WEEK 3-February 3
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
It's many-to-many communication. It's making possible citizen control of a remote political process. It's creating a new culture and economy. Sound familiar? It was the hype surrounding a technological revolution that occurred 75 years ago - radio. Is there a lesson here for the Internet? In "Deja Vu All Over Again, " WIRED 3.05, Todd Lappin draws some historical parallels -- and differences.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s several systems were introduced in the U.S., U.K. France and Canada that were labeled videotex and teletext. By today's standards they look very primative (and some of us thought they looked primative even then). There was much hype in the press about these systems, but as they never caught the popular fancy (too expensive, hard to use), they received nothing like the penetration of AOL and the WWW today. Still, it's useful to take a look at what these pioneers were and what the futurists of the time thought they would be. First look at the basic description of these services in Tydeman, et al, Teletext and Videotex in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), Chapter 1 .
Then look at a portion of Chapter 5 , which deals with some predictions about what types of information consumers might want from electronic information services. Based on what you know or estimate today, were the expectations of 1980 consistent with how we are using the WWW today?
By the way, both these chapters were scanned in and then put through Omnipage Lite to convert to text. The good news is it works. The bad news is that tables and charts don't convert, so I had to add them back in manually. So you may find some typos throughout that have been created in the process. Unless something has been garbled that I didn't catch, try to tolerate any mistakes you find.
See this week's Ask Bob Q & A.
In preparation for the Great Web Scavenger Hunt, look over Ackerman, Chapter 6. He has some helpful supplemental information and links set up at his companion Web site.
Deliverable: by Thursday, Feb 6 at 2:00 pm. See details at Web Scavenger Hunt
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