to be worthwhile
• The broader idea that the notebook computer would
  be a general purpose device. with educators and
  business people and poets all using the same type
  of Dynabook has also held true

36
Exercise 4

• What do you believe are the dangers of new media?
  (Consider the ways in which the new media that
  was in development before you were born now
  presents a danger to you.)