5
about the American spirit, such as Emerson’s, Turner’s or Crèvecoeur’s,
2
may prove
to be still effective if applied to the spirit that has driven the people who built up
what we now call World Wide Web.
Generally, most of us do not realize that website addresses remind us of the
American origin of the Internet in a quite evident way: the only “dot-nationality”
that does not exist is “.us”, which is true for email addresses as well.
A website based in a specific state ends with two letters indicating its
nationality (.it, .fr, .es). A US address ends with two letters indicating its topic (.com
for “commercial”, .org for “organization”, .edu for “educational” and so on).
Websites in the United Kingdom are organized in a similar way, but they still
indicate their nationality (e.g: “.co.uk” for commercial websites and “.ac.uk” for
academic).
3
There are several works that look at the Internet as a new American frontier,
but most of them only refer to Turner’s book
4
and his intuition that the American
people would keep being influenced by frontier life and the longing for new wild
territories to tame even after the closing of the frontier. In contrast, few works
analyze the Internet as a US phenomenon by looking at American classic culture.
Among the few who have done this, I consider Dave Healy’s paper “Cyberspace and
2
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance”, The Heath Anthology of American literature, vol. 1,
(Houghton Mifflin company, 1998). Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in
American History”, in The Frontier in American History (Huntington, New York, 1976). J. Hector
St. John de Crèvecoeur, “Letters from an American farmer”, The Heath Anthology of American
literature, Vol. 1., cit.
3
On the web, we can find non-US websites classified as “.com”; but, as far as I know, “.us”
websites do not exist.
4
Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”, cit.
6
place”
5
to be the one that has the most complete insight into cultural influences that
have shaped the Internet.
Even if only a few works have analyzed the Net with this insight, I have
found a great many documents, websites and manifestos for foundations that we can
clearly read from the point of view of American culture. The two books that have
represented my initial reference for sociological issues about the Internet and
computers in general are Negroponte’s Being Digital
6
and Rheingold’s The Virtual
Community, homesteading on the electronic frontier.
7
I have united this together
with a new interpretation of the social, urban and cultural studies of American
culture in the ‘90s, as presented in works by Jean Baudrillard, John Findlay,
Umberto Eco, Edward Soja, Mike Davis and Joel Garreau,
8
among others. The
writings of these authors on which I have based my research, were written before the
Internet became popular, and they are mainly centered on American culture from
other points of view.
What I am trying to do in this thesis, is to put the American electronic
information circulating on the web together with scholarly writings about American
culture, in order to show that there is a strong connection between American
5
Dave Healy, “Cyberspace and place, the Internet as middle landscape on the electronic
frontier”, in Internet culture, ed. David Porter, (Routledge, NY and London, 1996)
6
Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, (Coronet, London, 1995)
7
Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community, homesteading on the electronic frontier, (MIT
press, USA, 2000)
8
Jean Baudrillard, America, (London, Verso, 1988). Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and
simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1994). John Findlay, Magic Lands: Western cityscapes
and American Culture after 1940, (University of California Press, Berkley, 1992). Umberto Eco,
Travels in Hyperreality, (New York, 1990). Edward Soja, “Inside Exopolis: scenes from Orange
County”, in Variations on a theme park: the new American city and the end of public space,
Michael Sorkin, ed. (Hill and Wand, NY, 1992). Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the
imagination of disaster, (Metropolitan books, NY, 1988). Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the new
frontier, (Anchor Books, NY London, 1992).
7
attitudes, American ideologies and history and the way the Internet has developed. I
try to show the relationship between contemporary American culture and digital
technologies, and I try to explain why we have to bear in mind where the Internet
comes from.
The World Wide Web, as its very name indicates, is a global medium of
communication. I believe it is important to understand and remember that it was
invented in America and that it first became popular there among ordinary people. It
grew in America and together with it grew metaphors that are deeply linked to
American culture, and we risk misunderstanding if we ignore where these metaphors
come from and how they developed.
When analyzing the Internet we should also bear in mind that, nowadays, it is
a new invention, and it brings hopes and fears as other new inventions, especially
new media, have done before. Most of us remember the impact of television, but
being a one-way device, television is not the best medium to compare with the
Internet. The radio, which arose as a two-way medium, seems to be much more
appropriate for making a forecast based on the past.
