Week 7 (5/6,8): Social Computing

[Gio-Choi]

This week we explore the emergence of the computer as a novel communication and interconnection device, as a lead-up to the internet, world-wide web, social media and more. With the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and ARPANET wiring together a network of universities, academics and students, real-time and asynchronous communication between people and linking people and information (e.g., the world’s libraries) became an increasing reality. What is the relationship between a network of computers (e.g., ARPA’s network) and a network of people that interact on it—does the human network drive the machine one, the reverse, or do they exist separate but equal from one another? What are consequences of a global computer network for sociability and society? What were consequences of 1960s and 1970s society on computer networks?

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[suryachinnappa]

The readings this week on social computing highlighted some of the unique capabilities facilitated by, and novel challenges presented by, communication through digital channels. J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor’s 1968 paper was seemingly well ahead of its time in its conceptions of the future of digital communication.

In the modern world, the degree of expression possible through digital communication is very close to, and even in some cases surpasses, the expressiveness possible through in-person communication; however, this richness was only possible as a result of rapid advances in computational power that we have seen in modern times. Digital communication’s evolution, largely beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, was profoundly shaped by both the society in which it emerged and the computational restrictions that the current technology allowed for. The compressed nature of communication on many channels even in the modern internet is a natural consequence of this; while in-person interaction allows for the observation of vocal inflection, gesture and body language, and a dynamic, interwoven dialogue, the constraints that came from early computational restraints necessitated information transfer be limited to a finite set of symbols (i.e., written text) on a screen, sent and received strictly serially. The limitations on expression that might normally be possible through non-text cues such as those mentioned, however, sparked innovation with the textual medium that was available–capabilities of the text-based system that were underused or made vestigial due to the transition to digital communication were gradually and naturally repurposed and reanalyzed as meaning-bearing elements of the system. This is apparent in the domain of vernacular texting styles; so-called “textese”. Punctuation rules that add clarity to long-form writing lose much of their original value in a system that so easily allows for and encourages the physical separation of different ideas; as the period’s function is replaced by the message break, rather than losing all meaning entirely, it has grown to become reanalyzed as a marker of tone, namely emphasizing gravity, solemnity, and finality. Similar expressive capacity has emerged with repetition of letters, which have been analyzed to serve as a prosodic marker, indicating the holding-out of a sound, to some expressive effect. The confluence of these innovations in expressive capacity over a compressed medium created with it a new cultural identity, an in-group of those to whom such expressions were meaningful and those to whom they were not, such that even in a time when more rich modes of digital communication are available, the innovations in textual expression have persisted.

We also see that digital communication breaks down the previously universal barrier to communication of physical distance; as early computer networks propagated, they brought into contact individuals who otherwise would have had to have gone to great lengths to communicate with one another; as these networks have proliferated, physical distance has become increasingly negligible in culture and identity formation, with many who have grown up with modern accessible digital communication having identities shaped just as much by digital communities as physical ones.

Discovery:
Playing DarkWind was a really interesting experience, as it feels sort of like a “missing link” in role-playing games between tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons, and more modern, “rich” massively multiplayer online games. While the mode of communication is much more like the latter in that the game is played online, the style of gameplay feels a lot more similar to the former; since the only method of interaction is via text, all of the subjective “rich” details about the story, which may be presented in stunningly colored, moving graphics in a modern MMORPG, must be imagined, much in the same way as in a TTRPG. The computational complexity constraints are very apparent in this sort of minimal format, but the gameplay still feels compelling–it even sort of reminds me of the AI Dungeon from Week 5, which had a similar feel with a purely text-based interface (though likely with a massive discrepancy in computational power).

[evancholerton]

This week’s readings reveal that early computer networks were as much social experiments as technological ones, and that their affordances and constraints mutually shaped both machines and people. J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor argued as early as 1968 that computers weren’t merely “switches” for messages but dynamic modeling environments where users co-constructed shared understandings (p. 2). By externalizing mental models in real time - scrawling on shared screens, annotating data, pointing at pointers - participants didn't just simply exchange information but truly learned together.

Joy Lisi Rankin’s People’s History traces how PLATO users became “computing citizens” by repurposing an educational mainframe into a vibrant commons (pp. 193-202). Valarie Lamont’s Boneyard Creek program blended slides, photos, and quizzes to spur environmental activism; Stuart Umpleby’s DELPHI foresaw “citizen sampling simulations,” letting participants rate policy futures and debate trade-offs (p. 197). These small coding tweaks, like connect subroutines, notes files, and “talk” chats, turned passive learners into active authors, forging social bonds that outlasted class time.

Fred Turner shows how the WELL inherited PLATO’s communal ethos from the Whole Earth Catalog, even as it became a marketplace of ideas in the 1980s network economy (p. 507). On the WELL, “gift-economy” exchanges of insider gossip or technical know-how built reputations that led directly to freelance gigs and startup pitches. Turner labels this mix of social, civic, and economic value registers a “heterarchy”, by which he means multiple, overlapping logics that invite users to evaluate worth in more than one way.

