Appunti per l'esame di Inglese Orale III, libro consigliato 'From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg - John Naughton'

From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg

Take the long view

We are living through a revolution in our communications environment, and the strange thing about it is that it's very difficult to see where it's taking us. We hear a lot of interpretations—slogans, for example, 'texting is destroying grammar.' Can we learn anything from history?

A thought experiment

Let's imagine that print is a historical analogy for the Internet. The invention of printing by moveable type can be dated from 1455 when the first Bible emerged from the press created by Johannes Gutenberg. Back in the 1470s, nobody could have known how profound that impact would be (it triggered the Protestant Revolution, enabled the rise of modern science). So it's absurd to pretend what the long-term impact will be.

The typescript on the wall

The Chinese had invented a form of printing by moveable type by the end of the first millennium. As for Gutenberg, we know very little about him, only that he was obsessive, ingenious, persistent, fanatical, infuriating, and mostly broke. He assembled technologies and learned the different techniques to make his invention work, and he also found a way to finance his activities, which led him to deal with the first stirrings of capitalism. He eventually decided to print a Bible as the first book. From that moment on, printing spread with astonishing speed.

Gutenberg’s legacy

The invention brought about the most radical transformation in the conditions of intellectual life in the history of Western civilization.

• Mass production: Gutenberg invented an industrial system for stamping out perfect copies of a standardized product. Printing is the precursor of mass production, and it created new trades and professions.
• Advertising: Printing provided tools for distributing publicity material in large quantity.
• Intellectual Property: In the scribal age, that idea did not exist, except for the Biblical quote. In the end, the copyright system evolved as a way of protecting the contents of printed books. It also led to the extension of the notion of intellectual property to inventions and innovations: it paved the way for the vast apparatus of patenting and trademarking that characterizes the modern world.
• Accessibility: In the pre-Gutenberg age, books were copied by hand by scribes working in scriptoria. They were rare and very expensive objects. They were possessed only by the rich and the powerful, but after Gutenberg, books became more affordable and plentiful.
• The Reformation: Before Gutenberg, the ordinary people of European countries were dependent on the church for access to the Bible, which was only available in Latin. After Gutenberg, Bibles were printed in increasing numbers and translated into vernacular languages. People were then able to make their own interpretations of it. Printing also amplified the revolt of Martin Luther, who pinned his Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517. Protestantism represented a subtle shift of spiritual responsibility from the Church to the Individual. The Church tried to head off the threat posed by Gutenberg by creating an index of proscribed books, while also using printing as a tool for reinforcing standardization: prior to printing, liturgical texts were produced in manuscripts and were therefore variable in consistency and accuracy.
• Scholarship: After Gutenberg, to consult different texts, the scholar had no need to venture far from his home, and errors were an inescapable by-product of manual copying, too.
• Science: Printing provided typographical fixity. It also led to the popularization of scientific ideas because it made such ideas available to a wide public through translations.
• Childhood: In a pre-print age, adulthood began when a young person had attained communicative competence in the information environment, typically around 7 years old. In a print-based culture, it took longer for a child to attain full communicative competence: a considerable amount of schooling was required, the new definition was based on reading competence, pushing the age of transition to twelve.

None of those macro impacts happened overnight: changes happen over extended periods of time.

Writers, readers and changing minds

Gutenberg's invention led to the emergence of the writer and the reader. In the scribal age, there was no individual creative author: a man might write the book of others, changing nothing (scribe), write the book with additions (compiler), write his own works on others' for the purpose of explanation (commentator), or add in their works others' for the purpose of confirmation (author). Montaigne more or less invented the personal essay.

Printing and individualism are inextricably bound up with one another; printing helped to create a social environment within which the idea of individuality made sense. 'We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us' (McLuhan): as orality became muted, the reader and his response became separated from a social context. Reading is an anti-social act, and the practices linked with reading are not genetically determined: they have to be taught, so printing changed also our conception of education.

The fact that we are not genetically programmed for reading as we are for language is very significant because it may have shaped the structure of our brains. According to Wolf, our brains have an open architecture, and it's because of the brain's plastic design that reading can be learned. Reading fosters rationality; engaging with a printed text requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making, and reasoning. So printing spurred the evolution of what we might call Homo Typographicus. So, are we now embarking on the evolution of Homo Interneticus?

After Gutenberg, what next?

Media is the plural of medium, which is a carrier of something, but also a mixture of nutrients needed for cell growth. So there can be a metaphor: the social system is a living organism that depends on a media environment for the nutrients it needs to survive and develop. Any change in the environment will have corresponding effects on the organism—change the media environment and you can change society.

