User:Marie Wocher Trimester1-Essay

The notion of the network and its development in society

social and technical perspectives

With the conquest of the World Wide Web in the 1990s the idea of revolution in politics, economy and society spread out. The idea of a self-sufficient society, the idea of a network, consisting of individual peers, the idea that state borders and individual borders would disappear, the idea of an ideal society has been established, a society that is decentralized, egalitarian, harmonious, and free. In the post war years, computing had a absolutely negative connotation. It was associated with dehumanization, centralized bureaucracy and the rationalization of social life. It was seen as a war-calculating machine . And then in the 90s the opposite turned out to be the case: the computer stands for the realization of the Counter Culture and spiritual communes. The computer was not only a war technology anymore, but also a possibility to communicate worldwide and express ideas. The idea of the network came up within like-minded people could meet and exchange ideas. Now, people comment articles, share data, exchange knowledge on blogs, Twitter and Facebook. We experience the Web as a structure within everyone is horizontally connected, within everyone can be a writer, an editor, a critics, an expert. James Harkin shows in his book »Cyburbia« how important this interaction in the Web 2.0 environment became to us and that our social behavior is directed by, what he calls »Cyburbia«, "the space where people are hooked up with each other via a continuous loop of electronic information" (Harkin Cyburbia, 2009 p. xiii) The prime example of being influenced by Cyburbia is the membership of Facebook. Bringing together million of people without the given hierarchy structure in real life, shapes the human. The observation of people, presenting oneself, sharing information became more important than anything else. But not only Facebook, also other peer-to-peer communication like Youtube, Google and File-sharing sites has changed our behavior. The film »PressPausePlay« by David Dworsky and Victor Köhler question if democratized culture mean better art, film, music and literature. Is it cultural democracy or mediocrity? The film posited the thesis, that everyone can be a filmmaker, photographer, a writer or a musician. Everyone can be an artist because hardware became affordable and software became understandable for everyone. What happens is that everyone try to write a book, make music or buy a camcorder to record stuff, throwing it on Youtube. It is no longer defined who is an artist and who is not, who is the expert, who the amateur. This democratization in art what the film sketches had been possible because of the technical revolution and the horizontal structure of the Web. So can we see the Internet as the beginning of a revolutionary development in how we define cohabitation?

In the 1960s, Perry Barlow described the cyberworld as a world of authentic identity and communal collaboration. His ideal society equals the world view of the Free Speech Movement. The Free Speech Movement established at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. The Direction of Studies forbid any political agitation of their students on the Campus. As a reaction to this ban, students protest against the university. They insisted to the right of free speech and free research. After violent conflicts, Berkeley accepted their demands. The Free Speech Movement proclaimed a world in which hierarchy and bureaucracy are replaced by the collective pursuit of enlightened self-interest.

The internet as a prototype for new flexible and mobile ways of living and working? The student Protests went hand in hand with the emerging Counter Culture. This term was firstly used by Theodore Roszak in his book »The Making of a counter Culture« in 1969. Turner says that now a days we remember above all the Counter Culture's hedonism. The Youth-movement is seen as a clear break with the Cold War society. More Conservative America remembers the drug use and the realization of open sexuality the most and the Left were afraid that the Hippies would ignore any serious political debate. But for Herbert Marcuse, the founder of the »New Left«, "the hippies's hedonism marked the birth of a new, performative sensibility with which to challenge the social and emotional rigidities of mainstream culture"(Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 2006 p. 32). Although the critics noticed the power of political activism in the 60s, they didn't take serious the ideas of the Hippies, in a way, that that they echoed ideas, social practices and attitudes towards technology. Between 1965 and 1973 there had been built so many communities like never before. The data varies between some thousand and ten thousand communities around the hills of San Francisco. The key reason to build communities and live an alternative life, was the idea to expand awareness and interpersonal intimacy. For the Hippies it wasn't just a reaction to differentiate from a burgoise America, stuck in the Cold War era and it wasn't only to crate a space were it was possible to live the life of Sex Drugs and Rockn'Roll. It was building up an ideal society what could become a new national, a land of small, egalitarian communities linked to one another by a network of shared beliefs. Turner describes the Counter culture, who build communes between as a movement away from political action towards technology. A group that sees consciousness as social change and harmony as the alternative draft to the waring american state.

How established the idea of the network on a technical level? As I mentioned before defines Harkin Cyburbia as the the space where people are hooked up with each other via a continuous loop of electronic information so what does Harkin mean technically with being in the loop? Being in the loop means being in the know, knowing what is happening in the inner circle, sharing information with those in the inner circle. Being outside of the loop, means on the other hand being excluded from a specified circle. The idea of "being in the loop" is older than 70 years and refers to Norbert Wiener, who was the founder of the Cybernetics. In the beginning of World War II Wiener was researching the service of the war effort against the Nazis because he wanted to contribute his abilities to combat the european fascism. Wiener concentrate on the automatic controlling of destination and the automatic firing of anti aircraft guns and build together with Julian Biegelow a prototype of the flight path predictor in the summer of 1942. This anti-aircraft predictor machine could predetermine the flight path of an air plain, because of analyzing the behavior of a pilot who is persecuted. This information he bound together in an information loop, and then he used "electrical circuits to feed back to the gunner a continuous loop of information about the attempts to the pilot to move out of the gunner's line of fire." (Harkin Cyburbia, 2009 p.22). Cybernetics is the art of steering. It means to have a goal and to take action to achieve that goal. To know, if the gaol is achieved, you need feedback and feedback is again linked to communication. Achieving the goal is connected to communication. Later in the War time he became suspicious about the power of the American military industrial establishment. And with the initiating Cold War he became a harsh critic of the militarization of modern societies. And when the first atomic bomb was dropped by United States aircraft on Hiroshima, Wiener even quit his job at MIT.