Together, these accounts challenge a linear narrative of “technology drives society.” Instead, hardware limits (text-only terminals, 9600 baud modems) shaped vernacular innovation, such as early “textese” punctuated for tone, letter-repetition as prosody, that persist in emojis and GIFs today. Meanwhile, social needs like activism, camaraderie, and freelancing drove designers to build features like message boards, screen sharing, and persistent mail that anticipated e-mail and social media.

By weaving across these readings, we see a recurring pattern:

1. Constraint sparks creativity. Limited screens begat new expressive conventions.
2. Users shape tools as much as tools shape users. PLATO and WELL participants coded civic life into systems.
3. Social networks and machine networks co-emerge. Communities push developers; platforms enable new communities.

This week’s theme of co-evolution of people and machines helps us ask: What communal practices will we invent as AI systems grow more complex? How will our collective values shape those architectures? And what new constraints might spark the next wave of digital sociability?

Discovery
I was struck by how a twenty-word code tweak on PLATO opened “a new dimension of PLATO research,” enabling everything from gaming to group experiments (p. 196). That tiny subroutine reminds me that in today’s AI labs, small API calls or minor UI tweaks can unlock vast new social worlds, an echo of PLATO’s republic in our own chat-driven era.

[mhmanek]

In a dimly lit corridor of UCLA’s Boelter Hall on the night of 29 October 1969, a graduate student tapped “LO”—the first two letters of “LOGIN”—and sent them surging across telephone lines to the Stanford Research Institute. The word crashed after the second keystroke, but a frontier had been breached. From that instant the machine network and the human network became entwined: each fresh host brought new people, each new person demanded richer connection, and the network thickened in reply. Half a continent away, the PLATO terminals glowing orange in Champaign already hinted at the loop: as students built message boards, chat rooms, and multiplayer games, the mainframe found itself redesigned to keep up with the narratives its users invented. Machines opened the door; people decided how wide it must swing.

Once electrons were made social, the consequences radiated outward with the quiet force of a river breaching its banks. Electronic mail—barely an afterthought in 1971—soon consumed the majority of ARPANET traffic, compressing days of correspondence into minutes and turning distant colleagues into desk‑side confidants. On PLATO, “Talk‑o‑Matic” chat and “Notesfiles” discussion boards fostered a community whose jokes, romances, and quarrels played out on phosphor screens years before the word “online” entered common speech. The network rewarded gregariousness, but it also dissolved boundaries: hierarchies blurred when a freshman could correct a Nobel laureate; intimacy blossomed between strangers who had never heard each other’s voices. Yet the very ease of presence carried a paradox—connection became abundant, attention grew scarce, and the architecture of sociability began to favor those who could command the most eyes and clicks.

The shape of those early networks was, in turn, stamped by the era that financed and inhabited them. Washington’s Cold‑War purse paid for packet switching not out of utopian zeal but out of a desire for command‑and‑control resilience, binding together Pentagon‑funded campuses into an electronic nervous system as distributed as the anxieties that birthed it. Simultaneously, the ferment of the 1960s seeped through keyboard and code. Civil‑rights sit‑ins, anti‑war teach‑ins, and a new faith in collective action taught young programmers that computing ought to be shared, time‑sliced, and eventually free. The result was a technical architecture that carried within it the political ambiguities of its age: hierarchical money building egalitarian pipes; counterculture rhetoric riding on Defense Department circuits. The society of transistors could be no more—or less—innocent than the society of citizens who imagined it.

Discovery
Reading the Whole Earth Catalog, I was reminded of what Peter Thiel calls definite optimism. E.g., there are these illustrated guides to technology, futuristic visions of a world where society is improved by technology (optimism) and there are concrete plans for how that will happen (definite beliefs). See picture below as an example

[peterzhou-cs]

McLuhan’s idea of the “global village” imagined a future where media would draw people into a shared emotional space—one resembling tribal collectivity, where even guilt or judgment might be experienced communally. He foresaw that as media compressed distance and time, human relationships would become more synchronized, immersive, and emotionally entangled. The boundaries between private and public, local and global, would blur, pulling individuals into something resembling the emotional intensity of a pre-modern tribe.

And while it’s true that the internet has connected people across distances in unprecedented ways, I found that the outcome has been more fragmented than unified. People now flow effortlessly into virtual spaces where their views are echoed and affirmed, bypassing the friction of disagreement that once came with living among diverse neighbors or ideologies. In the past, escaping one’s social context required moving physically—starting over in a new place, navigating new norms. Today, all it takes is closing one tab and opening another.

What emerges, then, is a world not of one global village, but of many digital enclaves. These are not forced divisions, nor prisons. Rather, they are self-selected echo chambers—tight-knit, curated environments people willingly enter and rarely question. The promise of unity through shared connection persists on the surface, but underneath, the digital medium has enabled a quiet and rapid social segmentation. McLuhan was right about the power of media to restructure human relations—but perhaps overly hopeful about the direction that restructuring would take. Reading about the PLATO system, I was struck by the parallel between its so-called “Republic” and Plato’s Republic in the classical sense. In both cases, the structure—whether philosophical or technological—was redefined not merely by its original logic, but by the citizens who inhabited and shaped it. PLATO, once a secure, Cold War-era teaching system, became a vibrant networked society, reimagined by its users. This user-driven transformation mirrors how the ideals and tensions of Plato’s ancient polis were ultimately animated by the lives and actions of its people.

