Brainstorm in Progress: Bulletin board system

Showing posts with label Bulletin board system. Show all posts

Friday, May 31, 2013

Internet Archeology: Partying like its 1997

English: Cern office building 40, photographed...

CERN batiment 40 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was interested in finding some of my old webpages after reading about CERN rebuilding the first webpage back in April. I remember first seeing that website and thinking "why would anyone want to do this when all you have to do is log on to a bulletin board and download a hypercard stack and get all the information you could ever want?" I also ridiculed my little brother when he burst into the room with news of the "floppy disk." I told him it was idiotic since someone could go into any Radio Shack and by a cassette tape and store all their programs on something that only costs a couple of bucks. Please do not look to me for investment advice!

Anyway, if you have an old URL and you want find the information that was there even if the site is now down, the best thing to do is to go to www.archive.org and search in their "Wayback Machine" - a search engine that searches their archive of the internet. You can go there to recover old data or you can use it to find out what webpages looked like in the Dork Ages: "Browse through over 240 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported." Another important use for the Wayback Machine is that the URLs that you will find there won't change. This is particularly important for course materials in online classes that use links. If I find an article I like, I will look up the article in the Wayback Machine, take a URL from a year ago and post that. Then if the site goes away or the URL changes in the actual site, I will always have the resource.

I find this particularly interesting because by looking at old webpages, one can find all of the strange metaphors that people were using to build webpages which can give you clues to how we adapt (or not adapt) to new technologies. The early web was rife with book and magazine metaphors: there are websites out there built in the mid-90s that used a spiral bound notebook motif.

Another strategy for finding old webpages is to search for terms like "Optimized for Netscape 2.0" - that was something that we actually bragged about. This search will help you uncover riches such as:

Yes! We are optimized!

The Jethro Tull Discography -Why, oh, why did we give up on tables and background images?
Kid's World - and what a strange recursive world it is too.
Slovak Cultural and Information Center - Go for the food, stay for the technological advances.
The Official Wicked Home Page - It is so wicked, it even has a phone number for a BBS (bulletin board system).

If you really want to go old school you can still explore "Gopher Space." That was where really sophisticated cybernauts in the 90s searched for information.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Vaclev Havel and the 300-Baud Velvet Revolution

Image via WikipediaI was familiar with Václav Havel through his writings and only later came to understand his significance as a politician (I hate to use that word to describe people I like) as communism fell. Havel had to distribute some of his writings as "samizdat" - slang for self-publishing - because the means of communication was held by the state. Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc where individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader - it was the social media of the day but a lot more dangerous! The Soviet authorities at one time fired him from the state theater and sent him to work in a brewery. He was a signatory of Charter 77 which was distributed in the 70s this way. The whole "Velvet Revolution" was an amazing thing to watch. There was something so inevitable about it all: the truth was going to prevail despite money, corruption and guns.

You know you are living under a repressive regime when communication tools are against the law. For instance, it is illegal, according to the State dept., to own an unregistered computer modem in Myanmar: "It is illegal to own an unregistered modem in Burma. You may bring one laptop computer into Burma, but you must declare it upon arrival. Limited email service is available at some large hotels. All emails are subject to monitoring by Burmese security services. It is very expensive to send photographs via email. One foreign visitor was presented a bill for $2,000 after transmitting one photograph via a major hotel's e-mail system. During September and October 2007, the military government disconnected all Internet access across the country for extended periods of time." This is not unusual in countries controlled by dictators.

I remember reading about people smuggling modems into Czechoslovakia back in the late 80's. Bruce Sterling later recalled the Velvet Revolution in Wired Issue 3.01, Jan 1995: "Back in '89, Czech students were trying to coordinate the uprising across the nation, and the technical students...were running the telecom angle. They used a 300-baud device with the size, shape, and heat of a kitchen toaster. The Czech secret police were far too stupid and primitive to keep up with digital telecommunications, so the student-radical modem network was relatively secure from bugging and taps. Fidonet BBSes were springing up surreptitiously on campuses whenever an activist could sneak a modem past the border guards. Modems were, of course, illegal. Most of the Czech cops, however, had no idea what modems were." The Velvet Revolution was using 300 and 900 baud modems at a time when we were bathing in the lap of luxury with our 2400 baud modems. They used the best technology and means of communication in the most effective way they knew how. Much like the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street folks, no one asked if it was the most "appropriate" or the most "sustainable." A reading literate people can help foster and ensure democracy, Epictetus in his Discourses says that only the educated are free. In his day, that meant reading and writing. In our day it should include a technologically literate people, understanding how we are technologically connected and how to best leverage smart communication networks.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Egypt: The Revolution Will Be Twitterized

Image by Brooklyn Museum via FlickrOnce again, the power of social media and networks has toppled a government. There is nothing superficial about tweeting 140 characters. There is nothing "weak" about the weak ties and connections in Facebook or other social networks. Events in Egypt, Iran and elsewhere have shown that these networks are worth learning and knowing about. It is interesting that in America the questions about social networks have to do with the so-called superficial nature of the connections (I am thinking here of Sherry Turkle) and in the rest of the world Twitter is the vehicle of change - the electronic samizdat.

Technology as an agent of revolutionary change is nothing new - letters and newspapers linked networks of revolutionaries in Europe and America. Velvet revolutionaries in the late 80s were smuggling 2400 baud modems into Eastern Europe. The networks were used to send meeting information, demonstration notices, and information to illegal computer bulletin boards:

"Back in '89, Czech students were trying to coordinate the uprising across the nation, and the technical students...were running the telecom angle. They used a 300-baud device with the size, shape, and heat of a kitchen toaster. The Czech secret police were far too stupid and primitive to keep up with digital telecommunications, so the student-radical modem network was relatively secure from bugging and taps. Fidonet BBSes were springing up surreptitiously on campuses whenever an activist could sneak a modem past the border guards. Modems were, of course, illegal. Most of the Czech cops, however, had no idea what modems were." - Bruce Sterling, "Triumph of the Plastic People," Wired 3.01. Jan. 1995.

Computer networks are the new coffee house (the traditional hot bed of revolution in the 18th century). Twitter and cell phone texting has changed Iran (shaken, not toppled). The government of Myanmar knows all about the "dangers" of technology too which is why it is against the law there to own an unregistered modem.

Just as we would teach traditional journalism in schools with newspapers (I mean literal paper), we owe it to the students to utilize social networks and media in the curriculum. Social media literacy is not just for ordering pizza! The media is a superficial or as powerful as we make it.