Week 2: Social Systems

Today’s Plan

  • Welcome
  • Early History of “Social Software”
  • Activity: (finally) joining Special Fish
  • Uploading a site to the Purchase server space
  • Creating our Webring

Early Computer Networks and pre-history of Social Software

Women operating telegraph

The antecedents of our computer networks and the internet can be traced to earlier technology such as the telegraph, and later the telephone.

Women switchboard operators

Telephone companies used human operators to make connections between callers. Over time most operators employed were women. They experienced wage disparity and other inequities.

Arpanet

Arpanet was the first significant wide area network of connected computers, created by the Department of Defense. Formulated in 1966, ARPANET first came online in 1969. It used the TCP/IP protocol with packet switching. There was no central control but rather decentralized networking. These technologies were later to be used on the Internet.

The “Mother of All Demos” is the name of a famous lecture by Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) that took place in 1968. He demonstrated a large number of innovations years before they became commonplace on home computers, including: networking, projectors, simultaneous editing of documents, hypertext, word processing, video conferencing, file systems, bootstrapping and the mouse input device.

PDP-11 mainframe computer

The first ARPANET connection occurred between UCLA’s Kleinrock Lab and Douglas Engelbart’s SRI, in 1969. SRI later became the site of the first internet transmission, in 1977.

The first Unix ran on the PDP-11 in 1970. Designed for mass production, but still mostly for corporations, universities, government

Parallel alternative radical history:

Community switchboard operators
image courtesy Lee Felsenstein

This is the site of the Free Speech activist movement’s Central phone room in UC Berkeley in the 60s. Students would call in to leave announcements, find collaborators, get the word out about events or to find out information. Lee was so influenced by seeing this in operation that he realized he needed to create a computer network so that people could independently communicate in a decentralized manner.

He formulated the designs for the some of the first affordable, portable computers, which influenced how home computers were later made. His goal was to design the radical computer network he envisioned. He was one of the first people to apply principles of ‘open architecture’ to the computer’s design, and he distributed proto-zines with his ideas and engineering plans before being hired to actually build the machines for sale. One of his big projects was as a participant of Community Memory, where as engineer he desigened the hardware system for this radical network.

Back to the Internet

IRC
IRC in use, image by Triddle on Wikipedia

IRC or Internet Relay Chat is over 30 years old. It predates the graphical web. It is an ancestor of our current chat software such as Slack or Discord, but it was decentralized and non-commercial. It’s still in use today, though now there are desktop applications you can use to connect.

AOL chat rooms
AOL chat rooms, circa 1996

In the 90s, America Online sent out free floppy disks and CD-Roms and made their own platform of chat rooms, forums and other services. Chat rooms were listed with general category and topic names.

Myspace, circa 2005
Myspace, circa 2005

In the mid to late 2000s there was the growing trend of social media with personal profiles.

Class discusson of profiles, social media and chatrooms.

Vocabulary:

  • “Top 8”
  • “Who’s following who”
  • “poking”
  • “liking”
  • “favoriting”

This week’s Social Software: Special Fish

Each week we will try out at least one ‘social software’ project to evaluate and learn from. This is an evolving field and we will cover a full range of software from well-publicized social media apps to esoteric and experimental communal software. Last week we tried out walloftext.co. This week we visit Special.fish, a directory of profiles.

=> Special.fish

=> Elliot’s (creator of Special.fish) profile

=> random profile

Make an account. Fill out your profile with at least 2 sections, such as a text-based log, list or links.

Sign up for the email newsletter.

Discussion:

  • What is the purpose?
  • Who does it serve?
  • What kinds of pages exist (site architecture)?
  • How does the architecture and design serve the goal of the site?
  • What are the rules of the site (both explicit and implicit)?
  • What are your overall impressions of Special.fish? (Is it appealing? Would you use this? Why does this exist?….)
  • What questions do we have for the developer? (and or suggestions or critiques)
  • What do we take from this software that we’d like to consider when creating our own work?

Uploading sites to a server

You may have learned this before! This may be new! All students and faculty automatically have web space set up for their use. The URL looks like this: https://students.purchase.edu/firstname.lastname

FileZilla: File > Site Manager > Click New Site > And plug in the server details as they appear below:

Host: students.purchase.edu

Servertype: FTPES - FTP over explicit TLS/SSL

Logontype: Normal

User: jane.doe

Password: Your Purchase Password

Click Connect.

In Cyberduck go to Open Connection and plug in the server details as they appear below:

FTPS

Server: students.purchase.edu

User: john.doe

Password: Your Purchase Password

Your website is located inside the web folder on your server space. Pay attention to the directory (folder) structure. Files named index.html will be automatically loaded if someone types in the URL of the path to its current directory.

Sub-directories (folders) can have their own index.html.

Links / References and Reading

Homework

  1. Update your CSS and content based on feedback from your classmates
  2. Upload your completed webring site to your server space.
  3. Read Social Media before the Internet
  4. Listen to El Paquete Semanal: An Offline Internet in Cuba.
  5. Pick a social media site or application that we haven’t talked about previously in class. Write about its audience and community and specifically how it allows (or doesn’t allow) for varying size of audiences and networks. For example, consider whether it supports communication between one’s family or friend group, or for a much larger public. Write a post describing the expectations of users of this software. Can you find examples of users that best make use of this network? What activities disrupt this space and how does the network, software or community respond to that disruption?

Resources