Discovery：I find The Green Machine book deeply amusing. I especially appreciate its non-traditional layout and design—an approach that, unfortunately, seems to be disappearing in the age of standardized formatting through tools like Microsoft Word and LaTeX. These modern systems tend to replace the spontaneity of handwritten or manually arranged work with something pre-structured and uniform.

It’s hard to say whether there is more or less of this kind of creative book design today, but I would guess there is less. One particularly delightful example in The Green Machine is the “incorrect book notice” page, where the author uses a comic figure to deliver what would typically be a dry piece of information. It’s amusing and simply fun.

In our current publishing environment, while we’ve gained efficiency, clarity, and consistency, it seems we’ve lost a degree of freedom in how we express ourselves on paper—at least in most books.

[benkim04]

The relationship between a network of computers and a network of people that interact on it are not in one-way influential on the other. It is a two-way street of design and interaction between the two groups. First and foremost, human networks drive machine design because machine design is most often built in order to fix holes in human communication and better facilitate existing networks. Through this, existing networks of people can so very directly impact the design and creation of computer networks. This is apparent in ARPANET’s initial purpose, which was to facilitate resource sharing among geographically distant researchers. Thus, the network design was built around this goal. On the other hand, once the computer network is established, the computer network gets the opportunity to reverse the influence and change how humans interact with their own networks. Computer networks enabled new forms of communication like real-time chats that changed how humans socialized. Over time, this shifted academic, social, and even romantic relationships (long distance becomes more feasible, and dating apps come onto the scene) into digital spaces. All of this defines our current modern sociability which is heavily driven by existing computer networks. Of course, many of these networks are tailored for specific purposes (gathering followers, academic networks, sharing experiences, meeting new people), but these networks nonetheless define how we interact with each other. For one, I had never had a facebook account before University, but Facebook became an important method of communication between peers, and therefore I became a part of that network. Through computer networks, geographic barriers no longer mattered, allowing global communication and information spread. This allowed global communities to form on social media in which global movements have now been created. Further, humans have learned to interact in text-based formats in different ways than before. We see a rapid development of vocabulary, common-phrases, and other changes in language due to the interconnectedness of the internet and how memes and other social media phenomena shape and mold the culture. We also see a greater democratization of information, including access to databases, libraries, and even things like ChatGPT. This also of course comes with the opposite downside which is the spread of misinformation, in that any one individual in a computer network is as credible as any other, and if they are capable of creating false yet convincing evidence, it could be harmful to the truth of the matter.

Discovery:
I thought that the discussion surrounding the price of communication through computer networks in The Computer as a Communication Device was particularly interesting, in that I discovered how expensive such interaction would have been given rough estimations of a process that didn’t quite exist yet. For one, it is surprising how concrete of a number they arrive to despite so many unknowns. Secondly, the price of $16/hour is high, but that is not considered with inflation. Adjusting for inflation, that is $147/hour. That is a frankly absurd amount to think about. Now, this is more reasonable given the state of technology at that time, but imagine if I had to pay $147 to pay for the approximate hour it took to write this up, and more given time for reading the materials. This truly struck me as to how technology has gapped itself time and again to our modern iterations.

[Laurelli7]

Original Material
It's clear that computer networks and human networks grew together, each shaping the other. Marshall McLuhan argued that our tools and media influence us just as we influence them. He pointed out that electronic networks connect people instantly and constantly, creating a new environment for interaction.
Early pioneers like Licklider and Taylor also highlighted the importance of people in driving technology. In their 1968 essay, "The Computer as a Communication Device," they purposely emphasized people over machines, noting that real communication goes beyond just sending and receiving information. They imagined computer networks allowing people to actively interact and collaborate rather than just passively receive data. Systems like PLATO proved this right. Users quickly turned the educational platform into a place to chat, send messages, and build communities. Joy Rankin mentions that during the 1960s and 1970s, teachers and students using PLATO were already connecting and forming online communities. So, people’s desire to communicate drove the growth of computer networks, and those networks in turn transformed how people interacted.
The development of global computer networks—what McLuhan called the "global village"—had significant impacts on social interactions. McLuhan predicted in 1967 that new technologies would shrink distances and bring people closer together. This became clear with the growth of early networks like ARPANET, where people created email lists and discussion groups that went beyond physical boundaries. Licklider and Taylor also envisioned the Internet’s social potential. They imagined online communities formed around shared interests rather than locations, allowing people far apart to collaborate as if they were in the same room. Today, we regularly communicate with friends, colleagues, and collaborators around the globe, confirming their predictions. Licklider even anticipated that computers might someday allow more effective communication than face-to-face meetings—a bold idea that feels familiar now with video conferencing and social media.
These developments brought both positives and challenges. On one hand, global networks allowed people to share knowledge instantly and form communities around niche interests or shared causes. Early examples like the PLATO network, nicknamed "PLATO’s Republic," were among the first online communities. On the other hand, being constantly connected globally can be overwhelming. McLuhan suggested that this intense connection can deeply affect our lives. Overall, the global network has created a new type of social connection that spans great distances.
Lastly, the culture of the 1960s and 1970s had a major influence on the way computer networks were imagined and built. This era was characterized by experimentation, social change, and countercultural movements, all of which inspired early tech pioneers. Fred Turner shows how the counterculture’s emphasis on decentralized technology and personal transformation shaped early online communities. For instance, the Whole Earth Catalog from the 1960s inspired The WELL, an early online community from the 1980s. The aim was to create an online space that reflected the ideals of community and shared knowledge.
Government-backed projects like ARPANET also reflected this open and collaborative spirit. People like Licklider were influenced by the optimistic ideas of the 1960s, believing computers could improve human intellect and communication. Joy Rankin notes that many early users viewed computing as a shared resource for everyone, leading to a more open and collaborative environment. Thus, the social values of the 1960s strongly shaped how these early networks were designed, emphasizing openness, cooperation, and the democratization of information.

