Introducer: Kevin Driscoll, that’s a name that’s well-known to many of us, not least because he is one of us, hav­ing grad­u­at­ed as you can see, Comparative Media Studies Masters Program in 2009. We’re pleased to have him around Boston again so that we can tap him for events like this, and pre­vi­ous­ly for a bit of PhD career advice. 

Speaking of PhDs, Kevin received his from USC, where he did his dis­ser­ta­tion trac­ing the pop­u­lar his­to­ry of social com­put­ing through the dial-up bul­letin board sys­tems of the 1980s and 1990s, a top­ic that’s sus­pi­cious­ly like what he’ll be telling us about today. This talk will, accord­ing to the abstract that was cir­cu­lat­ed, ​“map out the gen­er­a­tive con­di­tions that gave rise to ama­teur com­put­er net­work­ing at the end of the 1970s and trace the dif­fu­sion of BBSing across diverse cul­tur­al and geo­graph­ic ter­rain dur­ing the 1980s.”

In his dis­ser­ta­tion, Kevin takes a deep dive into the his­to­ry, tech­nol­o­gy, and cul­ture of bul­letin board sys­tems and their users in an attempt to reframe the his­to­ry of the Internet away from ARPA and Licklider and a sort of highly-structured nation­al enter­prise towards some­thing that takes into account the great impacts that ama­teur and hob­by­ist users had in the devel­op­ment of the Internet and its social sys­tems as we know them today.

Kevin is now at MSR, where he con­tin­ues his tech­no­cul­tur­al research. He’s also work­ing on a man­u­script based on his dis­ser­ta­tion, but ori­ent­ed around the theme of the pre-history of social media, and he’s design­ing a series of ped­a­gog­i­cal tools that com­bine machine learn­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions stud­ies through the process of data min­ing your­self, which is some­thing I’m sure he’d be hap­py to answer some ques­tions about after the talk. 

We’re so pleased to have him here today to share his work with us. Please join me in wel­com­ing Kevin Driscoll.

Kevin Driscoll: I have a ques­tion. I haven’t said a word yet. Is this a record? [Response inaudi­ble.] Not the most sub­stan­tive ques­tion we could’ve asked. 

I’m real­ly excit­ed to be here, for many rea­sons, some of which you can prob­a­bly imag­ine. But there’s an inter­est­ing loop­ing back, to me, sit­ting in the room and lis­ten­ing to oth­er peo­ple speak and try­ing to fig­ure out how to con­cep­tu­al­ize projects and how to do research and like, where a CMS per­son fits into the world of schol­ar­ly work. What do we learn as CMS stu­dents that we can then take into what I con­ceived of as more rigidly-structured dis­ci­pli­nary spaces like Com[?], although I was quick­ly dis­abused of that notion by peo­ple who are in things like soci­ol­o­gy and his­to­ry. But I think one thing that we bring when we do com­mu­ni­ca­tions research from a CMS per­spec­tive is an atten­tion to the bound­aries and the edges and the lit­tle nooks and cran­nies where oth­er lit­er­a­tures and oth­er per­spec­tives might creep in.

And so, we also are fond of ask­ing ridicu­lous­ly tricky ques­tions. So here’s a ques­tion that dri­ves out time today: Where did the Internet come from? And in order to answer that ques­tion, you would have to have a pret­ty clear idea of what you mean when you say ​“the Internet.” I sus­pect that if we were to poll every­body in the room, we would have a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent, some­times con­tra­dic­to­ry, some­times incom­pat­i­ble, some­times over­lap­ping, def­i­n­i­tions of ​“the Internet.”

What I know about the Internet is that it mat­ters a lot. Because when you ask peo­ple about Internet use, they will tell you that it mat­ters a lot to them. Internet use ( Whatever that means. We’ll leave it open-ended for a minute longer.) is inter­wo­ven with peo­ple’s every­day lives, all their activ­i­ties. And they will tell you if you ask them.

So of Internet users, near­ly half say that it would be very hard to impos­si­ble to give up, and if you gen­er­al­ize by look­ing at the data, that means one in four of peo­ple in America say this. So Internet mattes. That’s true. And here’s what I think we mean when we talk about the Internet. All the things that we do with it.

So my guess is that you prob­a­bly can’t read that in the back. But this axis right here is per­cent­ages. This is from the Pew Research Center data ask­ing peo­ple what they do when they go online, and I’ve col­lapsed some of that data here to focus on the prac­tices that they men­tion. What are the things that they do with the Internet? When they say ​“Internet use” what are the uses that they’re talk­ing about? The things that you see are research­ing their hob­bies, look­ing up infor­ma­tion about the news, argu­ing about pol­i­tics, get­ting health data, dat­ing, find­ing jobs, fig­ur­ing out how to fix some­thing in their hous­es. All the things that peo­ple men­tion when they talk about the Internet are things that hap­pen at this cul­tur­al lev­el. It’s things that they do with it that the Internet facil­i­tates, that it enables them to do.

And yet in spite of how deeply woven it is into peo­ple’s every­day lives in all these dif­fer­ent areas of activ­i­ty, by and large we col­lec­tive­ly do not know very much about how it works, where it came from, what are the dif­fer­ent com­po­nents tech­ni­cal­ly or polit­i­cal­ly that make it up? And that gets to the place like this where a pret­ty over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of the users of the Internet, peo­ple who self-identified as Internet users, would be able to dis­tin­guish reli­ably between ​“Internet” and ​“World Wide Web.” They would just say that they are essen­tial­ly the same thing.

This is con­stant across ages, too. This isn’t a sto­ry about gen­er­a­tions. Young peo­ple are just as like­ly to have these ambigu­ous under­stand­ings of what they mean when they talk about Internet as old­er peo­ple. In fact, we’re start­ing to see some infor­ma­tion that sug­gests that even the term ​“Internet” is falling out of use. 

But I’m approach­ing this from a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive. I asked at the begin­ning ​“where did the Internet come from?” So we know the Internet mat­ters. People tell us that it mat­ters, and they tell us all these dif­fer­ent things about it. And they must have some idea where it came from. So real­ly if you press peo­ple and you ask them, ​“Okay, where does it come from? Just tell me where you think it comes from.” they would be able to give you some kind of sto­ry. And there’s lots of dif­fer­ent sto­ries. And the sto­ries that they tell mat­ter a lot.

This is where this kind of CMS‑y per­spec­tive comes in, which is we can look at those sto­ries, no mat­ter how truthy they are or coun­ter­fac­tu­al they might be, and then think about what comes forth from that? If that’s what you think is the ori­gin of the Internet, then what does it mean for you when you’re doing all those things that are on that list, when you’re send­ing emails to your fam­i­ly or some­thing? How does the ori­gin sto­ry play in here?

And we’ve been lucky recent­ly to have oppor­tu­ni­ties to see this. In the dis­cus­sion of net neu­tral­i­ty, of how we should reg­u­late the Internet, what you see are key fig­ures in a par­tic­u­lar kind of hagiog­ra­phy of Internet his­to­ry, who are invit­ed to speak about how the Internet ought to work, how it ought to be reg­u­lat­ed and gov­erned. And when they do speak, whether it’s in a blog post or giv­ing tes­ti­mo­ny, they will always remind you of their place in a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal set­ting, in a par­tic­u­lar narrative.

So here you can see I’ve high­light­ed a part of this open­ing sen­tence to a blog post that appeared on the Google blog but authored by Vint Cerf, where he reminds you ​“when my col­leagues and I pro­posed the tech­nol­o­gy behind the Internet” blah blah blah blah blah. So from a rhetor­i­cal point of view, you remind your listener—you are recall­ing a par­tic­u­lar his­to­ry and nar­ra­tive that they might not even have, but you’re say­ing, ​“Come on, this is com­mon knowl­edge. I’m the guy. And so here, this is what I’ve got to say.” This is not unique. We see it over and over in this con­ver­sa­tion. ​“When I invent­ed the web,” blah blah blah blah blah. 

So ori­gin sto­ries mat­ter. And the place to start, if you’re going to do work like this is to ask about what is that sto­ry that these guys are refer­ring to? Because clear­ly they have some con­sen­sus with­in them­selves about how this sto­ry’s shaped and who fig­ures into it. Thom Streeter called that ​“the stan­dard folk­lore.” He said yeah, if you look out there, there’s kind of a way of telling the sto­ry, it has cer­tain actors, cer­tain dra­mat­ic moments, con­flicts that sto­ried that are told over and over, and that forms some­thing of a folk­lore. It has some basis in the expe­ri­ence of cer­tain peo­ple form cer­tain per­spec­tives, but we should­n’t assume that that is a uni­ver­sal history.

