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Stefan Münker and Alexander Roesler From myth to standard practice And a history of the

When in the mid Nineties, the Internet set off on its path to success, expectations were high - too high. So, even before most people knew how to use a browser or surf on the digital network, a myth was born: the myth of a new and wonderful world in which you could go beyond the limits of space and time to create the places of utopian visions and bring them to life. As the technology of the world of the net progressed, it became possible, but also necessary, to break the myth’s spell1. And that’s just one aspect. Despite the fact that the inventions of the wheel, writing, printing machines, the steam engine or the may have been more important in terms of the history of civilization, it is still true that up until now no medium like the Internet has generated such a high number of important changes and technical innovations; and its success story is far from over. The other aspect is this: new cultural practices – whose key words are e-mail, chat etc. – have emerged and influence previous ones. We communicate in a different way, we have faster access to information, and we move in new and different ways in a world that actually appears to have become smaller, or in any event to have undergone a transformation in media terms. Today, for many of us, the INTERnational NETwork is part of our daily lives: it is an engine that fuels economic growth and scientific progress, a tool for social and political commerce, a means for artistic and literary works, an agora, a darkroom, a laboratory, an archive and a . Above all it represents an irreversible process. Instead of nurturing illusory expectations, nowadays users make straightforward practical requests of this technology and its (continual) developments, and expect competence, flexibility and creativity. Life and commerce in an electronic environment visibly represent common practice for entire communities and for mankind in general, even outside of the digital sphere. The truth is that what has happened depends paradoxically on the strength of the myth. Its utopian tales of possible conquests of cyber space, paralleling them to the colonization of a new and far-away continent brimming with unexpected opportunities, liberated the initial energy needed for the enormous technological and economical

1 S. Münker / A. Roesler (ed.), Mythos Internet, .Suhrkamp 1997. efforts that have led to the establishment of the Internet as a medium that works globally and that can be used by the masses. Energy that is all-important for its future development. But despite the fact that these Utopias can provide us with an incentive, they have not let themselves be transformed into standard practice. The latest social sphere to have suffered enormous losses was the economy. Even the so-called rational experts of the economy’s local and global players, after an initial hesitation, in the end believed in the almost too optimistic promises of the market and read too much into them, attempting to capitalize on them, and to a certain extent ended up paying dearly for them. The mistakes made in economic evaluations are typical. Even though, in this era of globalisation, the Internet is no doubt an efficient medium and is able to generate profits for e-commerce, it can quite rightly be confirmed that with the Internet, Marx’s words “all peoples mingle in the network of the world market” has reached its digital level (Haug 619). However, the euphoric visions of the so-called “new” market, also known as the other one, have not succeeded in integrating with the existing economic system: what exists is actually a single market. Ironically the bankruptcy of the Internet start-up companies and the collapse of shares such as Dotcom provide more information about how the stock market works than how Internet works. And despite everything, once the initial media hubbub had subsided, the Internet was shelved as a mere myth, a bit like throwing the baby away with the dirty water. In the same way as the myth and the Enlightenment are linked dialectically, the utopian potential promised by the myth is in actual fact intertwined with the practical use of the network.

Brief

“Where you are makes no difference”, “you will find what you are looking for”. The Internet makes promises such as these to draw us users into its spell. A promise that talks about uniting the memory capacity of a digital machine with the possibility of transcribing electronic media in truth does sound like the Utopia of successful globalisation. It tells us that: everything is always there, each one of us is always understood. What each of us says, is revealed by the statistics (that given the rapid growth are almost always out of date before they are even published): if five years ago the number of users was estimated to be around 50-60 million, today, in 2001, the number has risen to around 400 million. There are estimated to be around 110 million hosts, which simply means that have a personal Internet address. In August 2001, only half of the population of Germany had access to the Internet. Users spent most of their time simply surfing the net, participating in on- auctions and looking for bargains on the second-hand sites, amusing themselves in the numerous chat rooms or with multiplayer video games. The most common uses of the net, apart from e-mail which is the most popular and attractive feature of this new medium, are downloading of a variety of different types of data, online banking and shopping, holiday reservations, the use of various services by public enterprises, such as trading shares and securities, and, last but not least, visiting pornographic sites.