• Utopianism: Utopian dreams stemmed from the realization that the network was a kind of virtual place, a cyberspace, a word first used by Gibson in his novel Neuromancer and eventually by Sterling (cyberspace is the place where a phone conversation appears to occur). In the early days of the internet (1983-1993), there was a powerful vision of it as a new frontier where people lived in peace: a space where corporations and commercial forces were largely absent, causing many to hope that the internet would liberate us from the world we live in and change our conditions. Barlow writes his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (prompted by the Communications Decency Act of 1996): cyberspace is a home of mind, with no elected government, independent of tyrannies. Subsequent decades have shown that the internet does not lie beyond the reach of nation-states, and the threat of being dominated by large companies like Google and Apple has grown, making the internet a battleground for powerful industrial interests. Utopians also live on more pragmatic representations: people can join forces to demonstrate the wisdom of crowds or to collaborate in open-source software.
• Dystopianism: Fears about the network's social impact: a conviction that the network is reshaping our intellectual, social, economic, and political landscape, changing also our conception of art and entertainment, fragmenting culture, and eroding personal privacy. The internet has created a world of isolated individuals and has unleashed upon us an avalanche of information and disinformation.

The human impact: a networked media environment may be affecting the ways we think and how our brains work. Carr asks, "Is Google Making us Stupid?" He argues that once immersing in a book or lengthy article used to be easy; now concentration begins to drift after two or three pages. The net seems to be chipping away at his capacity for concentration and contemplation; the internet has altered our mental habits. He cites a pathologist saying that he has to also restrict his blog notes assuming that his readers have a short attention span. Cascio argues that human cognitive capacities have always evolved to meet new challenges: one of the new challenges is the torrent of information unleashed by the net, but this proliferation of voices might have the effect of improving our ability to think. Even video games help us because they reward the capacity to make connections and use patterns. The problem isn't that we have too much information, but that our tools for managing it are still in their infancy (in this Google may be the beginning of a solution).

Gloria Mark studies how online activity may affect cognitive processes while reading: people are continually distracted when working with digital information; it's impossible to concentrate on a serious matter when you are switching off so rapidly. Theorists suggest that endless hyperlinked diversions can be addictive because humans are genetically programmed for seeking. For example, when we go on Google to look for an actress we have seen in a movie, we realize that search has led to an hour of googling. But some other scientists argue whether we can predict the internet's effects so early.

The web is not the net

The Internet and the Web are not synonymous: railway metaphor, internet as the tracks and infrastructure of the system; in a railway system, different kinds of traffic run on the infrastructure. In the internet context, web pages are just one of the many kinds of traffic that run on the infrastructure. Other kinds include software updates, emails, streaming media. The web is huge and important, but it's just one of the things of the internet. The network is much bigger and far more important than anything that works on it. The tendency to identify a technology with the particular instantiation of it with which one happens to be familiar is an old story: in the 1930s, a radio receiver would be referred to as radio. The same way as videotapes became videos.

For the net, disruption is a feature, not a bug

The author claims that we don't appreciate the net: it went from being something exotic and mysterious to something that we take for granted. The net result is that we have been sleepwalking into the future, into a global communication system about which most of us have little knowledge and even less curiosity. The internet is special because it's a powerful enabler of disruptive innovation: it is a global machine for springing surprises on us, and it was explicitly meant to be like that.

The uniqueness of the Internet stems from two fundamental principles that underpinned its design. The internet that we use today was switched on in January 1983; it was designed over the course of the previous decade and derived from another work, the ARPAnet, that was created by the US Department of Defense in the period 1966-1972. The internetworking project began in 1973 and was led by Cerf and Kahn, who had been working on the ARPAnet. They wanted to create a network that would seamlessly link other networks with two components:

• There must be no central control.
• The network should not be optimized for any particular application.

In a way, both principles were based on the experience with telephone networks:

(1) Until the 1980s, all telephone networks were owned and regulated either by governments or by state-regulated telephone companies, which were able to dictate who could connect to the network and what the network could be used for. In the US, it was AT&T. The Hush-a-phone was a plastic device that could be clipped onto a telephone handset to reduce extraneous noise, but when released to the market, it was objected to on the grounds that it was a foreign attachment, forbidden by the company’s permission, because a misbehaving device could bring down the system for the entire region. These rules had an effect on innovation in telecommunications; they were suppressed. In 1934, Hickman invented a telephone answering machine (if a phone call went unanswered, it would beep and record the message of the caller), but Hickman's research was suppressed by AT&T for more than 60 years. The AT&T fear would be that people might abandon the telephone, and businessmen might fear the potential of using a recording to undo a written contract.