So here is an image that I throw up here. I’m not going to spend too much time on it because this is a lit­tle bit of a side-quest from our main sto­ry right now. But in the process of doing a dis­ser­ta­tion you have lots of side-quests. So on this one I want­ed to know about this stan­dard folk­lore ques­tion. Here I’ve picked three rep­re­sen­ta­tive texts that were from a cor­pus of texts that I looked at. The rea­son I choose these to share with you is because they real­ly rep­re­sent the best, the most widely-read, schol­ar­ly and pop­u­lar books. These are reg­u­lar­ly in print. You can usu­al­ly get them at libraries. If you were a high school stu­dent who was going to write about where the Internet came from and you went to the town librar­i­an, they may give you one of these two books. And this exam­ple you’ll see is dat­ed 1993, before the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of the net. This was a mag­a­zine, Fantasy & Science Fiction that pub­lished a col­umn by mul­ti­ple peo­ple, and one of those authors is sci­ence fic­tion writer Bruce Sterling, and he had begun his­tori­ciz­ing the Net (as he was call­ing it at the time), before most peo­ple could even get on it. So you’ll see these num­bers refer to con­cepts and as a way to explain this in short­hand, they are prop­er nouns, events, or insti­tu­tions, or peo­ple. This over­lap is show­ing how dif­fer­ent ways of telling the sto­ry have cer­tain fea­tures in common.

So the lit­tle ker­nel in the mid­dle, the lit­tle chunk where they all meet, that’s the seed of the stan­dard folk­lore. As I add more text to it, that thing more or less stays con­stant. You have cer­tain fig­ures, cer­tain events, that they are there. So this notion of the stan­dard folk­lore that Thom Streeter detect­ed, we can see empir­i­cal­ly how it is con­tin­u­al­ly renewed over time. That as the sto­ry’s told with years pass­ing in between, there are cer­tain char­ac­ters, cer­tain fea­tures that come back around and around.

So if we go back to this ori­gin sto­ry, the one rep­re­sent­ed by this stan­dard folk­lore, we can kind of pull out some char­ac­ter­is­tics. Here I’m refer­ring to it as the ARPANET ori­gin sto­ry. Show me with your thumbs, if you are not famil­iar at all with this ori­gin sto­ry you would put your thumb all the way down. If you know it super well and you could stand up here and tell every­body, then you would put your thumb all the way up. Give me a sense of your famil­iar­i­ty with this sto­ry so I can use my time wisely. 

In the stan­dard way of telling this ori­gin sto­ry (and this is what we would see if we looked at those dif­fer­ent tales) what you see it the devel­op­ment of this real­ly inter­est­ing research net­work that brought togeth­er peo­ple from indus­try, from acad­e­mia, from the mil­i­tary, who were doing com­put­er net­work­ing research, and were par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in build­ing robust net­works that could con­nect machines that were using dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems, dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tions hard­ware and infra­struc­ture, that would com­mu­ni­cate over long dis­tances, that would be reli­able. And they devel­oped the pro­to­cols and the tech­no­log­i­cal habits that con­tin­ue to under­gird the glob­al Internet today.

This table tells us a lit­tle bit about the cul­tur­al and tech­no­log­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of that milieu. We can see their host machines, the ones that are host­ing the ser­vices and the con­tent on the net­work, those tend­ed to be mini com­put­ers or main­frames. So you can imag­ine that at MIT there are time-sharing com­put­ers like one com­put­er with a room that has a bunch of ter­mi­nals attached to it. That would be a host. And that one com­put­er would be very expen­sive, and it would require sig­nif­i­cant exper­tise to manage.

The clients in this con­text are either what we would call ​“dumb ter­mi­nals” mean­ing not real­ly com­put­ers. A screen, a key­board, and some com­mu­ni­ca­tions hard­ware. Or they are work­sta­tions that are also used by say, a physi­cist who needs to be able to mod­el things ad hoc. All of these folks share a cer­tain kind of polit­i­cal econ­o­my. The mon­ey that pays for all this hard­ware (and prob­a­bly their food and rent) comes from grants, it comes from their salaries that they get from uni­ver­si­ties, it kind of comes from a sim­i­lar pot.

Likewise, they often have a social rela­tion­ship that exists out­side of this research. So it’s like the peo­ple you see at con­fer­ences every year. The peo­ple that you read their jour­nal arti­cles that you reviewed. There’s a kind of social homoge­ny that exists here that enables and facil­i­tates this research. It’s crit­i­cal to get­ting the work done. But it also means that when you go online on this net­work, you’re not expect­ing to encounter much dif­fer­ence. You go online and you kin­da know who’s there, because you’ve met them before. Behind the han­dles it’s like, ​“That guy, I saw his paper. It was okay. Whatever.” You have some kind of fall­back social relationship.

That’s kind of dif­fer­ent than the way that I expe­ri­ence the Web and that I have for a while. When I go online I tend to expe­ri­ence a lot of dif­fer­ence. Contact with strangers, with peo­ple from back­grounds that are unknown to me. So I’m not see­ing my social rela­tion­ships nec­es­sar­i­ly reflect­ed in this community. 

We’ve said a lit­tle bit about what’s miss­ing. Political econ­o­my, soci­o­log­i­cal­ly, we kin­da have some dimen­sions through which when we look at this we don’t real­ly see the Internet of today. One dimen­sion that we do see is the tech­no­log­i­cal dimen­sion, so sim­i­lar pro­to­cols and habits. But we real­ly don’t see the social shape that we expe­ri­ence today there. And we def­i­nite­ly do not see all of these pop­u­lar cul­ture activ­i­ties there. So you would­n’t use the ARPANET to email with your par­ents, because they are not there. You would­n’t be able to use it to buy tick­ets to the movies, because the movie tha­tre is not there. You could­n’t use it to pro­vide cus­tomer sup­port for your small busi­ness, because com­mer­cial activ­i­ties are not allowed.

So here again at the lay­er of prac­tices and cul­ture, it’s not a sat­is­fy­ing ori­gin sto­ry for us. It’s robust, and it is rich when it accounts for insti­tu­tion­al and tech­no­log­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions, but it’s very thin on the side of cul­ture. So where is pop­u­lar cul­ture, because you can’t write a book about the ear­ly Internet and not write about cul­ture. Indeed, when we look at the best books about Internet his­to­ry, they do their best to account for this. So one key recur­ring com­po­nent of the stan­dard folk­lore is the design of this ear­ly net­work, the ARPANET, was to enable researchers in one insti­tu­tion to access very expen­sive com­put­ing resources some­where else. And you can see from a gov­ern­ment point of view why that would be desir­able. You just gave mil­lions of dol­lars to the University of Illinois to put togeth­er a super­com­put­er and you’re like, ​“Well, it’d be pret­ty good if uni­ver­si­ty researchers at oth­er loca­tions could use that com­put­er.” So the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the net­work is real­ly clear.

But in prac­tice what hap­pened is that every­body used it to exchange emails, which is kind of fun­ny because it’s a real­ly expen­sive way to have email, even at the time. One of the most pop­u­lar uses for email is not one-to-one com­mu­ni­ca­tions but many-to-many email forums or list­servs, mail­ing lists. So a recur­ring sto­ry in the stan­dard folk­lore is about the first email list to focus on pop­u­lar cul­ture, the SF-Lovers. I would nev­er have thought of this any­where else, but were there peo­ple in this room that were mem­bers of SF-Lovers? I feel like I always have to ask because one time there was some­body who was, and I was like okay, got to watch my words.

So here’s an email (obvi­ous­ly you’re not going to read this), but this pul­lquote in the mid­dle that I’ve made quite large puts a real find point on the place of pop­u­lar cul­ture in the ARPANET. It was in hid­ing. It was not real­ly a good idea to talk too much about the SF-Lovers. Which was so unfor­tu­nate, because if you look at the archive of this mail­ing list, peo­ple are thrilled at the chance to talk and debate about the issues being raised in sci­ence fic­tion dur­ing a real gold­en era of sci­ence fic­tion, a peri­od of time where peo­ple are bring­ing in new ideas and new voic­es. They want to talk about it, peo­ple are dying to talk about it.

They’re say­ing, ​“Oh, would­n’t it be great if we could give an account to this author? He lives in the town with me. I could teach him how to use it? Or maybe we could print out some of the best mes­sages and make a fanzine and dis­trib­ute it at this con­ven­tion.” This per­son, who’s one of many who says this is like, ​“Folks, no. We can­not do that, because if the peo­ple in Congress who are cur­rent­ly in the process of dis­man­tling all pub­lic insti­tu­tions under the Reagan admin­is­tra­tion hear that we’re using the ARPANET to talk about sci­ence fic­tion, they are going to stop fund­ing the ARPANET, so zip it.” 

When new infra­struc­tures and new net­works became avail­able to sup­port this kind of activ­i­ty, every­body moved. The SF-Lovers group, the com­mu­ni­ty, per­sist­ed, but it stopped using ARPANET as its com­mu­ni­ca­tion infra­struc­ture because of a political-economic char­ac­ter­is­tic of that ear­ly network.

