ABSTRACT
It has now been four decades since Joseph Licklider and Robert Taylor presented one of the earliest visions of what we now know as the Internet. In 1968 they coauthored “The Computer as a Communication Device,” in which they predicted a global computer network of “distributed intellectual resources” (28) characterized by its accessibility by multiple users at disparate locations; its ability to help users share, manipulate, and locate data; as well as its facilitation of easy interactive communication among users. Licklider and Taylor’s important work eventually contributed to the development of ARPANET, which later became the modern Internet. Their predictions, however, did not focus only on descriptions of human-computer interaction or the technical structure for sharing bits of information across a computer network. They were also interested in human-human interaction, the social dynamics of what they coined a networked “supercommunity.” In the introduction to the essay, they made a provocative claim about networked communication:
[T]o communicate is more than to send and to receive. Do two tape recorders communicate when they play to each other and record from each other? Not really-not in our sense. We believe that communicators have to do something nontrivial with the information they send and receive. And we believe that we are entering a technological age in which we will be able to interact with the richness of living information-not merely in the passive way that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but as active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it through our interaction with it, and not simply receiving something from it by our connection to it. (21)
In the years since, the suggestion that the Internet is a means for rich, active participation among computer users contributing toward “living information” has become an idealistic model rather than a representation of actual use. Indeed, we would do well to view this utopia with some skepticism, given the understanding that the Internet is not an inherently progressive
technology, in and of itself offering the promise of advances in intellectual and creative production.
