[iDC] The internet that is not one

[Simon Biggs]

This is old stuff, but it graphically demonstrates how there are numerous
internets and, if you dig around, the historical precedents to its current
structures. In its earliest guises the internet consisted of primarily three
parts ­ military, academic and corporate. A small public internet began to
emerge in the early 1980¹s. Reagan (ironically) passed the law that opened
the doors for public access, demilitarising tracts of network infrastructure
and protocols. It was the advent of http (c. 1990) that made the net
friendly enough that it could become a mass medium. I haven¹t read a
complete sociological analysis of this history yet.

http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/atl
as.html

Regards

Simon


Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/

simon at littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk



From: Sean Cubitt <scubitt at unimelb.edu.au>
Date: Sun, 12 Jul 2009 18:18:43 +0100
To: "Dean, Jodi" <JDEAN at hws.edu>, "idc at mailman.thing.net"
<idc at mailman.thing.net>
Conversation: [iDC] The internet that is not one
Subject: Re: [iDC] The internet that is not one

Funnily enough I was scribbling note son this on a train ride yesterday
while reading Vattimo on nihilism and emancipation, and reflecting on a
not-so-good conference presentation I'd just done. Vattimo says something
like "we have to have a social constru8ctivist concept of history: that we
build our own historical provenance of the situation where we are in order
to make a (non-metaphysical) ethical act". After Latour etc, the "we" is not
wholly human and after everyone else, not wholly individual. Agency is in
networks. So the question is whether there can exist networks
(political-technical-physical) which have sufficient autonomy from The
Network to have ethical agency and/or the capacity for action. Apocalyptic
scenario: TCP/IP and the protocological constrains all possible action.
Glass hlf full scenario: bounded and often ephemeral networks maintain
sufficient autonomy for sufficient time to act politically and/or ethically.
The second is only thinkable if there is not a single internet but a
multiple (network of networks) where the networks, despite integration,
retain their autonomy to some extent. Bad news: many of these incompletely
integrated networks are banks, military, corporate, subscriber-only etc.
Good news: iDC and similar flourishing 'minor' articulations evidence the
capacity of incompletely integrated networks to produce discourse of
potential 

BBS and others don;t necessarily run on TCP/IP; different use of layers in
the suite also disctinguishes different zones/activities insode TCP/IP
internet. These quite apart from areas marked off by language or by
expertise

Good question!


On 11/07/09 5:57 PM, "Dean, Jodi" <JDEAN at hws.edu> wrote:

> 
> A question for the list (this is a real question that comes out of
> conversations I've had in the last few months):
> 
> Is there one internet?
> 
> Is the internet singular, a unity?
> 
> Are there multiple internets?
> 
> 
> 
> thanks,
> Jodi
> _______________________________________________
> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
> (distributedcreativity.org)
> iDC at mailman.thing.net
> https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc
> 
> List Archive:
> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
> 
> iDC Photo Stream:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/
> 
> RSS feed:
> http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc
> 
> iDC Chat on Facebook:
> http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647
> 
> Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref

Prof Sean Cubitt
scubitt at unimelb.edu.au
Director
Media and Communications Program
Faculty of Arts
Room 127 John Medley East
The University of Melbourne
Parkville VIC 3010
Australia

Tel: + 61 3 8344 3667
Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494
M: 0448 304 004
Skype: seancubitt
http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/
http://www.digital-light.net.au/
http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/
http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/
http://del.icio.us/seancubitt

Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Book Series
http://leonardo.info

_______________________________________________
iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
(distributedcreativity.org)
iDC at mailman.thing.net
https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc

List Archive:
http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/

iDC Photo Stream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/

RSS feed:
http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc

iDC Chat on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647

Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref


Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/attachments/20090713/ec13fffd/attachment.htm