So I think I’ve got you con­vinced that the ARPANET is a real­ly good sto­ry for telling us about tech­nol­o­gy and inter­est­ing ways that groups come togeth­er to build them, but it does­n’t tell us too much about cul­ture. So where else do peo­ple go? If we’re polling peo­ple ​“Where did the Internet come from?” the oth­er place that they will tell you is Silicon Valley.

Again, I was lucky dur­ing this project that I had an event occur where peo­ple expressed their coun­ter­fac­tu­al beliefs about the his­to­ry of the Internet, and this was the death of Steve Jobs, where thou­sands of peo­ple thanked him for cre­at­ing the Internet. Even President Obama stopped just a hair short of say­ing the same when he says that Steve Jobs, indi­vid­u­al­ly, ​“made the infor­ma­tion rev­o­lu­tion acces­si­ble and fun.”

In these moments, peo­ple are reveal­ing some of their coun­ter­fac­tu­al his­to­ry, and it kin­da made sense. For some folks, they think okay, Bay Area…yeah there’s some cul­tur­al stuff going on there, and peo­ple val­ue their egal­i­tar­i­an cul­ture and that’s kin­da like how the web works. So, yeah, it makes sense. 

However, if we actu­al­ly look at what prod­ucts and ser­vices were being bought and sold in the time, if you pur­chased an Apple com­put­er it did not come with any com­mu­ni­ca­tions devices or hard­ware. That was an addi­tion­al pur­chase, and kind of a hard sell. So for exam­ple, this is the pack­ag­ing for modem for the Commodore 64, which was a very afford­able home com­put­er of the time. You can see they’re try­ing real­ly hard to fig­ure out how to mar­ket this. It’s a chick­en and the egg prob­lem, because in order for the net­work to be valu­able, there have to be peo­ple already on the net­work that you want to talk to. So how do you get peo­ple on the network? 

What we find is it’s a real word of mouth kind of thing, which is like, you go to your friend’s house; they’re already on; they show you; then you are con­vinced to get a modem. On the pop­u­lar cul­tur­al lev­el, it spreads in a real person-to-person way. So if we’re not talk­ing about modems and their absence, then we’re kind of mis­char­ac­ter­iz­ing this peri­od. It rais­es yet anoth­er inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal ques­tion, which is if you went to the Apple store today and you bought a device and found out that it costs extra for it to have WiFi, it would be a pre­pos­ter­ous this. It would be like it [cost­ing] extra for your car to have brakes. The com­mu­ni­ca­tions fea­tures are defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of how we imag­ine net­worked per­son­al com­put­ing today. But they were not at this time, as evi­denced by the fact that none of the major home com­put­er brands shipped with com­mu­ni­ca­tions hard­ware by default.

So not ARPANET, not Silicon Valley. Where can we go? And this is real­ly my inter­ven­tion. This is where the project begins to take a turn for the his­tor­i­cal. My argu­ment here is that if you want a rich ori­gin sto­ry for all of these pop­u­lar cul­ture prac­tices, the places you need to go are the small grass-roots bul­letin board sys­tems that dot­ted North America dur­ing the 1980s.

Tens of thou­sands of sys­tems run main­ly by vol­un­teers and hob­by­ists out of their homes or the offices of their small busi­ness­es. Church base­ments, or by after-school clubs. This is the place where peo­ple first start­ed to encounter dif­fer­ence, that they were argu­ing about pol­i­tics, or that they were exper­i­ment­ing with online dat­ing or ecom­merce, or all the defin­ing activ­i­ties of the con­tem­po­rary social web.

This is sort of how I con­cep­tu­al­ize this big messy project. We want to know the role of com­put­er hob­by­ists. What are the mate­r­i­al con­tri­bu­tions that they made to build­ing the net­works that we’ve come to think of as the Internet? Then we also want to know the impli­ca­tions of this sto­ry. If you restore this sto­ry, and this sto­ry had as much of a promi­nent place in the pop­u­lar imag­i­nary as the ARPANET sto­ry, what would that mean for us, polit­i­cal­ly? What new polit­i­cal pos­si­b­li­ties would become available?

So here’s how I did it. The first thing is that there’s a rea­son that peo­ple haven’t done this work already, and it’s not because it’s not inter­est­ing. Almost every his­tor­i­cal book about the Internet will men­tion bul­letin board sys­tems along the way. Because every­body knows it mat­ters. The prob­lem is that it was insti­tu­tion­al­ly not very high­ly val­ued. In oth­er words, from the per­spec­tive of some­body who has access to those awe­some­ly pow­er­ful military-funded machines, it’s just not that inter­est­ing to look at dial-up bul­letin board sys­tems. So the folks that are leav­ing behind a lot of traces that are well-organized and placed in archives and libraries, those folks just weren’t mess­ing with these systems.

In fact, there’s evi­dence from when bul­letin board sys­tems got real­ly big they would have con­ven­tions and invite folks who were big com­put­er net­work­ing researchers to come speak, and the peo­ple would admit they had nev­er called a bul­letin board sys­tem, ten or fif­teen years after they had become a dom­i­nant form of hob­by networking.

That’s one prob­lem. Another prob­lem is that the key thing that we care about, which is the mes­sages, the chats, the files, the things that peo­ple were actu­al­ly doing on the boards, were high­ly ephemer­al. So even if you want­ed to col­lect it, it was real­ly hard to col­lect it. People did­n’t have the stor­age media need­ed. They just did­n’t have big hard dri­ves. It was real­ly cost­ly to print out mes­sages, and it’s hard to know what would’ve been worth keeping.

Like, now we want to know the every­day expe­ri­ence of a bul­letin board, but from the con­tem­po­rary moment of look­ing at the bul­letin board sys­tem as a sys­tem oper­a­tor, how do you choose which mes­sages are worth sav­ing and not? Indeded, when I look at the code of the bul­letin board sys­tem host soft­ware, often it had a set num­ber of mes­sages that could be stored, and when you got to the last one it just went back and wrote over the first one. So the his­to­ries were being writ­ten over by the very activ­i­ty. The more live­ly the board is, the more like­ly it is that we don’t have a record of all that went on there.

So we’ve got a chal­lenge. But for­tu­nate­ly, the same kind of pop­u­lar cul­ture, the same tech­ni­cal cul­tures that we’re inter­est­ed in doc­u­ment­ing, have also grown to include a kind of ama­teur preser­va­tion­ist activity. 

This is a snap­shot from a ham radio swap meet. There are ham radio swap meets in most big cities. There’s one at MIT on the cam­pus. This is a place where a dis­trib­uted archive of hob­by tech­nolo­gies comes togeth­er. It’s where it is man­i­fest. There are no find­ing aids, and there’s no easy index­es for us to use, but when we go to these places we meet peo­ple with exper­tise and expe­ri­ence and excite­ment, who have an inter­est in find­ing and pre­serv­ing these sorts of mate­ri­als. So in a way these are the kinds of archives that I have to work with, and I pre­sume some of you soon will work with when you see how impor­tant and inter­est­ing this research is. And this is reflect­ed also in online spaces where peo­ple build web sites that serve as kind of nodes in this dis­trib­uted archive, some of which are just lin­ger­ing. They were con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous with Internet bul­letin board sys­tems of the 1990s, and some of which are more reflective. 

So if you see this top left cor­ner, the BBS Mates, that’s a data­base of bul­letin board sys­tems orga­nized by their names and their area codes, their dial-up phone num­bers. In the About page for it, the per­son says, ​“Did you lose con­tact with your friends? Here’s a place for you to find each oth­er again.” So there is some mem­o­ry work that’s only recent­ly start­ed to hap­pen that we can inter­face with as researchers. 

But the inter­face has some tricky eth­i­cal ter­ri­to­ry that comes along with it. It’s hard to know from a researcher point of view how we relate to this dis­trib­uted archive. The rela­tion­ship to a library archive is a lit­tle bit more clear. 

But here’s a pic­ture that I took from some­one’s home look­ing at just a piece of the col­lec­tion that they have amassed. When I encoun­tered this I was feel­ing like I should turn away and run, because it was fright­en­ing. It was like, whoa, there’s a lot of stuff here and it is not orga­nized and I don’t know what to do about it. Then what I learned through spend­ing time is that there are ways that these mate­ri­als cir­cu­late that have labor attached to them. So there become cer­tain fig­ures in these com­mu­ni­ties who are bear­ing a very large bur­den, who are kind of serv­ing a mid­dle role between the for­mal col­lect­ing insti­tu­tions catch­ing up and start­ing to build and house these things, and their ini­tial production. 

So in the case of this per­son, part of the way that their col­lec­tion grew so large is that they got a rep­u­ta­tion in the com­mu­ni­ty for some­one who val­ues and [pre­serves] these mate­ri­als. And oth­er peo­ple would send them unso­licit­ed box­es of stuff, along with notes that said things like, ​“I know that you will take care of this. It was so impor­tant to me I held onto it for twen­ty years.” Just putting this incred­i­ble emo­tion­al bur­den on this per­son to be the stew­ard of a com­mu­ni­ty’s history.