This is the point I start from. I prefer to consider the Internet as a new tool,
and I want to bear in mind that several new inventions were expected to change the
world and then revealed themselves to represent just a slight change. If we go back
and read the history of the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television or the
invention of computers, at a time in which they were conceived as more efficient
calculators, we shall see that history is repeating itself.
In fact, in the first chapter about the history of the Internet, I try to show how
it was born and that the way it developed and was projected is still very important.
8
Then I analyze the history of the radio, a history that can by now be considered
closed and that may be considered as an example of what could happen to the
Internet.
In the three following chapters, that represent the main part of my work, I
analyze the aspects of the Internet I believe to be linked to American culture and
American society. The basic argument is that the Internet is perceived as space, as if
it were physical space. This has a great number of implications that I try to analyze.
At the same time the Internet is characterized by a strong feeling of placelessness,
which obviously clashes with the previous affirmation.
This paradoxical contrast between perceiving the Internet as place while
appreciating its aspects of ubiquity and placelessness has interesting implications for
how the web is conceived, built and structured. It also has very important
implications for the regulations that the various nations are trying to establish as this
new medium becomes so important in contemporary society.
Placelessness and ubiquity imply that the web does not know boundaries. The
information available there spans the globe, disregarding national laws and
regulations. Moreover it allows people all over the world to learn more about
faraway countries. This is especially important in the case of countries such as China
or Afghanistan, whose governments do not like their population to learn too much
about foreign governments that have more democratic approaches.
In the second chapter, “Space on the Internet”, I try to show all the links
between the concept of the American frontier and the development of the Internet.
I believe there are several connections between the attitude of colonizers and the
ideologies that drove the people who built the Net. In the second part of this chapter
9
I try to make clear how the virtual, insubstantial character of this quantity of
electronic data perceived as physical space has important consequences. I also
account for the fact that, differently from physical territory, electronic space has
virtually no boundaries.
The third chapter, “Place on the Internet”, is about how the perception of
Internet space as “real” space has driven people to have attitudes towards it as if it
were a territory to transform into “place”, in the sense of a familiar dwelling. I
analyze virtual communities as the features of the Internet that show an attempt to
make a place in cyberspace. I try to prove that similar attitudes have conducted the
building and development of American cities as well as of virtual communities. I
then go on to analyze all the different kinds of Virtual communities, with a brief
analysis of the linguistic impact of electronic communication.
In the fourth chapter, “Ethics and Politics on the Internet”, I study
sociological and political issues about the Internet. I explain the origins and the
meaning of hacking.
I analyze the legal problems of the globality of the Internet, through the
analysis of legal trials, and I also look at some of the moral and ethical implications
of globalization through the Net. I try to explain what has been done about control of
information traveling through the Internet and why it is so hard to control what goes
on there. In the end I take account of the problem of “digital divide” and report the
opinions and solutions that have been proposed.
10
1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INTERNET
11
1.1 EARLY DAYS
1
The origins of the Internet must be traced back to computer connectivity
technologies in Defense related research. The aim of the project was to create a
communications network that would be able to survive atomic attacks. I believe this
to be the first aspect that we should bear in mind. It is astonishing how the Internet
moved from being a military tool conceived to maintain authority to being a tool that
often takes on an anarchic flavor.
It all started with the intuition of Paul Baran, who worked for the RAND
corporation.
He proposed a network without central authority because, in case of an
attack, any headquarters would become an obvious high priority target. The system
he projected would be so full of redundancies that it would be able to function even
if mutilated. All the nodes in the network would have equal status and would be able
to originate, relay and receive messages.
2
1
All information in 1.1 and 1.2, if not otherwise specified, is taken from: Wade Rowland,
Spirit of the web, the age of Information from Telegraph to Internet, (Keyporter, Toronto, 1999),
chapter 26
2
A brief technical explanation is needed: messages sent through the system would be chopped
into packets that would travel separately and be reassembled when they reached their destination, by
taking any route and bouncing around working nodes. In this way, if a node were destroyed, the
packet would be able to bounce back until it found another working node. Meanwhile it would be
impossible to intercept the whole message, because only parts of it would be traveling separately.
The Internet […] was designed for purposes of
military communication in a United States
devastated by a Soviet nuclear strike. Originally, the
Internet was a post-apocalypse command grid. And
look at it now. […] It's as if some grim fallout
shelter had burst open and a full-scale Mardi Gras
parade had come out.