Just as the triumphant march of the Internet, from the mid Nineties on, was consumed in an impetuous and spectacular way, setting up the connection of the network of networks has dragged itself slowly and imperceptibly over the course of a long period of time: The responsibility for the birth of Internet can be attributed in a certain sense to the Sputnik, or more precisely the fear of the USA of losing the struggle for universal supremacy after the Soviet rocket made its blissful trip around the world. Because of this, at the end of the Fifties, the Pentagon gave life, amongst other things, to a new research group, the so- called Advanced Research Project Agency, abbreviated to ARPA. A decade later, the struggle in space was temporarily resolved, with the moon landing of Apollo 11, in favour of the Americans, who were just about to suffer a new humiliation, this time on a bigger scale given that they were the leading world power: the retreat from Vietnam. For this reason, Arpa’s scientists developed a decentralised network, named Arpanet, whose strategic was to connect up computers at different military bases, so that communication could not be interrupted even in the event of a nuclear attack. The outcome of this historical-media development was the transformation of the from calculator to means of communication, something that, according to Arpa documentation, took place thanks to the then director J.C.R. Licklider. In autumn ’69 Arpanet went online in collaboration with the University of California in Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of Utah and the University of California in Santa Barbara. The number of universities connected rose rapidly as they started to discover the advantages of the network, above those strictly linked to military and strategic circles, for those interested in exchanging scientific information. Consequently, the technical possibilities of the network continually progressed. This is how, for example, in 1971, the File-Transfer-Protocol made it possible to exchange data between individual computers; enabled direct access to another computer connected to the network; and finally, thanks to the user@host convention, Internet’s electronic mail (e- mail) service was programmed. In 1973, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) gave a decisive boost to further development: the connection between different networks and, with the later addition of Internet Protocol (IP) to TCP, the network officially received its name. In 1978 the Arpanet experiment finally reached its conclusion, even though the Arpanet itself was closed down only in 1990. In parallel to further developments of the technical possibilities of Internet, additional networks were created in the Eighties, on the basis of the (BBS), some were private such as FidoNet in 1983 or in 1985, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL), and others were commercial, such as Computerserve and AOL, that worked without being connected to Internet for a brief initial period. When in 1989 Computerserve started to dominate in Internet, the idea of independent networks disappeared de facto. From the end of the Eighties, the Internet started to envelop the globe with its network. Despite this, for several years, it was relatively unfamiliar to the general public; also because it was truly difficult to use. The solution to the problem, that launched the real boom of the Internet, was the invention of Tim Berners-Lee at the Swiss Research Centre CERN in 1991: the Word Wide Web. The network therefore became suitable for multimedia use and was warmly welcomed by the global information society, already omnipresent at that time. In the meantime the three letters WWW have almost become a synonym of the Internet and hardly anybody remembers the times of network pioneers when there were no images or sounds, when the pilot programs that surfed on the sea of data had beautiful names such as Gopher, Veronica or Archie…

The rest of the story is common knowledge: the Internet developed in three stages starting from the strategic experiments of the American army, then through an international communication plan set up by university researchers, and finally to the commercialisation of this means of communication, for many nowadays used as a sort of “means of daily assistance”. However, its story is far from over. Its course is mainly established by three factors: 1. faster transmission lines; 2. more transparent access portals; 3. a growing convergence (technical and contents) between the different (, , ) and computers.

The technical heart of Utopia

The media are not impartial. What they are is established through the more or less clear exchange of two factors: their technical quality and their practical use. If the limits of their possible use, and therefore what they can do, are established by their technical qualities, the same is true for their practical use, through which we decide what in actual fact will be developed. An example: the main medium in the times of Gutenberg, the book, cannot for instance be used as a means of interactive communication due to the lack of specific technical requisites; in the same way, the different literary genres (here the key word is “novel”), that are spread by means of books, have partly only developed over the course of their age-old history of use, increasingly differentiating themselves on the basis of their technical foundations. The telephone, on the other hand, modern man’s classic means of communication, is technically superior in terms of interactivity, even though at the start of its career the use of the telephone (and later radio) was experimented, to broadcast musical performances2: the cultural practice of verbal had not been invented at that time.