This is anoth­er place that I vis­it­ed that is full of com­put­er ephemera. It is a stor­age con­tain­er that was fund­ed through the crowd­fund­ing plat­form Kickstarter, and this is a pic­ture of me inside of it where it was below freez­ing and we were going through all these mate­ri­als. While I was there and I was lit­er­al­ly freez­ing, to the point there was blood com­ing out of my fin­gers, I was think­ing about mate­ri­al­i­ty, sure. But also, what is my role in that moment? Am I just a researcher doing archival work? Because we’re hav­ing con­ver­sa­tion while we’re work­ing, there’s a lev­el of inti­ma­cy that’s going on here that was unex­pect­ed to me. I did­n’t think of this as an inter­view or as an ethno­graph­ic moment. So this is a chal­lenge that we will have to con­tin­ue to take up.

And this slide is a bit of an invi­ta­tion because we’re in a local insti­tu­tion, so some of the mate­ri­als that I’ve col­lect­ed are now in a very small book­shelf that’s in the 1 Memorial Drive build­ing near­by. So if any of you are inter­est­ed in this work, you should let me know and you can come and vis­it and take a look at some of the mate­ri­als that I’ve collected.

So I described a lot of work. Some of it was mine, a lot of it was oth­er peo­ple’s, but it enabled me to put togeth­er the pieces for what I think is a pret­ty com­pelling alter­na­tive ori­gin story. 

All ori­gin sto­ries need to have some kind of start­ing moment, a con­text with­in which every­thing became pos­si­ble. For us I locate that in the mid-1970s, for a few dif­fer­ent rea­sons, some cul­tur­al, some polit­i­cal, some eco­nom­ic, some technological. 

Here is a blown-up snap­shot of the stan­dard tele­phone jack. It may be dif­fi­cult to rememe­ber, if you can remem­ber this far at all, but this was an inno­va­tion and it only came about through seri­ous polit­i­cal inter­ven­tion on the part of the gov­ern­ment into how the tele­phone com­pa­nies worked. It was only til the mid-1970s if you lived in a big city that when you rent­ed a new apart­ment you could assume that there would be a stan­dard­ized phone jack on the wall for you to plug into. Prior to that, you had to call some­body from the tele­phone com­pa­ny to come and wire you up. This was part and par­cel of a num­ber of moves that were around this junc­ture between the peri­od of time when the tele­phone net­work was a reg­u­lat­ed monop­oly and the peri­od of time where it became de-regulated. And both sides of that his­to­ry are essen­tial for cre­at­ing the con­di­tions with­in which dial-up bul­letin boards became possible.

So when we think about the mid-1970s, we think about a project that had pub­lic inter­est at its heart which built an infra­struc­ture for com­mu­ni­ca­tion that con­nect­ed almost all of the homes in the US. Not only did it con­nect them, it also gave us a very robust and easy to under­stand address­ing sys­tem, which was the phone num­bers. The phone num­bers are real­ly inter­est­ing; they’re not ran­dom. You have the area code and the exchange, which gives you infor­ma­tion about how much it will cost to call that num­ber, and where on the map that num­ber is locat­ed. So if some­one gives you a phone num­ber, you learn over time, or you can look up in a book, that’s in Wyoming, and this is down the street, and this costs a lost, and this does­n’t cost any­thing. So we got this real­ly inter­est­ing sys­tem, and then through de-regulation it became pos­si­ble to exper­i­ment with that net­work. So not only did we have a net­work that con­nect­ed almost every­body, but it worked in a real­ly reli­able way and it was now legal for you with­out any pri­or approval to just con­nect some new toy to it, some­thing that you built your­self or you bought, so that’s why we got fax machines and answer machines, and the modem. But this goes by with­out most peo­ple notic­ing it. It’s like some­what more con­ve­nient, but if you’re just a tele­phone user it’s like, okay ther’s now a dif­fer­nt plug in the wall. 

This is more inter­est­ing. This is the poster from Smokey and the Bandit, by all rights a mas­sive hit in pop­u­lar cin­e­ma. If you look in the logo for Smokey and the Bandit, you see the micro­phone for a CB radio. Also in the paint­ing, with all that’s going on, Burt Reynolds is still hold­ing on to the CB radio with his left hand and a Coors in his right hand as he’s truck­ing from Texarkana car­ry­ing all of the beer back to Texas where a big par­ty will take place.

So the CB radio has shift­ed ama­teur telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions from this kind of orga­nized rule-based ama­teur radio place where peo­ple are very inter­est­ed in doing it right and doing it well, to a pret­ty chaot­ic wild space of cow­boys and truck­ers and mus­cle car dri­vers who are out there just talk­ing, evad­ing police, try­ing to do all kinds of things. And the boom of the CB radio hap­pens across mul­ti­ple areas of pop­u­lar cul­ture. So there’s films like Smokey and the Bandit and Convoy, but there’s also songs on the radio that have the sounds of the CB radio in it. So for your every­day con­sumer of pop­u­lar cul­ture, the notion that tech­nolo­gies could be used for com­mu­ni­cat­ing with oth­er peo­ple at a dis­tance in a way that’s fun, that’s plea­sur­able and maybe a lit­tle bit sub­ver­sive, is a pret­ty mass idea at this time. And it’s reflect­ed in the lit­er­a­ture of the tech­ni­cal hobbies. 

This book is titled Hobby Computers are Here, and it is pub­lished by 73, which was a pub­lish­er of ama­teur radio books and mag­a­zines, and edit­ed by Wayne Green, who pro­vides his call sign. Green was pub­lish­ing columns in ama­teur radio mag­a­zines entreat­ing the read­ers to get involved in hob­by com­put­ing, say­ing, ​“This makes a lot of sense. If you like radio, you’re going to like com­put­ing.” Then he went on to found a num­ber of mag­a­zines, includ­ing Byte, which became one of the most wide­ly read and dis­trib­uted hob­by com­put­ing mag­a­zines. So from that orig­i­nal moment, the con­nec­tion between telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, ama­teur telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, and hob­by com­put­ing was pret­ty clear.

Here’s a group of peo­ple that cap­i­tal­ized on it quite ear­ly. In February of 1978 there was like two friends who were mem­bers of the same com­put­er club, and they got snowed in and decid­ed to do a project. This was the [Great] Blizzard of 1978 win­ter. The project they con­ceived of was sim­i­lar to oth­er projects that were get­ting under way by dif­fer­ent com­put­er clubs, but they called it CBBS, which is help­ful for us because they bor­rowed the rhetor­i­cal struc­ture of com­put­er­i­za­tion of some­thing, which was very com­mon for the two decades pri­or. There had been the com­put­er­i­za­tion of finance, and the com­put­er­i­za­tion of air trav­el, and com­put­er­i­za­tion of vot­ing. And here there is com­put­er­i­za­tion of bul­letin boards. 

So they kind of paired this super high-tech thing, com­put­er­i­za­tion, with one of the most low-tech com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies that would be famil­iar to every­day folks: the com­mu­ni­ty bul­letin board that’s in the local gro­cery store or the church, that any­body can post a mes­sage on. The mes­sages can be all sorts of things, they could be art, they could be announc­ing events and oth­er things. They imag­ined a com­put­er based sys­tem, just sit­ting in one of their homes con­nect­ed to the wall, and it invites you to come in and leave mes­sages. And I’m very inten­tion­al with my use of the verb ​“invite” here because they real­ly did con­ceive of it almost like an open house. The callers that were call­ing into the bul­letin board were vis­it­ing the home of Randy Suess, and like­wise they kind of expect­ed them to fol­low cer­tain social pro­to­col like, ​“Don’t be a jerk and mess up the place. I’m wel­com­ing you to take con­trol of my com­put­er temporarily.”

So there’s this kind of infor­mal friend­li­ness. And this appealed to a lot of folks who are already in lit­tle net­works of com­put­er hob­by­ists, local com­put­er groups and things like that. So quick­ly, bul­letin board sys­tems pro­lif­er­at­ed, par­tic­u­lar­ly in met­ro­pol­i­tan areas where the area codes were large enough that you could make a lot of cheap calls. So it’s actu­al­ly inter­est­ing because if you’re in a super-dense area, they were chop­ping up the areas so you could­n’t call as far with a toll-free call. So you may be liv­ing in a place like this hypo­thet­i­cal per­son where you have two bul­letin boards near­by. You could have dif­fer­ent accounts on them, dif­fer­ent names, you could have a total­ly dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ty. So the bul­letin board notion, this net­work of small net­works, an inter­net of sorts, gave peo­ple a lot of flex­i­bil­i­ty about how they pre­sent­ed them­selves and how they engaged dif­fer­ent communities.

This is a chart (and I use this chart instead of mak­ing my own because this was made by Jason Scott, who’s a well-known enthu­si­ast of bul­letin boards and also a doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er who made a doc­u­men­tary about them) and he esti­mates that there are over 90,000 BBSs at peak time. But this chart also invites us to spec­u­late, because a bul­letin could be three friends who just for fun make a bul­letin board sys­tem and hang out a shin­gle, or it could be three thou­sand peo­ple who are rou­tine­ly call­ing in and trad­ing soft­ware and doing all kinds of things.