He feel that the only usable heritage from his time as a military researcher, is the "continuous info loop”. He saw a comparison between self-steering Engineering devices and human action. Wiener began to see Loops everywhere. For example, "The picking up of a pencil , was a process in which Information from the eyes was processed by the the nervous system to control the hand."(Harkin Cyburbia,2009 p. 23) Cybernetics would be the study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society. The idea of Cybernetics could be applied to "messages, sent by people, electric motors, pieces of machinery or the brand new electrical computing machines that scientist were then in a race to build. " Wiener founded the Cybernetic Groups, that organized meetings with the key task to clarify the connection between human being and technology. He promoted his idea that communication and messages were central to an understanding of what it is to be human. He intimated that the pit of our society is the communication of information. The fact that machines could communicate with machines and humans, makes machines and humans equivalent. He sees machines and human Action as a never ending Information feedback loop. the language of the information loop could be apply to both, humans and machines. "the whole of human society could be imagined as a system regulated by the looping flows of information around it and the continuous feedback that they brought."(Harkin Cyburbia,2009 p. 30) Wiener doesn't distinguish between communication and information. Communication takes place when we not only see single acts of transferring information, but a collection of information. All social systems consist of Communication. He includes non-communicative Communication like observation and interests to his Communication concept. Communication is not restricted by Communication made possible through technology, it includes everything that happens in a social system.

Wiener was concerned that society could collapse if we are not connected permanently to each other. Also Marshall Mc Luhan believed that everyone is connected to each other and we would live in interdependent relations to each other. The Loop would encourage the mutual understanding and the society would develop into the era of greater responsibility and understanding. They had exactly the same idea like the hippies of the counter culture.

A person who was interested in the ideas of the Hippies as well as technology was Stuard Brand. Stuard Brand was born in 1938 and grew up in the anxious atmosphere of the Cold War. He went to Stanford University to study biology. He had two existential questions: First he wanted to know how we can protect the world either from destruction from nuclear weapons or hierarchical governmental and industrial bureaucracies. And second, he wanted to know how you could protect Individualist and personal liberty in such a world. To answer his questions, he focused on ecology and System orientated view of the natural world. After he graduated in 1960, he became a paratrooper at the army for two years and after that he moved to San Francisco to study design and photography. Because of his deeply reception of the cold war he had something in common with the Counter Culture. Like the Counter Culture he believed in an alternative scheme of life. But his interest for science and technology he couldn't share with the hippies. He shared it with artists like Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage who start reading Norbert Wiener, Marshall Mc Luham and Buckminster Fuller. Brand saw Cybernetics as "intellectual framework and a social practice, he associated both with alternative forms of communal organization."(Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 2006 p. 43)

Stuard Brand is also the editor of »The Whole Earth Catalog«. The first issue was published in 1968. It consist of 448 pages and is divided into seven equivalent categories: Understanding Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, Communications, Community, Nomadic's and Learning. The catalog offered "a cacophony of artifacts, voices and visual design." The reader had to find his own way to read the Catalog. Turner describes »The Whole Earth Catalog« as a book that clarifies the interweaving between the two legacies: the military-industrial research culture, that show up during World War II and the american counter culture. Brand unit the research world and the counterculture world. He traveled from one to the other intellectual groups, from the world of scientific research to the hippie homesteading to ecology and mainstream consumer culture. His way leads him through the1960s Art Scene to the communes of the southwest, to the Bay area computer science in the 70s into the corporate world in the 80and 90s. »The Whole Earth Catalog« listed goods that are relevant for a sustainable life like for example a synthesizer and a personal computer as well as methods of alternative energy production. The compilation of the products plus information about the traders is the result of four social groups: the science and technology group, the New York and San Francisco Art Scene, the Bay area psychedelic community and the communes. The Catalog crated an interdisciplinary space where those different groups of people could meet, discuss and share ideas about how information and technology reshape social life. Brand picked up the idea, the military-industrial research world had years before, the same world, that invent nuclear weapons and computers during World War II also invent the idea of collaboration and the slump of bureaucracy. During the Cold War, scientists, soldiers, technicians and Administrators worked collaboratively together and brought together computer and information. They were the first who came up with an imagination of social networks and the evaluation of information as the key to understand technical, social and natural worlds. Twentie years later the contributors of the Catalog decided collaboratively that technology should be small-scaled, informational and personal. They created an environment where micro computers and Networks could be used as tools of liberation.

Bibliography:

Harkin, James - Cyburbia (2009) Little, Brown. University of Chicago Press, United States.

Turner, Fred - From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), London

Dworsky, David and Köhler, Victor - Presspauseplay

Symposium at Stanford University Libraries - From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog