[ICTs-and-Society] what is the subject matter?

[Leah Lievrouw]

Hi, I second Andrew's observation here -- "internet" was a generic term 
in the computing community denoting a network-of-networks long before 
computers were popularly perceived as media by the general public or the 
market, with the introduction of browsers in the early 90s. Janet 
Abbate's book /Inventing the Internet/ has quite a bit to say about the 
economics and politics of X.25 vs. TCP/IP in the U.S. (as Andrew rightly 
points out, Minitel in France and other "information utilities" like 
videotex in the 1970s-80s really prefigured the 
information-retrieval/delivery-driven internet of the 1990s and early 
2000s). Early "internet" (aka non-defense-secret Arpanet) accounts were 
available in American research universities in the late 70s (I had one 
at a University of Texas medical campus that was linked to the UT 
arpanet node in Dallas). Indeed many of the early architects of the 
Arpanet were astonished that person-to-person messaging quickly became 
the bulk of the network's traffic by the later 70s, even just among 
research and military users. And similar "intranets" for 
intra-organizational messaging were common in tech and telecoms 
companies like AT&T, DEC, IBM, and so on.

my two bits!      Leah


On 1/7/13 5:13 PM, Andrew Feenberg wrote:
> The Internet is very important today but historically it evolved in isolation from society as a whole until long after communication by computer developed in the public domain on the basis of the very different X.25 protocol with support primarily from telephone companies. There was widespread communication on computer networks in the 1980s, although of course nothing like what we see today since it was almost entirely professional. The big exception was France where the Minitel system attracted millions of users in the 1980s. I think the argument over the origins of the study of the Internet is not very interesting since the substantive issue is communication by computer and the study of that subject matter goes back well before the emergence of the Internet as a public system.
>

-- 
Leah A. Lievrouw, Professor
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
216 GSE&IS Building | Box 951520
Los Angeles, CA  90095-1520

Tel  +1 310 825 1840   Fax +1 310 206 4460
Email    llievrou at ucla.edu
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/llievrou/LeahLievrouw/Welcome.html

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