So it’s anoth­er his­tor­i­cal chal­lenge for us to esti­mate how many peo­ple were involved in this. But I think we get to this point where we can think of this as a par­al­lel world. There are par­al­lel tracks here where the ARPANET is devel­op­ing real­ly robust ways of doing inter­net­work­ing over long dis­tance with var­i­ous types of media. Sometimes it goes over the wires, some­times it goes over the air­waves, some­times it goes to a satel­lite. And at the same time there are hob­by­ists who are using just the tele­phone net­work that had been in place for decades, but they’re devel­op­ing all this social tech­nol­o­gy on top of it, fig­ur­ing out how you should mod­er­ate the sys­tem, admin­is­ter it, who’s in charge, who makes the rules, what are good rules, what are bad rules, how do you kick peo­ple off if they’re being a jerk, how do you get more cool peo­ple to join you? All of that is hap­pen­ing on this kind of peo­ple’s Internet layer.

So we can expand our table and put them togeth­er, and we’ll come back to the impli­ca­tions of this in a moment. But the peo­ple at the time con­ceived of it as this oth­er space, and own­ing a modem and using a modem was real­ly a mark of dis­tinc­tion. People would say, ​“I’m a modemer.I’m not just any com­put­er user, I have a modem. I’m part of the modem world. I go modem­ing. I do this thing that’s dif­fer­ent, that’s unusu­al.” And so the modem world had cer­tain fea­tures that would be rec­og­niz­able regard­less of where you hap­pened to be in the network. 

One is that there were low bar­ri­ers to get­ting involved, but also to leav­ing. So if you did­n’t like the way it was going, you could get out. Part of that has to do with polit­i­cal econ­o­my. There’s sym­me­try between the hosts and the clients in these net­works. So where­as in ARPANET the hosts are real­ly expen­sive mini­com­put­ers and the clients are dumb ter­mi­nals in this time-sharing par­a­digm, on these bul­letin board sys­tems, the com­put­er you use to call a bul­letin board could be used to host a bul­letin board. So there is a real par­i­ty there. 

I put these num­bers here to give some con­text for when I say that things are afford­able. Because when I say afford­able I do mean a very con­ven­tion­al notion of what middle-class 1980s American looks like. But we tend to col­lapse all the com­put­ers togeth­er when the pric­ing was an area of eco­nom­ic inter­est. It was­n’t clear how to price these machines yet. So you can see this is the Nintendo Entertainment System, which few peo­ple peo­ple thing of as an elite tech­nol­o­gy; it seems like quite a pop­ulist sys­tem. And yet it was more expen­sive at launch than the Commodore 64, which also was a game-playing device but had these addi­tion­al affor­dances of being a thing you could learn to pro­gram on or con­nect to bul­letin boards. There were, of course, very expen­sive sys­tems like the IBM PC, which trad­ed on the busi­ness rep­u­ta­tion of the IBM brand, and the Apple PC which did aspire to be this very expen­sive elite cul­tur­al prod­uct. So both of those cost as much as a used car would.

This low cost had caught the inter­est of folks who build net­works. One group of those are polit­i­cal activists. Here is a book that caused some con­tro­ver­sy upon its release among folks who hoped that BBSes would achieve some Wall Street legit­i­ma­cy, The Anarchist’s Guide to the BBS, where the author says that the BBS is the ​“five hun­dred dol­lar anar­chy machine” and specif­i­cal­ly men­tions that you should go to thrift shops or busi­ness­es that are clos­ing and see if you can buy old machines. He’s like, the cen­tral activ­i­ty you want to do here is chat­ting and shar­ing mes­sages with peo­ple, and he even says ​“amber let­ters read as nice­ly as red, blue, and pur­ple, and a mono­chrome sys­tem is much cheaper.”

So there was this aware­ness that even when we do this kind of eco­nom­ic look at the his­to­ry and look at the prices, there’s a sec­ond life that a lot of machines had that’s invis­i­ble from the industry-level met­rics that are avail­able. This low cost led to a dis­tri­b­u­tion of own­er­ship over the infrastructure. 

[The T.A.R.D.I.S BBS] is a BBS that I came across dur­ing my archival peri­od of research. This one ran for ten years on the same Appke II, but yet it was live­ly and it was beloved by its users. It was not inter­est­ed in tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion but the four peo­ple who found­ed it, two men and two women, were real­ly inter­est­ed in cre­at­ing a sys­tem that was acces­si­ble by many def­i­n­i­tions of the word. Accessible both in terms of dis­abil­i­ty, and acces­si­ble to peo­ple from dif­fer­ent social stra­ta. So when they real­ized that women who were going on oth­er bul­letin board sys­tems where they were sound­ly out­num­bered (this was an over­whelm­ing­ly male pur­suit) they cre­at­ed a women’s-only area on their bul­letin board sys­tem, and in order to enter the area you had to be ver­i­fied by a voice phone call or a face-to-face meet­ing with the women who were in charge of mod­er­at­ing the area.

In reflect­ing on this peri­od of time, the founder of the board said to me, ​“Still to this day I have no idea what went on in there.” It’s inter­est­ing for him to say that con­sid­er­ing that the machine was in his home. So there’s the disk whirring away, and there’s phone calls com­ing in, and peo­ple are access­ing this women-only area, and he can­not see it because he has locked him­self out of it pro­gram­mat­i­cal­ly. This is a sys­tem that peo­ple remem­ber fond­ly because of that. It also encour­aged them to meet offline. Many of the peo­ple here lived around Indianapolis and they would get togeth­er month­ly for piz­za par­ties and stuff like that.

So there was a real move for the online and offline dis­tinc­tion to be con­tin­u­ous. That reflects an affor­dance here that’s not imme­di­ate­ly obvi­ous, which is because of those low bar­ri­ers and because there were peo­ple own­ing dif­fer­ent nodes of the net­work and man­ag­ing them dif­fer­ent­ly, you had a lot more auton­o­my over how you behaved and how you expe­ri­enced this sys­tem. When you vis­it the home of some­body who’s host­ing a BBS, there is noth­ing abstract about where you’re data is stored. You know where it is, it’s lit­er­al­ly on that brown desk in the cor­ner of that room in that house, and I know the address and I might’ve even vis­it­ed it. Which is such a con­trast to the way that our data is evap­o­rat­ed into a kind of cloud imag­i­nary that we are hope­ful­ly think­ing is ubiq­ui­tous. There were advan­tages to know­ing exact­ly where your data was stored. So you might choose to con­duct cer­tain types of com­mu­ni­ca­tion on this node that you would­n’t on that node, and vice versa.

And of course this was extreme­ly impor­tant to com­mu­ni­ties who were using these sys­tems who were oth­er­wise fac­ing oppres­sion, or were mar­gin­al­ized, or their com­mu­ni­ca­tion was being sup­pressed in oth­er syst­mat­ic sorts of ways. The gay and les­bian BBS list, which was com­piled and cir­cu­lat­ed month­ly, was orga­nized by area code so that you could eas­i­ly locate a sys­tem that is near to you. You can think of lots of rea­sons why it would be help­ful to know if a sys­tem that is geared towards gay and les­bian users in the 1980s is near­by. Not only is it cheap­er to call (you have an eco­nom­ic rea­son to do it) but there’s also a chance that those peo­ple are deal­ing with con­di­tions that are unique to that region. There may be laws in place that are not in place in oth­er states, there may be com­mer­cials on TV that are offen­sive to you and you want to talk to peo­ple that are near­by about it. So it cre­ates this safe space to go where you can assume that the oth­er peo­ple there are fac­ing sim­i­lar regionally-specific conditions.

So with these kind of char­ac­ter­is­tics in mind, let’s go back just as a way to con­clude and think about this recent peri­od we’ve gone through of sav­ing the Internet. Here’s an image of activists protest­ing out­side the FCC in advance of the rul­ing about net neu­tral­i­ty, who are say­ing keep the Internet free. And of course after lis­ten­ing to be gab for 45 min­utes, you’re ask­ing your­selves, ​“Oh well, what is the Internet that you’re talk­ing about here?” Is it the Internet of bul­letin board sys­tems with all these locally-specific, tightly-managed, very hands-on face-to-face type rela­tion­ships, or is it the highly-centralized, vertically-integrated walled gar­dens that we tend to com­mit our very valu­able inti­mate com­mu­ni­ca­tions to today?

I’m going to go one step fur­ther and show a mate­r­i­al link that exists between these two worlds. Some of the biggest bul­letin board sys­tems that were thriv­ing in the mid-1990s were pro­vid­ing some lim­it­ed Internet ser­vices. So you could dial in and then you could send email. Sometimes you could use what’s known as SLIP and cre­ate a kind of IP con­nec­tion so you could use Mosaic or Netscape or some­thing like that. 