The same thing happened with faxes, patented in 1843 but became an acceptable part of the office only in 1980 because national post offices, which owned telephone companies, did not look favorably on the idea of people being able to send letters over the telephone network. So if you allow central control of a network, then innovation will proceed at the speed deemed suitable by the controller.

(2) If a network is optimized for one application (voice), it may be sub-optimal for a new application (computer communication). So Cerf and Kahn concluded that the Internet should be agnostic as to applications and so came up with a network that essentially took data packets and did its best to deliver them to their destination, but it was indifferent to what was in the packets. Those two principles enabled a remarkable explosion of innovation, as inventors and entrepreneurs thought up applications that could harness the capabilities of the network.

There are different surprises: first-order surprises (innovations that spring directly from Internet’s open architecture: www, Napster, malware), second-order surprises (innovations which built on the openness of the first-order surprises: Wikipedia, Facebook).

First-order surprises

The Web: In 1984, a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN to focus on software that allows documents to be stored and later retrieved. He had to invent a system with common rules that would be acceptable to everyone. This meant as close as possible to no rules at all. First of all, it should be decentralized, and secondly, it had to use the idea of hypertext (documents with internal links to other documents). Turned down by CERN, Berners-Lee kept unofficially working on his idea.

To create the web, Berners-Lee had to:

• Invent a way of giving every single web page a unique identifier; he used URI as an identifier and URL as a locator.
• Design a technical protocol (a set of computer-readable conventions) that would enable web clients and servers to communicate without ambiguity as they requested and served documents; the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) emerged.
• Create software that would enable people to browse and edit web pages, a client (like Firefox), and a server program that would enable a networked computer to serve up web pages on demand.
• Come up with a standard language for marking up web pages: HTML for Hypertext Markup Language.

So Berners-Lee came up with a working system in just a few months. But the Web was never an official CERN project. And now, nobody knows how big the World Wide Web is, with almost between 20 and 40 billion pages, and that's just the tip of the iceberg—below the indexed web is the 'deep' web (pages lying behind organizational firewalls).

Napster, the celestial jukebox

'Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch': for Fanning, his personal obsession concerned online music. He was very keen on computers and the Net, but his true passion was music.

By the mid-1990s, there had been a lot of music on the internet. The problem was that it was difficult to locate, and even when you had found it, it was difficult to acquire. Up to 1981, the only way we had to copy music was by faithfully copying the patterns they made, their pressure waves. Sony, by the 1970s, had developed a way of digitizing pressure waves and getting a pretty good digital representation of the original analogue waveforms. In 1981, Philips and Sony unleashed the CD. And from then on, all music was digital (and the industry was offered a way of re-selling its back-catalogue, with high profits because the CDs were far more expensive).

There was a very important difference between CDs and their analogue predecessors: copying in an analogue world is a degenerative process (every copy has imperfections which make it inferior to the original), while digital technology doesn’t suffer from that problem: every copy is a perfect representation of the original. Soon after the internet was switched on, with people from the record industry unaware of it, tracks taken from CDs began appearing on the hard drives of computers connected to the network. Initially, it didn’t appear as a threat to the musical industry:

• Files were huge: a three-minute music track took up more than 30 MB.
• The technology for moving files around was pretty arcane: you had to know where the file was located, have the permission to access it, and know how to fetch it.

There was interest in finding a way of shrinking video files to acceptable sizes: one can dispense with parts of the signal without one listener noticing the loss. One can dispense with data outside the effective resolution of hearing. Then there was the analysis of what happens when the audio signal passes from our ears to our brain, and an algorithm was written to reduce the file size to 1/10 without much perceptible loss of quality. That was the birth of MP3. A Croatian programmer wrote a program that could play music encoded in MP3 format on the pc; it was the ancestor of WinAmp, released on the web as shareware, which was able to encode the tracks of a CD and store them into the hard drive. So the entire collection could be stored in a tiny space, and there was also the possibility of producing compilations. A new vocabulary emerged to describe the process: rip, mix, and burn. The compilation spree was already popular at the time of cassette tapes.

The problem was that there was no organized way of searching for music held on people's PCs, and standard search engines would only search web pages, not people's PCs. Worse still, broadband connections were relatively scarce, and computers lacked permanent IP; they had a temporary address. PCs were not able to function as servers for file sharing, leading to complexities that Napster aimed to resolve.