Foreward: This paper is submitted for my electronic portfolio as a course requirement in cultural archaeology and as a contribution to Silicon Valley Interpretive Village. It was prepared using late twentieth century techniques and concepts that would have been available to the inhabitants of that period of history.
Although the seeds of Common Unity are evident during that era with the explosion of two way interactivity and crude "multimedia" experiments , most of the records from that time (when the "community" (sic) we take for granted was an outcome still in doubt) are in text form, and are presented in this interpretive format to provide a sense of what they experienced. Unfortunately, we lack links to trace how they felt about what they produced, or the shaping influences, both of which have formed the basis for valid research for generations.
At that time, debate focused on what was known as the "Internet", particularly whether and how to connect "schools" to it using machines that were known as "computers". The material which follows will become part of the permanent exhibit.
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"Look at them! Digging, scooping, molding and decorating, in perfect oblivion to the rising wind and approaching tide. As they collect these tiny bits of silicon, you'd think they were building Oz instead of their childs' play with high tech sandcastles. Don't they see that they'll all be washed away, without a trace, when the forces of the market and taxpayer wrath catch up with them?" - from "Why the Internet is a Waste", New York Times OpEd Page, Oct 14, 1996
The theory was simple: provide a way that people who wanted to know something could connect with each other, and the resulting massively parallel processing would yield answers which could be shared. An outgrowth to this was that learning could be summative, and the results built upon by subsequent users of the "system". This permitted replacing meaningless hours spent learning to recite by rote "facts" of dubious duration with memorable moments of pride in having sought solutions, and applied new information to problems at hand.
At first, only handfuls of people grasped the potential. It appears that the technical complexity of their crude tools served to deter the casual user. At the outset, access required the most powerful "computers" and physical connections which were closely guarded both by high cost and the requirement to have authorized entree to facilities of either government research, elite universities or large, progressive corporations.
Remarkably, the initial days typified what later came to be known as the "Internet Ethos" as complete strangers went out of their way to assist each other, sharing any scraps of helpful information they could acquire. This extended to the creation of software tools, information robots and other actions which served to strengthen an anarchistic group of individuals, who collectively managed an enterprise owned by none of them.
The next wave of users swept in due to a confluence of factors, including:
* a strong desire to see young (pre-college) students gain skills that were thought to provide an economic competitive edge in an unpredictable future
* a sustained focus of media attention to a metaphor known at that time as the "information superhighway" (in this archaic era, individuals were required to transport individual power sources 20 times their weight in order to go anywhere, and did so on massive stripes of asphalt which connected residences and places of employment)
* the desire of commercial and entertainment sectors to test market the concept of "connectivity" to the workplace and home.
It was at this point that the discussions turned from "apple pie and motherhood" to "hardball" (link to the Smithsonian Collection of archaic aphorisms for grounding).
Another part of the "Internet Ethos" was well known to users, but deliberately less well publicized: the flattening effect on existing hierarchy. Throughout the Industrial era (whose last remaining model, the public school, persisted well into the subsequent ages and only recently has been supported as an endangered social pattern, protected in Interpretive Villages such as the one you are visiting today) "order" was maintained by organizing access to information and decisionmakers in a "vertical" fashion. Only with sufficient "power" within a hierarchy could a person present their ideas to someone "above" them, and to attempt to do so without permission carried significant personal and professional risk.
Even the crude networks which permitted text messages to be exchanged between individuals or by an individual to large groups of interested parties had the effect of breaking down carefully constructed hierarchies. The Message Bans of the early 21st century represented a last ditch effort to save these counterproductive structures, which was ultimately unsuccessful.
Just as nations persisted long after the reasons which formed them ceased to validate their necessity, many groups felt threatened by the very flow of ideas the "Internet" was designed to provide, and these groups organized several strategies to reverse or resist its adoption. At the local level, focus on inappropriate resources of a sexual, criminal or religious nature was sufficient to stop some locally elected school officials in their tracks. A more effective method was to place the debate at the state and regional level, where cooperation was historically difficult to achieve. This method reduced national advances to a glacial rate.
However, it was this glacial progress that ultimately provided local efforts with success. Inch by inch, layers of individuals (linking like the unique crystalline forms known as snow) piled up, and did not recede in the heat of examination. Students and teachers linked with parents, who were not ready to give up an iota of connectivity, having experienced the value firsthand. The "Internet" all along had been a grass roots effort of global proportions, and local people applied local talents and ingenuity to the task of finding, funding and building whatever they needed to become part of the knowledge exchange.
One user of the period provides this insight, based on a visual publishing fad known as Magic Eye, which permitted two dimensional colored images printed on paper in book form to simulate patterns in three dimensional space: "many people looked at these pages for hours, and seeing only random dots and squiggles, simply gave up. Some even argued that the whole idea was a hoax. What was required was a new way of seeing, of using both eyes in concert, but in a way that was never useful for any other purpose, that amounted to looking beyond the page, until the image snapped, and depth was created. Once you "learned" to see your first image, the others came easier.
"It was a lot like the Internet, where you learned to live in a "place" most other people couldn't hear or see. Once you learned your way around, met your fellow explorers and began to share your essence, the magic began."
By the time advances in power and projection techniques merged with understandings of the physical and non-material processes of consciousness, a critical mass of users was poised to transfer their experience to the precursors of our current systems.
Conclusion:
Did they know it? Could they have forseen as they connected their tiny bits of silicon it was merely a dress rehearsal for what was to come? When the next wave of technology washed aside the old constraints of size and power, when price became moot and universality came within reach, and the "computer" disappeared without a trace...these pioneers had already marked a path to that part of consciousness where time and space no longer separate. Did they realize they were building Oz, as their sandcastles washed out to sea, at last liberated from physical connection?
1994 by Ferdi Serim
Ferdi Serim
January 15, 1995
Princeton Regional Schools
Computer Teacher/ District Computer Coordinator
ferdi_serim@monet.prs.k12.nj.us (school) phone: 609 683-4699
ferdi@cosn.org (Consortium for School Networking)
"The unlived live is not worth examining."