And what’s so fun­ny is that many of these bul­letin board oper­a­tors saw that there was poten­tial to make mon­ey with this new infor­ma­tion super­high­way bub­ble. So they would cre­ate cor­po­ra­tions and give them much more staid names. So Crazy House BBS became the first Internet Service Provider to serve the west coast of Florida around St. Petersburg [as ​“Florida Network Technologies, Inc.”], and they def­i­nite­ly did­n’t mar­ket them­selves as ​“Crazy House” when they did that. It was a business-friendly ISP. They grew through this peri­od, and the bul­letin board sys­tem stayed, but it also facil­i­tat­ed this Internet access. So the big entrenched tele­com com­pa­nies, it was not a pri­or­i­ty to bring high-speed Internet access to St. Petersburg. So the guys that ran Crazy House were the Internet. There’s no dis­tinc­tion or rhetor­i­cal moves that we have to make. They pro­vid­ed Internet ser­vice to the communities—large communities—along the Gulf Coast.

And there was mon­ey in it, because the big ISPs when they decid­ed to come in, would see that this small grass­roots ISP was already there, and it made a lot more sense to buy them out. There’s lots of good eco­nom­ic rea­sons to have these huge monop­o­lis­tic ISPs because they can take advan­tage of net­work exter­nal­i­ties and oth­er sorts of things. But what that moment of acqui­si­tion does is that it rup­tures the clear mate­r­i­al and cul­tur­al con­nec­tion between the 1980s grass­roots sys­tems and the com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems we val­ue now.

So here we are back at our keep­ing the Internet free. And we can move for­ward with our activism and our advo­ca­cy with this enlarged imag­i­nary, and we can ask for an Internet that looks a lit­tle more like the col­umn on the right. Where there’s a place for community-run sys­tems. Where nodes can be oper­at­ed by small and medium-size enter­pris­es. And where there can be more locally-specific con­trol and moderation.

So I’ve giv­en you this provoca­tive pic­ture, and let’s talk about it for the time that we have left.

Thanks.

[It seems no micro­phone was passed around, so audi­ence ques­tions were extreme­ly faint to inaudi­ble. Kevin’s respons­es are includ­ed below, and are gen­er­al­ly detailed enough to get a sense of what the ques­tions were.]

Response 1: That’s a real­ly good ques­tion, and there’s two answers. There’s implic­it con­nec­tions, which is almost like rein­vent­ing the wheel, in a way. I think for exam­ple, Yik Yak recre­ates some of the regionally-specific con­ver­sa­tion that hap­pens on a BBS, but it’s not because the founders of Yik Yak used BBSes. They were chil­dren at the time that this was real­ly thriving. 

That’s one answer. Another answer is where peo­ple moved and they took their expe­ri­ences for­ward. So there you can see it more in the dis­cus­sion of larger-scale sys­tems where…and in a way this hap­pens more in places where the BBS peri­od lin­gered longer— So I have Google alerts for tons of key­words relat­ed to my research, and some­thing that’s real­ly strik­ing is that there’s a lot more mem­o­ry work hap­pen­ing among Russian-language com­put­er hob­by­ists than among English-language com­put­er hob­by­ists of remem­ber­ing some of the big BBS networks.

Even sim­ple things such as putting the Russian-language Wikipedia pages for cer­tain big net­works and the English-language pages side by side, there is so much more mem­o­ry work going on. So what hap­pened there is some­times peo­ple use the exact same han­dles or names from their dial-up sys­tems in a web-based forum, or a sub­red­dit, or some­thing like that. They have a con­tin­u­ous iden­ti­ty that hops as the infra­struc­tures beneath them change. 

So yeah, there’s some implic­it and some explic­it connections.

Response 2: I’m inter­est­ed in Reddit, and Lana [Swartz] and I have been talk­ing about Reddit a lot recent­ly. Lana, who’s anoth­er CMS alumn and I have a paper that is about interest-driven mes­sage boards, like inde­pen­dent web sites that peo­ple go to talk about a shared inter­est. It could be sports; in the case we looked at it was about gem col­lec­tors. [“ ​‘I hate your pol­i­tics but I love your dia­monds’: The Web-based Interest-driven Messageboard as DIY Infrastructure” (Google Books pre­view) in DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media] There, we sug­gest­ed that it was the­o­ret­i­cal­ly use­ful to imag­ine all web forums as a sin­gle socio-technical phe­nom­e­non that we called ​“the decen­tral­ized social web.” That gave us a reasonably-shaped unit of analy­sis to com­pare that against some­thing like Facebook.

What’s inter­est­ing to me about Reddit is that it occu­pies this mid­dle space, where to me Reddit is like eco­nom­ic enclo­sure of that decen­tral­ized activ­i­ty. Reddit pro­vides the tools for you to start a forum and it looks a lot like bul­letin board sys­tems. In fact one of the places I go to see retro­com­put­ing enthu­si­asts talk about BBSes is on a sub­red­dit called r/bbs, which is just too recur­sive for me to manage.

But there you see that could be admin­is­tered in a decen­tral­ized sort of way that allows some of the full auton­o­my of the dial-up sys­tem, but there’s an eco­nom­ic rea­son that it is ful­ly enclosed and owned, and that’s part­ly to cen­tral­ize all the data in a com­mon store that’s acces­si­ble to only a small num­ber of peo­ple. So I can see why that is hap­pen­ing, and I don’t expect that to stop soon. But I do expect that peo­ple will start to frag­ment their con­ver­sa­tions across many dif­fer­ent platforms. 

And that’s not real­ly a pre­dic­tion because that already hap­pens. You look at your phone and you have like nine apps that you can send me a mes­sage on, and you decide in the moment, ” Well, Kevin and I talk about sports on this app and we talk about work on GMail and so I click on that and I send the mes­sage.” I have many dif­fer­ent chan­nels, and chan­nels have dif­fer­ent sym­bol­ic mean­ing attached to them, and the mes­sages that come through them are shot through and laden with those meanings.

Response 3: It’s inter­est­ing from both a crit­i­cal art and tech­nol­o­gy point of view, and schol­ar­ship of maybe ten or fif­teen years ago, peo­ple were real­ly excit­ed about peer-to-peer, and it seemed like peer-to-peer was going to be the answer. Peer-to-peer sys­tems are gen­er­al­ly described as dis­trib­uted, mean­ing every node can con­nect to every oth­er node, that’s like a rad­i­cal­ly dis­trib­uted sys­tem. I’m pret­ty crit­i­cal about my choice of ​“decen­tral­ized,” which is there are still cen­ters, it’s just that the cen­ters hap­pen at a much more local scale, and there are many many more cen­ters, and there are redun­dan­cies among the cen­ters so that if one of them takes a turn away from your cul­tur­al val­ues, you can opt to choose a dif­fer­ent cen­ter. So in a way, we used to think a lot about bar­ri­ers of entry and we want to low­er the bar­ri­ers of entry. That was a big con­cern for all media schol­ar­ship. We want to see like, we went from film to video and the bar­ri­ers of entry went down with some costs asso­ci­at­ed with them. 

But now I’m real­ly con­cerned about bar­ri­ers to exit, because the bar­ri­er to exit for some­thing like Facebook is ridicu­lous­ly high. So tons of peo­ple stay no mat­ter how unhap­py they are with the way that the sys­tem is gov­erned and the poor stew­ard­ship of our pub­lic cul­ture that hap­pens in that place. So I want to think about sys­tems that have low­er bar­ri­ers to exit, even if their bar­ri­ers to entry are a lit­tle bit high­er, which real­ly is the case for some of these kind of things.

Response 4: So the term ​“net­work” is gen­er­a­tive for schol­ars because it has mobil­i­ty across all of these dif­fer­ent domains, and so we can imag­ine that any humans that lived in as densely-settled com­mu­ni­ties as we do now had social net­works that pro­lif­er­at­ed the way that yours have. The dif­fer­ence that we face now (and this almost bridges to your oth­er ques­tion) is that they are often inscribed in socio-technical sys­tems in ways that they might not have been before. So you might have met the bas­ket­ball group infor­mal­ly and you agree each time you meet when to meet the next time and share infor­ma­tion about what Ben Gay sub-brand is the best. But now that con­ver­sa­tion can car­ry through in between meet­ings, and it leaves behind dig­i­tal traces of a sort. 

So there is a ques­tion then about what media you choose to use for dif­fer­ent net­works. That’s a lit­tle bit what I’m point­ing to with hav­ing the dif­fer­ent apps and things like that. Some of the social net­works that you are engaged with will opt to use one sys­tem or anoth­er, and it does seem to me that there are cas­es where peo­ple’s social net­works have moments of break­down or con­flict over dis­agree­ments over which medi­um to use to have their con­ver­sa­tions on. My inter­est then is real­ly more about both the tech­ni­cal affor­dances and val­ues asso­ci­at­ed with those media, and also the political-economic dimen­sions of them. So if your bas­ket­ball ball group is hav­ing small but not insignif­i­cant eco­nom­ic exter­nal­i­ties for this cor­po­ra­tion that is send­ing its prof­its over­seas so as not to pay the tax­es that will then make sure that there are nets on the hoops at the pub­lic bas­ket­ball ball court, that has some sig­nif­i­cance that is his­tor­i­cal­ly unusual.

