Prologue at Participation Literacy

Prologue

Published May 15th, 2006 in Academic Theme - Licenciate Thesis 2006 Tags: augmentation, collaborative filtering, CSCW, cyborg, DRM, E ink, ebook, groupware, haraway, hci, memex, situated knowledge, social navigation, transdiciplinary, web 2.0.

Returning to the 1940�s and Vannevar Bush�s memex device, there are parts in the text reminding of social software and the hypertext nature of Internet:

Wholly new forms of encyclopaedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behaviour. (Bush, 1945)

Bush�s term �memex device� never gained wide acceptance and the whole concept was way before its time. After Vannevar Bush, Christopher Allen jumps to the 1960�s and the rising of ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency; formed 1958), which later formed ARPANET, which in its turn led to the Internet. In 1962 Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was appointed to head ARPA. He was going to have a profound influence on the emerging academic subject of computer science. In the article The Computer as a Communication Device Licklider says: �There has to be some way of facilitating communication among people without bringing them together in one place� (1968, p 34). This single sentence says much about the last 50 years of endeavours in the field of computer technology.

In Sweden we had an education subject called ADB (Automatisk Databehandling), which means Automated Computer Processing. The subject was called ADB from the early stages of computer science to the Internet age in the middle of the 90�s � the subject is still called ADB in some educational institutions. The concept automation originates from the ARPA researcher Doug Englebart�s concept �augmentation� from his seminal work: Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (1962). In the introduction he explains �augmentation�: �By �augmenting human intellect� we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems� (p7). Engelbart was among the first to argue that in order to design tools for augmenting the human intellect we must integrate psychology and organizational development with advances in computing technology. This interdisciplinary approach disappeared later when the term �augmentation� became �office augmentation� and later in the 70�s �office automation�(Allen, 2004).

�Yet the number of successful product lines bearing the tag ‘office automation’ did mean that there was increased research money for creating new tools. One of the most important was a project called Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES). […] EIES was the first major implementation of collaborative software� (Allen, 2004). In the paper Delphi Conferencing: Computer Based Conferencing with Anonymity (1972), the founder of EIES, Murray Turoff, describes the system in terms reminding of modern collaboration systems: threaded-replies, anonymous messages, polling, etc. Though Turoff envisioned something similar to modern collaboration software, it was in the 80�s the implementations took off to form today�s conception of social software. In the late 70�s Peter and Trudy Johnson coined the term �Groupware� as �the combination of intentionally chosen group processes and procedures plus the computer software to support them� (Johnson-Lenz, 1989). The term groupware existed basically in academic settings until the end of the 80�s, when Robert Johansen wrote the best-selling business book Groupware: Computer Support for Business Teams (Johansen, 1988). The surge from the book transformed the concept of groupware from a relatively unknown term which only lived in certain academic contexts, to a buzzword in marketing and a in a broad techno sensitive public. This led to an interest in the concept from companies such as Lotus and Microsoft; both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook have been called Groupware. You can keep that in mind when you read about the concept Web 2.0 below.

In the 1970s there was the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES). According to Christopher Allen EIES was the first major implementation of collaborative software (2004). EIES had many of the features of BBS- style community software that we see today, but in a primitive form.

From my viewpoint, it was in the 1980�s everything happened at once. The PC was introduced to the world. Groupware continued to evolve. New social software approaches were developed. Among them a technique called Collaborative Filtering. The term was not actually expressed before 1992 � that I know of. It was coined by Dave Goldberg and his colleagues at Xerox PARC (Goldberg D, 1992). It was also in the 1990�s the technique became known in a wider context. With Collaborative Filtering, we have the real starting point for the Web 2.0 concept. I will follow this line of development soon, but first I want to introduce my own starting point in the world of computers.

It was in the 1980�s the computer became a real concept for me. The first computer I owned was an 8088 PC in the beginning of the 1980s. This was the time just before the hard disk and the computer mouse. Advanced computer graphics was two lines crossing each other on the black screen. Still, this PC was sensational. Earlier I had used computers such as Commodore and ABC 80 and older persons I knew talked about computers with the software on punch cards. By comparison with that my PC seemed very advanced. My interest focused on art and literature in those days, and in some way I had persuaded myself that a computer would add something to these activities.

My approach to literature was to follow certain concepts through one or several authors� work. In literature research these concepts are called themes, motifs, symbols or metaphors. It would be splendid to get masses of text into the computer and do comparable searching to find spots for closer reading and thereafter find relations between different concepts over space and time. As if this was not enough, I wanted to find a way to transfer my interest for oil painting into the computer. When I had spent some time with this PC I understood my intentions were a good laugh, nothing more.

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