Discovery:
Visiting Argonne Lab made me realize just how important supercomputers like Aurora truly are. These powerful machines aren't just impressive because of their computational abilities; they're also central hubs where researchers from diverse scientific fields come together. By enabling scientists from different backgrounds to use Aurora's power, Argonne Lab fosters a vibrant community around these supercomputers. It's fascinating to see this intersection of technology and social interaction, directly linking back to the idea of social computing—where computing resources become a shared space that brings people and ideas together.

[Alex7692]

Original material

The relationship between networks of computer and human user seems to be a bilateral one. But before detailing the specific dynamics, I believe it's crucial to reject the third possibility in the question: that networks of computer and people are separate (even despite admitting their equality) from one another. Indeed, it has never really been plausible to speak of an isolated network of humans without permeation of other actants: whether it would be nonhumans agents, quasi-objects, instruments and tools, et cetera.

The heart of the issue, arguably, lies at the nature of medium. McLuhan's catchphrase "medium is the message" is, as it were, a pithy dictum that captures the ideological nature of any communication network. And yet it presents an extremely simplified worldview that disregards the pliability of media (as Eco would illustrate using a Peircean framework in Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare, even the example of "light" is packed with at least three different ways in which it could be enacted as a medium: as source, channel, or code). Insofar as we appropriate networks of computers for our distinct ideological purposes (cf. the diversity of news media). When it comes to identifying the specific nature of computer networks, McLuhan could indeed be credited for, as we see from the readings on PLATO and WELL, anticipating how the egalitarian, democratized environment of virtual community (geographically unbound but rather selective based on common interests) seems to necessitate an ideal of transparency that decentralizes authority. But the libertarianism that gradually comes to characterize the digital space is not exactly the consequence of computer networks, but quite the opposite in reality. As The Computer as a Communication Device points out (and I agree with the fundamental insight here), communication is, beyond exchange of information, also the process of "cooperative modeling" such that we are constantly prompted to externalize our concepts in the public space.

While the paper postulates that human life would become "happier" within the interactive environment constructed by network of computers, the complete migration of social life upon the digital space does seem to collapse the materiality of social interaction. Without having the space to elaborate in full detail, the conflaton of reality and simulation disorients human freedom insofar as our actions (which are, arguably, defined by a drive to possess) are no longer fulfilled in concrete ways. The panoptical nature of social media also makes authority return in a distributive manner (as oppose to the ideal of decentralization). These are the ethical questions we must consider to examine the full impact of social computing upon sociability

Discovery

Reading Ted Nelson's book was an interesting (and mind-boggling) experience: it almost feels like the modern equivalent to Diderot's encyclopedie. But it also felt like a sort of meta-science-fiction. I wonder what was it about the word "hypertext" that makes it part of the common lexicon, as opposed to the perhaps more obscure wording of "interwingability".

[meeradasgupta247]

Anti-Social Social Machines

Social computing seems like an oxymoron when you may first engage with the terminology. While human beings have often been characterized as “social animals” the questions now lies in whether we consider computers to be an appropriate medium to facilitate discourse - or, rather, are computers/machines more isolating than we may realize. Though the readings seem to generally cautiously approach social computing by seeing computers as a facilitator rather than a tool that one should be overly dependent on, I would argue that computers are isolating to those who choose machines as their choice medium of interaction with others.

In The Medium is the Massage there is a general sense that “too many people know too much about each other” (p.24). Though this might seem as though it is helpful in diversifying the narratives that one is exposed to - if not, oversaturating individuals with knowledge that they may not be privy to in in-person interaction - this knowledge often remains curated to the individual and their will. Social media, for example, has often been regarded as a business when attention is sold to advertisers and those who seek recognition. Hence, when one enters the sphere of these platforms, they will often be shown content that is tailored for them. Similarly, though the internet and machines have democratized access to education, much of this education still centers around geographies and languages that may appear more frequently (either in the context of where one is residing or, generally, as it relates to the privilege of some counties and individuals in being able to produce and platform their knowledge production).

“The Computer as a Communication Device” also portrays the usefulness of having access to devices for visual and other aids while working with others (p.26). Still, while these aids may assist in communicating concepts, other modes of communication - such as eye contact - are lost. Perhaps we still may adapt to a new form of communication, through machines, as the prevailing paradigm; however, if what is meant by social connection primarily rests on human-to-human connection as it exists presently, choosing to change how we communication must be met by an understanding that much information is lost in the pursuit of new data - and that this communication may be less social than we perceive it to be.