So that would be one answer. The oth­er thing about his­to­ry, which I love talk­ing about with hob­by­ists because some of what dri­ves the com­put­er hob­by­ists is a sense of loss, which is like, ​“This thing was so impor­tant and I was part of this big net­work and it was huge and there was thou­sands of peo­ple there, I swear.” And you will even see when you start look­ing at say, blog posts that are about vio­la­tions of pri­va­cy on Facebook, I hes­i­tate to say that there is a law, but I would almost pre­dict that when the com­ments get above a thou­sand or so, some­one will even­tu­al­ly say, ​“Boy, I wish we could go back to those BBSes, ha ha. I bet I’m the only one who remem­bers that.”

There’s this very unusu­al social mem­o­ry thing that’s hap­pen­ing with folks there. So some­times the peo­ple that would be like­ly to utter some­thing like that would be like, ​“Oh, we’re los­ing it but at least you’re engaged in doc­u­ment­ing or sav­ing it.” And it’s like, we might be los­ing it but we’re los­ing it a lot less than peo­ple who are in dis­ad­van­taged posi­tions of var­i­ous kinds ever did before. So doing social his­to­ry of com­put­ers of the 80s, it’s like we’ve got tons of stuff.

Response 5: That’s kind of what I’m say­ing. Things that nev­er left a trace do leave traces now, and in fact over­whelm­ing traces. From the point of view of if there was a pro­fes­sion­al archivist here, they would say— Actually I have an empir­i­cal quote. I vis­it­ed anoth­er archive that was the Microsoft cor­po­rate archive, and the archivist there told me that from her per­spec­tive man­ag­ing very very large insti­tu­tion­al archives, her biggest skill that she devel­oped was what to throw away, because every time they released a prod­uct, there was like fifty lan­guage ver­sions of it. So did she need to pre­serve Excel for each dif­fer­ent mar­ket that they sold it in, or was it okay to have one ver­sion, or should she make a dig­i­tal copy of each and just save one box? Very unusu­al kinds of archival ques­tions which are not scarcity-driven, but are dri­ven by abundance.

So that’s from a cor­po­rate his­to­ry point of view. But from a social his­to­ry point of view, it’s sim­i­lar. There’s a lot of evi­dence, but the shape of the evi­dence is very unusu­al. Thinking about this is almost a sta­tis­ti­cal way, we’ve got these bits of data and we’re kind of try­ing to fit them to a curve but we’re miss­ing all these dif­fer­ent parts. An exam­ple of that is the mate­ri­als that I rely on are often pre­served by video game enthu­si­asts whose sole goal is to be able to play old games. And on the road to being able to play an old game, they may pro­duce some knowl­edge or tech­nol­o­gy or soft­ware that I can then use to recre­ate or sim­u­late an old bul­letin board sys­tem. That was not at all the goal of that com­mu­ni­ty. So if peo­ple like that become aware that BBSes are impor­tant, they may come across the soft­ware and save it, but by and large you can go and get a tor­rent that has every sin­gle Commodore 64 game known to man, but try to find all the Commodore 64 com­mu­ni­ca­tions soft­ware and it’s a much trick­i­er terrain.

So there’s some inter­est­ing stuff that goes on in terms of what gets saved, and it does­n’t fit pre­vi­ous mod­els of decid­ing what was worth sav­ing, but it does­n’t mean that it’s whol­ly egal­i­tar­i­an or uni­ver­sal, either. There is a dialec­tic at play in the Internet at large, which is the Internet is for­ev­er and it will embar­rass you thir­ty years from now and it nev­er for­gets. That’s one strand of con­ver­sa­tion. And the oth­er strand is you can’t find things twice and it’s gone and there’s too much stuff and it’s infog­lut. These are polar oppo­site, total­ly con­tra­dict­ing per­spec­tives that peo­ple hold at once in their mind as they use the… They both can be true.

Response 6: There’s gen­er­a­tions with­in this BBSing com­mu­ni­ty, and there was a clear peri­od around 1990 where there was a young people/teenager/hacker land, peo­ple who are shar­ing a lot of games and stuff, and then there’s old­er folks who maybe had a busi­ness inter­est or they’d been talk­ing to the same peo­ple about Doctor Who for ten years and they did­n’t want to teach some­body how to use a bul­letin board. And peo­ple intu­itive­ly knew this is a board for adults, and this is a board for teens and some of the teens of the time would have said ​“this is bor­ing” to go to this place. ​“All the peo­ple talk about their jobs” or whatever. 

how­ev­er, there’s an inter­est­ing space which peo­ple called slam boards or flame boards where you would just go and talk smack to each oth­er. It seems to have recurred across many dif­fer­ent region­al com­mu­ni­ties, that teens would just cre­ate a bul­letin board sys­tem. And cre­at­ing a bul­letin board sys­tem can be as sim­ple as run­ning the soft­ware for a few hours and call­ing your friend and being like, ​“Okay, call me in fif­teen min­utes,” then hang­ing up and start­ing it then you can talk on the board. So the def­i­n­i­tion of a run­ning board is actu­al­ly pret­ty loose. 

There were even games and oth­er sorts of things. Formalized games that encour­aged board ver­sus board wars where peo­ple, almost grafit­ti crews fight­ing with each oth­er go and try to crash the oth­er per­son­’s board. Actually a sad end to the T.A.R.D.I.S. BBS that I men­tioned was that there were some local kids who fig­ured out a way that you could break their bul­letin board and take it offline, and it’s almost too per­fect for me to tell. I’m afraid you won’t believe me that this is the sto­ry, which is that new­er modems were so fast that when they con­nect­ed, the hand­shake sound con­fused the modem that was being used by the T.A.R.D.I.S. BBS and would make it hang up and then crash the board. So mere­ly call­ing at it with a 9600 bps modem would crash this board by a quirk, and at that time the per­son who was run­ning it did­n’t have the tech­ni­cal exper­tise or the time to fix this problem. 

Kids broke it and took it down week after week, and he even called their par­ents and was like, ​“Please stop your child from doing this,” and the par­ents got real­ly mad at him and said no. Then were were threats of police and stuff. Eventually the callers assumed that the board went offline so they stopped call­ing, and that was this peter­ing out point for that com­mu­ni­ty. It’s real­ly sad. 

So there were these things where some­times tech­nol­o­gy and social norms met in this case. So flood­ing a chat room is an exam­ple of that. Or upload­ing dis­gust­ing pic­tures of vic­tims of crimes or some­thing like that, where you’re inten­tion­al­ly tak­ing advan­tage of the affor­dances of the sys­tem in order to make it work less well for oth­er users.

And there are text files that cir­cu­lat­ed that were some­where between an FAQ or a guide that sug­gest­ed things you might do as a sys­tem oper­a­tor or mod­er­a­tor to pre­vent those things from hap­pen­ing, and ver­i­fy­ing callers by voice was a real­ly com­mon one. In fact, lat­er bul­letin board sys­tem soft­ware imple­ment­ed the fea­ture, which is real­ly neat, where you’d call in and say, ​“I’d like to become a mem­ber of this com­mu­ni­ty,” and you’d just leave your name and phone num­ber. Then when the per­son who ran the board came home there’d be a queue wait­ing that these three peo­ple called in, and then you just call them like, ​“Oh yeah, I’m Jim. The board is about video games.” Then they would get brought in and peo­ple at the time did­n’t real­ly spec­u­late explic­it­ly about this, but I think it’s a rea­son­able assump­tion to make that there is some­thing that occurs with peo­ple in a social/psychological way that if they’ve heard your voice it alters the expe­ri­ence rather than just com­ing in anony­mous­ly and you have no ori­en­ta­tion into what the pur­pose of that sys­tem is at all.

And there are a small num­ber (I have them in my lit­tle library, if any­body’s curi­ous about this mod­er­a­tion stuff) of books that are about run­ning bul­letin board sys­tems. So this one is how to cre­ate your bul­letin board sys­tem and it’s one of the first ones. It includes a lot of code to bring it online, but says noth­ing about how to get callers or how to treat them. Then with­in ten years, lat­er books that came out that are much longer and look kind of like they’re in the genre of How to Learn Java in 20 Days-type books, those would have all kinds of stuff about adver­tis­ing and how to charge fees. There’s a ton of dis­cus­sion about pric­ing and pay­ment and how to receive pay­ment and pay the bills, because it was­n’t free to run a bul­letin board sys­tem. Then they some­times include things, some­times in a legal­is­tic way and then occa­sion­al­ly more in a hands-on socio-cultural kind of way, on how to run a board, like what it means to be a sys­tem oper­a­tor beyond the tech­ni­cal stuff.