Bruce Sterling, Speeches, 1993
12
Like most brilliant ideas, Baran’s proposal was at first seen as very inefficient
and unfeasible, especially because it implied the lack of some central authority. But
in 1962 Paul Baran’s report was released and, at the same time, the U.S. Department
of Defense’s Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was asked to study how to
take advantage of the growing number of computers and how to create high-security
networks. The two projects were bound together and, in October, Dr. J.C.R.
Licklider, known universally as “Lick”, was chosen to lead the research.
J. Licklider was working at MIT during the time period around August 1962
discussing his “Galactic Network” concepts. In his papers, he envisioned a globally
interconnected computer system to which everyone around the world could quickly
and easily access data and programs from any other location. In concept, his ideals
were in fact much like the Internet as it is today.
3
Lick’s most important intuition was to consider computers as a medium to
communicate between people instead of a mere “batch processing” device. He
focused research on developing software that would allow computers to exchange
information, allowing people to exchange information through computers. Rowland
defines him as “a hacker at heart”; his background in psychology gave him the
sensibility to be the first to notice the spirit of community arising among the users.
Rheingold comments:
When you build a computer system that enables fifty or a hundred
programmers to sit around a computer room and interact individually and
directly with the main computer, you are automatically building in the
3
David “Conundrum” Condrey, “Black and White” [19/02/2002]
<http://www.hackers.com/new/Black_and_White.pdf>
13
potential for a community, because they are going to want to exchange lore
and wisecracks while they do their programming. Electronic mail was one of
the features built into the new time-sharing systems.
4
Later, in 1964, Leonard Kleinrock, also working on research at MIT,
published his first book on his theories of packet switching. In 1965, the TX-2
computer in Massachusetts to the Q-32 in California were connected with a low
speed dial-up telephone line creating the first wide-area computer network ever
created. The result of this project was to provide proof to the legitimacy of the
original theories of packet switching and computer networking.
In December 1969 the University of California at Los Angeles, the
University of California at Santa Barbara, Stanford Research Institute and the
University of Utah held the first four nodes of the very first American network:
ARPANET. By 1971 there were fifteen nodes; by 1972, thirty-seven. The nodes
consisted of minicomputers that would make communication possible by solving the
problem of exchanging data between computers running on different operating
systems, i.e. speaking different languages.
The nodes would translate incoming data from different computers into a
universal Net language and data on the Net back into the language of the user’s
computer. This strategy is still the same in the current system of Internet Service
Providers for dial-up access to the Internet.
4
Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community, homesteading on the electronic frontier, (MIT
press, USA, 2000) p. 65
14
1.2 TRYING TO RULE THE NET
A couple of years after ARPANET’s launch, its users had transformed it into a
kind of electronic post office. The messages exchanged through the network were
mainly news and personal messages, rather than long-distance computing. People
used the net to collaborate on projects, exchange information and chat about
anything that interested them. What users enjoyed most were mailing lists,
newsgroups and digests and what made communication through computers special
was mainly the colloquial informality that characterized it. Licklider noted:
One of the advantages of the message system over letter mail was that in an
ARPANET message, one could write tersely and type imperfectly, even to an
older person in a superior position and even to a person one did not know very
well, and the recipient took no offense. The formality and perfection that most
people expect in a typed letter did not become associated with network
messages, probably because the network was so much faster, so much more
like the telephone… Among the advantages of the network message services
over the telephone were the facts that one could proceed immediately to the
point without having to engage in small talk first, that the message services
produced a preservable record, and that the sender and receiver did not have
to be available at the same time.
5
During the 70s the first email discussion groups were launched; the letters or
“postings” were available to any member of the group. They used to be called
“store-and-forward nets”, nowadays the process is defined as “conferencing” and the
interest groups are called “newsgroups”. By the late 70s they had evolved into
5
Licklider and Vezza, “Applications of Information Tehnology”, Proceedings of the IEEE, 66
(II) 1330 (1978), cited in Wade Rowland, Spirit of the web, cit., p. 295
15
friendly environments, thanks to software called Usenet, BITNET, Fidonet, and were
capable of catering for the growing number of personal computers. Some years later
they would comprise the Internet.
Usenet (short for Unix User Network) was devised for computers running the
Unix operating system. Later it was adapted to IBM and Macintosh PC operating
systems, becoming much more accessible. It was at first used mainly by university
students to discuss academic issues. Soon, predictably, discussions started to include
non-academic topics. In order to organize the growing number of newsgroups
proliferating without any planning, its volunteer administrators divided them into
two categories: “mod” for groups where messages would be filtered and discussion
would keep on track, and “net” for unmoderated groups.