Citations

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967, pp. 48-85 (mostly not writing).

“The Computer as a Communication Device.”](https://internetat50.com/references/Licklider_Taylor_The-Computer-As-A-Communications-Device.pdf) J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor in Science and Technology, 1968.

Explore

I played some of Darkwind; it was an interesting experience because I have played Dungeons and Dragons before, which is a tabletop rpg. I think, as I had mentioned in my short answer, though Darkwind did provide a log and constant access to information/freedom to roam coordinates, the missing information came through in the form of character personalities. When a DnD DM (Dungeon Master) acts out the NPCs and side characters, you are able to viscerally experience the conversation and fully embody your character while Darkwind provides a role of being a more omniscient third party.

[ucachyut]

The emergence of computer networks such as ARPANET and PLATO illustrates a complex and reciprocal relationship between technological systems and human interactions. Initially, these networks were designed explicitly to address human needs, primarily facilitating efficient information exchange among researchers, academics, and institutions. However, as these technologies matured, they substantially transformed social interactions, underscoring Marshall McLuhan’s argument that media profoundly reshape societal structures and communication dynamics.

Human interactions initially guided the development and implementation of these networks. ARPANET began as an infrastructure intended to support practical, real-time collaboration among geographically separated researchers and academic institutions. The network enabled the rapid sharing of data and significantly improved productivity, reflecting the demands and operational realities of the research community at the time. PLATO, originating as an educational tool, similarly evolved due to active human engagement. Users quickly began repurposing PLATO beyond its original educational mission, creating informal social communities through tools like message boards and interactive multiplayer games. This informal innovation highlighted users’ influential role in directing technological evolution.

Conversely, the structural capabilities inherent within computer networks profoundly influenced human sociability, extending the reach and nature of interpersonal interactions. The establishment and growth of the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) exemplifies this transformative impact. The WELL combined countercultural ideals with the digital revolution, establishing a new mode of community interaction characterized by openness, collaboration, and the blending of social and economic exchanges. This platform anticipated modern social media by providing diverse individuals opportunities to communicate across previously insurmountable geographic and social boundaries. It thus reshaped notions of community and collective identity, significantly influencing contemporary digital culture.

The broader societal context of the 1960s and 1970s—marked by heightened political activism, emerging countercultural movements, and preferences for decentralization—also significantly shaped computer networks. During this period, a broader cultural shift emphasized democratic participation, decentralization of information control, and collective intellectual collaboration. These societal ideals were mirrored in the technological design and philosophy underpinning networks such as ARPANET and PLATO. As such, the era’s emphasis on communal knowledge sharing, participatory democracy, and collaborative innovation directly informed the structures and operational models of these early digital networks.

Furthermore, the advent of these technologies introduced new societal implications and challenges, including concerns related to privacy and information control. As computer networks facilitated increased information exchange, they also raised questions regarding data privacy, surveillance, and the ethical use of personal information. These issues remain relevant today, continuing to shape discussions about digital technologies’ broader societal impacts.

Thus, computer and human networks do not exist independently but are entwined in a continuous feedback loop, each shaping and reshaping the other’s development.

Discovery:
The historical exploration of PLATO revealed the significance of spontaneous user-driven innovation. Specifically, users’ informal adaptation of PLATO for social interactions, such as message boards and multiplayer games, anticipated contemporary social media dynamics. This underscores the ongoing role of human creativity and adaptive use in shaping technological developments, providing valuable insights into the evolution of contemporary computing and artificial intelligence.

[Noah48841]

One of the most profound developments in computing history is the transformation of the computer into a tool for communication and connection—not just with data, but with people. From PLATO at the University of Illinois to ARPANET connecting universities, early computer networks were not just technical systems but social systems, foreshadowing today’s internet and social media. These technologies didn't merely support human networks—they shaped them.

While it’s tempting to assume that the human network (users, designers, institutions) drives the machine one, thinkers like Marshall McLuhan challenge this. In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan argues that we tend to focus too much on content and miss the deeper effects of the medium itself. The tools we use to communicate—whether face-to-face or via computer—change how we think, feel, and relate. The network doesn’t just serve human relationships; it transforms them.

J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor predicted this shift early on. In “The Computer as a Communication Device,” they imagined a world where communication through machines would surpass face-to-face interaction in effectiveness. That vision has largely materialized. Despite drawbacks like the loss of certain interpersonal cues, the efficiency and reach of machine-mediated communication have led us—as a culture—to prioritize it.

Systems like PLATO show that these ideas were not just theoretical. Joy Lisi Rankin's PLATO’s Republic presents a vision of the computer as a social and educational hub: users developed games, forums, and messaging features decades before the World Wide Web. Rankin calls PLATO “the other ARPANET” to highlight how this forgotten network embodied a more collaborative and grassroots vision of connectivity, where the line between user and developer blurred.

Fred Turner’s work on the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) shows how 1960s counterculture ideals of community, openness, and experimentation found a new home in early online communities. This further supports the idea that computing networks and social values are deeply intertwined. The WELL wasn’t just a technical system—it was a reflection of a cultural moment that valued decentralization, collaboration, and individual voice.