Response 7: Scoping it down to North America was just some­thing I had to do to make the project man­age­able, and in fact it’s a very transna­tion­al sto­ry and like I men­tioned with that anec­dote about Wikipedia pages, in many ways the sto­ry is much rich­er in Europe and espe­cial­ly Eastern Europe. Part of the rea­son is that, as I under­stand it, behind the Iron Curtain in cer­tain coun­tries telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions devel­oped dif­fer­ent­ly. So there was not the same pri­vate invest­ment in build­ing high-speed data and net­works. So in the US, high-speed data net­works were being built by MCI and these newly-deregulated long line tele­com com­pa­nies. So when it became polit­i­cal­ly fea­si­ble to inter­con­nect the sys­tems, it was like ​“the wires are already on the poles, so we can do that” where­as in oth­er places the ear­ly encounter of the net is bul­letin board systems. 

For exam­ple, it was a bul­letin board sys­tem net­work that brought Internet email to South Africa. This we know for sure. Then there’s more sto­ries that I’ve been hav­ing a more dif­fi­cult time sub­stan­ti­at­ing, but a kind of folk­lore among the bul­letin board sys­tem enthu­si­asts is that there were NGOs who were in dif­fer­ent places who were exchang­ing health infor­ma­tion that was com­ing out of US research insti­tu­tions, but was not yet avail­able in places like Northern Africa for rea­sons of gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship and sur­veil­lance. So in a way the bul­letin board sys­tem archi­tec­ture enabled some amount of sub­ver­sive com­mu­ni­ca­tion because the con­nec­tions are intermittent. 

Now I’m get­ting into the weeds a lit­tle bit of what would be a whole oth­er hour, but there was a way of inter­net­work­ing the bul­letin board sys­tems where the boards them­selves would call each oth­er and so in the mid­dle of the night two boards would call and then exchange mes­sages and syn­chro­nize their forums. What that means was if you were at Board A, you could talk to some­one at Board B with­out hav­ing to make that long-distance call. That tech­nol­o­gy was extend­ed to trans-oceanic links, so there were a small num­ber of bul­letin boards on the East Coast of the US that made calls into Western Europe and then the files and mes­sages dis­persed. And get­ting to David’s com­par­i­son, that struc­ture, that way of mak­ing a com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­work is exact­ly as a hun­dred years before when ama­teur radio oper­a­tors cre­at­ed trans-continental mes­sag­ing net­works using store and for­ward links, which is basi­cal­ly it takes a few hops to get your mes­sage there, but the mes­sage trav­els across the cheap­est route. So you always want your mes­sage to go through the cheap­est link.

There were also some wealthy peo­ple that were involved that just foot­ed the bill. There was a very wealthy per­son who was very con­cerned about the health of queer peo­ple and the abil­i­ty of queer peo­ple in dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try and in dif­fer­ent parts of the world to get access to infor­ma­tion about HIV and AIDS. They used their per­son­al wealth to call into the Department of Health and access new health papers each week, and then they used their per­son­al funds to call a whole bunch of oth­er nodes and redis­trib­ute the infor­ma­tion. There is a real­ly great sto­ry there and I’m look­ing for­ward to read­ing some­body else’s book that is about it, but you’re total­ly right that it is tricky to talk about a thing in its glob­al impli­ca­tions with­out los­ing a lot of real­ly impor­tant detail around the edges.

Response 8: You’re point­ing to a real­ly inter­est­ing aspect of denat­u­ral­iz­ing the way that the tech­nolo­gies work now. I think often about the smart­phone as this real­ly inter­est­ing radio that has mul­ti­ple anten­nas, and it can trans­mit and receive on a sur­pris­ing array of fre­quen­cies. I can talk on Bluetooth, and I can talk to the 3G net­works, and I can talk to WiFi, and that’s pret­ty wild, that I can jump between those dif­fer­ent types of radio com­mu­ni­ca­tions. But there’s no stan­dard app in my phone that when I want to trans­fer some­thing it sug­gests to me the opti­mal medi­um to use in that moment. There’s no way for me to cre­ate some log­ics in it that would say, if I’m mes­sag­ing with this per­son wait until I’m on this type of net­work, because I don’t want this mes­sage to go over T‑Mobile; I only want it to go over the MIT net­work, or some­thing like that.

So in a way, what we’re talk­ing about is maybe detect­ing pref­er­ences that say ​“You only ever mes­sage these peo­ple when you’re on WiFi. Should I delay them?” This is not a pri­or­i­ty in terms of our design, and it isn’t about Moore’s Law, or cre­at­ing faster net­works or some­thing like that. It’s about orga­niz­ing the tech­nolo­gies that we already have in a dif­fer­ent way so that when they com­mu­ni­cate, the types of com­mu­ni­ca­tion are reflect­ing some of the val­ues of the users differently. 

In a way it does point back to this ide­al­ized research net­work that was being devel­oped in the 1980s that real­ly did hope that it would work in a cer­tain way, but it’s hard to have a com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work that cross­es huge, vast tracts of land that does­n’t involve any cor­po­ra­tions at all. And espe­cial­ly polit­i­cal­ly intractable in the 1980, when we were in the project of cre­at­ing more for-profit enter­pris­es with­in the world of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions. So I mean, I love that way of iden­ti­fy­ing the con­flicts between the ide­al way that the net­work ought to work, the way that it does, and how some­times there can be mis­match­es there, but they work fine, and they kind of get along fine. It seems like that was hap­pen­ing for most of the ear­ly his­to­ry of the Internet. 

The turn­ing point real­ly is when almost all Internet users in North America shift­ed from a mix of dif­fer­ent ways of get­ting onto the Internet to just four or five dif­fer­ent broad­band Internet ser­vice providers. Then we fun­da­men­tal­ly changed what we mean by ​“Internet” and we’re de-emphasizing the net­work. A lot of our com­mu­ni­ca­tions nev­er leave our inter­net ser­vice provider. We nev­er actu­al­ly do the inter-networking of going to oth­er net­works. We’re always inside of Comcast or what­ev­er it is.

So yeah, I’m very curi­ous about futures that have more inter-networking involved in them, where I know that my com­mu­ni­ca­tions are trav­el­ing across dif­fer­ent kinds of net­works and I have some sense of the val­ues and pur­pos­es asso­ci­at­ed with those dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tion media.

Response 9: All sex­ting, all the time. Exclusively sex­ting. [More from the audi­ence mem­ber.] It’s very inter­est­ing to play the role of both schol­ar and polit­i­cal activist or advo­cate. So from a polit­i­cal point of view, save the Internet. I want to have net neu­tral­i­ty rules in place.

But from a schol­ar­ly point of view, I can see that polit­i­cal cam­paign made strange bed­fel­lows, where I’m sit­ting along­side of major media cor­po­ra­tions. That’s weird. I would­n’t have thought that that would nec­es­sar­i­ly have hap­pened. And why should the Internet be neu­tral for tele­vi­sion com­pa­nies to send tele­vi­sion shows to me? We already have net­works and means of send­ing tele­vi­sion shows around, so why is the use of the Internet for tele­vi­sion now crowd­ing out all of those pop­u­lar cul­tur­al activ­i­ties that you just men­tioned, be it sex­ting or tex­ting with a fam­i­ly member?

So I do think that there is a way that we can oper­ate on both lev­els, and there’s expe­di­en­cy and instru­men­tal prac­ti­cal real­i­ties that we have to con­front as polit­i­cal actors, and there’s also the­o­ret­i­cal dreams and imag­i­na­tion that we have to bring into the pic­ture to imag­ine what an ide­al sys­tem would be. And in an ide­al sys­tem, Netflix is seen as an exten­sion of tele­vi­sion, it is a mass medi­um, it is not the same as point-to-point com­mu­ni­ca­tion. YouTube seems to occu­py dif­fer­ent spaces, but YouTube caters through its struc­tures and poli­cies to entrenched mass media companies. 

This isn’t to say that mass media com­pa­nies are bad or some­thing like that, but they are fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal actors than indi­vid­u­als or non-profit groups or church orga­ni­za­tions, and treat­ing them all the same seems to be a rad­i­cal shift from the way we’ve man­aged media in the past.

Response 10: I think sex­ting is extreme­ly mean­ing­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I don’t know what to say about that. I would not want a ces­sa­tion of sex­u­al con­tent online. And it’s fun­ny, I’m engaged in anoth­er project about Minitel, which was a French state-run net­work that’s often remem­bered as a highly-censored net­work, but the state had no inter­est in the sex­u­al activ­i­ties of its users and in fact that was the first major sys­tem for online sex­u­al con­tent. And lots of peo­ple had real­ly nice affairs through that, I’m sure, and they wrote songs about it that you could hear in the club and stuff like that. So, peo­ple are going to use the media for what­ev­er social needs that they have. It could be trans­fer­ring data files, it could be find­ing some­body to hook up with. Those are both real­ly impor­tant valu­able uses. So I don’t know what will come from that.

Thanks.