In 1986 what is remembered as “The Great Renaming” took place: Usenet
administrators decided to divide the hundreds of different newsgroups into seven
hierarchies: computers, miscellaneous, news, recreation, science, society and talk.
Newsgroups considered less serious were grouped under “talk”, making it easier to
censor them if moderators wished to do so. The event caused a flame war which
proved for the first time a strong feeling of property felt by Net users as part of a
community. They would not easily accept any kind of attempt to impose a
management “from on high”.
The “revolution” went on with the provocative proposal of two groups called
“rec.sex” and “rec.drugs”. In spite of their winning the necessary number of votes to
be listed, moderators refused to create them. So “alt.sex” and “alt.drugs” were
created, using routings that were separated from the official ones. Brian Reid, their
creator, five years later declared:
16
I do not wish to offer an opinion about how the Net should be run; that’s like
offering an opinion about how salamanders should grow: nobody has control
over it, regardless of what opinions they might have.
6
This episode is emblematic to explain how and why the Net managed to remain
ungoverned and unstructured.
6
Brian Reid, Usenet posting, 1993, cited in Wade Rowland, Spirit of the web, cit., p. 299
17
1.3 THE LATEST YEARS
The Internet was formally proposed in 1972; October of that year saw the
first International Conference on Computer Communications. Scientists from
Canada, France, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain and the United States agreed
that protocols to link together computer networks in various countries were needed.
A couple of years later the TCP/IP code
7
was ready. In the best hacker tradition
8
, as
Rowland puts it, the protocol was immediately made available for anyone, free of
charge.
Meanwhile, Ethernet local area networks (LAN) and workstation came on the
scene. These LANs worked using the same communication protocols as the
ARPANET, namely TCP/IP. It became obvious that everyone would benefit if these
networks could talk together.
9
In 1981 the National Science Foundation financed the building of a
backbone
10
known as CSNET (Computer and Science Network) with 56 bps
11
networking (while ARPANET was currently using 50 kbps networking) for
institutions that did not currently have access to the ARPANET.
7
TCP/IP means “Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol”. It is the basic
communication language or protocol of the Internet. It can also be used as a communications
protocol in a private network (either an intranet or an extranet). Leaving out technical explanations,
it is the code that allows computers working on different systems to communicate through what
could be defined as a “common language”.
8
A good hacker believes that computer knowledge should be available to everyone to learn
and develop it. For a full explanation of the hacker ethic see page 139.
9
Ed Krol, The Whole Internet User’s Guide & Catalog, (O’Reilly, USA, 1992)
10
“Backbone” is another term for bus, the main wire that connects nodes. The term is often
used to describe the main network connections composing the Internet. (from
<http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/b/backbone.html> [3/05/02])
11
“bps” means bit per second. A 56 kbps roughly corresponds to the ability to transfer two full
typewritten pages per second. Mbps stands for Megabytes per second. (Krol, The Whole Internet,
cit. p. 12)
18
This made resources, that had been reserved to weapons developers, available
for any scholarly research.
12
Regional networks were created: each school would be connected to its
nearest neighbor, each chain connected to a supercomputer center and centers were
connected together. But at some point this very efficient system became overloaded
because the traffic had increased too much.
In 1983 ARPANET split into ARPANET and MILNET, the latter became
integrated with the Defense Data Network that had been created the previous year.
13
In 1984 CSNET started its upgrade. The three companies working on the upgrade
were MCI, IBM and MERIT. After upgrades, the CSNET changed its name into NSFNET
(National Science Foundation Network) and the older lines remained as the original
CSNET. NSFNET was finally completed in 1988, when new circuits were made to be
T1 lines (1.5 Mbps).
14
By 1985, the Internet was already supporting a broad community of
researcher and developers and other communities started using it for daily computer
communications, especially through emails.
Five years later, in 1990, MERIT, IBM, and MCI formed a non-profit
corporation, the Advanced Network and Services Corporation (ANS) to conduct
research into high speed networking. Soon, they were able to come up with concepts
for the T3 (43 Mbps) lines. NSFNET quickly adopted the new network and was fully
upgraded by the end of the following year.
12
Condrey, “Black and White”, cit.
13
Hobbes’ Internet Timeline 5.6 [7/05/02] <http://www.pbs.org/internet/timeline/timeline-
txt.html>
14
Condrey, “Black and White”, cit.
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