As for consequences, the rise of global networks has profoundly reshaped sociability. Communication is more constant, more public, and more fragmented. We are nodes in a web of real-time, asynchronous, and algorithmically mediated interaction. And yet, this shift began in an era—1960s and 1970s—already grappling with Cold War fears, educational reform, and the search for more democratic, participatory technologies. Those societal concerns directly shaped the design of PLATO, ARPANET, and the communities around them.

Ted Nelson’s early vision of hypertext reminds us that the web’s structure isn’t just technical—it reflects a philosophy of interconnection. It allows people to locate themselves within a vast network of information and others, creating both empowerment and overload.

In short, the relationship between machine and human networks is recursive: people build networks, but networks also reshape people. Neither exists independently, nor are they equal but separate. They co-evolve. And the digital infrastructures we inherit are also cultural inheritances—shaped by the values, constraints, and imaginations of the societies that built them.

DISCOVERY:
I was particularly surprised (though shouldn’t have been) to hear that a sociologist coined the term and created some of the groundwork for hypertexts. I also have heard of the medium is the message argument before and assumed it was going to be much tamer: Something like “people probably, on the margin, underrate the medium”, which is a sentiment I think I would agree with. However, his actual claim (even after reading a chapter of his book about it) seems totally implausible (i.e. the view that the content is largely a distraction). Surely two pieces of content with different mediums are more similar than two different pieces of content with the same media, right?

[cavanbgon]

If there is a single critical “point” to be gleaned from McLuhan, it’s that the channels of communication which dominate contemporary life require a vocabulary of their own. To this point, “separation” and “unity” may not be terms fully apt to describe the relation between computer networks and their corresponding networks of human operators. To motivate this slightly, the space through which messages may be relayed between even two agents is at its most flexible in digital systems, where the units of information communicated extend to their simplest conceivable units. Thus, the field of mutually comprehensible communication by operators is allowed to have both its loosest and most strict, formalized expressions. Disentanglement between the active transmission of information within the system of communication (what is “acted” by the human actors within the system) and the “form” in which this information is articulated becomes, as such, essentially impossible. Without a clear distinction between action on the part of a human within a computer network and the plastic architecture of the computer network, how could there hope to be a neat distinction between the actors within a computer network and the computer network itself? How could it be said that one does or does not act on the other?
Responding to this newly realized ambiguity, one shouldn’t simply throw up their hands, finding the hybrid human-computer system beyond description. Instead, the system’s hybridity allows for the simultaneous application of two previously ostensibly separate (though the connection between the development of the social sciences and computation suggests that there may never have been so neat a separation) vocabularies for describing complex systems. With this in mind, we can see the deep influence of sociological phenomena on the structure of early computer networks. The Whole Earth Catalog is an especially effective demonstration of the structural influence conscious social movements had on computing systems, and how this influence could gradually lose out to stronger external phenomena. Viewing an incipient internet as an extension of a network of essentially anti-capitalist knowledge sharing/bartering, the Whole Earth Catalog’s emphasis on gift giving would, in its successors, gradually give way to more practical, familiar models of exchange. Though this cost structure would first be posited as necessary to the maintenance of the skill-sharing systems, due to its founders having faced significant financial headwinds, gradually, the organization of the internet would come to be shaped irretrievably by a far more centralized form, most easily monetizable.
Ted Nelson’s indefatigability in trying to establish an internet system based around the free exchange of coherent paths of thought, rather than a narrowly local concept, can be seen as a continued assertion of the early structure of the internet. Taking this view, one could easily be rather discouraged: the far less aspirational conception of information sharing has triumphed unambiguously. On the other hand, Nelson’s continued efforts suggest that what was originally conceived as tools for furthering human understanding can still be employed as such. Sweat and conviction are enough.
 
Discovery:
If it isn’t too late, I’d like to talk a bit about the trip to Argonne. I kvetched a bit in class about finding the data visualization stuff a bit corny (also maybe deeply symbolic of problems in the funding structure for American science), but overall, I found the experience quite enlightening. I found Aurora especially apt to capture the imagination. I’ve been prone in the past few years to reach for abstraction rather than settle for tangible work in a simpler, humbler context. The immense computational power unleashed by something like Aurora, whose use is available to the public, suggests the possibility of doing computational work that stretches the imagination, that is capable of really contributing to further insight. If not for me, for people in general. It’s deeply gratifying to know this exists.

[rshah1869]

Licklider and Taylor in 1968 envisioned the emergence of the computer as a communication device with remarkable foresight. They saw beyond the possibilities of calculation or message switching, predicting that computers would become the most effective medium for human interaction by facilitating "cooperative modeling". This turned out to be incredibly prophetic as the networked world we live in today is intertwined with the digital space. The PC, smartphone, and worldwide web allowed for the manipulation of ideas within a dynamic, digital space. This digital communities based upon common interest drawn together in online forums is a critical feature of modern life with the rise of social media.

Examining early networks like the University of Illinois's PLATO system and the Bay Area's The WELL reveals how this vision began to materialize, but also how these systems were very ingrained in their own social contexts. The relationship between the human network and the machine network developed and changed together over time. While the technology provided the potential for new forms of interaction, it was the users that truly shaped how these networks were used and how they evolved. Similar to what we discussed in previous weeks with software, the user interfaces that we design have an impact on the way we think as well. On The WELL, the counterculture ethos inherited from the Whole Earth Catalog defined the community's values and governance, emphasizing collaboration and open access to information. Similarly, PLATO users repurposed a system designed for education into a vibrant platform for social connection, political activism, and recreation, driving the development of features like messaging, notes files, and email based on their own emergent needs.

The consequences of this shift for sociability and society were profound and multifaceted. Virtual communities flourished, enabling new forms of collaboration and communication, both real-time and asynchronous. However, these early online spaces also became crucibles for developing digital social norms, revealing patterns that remain familiar today. Alongside cooperation and shared humor, users on platforms like PLATO experienced conflict, security breaches, harassment, and a noticeable gendered digital divide, where women often faced hostility. The WELL, situated in the burgeoning network economy of the Bay Area, demonstrated how social interaction and reputation-building online could translate into tangible economic value, blurring the lines between personal and professional life. Licklider and Taylor's early warning about access potentially becoming a privilege, creating a digital divide, also began to surface as an inherent challenge.

These early networks were deeply influenced by the societal currents of the 1960s and 1970s. The counterculture's critique of mainstream bureaucracy and its yearning for authentic community fueled the character of platforms like The WELL and PLATO. Ultimately, this era represented a crucial period of experimentation, where users actively defined the nature of online interaction, establishing patterns of sociability, collaboration, and conflict that laid the essential groundwork for the internet and the complex digital society that followed.

Discovery:
Reading Ted Nelson’s “Dream Machines” made me think about how creative the movement towards social computing was in the 1960s and 70s. Nelson’s idea of “New freedoms Through Computer Screens” and his description of the “computer underground” is related to the counterculture ideals of his time. Nelson sees this social computing community as distinct from the established academic and industrial complex. It has the air of revolution about it, especially in its criticism of traditional “experts”. I think the modern equivalent of this is the “hacker” community. Computer science teaching seems to have ingrained in it an element of counterculturalism. I have a friend in a class called adversarial machine learning that teaches people how to confuse AI programs. The widespread teaching of the ability to interfere with technology has an ideological purpose and a history that dates back to the early days of this concept of the “computer underground”.

[jpprieto]

Just like with sensory perception, the eye and the object of sight, I believe the human network and the digital structure arise coemergently. It was interesting to read about the socially aligned PLATO, I feel its parallels to the more informational ARPANET are rich comparisons even to modern systems. On the internet now we have a social network (or many, depending on perspective). However, unlike the vision of PLATO or WELL where the users and authors directly influenced the infrastructure, nowadays we have a much more centralized structure of host companies (Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit, etc.).

I think it is important to consider how this drives social evolution. The system also is such that the incentive is for user engagement, and company profit, distant goals from those of community formation or knowledge sharing. More and more there is a higher focus on content which can be optimized by an engagement algorithm, driving higher data collection and ad revenue. This paired with AI generated content may drive an "empty" internet. To be sure there are ways to interact, but the structure of our tools by increasing or reducing the friction towards certain possibilities shift societal curves towards or away from behaviors.
We must be wary of even social trends themselves when the purpose is not engineered with society in mind. While echo chambers and tribal dispositions could be argued to be an inherent and ancient phenomenon, social media that reflects to users back their ideas, and the community attached to them can exacerbate the degree to which with the vast network of information and people that is the internet, there is increased polarization and reduction of the scope of knowledge. This could even be seen in the WELL development, in that there was a predilection for users that were “counterculture”, or the divide of gaming vs “productive” endeavors or different genders in PLATO terminals.

How can we engineer and even more than that incentivize the generation of internet infrastructures which harness the power of fabricating modes of user interaction that lead not to revenue for companies, but to overall societal progress and enhancement?
The Media is the Massage, was an incredible read. Many things seem to resonate even with the current era, such as the attachment to old ideals now in the era of AI, or of the extension of the human through its available mediums and media. One striking part to me was the discussion about mental models of the world. In that experts in a field can become so used to the paradigms and rules they are masters of, and feed their ease of use, that they may lose solutions which external modes of understanding can see more clearly. Another powerful thing was the talk about the inherent lag of education with technology. It is crazy that ARPANET, or the internet, was something that only arose 50/60 years ago. We take for granted current tech, but we are at the very dawn of really advanced human technology. Generation Alpha is being born native to iPads, digital worlds, AI, and algorithms. Is the current education system well designed to handle their development for the future world? Do we reject the tools or deeply engage with them so that we act not as adversaries but facilitators in how these are deployed, and in the education of their use?

Discovery:
I enjoyed discovering DarkWind. It feels like a world of immersion like we see in modern RPGs, but in a much more expansive way. It makes me think about how sadly people may no longer be as interested in text-based games to take hold, but the fact that with well-tuned LLMs there is possibility for incredibly rich interaction with the world. No longer constrained by simple commands, there is potential for very rich roleplaying. Ironically this echoes precisely the empty internet I talked before, with richer NPCs where do fellow players stand? It also makes me think about how we could structure learning in the future. I have toyed with the idea of much richer learning games, like perhaps an alchemy-based world which uses chemical rules, or a well-simulated society which would be structured to learn to economic or collaborative understanding without feeling tedious. I also started with Computer Lib/Dream Machines and it is fantastic, but didn’t get to digest enough for it to be my primary discovery material. Today, at the start of the AI era seems a very rich period for this kind of philosophy of computation and the role of the human in the world of technology.

[eeengland1]

Valarie Lamont and PLATO seemed to set the foundation for a large number of the modern-day internet’s uses and format. The creation of online messaging systems similar to email allowed for the seamless transmission of information between users, even when offline, and correspondence for the first time could be held in a continuous stream between disconnected individuals. This in part paved the way for SMS and text messaging.

I doubt the machine network really “drives” the human one in the conventional sense. It’s arguable that the development of primitive email and SMS features an instance of computing affecting communication, and that as a result of a lack of computational ability, email was solidified as a primary form of communication in this upcoming age. On the other hand, the development of online communities irrespective of geographical distribution was also foreshadowed by both PLATO and Licklider, allowing people with similar interests to pool their attention towards subjects and goals. “Communication” has been revolutionized and expanded upon from both sides, developing a new norm for societal interaction in the modern age.

In fact, the computer initially revolutionized society as a means of communication. Licklider and Taylor drive the point that people will be able to use computers as means and mediums of communication in a manner far more effective than was initially possible; examples are given as looking through supplementary materials during a presentation, other than the obvious case of direct textual communication between individuals. I would also like to emphasize that computers can already communicate in the non-trivial way that Licklider and Taylor described in the opening, (e.g. the sending and processing of data between computers to complete some physical task) removing the need for person-to-person communication.

A truly prescient point (or as it seems) from “The medium is in the massage” is that information war is a natural development of the information age. Through the web, propaganda can be shared at an extreme volume and rate, and whole communities of people from all around the world can be influenced in an abrupt fashion. This is only made worse with the relatively newer flooding of chatbots and AIs into community forums and similar mediums for communication, allowing for the quick waging of “information operations” across vast social spaces.

Computers didn’t just allow for the rapid spread of influence across individuals, but the connection of ideas into one large web of information as well, revolutionizing research. Ted Nelson’s hypertext is alive and well today in some forms, allowing for the seamless connection of concepts and related ideas across pages. The communication age was enormously beneficial to not just the community, but the individual as well.

Discovery: The ability for a 1967 “inventory of effects” to predict information wars, something that can only now be considered a major issue to the general public, is exceptional. The outcomes of physical wars are already in part dictated by the outcome of the digital ones, and the capacity for the internet to rally society in favor or against a certain concept or ideal is beyond what was conceivable by humanity before.

[ciara-kinney]

In their essay, The Computer as a Communication Device, J.C.R Licklider and Robert W. Taylor ask, “Is it really seeing the expression in the other’s eye that makes the face-to-face conference so much more productive than the telephone conference call, or is it being able to create and modify external models?” (Licklider, Taylor, 23). I find this question very interesting. From my understanding of what they are saying, they are challenging the idea that physical presence is inherently better for idea communication, as opposed to communicating via digital means. They argue that the shortcomings of digital communication might not lie in anything fundamental to the medium, but rather in underdeveloped ways of using the medium. If externalizing models is the key to communicating ideas, then developing better tools for this externalization can push forward communication efficiency to new, potentially unbounded terrain.

I felt that this sentiment connected, in a way, to some ideas present Ted Nelson’s interviews. Nelson was devoted to expressing interconnection in computers, and developed methods for communicating and modeling these connections, especially in text. In the Herzog clip, he shows his idea for an alternate system of linking text, which shows multiple pages at once and sketches a visual picture of the connections between ideas. Although I think that we can simulate a slightly similar set up with the current configuration of standard laptop functions by split screening between two documents and scrolling, his visualization is obviously very different and accomplishes more sophisticated, complicated functions in a streamlined way. The medium one uses naturally prompts one towards particular thoughts and ways of thinking, and away from others. I suspect that using Nelson’s linking system would prompt one to focus more on textual connections, rather than on the single piece of writing you are analyzing.

This is also echoed in McLuhan’s The Media is the Massage. In the first few pages, he argues that “Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment”. Our thoughts are abstract until they are funneled into some means of expression, whether that be language or another medium. The structure and interface of computers are thus crucial in determining what will, and won’t, arise from their use.

There is a deep and crucial interplay of computer interface structure and the possibilities any particular system affords, or does not. These ideas of course beg the question of alternative possibilities of structure, and where the internet would be today if these routes had been pursued. Given that the internet composes such a large part of society, culture, and life today, the implications of an alternate system would be absolutely enormous.

Discover:
This week, I read twenty pages from Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. The “purpose” section begins with the statement: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it”. It stresses independent development outside of traditional spheres, and presents itself as a means to help achieve this. I really enjoyed reading through the catalog, and it seemed extremely evocative of the time and culture which produced it. There was lots of content on geodesic domes and other alternative architecture styles, engineering and design, innovative systems and studies of ecology and natural crafting. Lots of diagrams and complicated schemes, and lots of mysterious feeling books. The catalog communicated the presence of an incredibly active and engaged community which had legitimate desire to actualize the ideas which they embraced. It was quite cool, honestly, and I’d enjoy looking through it again for project inspiration haha.