The feature of the history of the Internet specific to this context is therefore the fact that here the advantage, based on technical aspects rather than its implementation being defined in an increasingly clearer way, continues to constantly extend its application. To say it in a more unconventional way: we do not only put into effect what the network can do; the network also learns to achieve what we want of it. This, once again, depends essentially on the fact that the development and the use of the Internet have surprisingly taken parallel courses. Besides the transformation of the computer-calculator into a means of communication, the second effect of the media story of Internet is rooted in this parallelism: its unusual flexible structure that makes the Internet a medium sui generis. Certainly, flexibility does not mean that you can do everything you want. The limits of its possible use are unilateral: the Internet medium can only be used for activities that have something to do with digital data and their telematic transmission. (We can certainly order a pizza or a book on-line, however we can’t deliver them on-line …).

2 See: John Durham Peters, "Das Telefon als theologisches und erotisches Problem" in S. Münker e A.Roesler (editors) Telefonbuch. Beiträge zu einer Kulturgeschichte des Telefons, Frankfurt: ed. Suhrkamp 2000, pages 61-82.

However, Internet can be used for everything that regards the exchange of digital data. (In this sense, one can safely predict that there will be no limits to technical and cultural creativity for a long time yet).

The parallelism between the development and use of Internet can be exemplarily illustrated through three fundamental principles, that have a wealth of consequences, put into practice by the medium’s technical structure, and that are being increasingly developed through its practical use: the principles of decentralization, non-closure and interactivity.

Internet’s decentralised structure is the initial and simple result of the strategic task that the Pentagon assigned to Arpanet’s researchers. As mentioned previously, they needed to find a way to avoid a possible collapse in communication between their strategic armed forces in the event of a military attack by the enemy. The solution consisted in the development of the procedure that is still used today: information is split into small data- packets that, in turn, supplied with the necessary data regarding the and the receiver, individually and independently seek out their path in the telematic network to reach the established destination; the idea being: if no one knows what path the data will take, then no one can interfere with this route.

Bringing this idea to life, through technology, satisfied the military that sent Arpanet on- line. Nevertheless, from a military point of view, the same technology was revealed to be a Trojan Horse: as no one can check what path the data will take in the Internet, by the same token, it is not possible to carry out centralised surveillance of communication. The Pentagon learnt from this experience, and decided to continue to develop telematic communications independently. As the principle of decentralization was applied to Internet technology, at the same time the first predominant idea emerged for its next practical application: the idea of the uncontrollable. The institutions of the scientific community, where Arpanet went online for the first time in order to be further developed, revealed themselves to be incredibly fertile ground for the subsequent cultural development of the network. The acceptance of a technical structure commissioned by the Pentagon in university circles, brought with it the first fundamental change in military thinking. What had been created as a system of strategic defence against an enemy attack was re-interpreted on the basis of the possibilities realised on a technical level and was developed for scientific research in the form of a communication structure: in this role, it acquired new incentives adapted to the specific needs of topic rather than strategy-based communication of scientific debate. With the growth of the network a new problem soon emerged: how to link up the different computer systems of the various universities.

The solution to these problems consisted in the development of a transmission protocol (TCP/IP) specific to the Internet that enabled, as mentioned previously, a number of very different technological platforms to be connected through a network: the principle of non-closure is similar to that of decentralisation, and from then on, Internet only existed in the plural, only, in the true sense of the word, as a “network of networks” that was took the form of a global fusion of the different individual technologies of network and computer architectures, and that is based fundamentally on almost unlimited growth. Internet does not merely connect spaces in the of an eye, neither is it subject to any significant time constraints. Here, again, the idea that the technical application of non- closure is fundamental for the practical use of network holds true, as does the idea of the “opening” of network communication and of its theoretical basis.

The network is not only open to various digital technologies and a potentially infinite amount of data, it is also open to the most diverse forms of use. In a (like the telephone) or via e-mail (like a letter), we can communicate in real time, we can download information through on-line archives (like in a library) or send data through FTP (like the postal service), see each other live through a (like TV) or download video data from network saved on a Web page (like in a video library), and so on. We use the Internet medium in increasingly different ways – and in a certain sense we use it like a different medium. You can apply the following maxim, borrowed from McLuhan, to the network: the medium is its practice. And this hides the third and final effect of the Internet's media history: the essence of the Internet medium should also be considered as its practical use. Even if one is aware of the basic technical structure, it is impossible make a partially complete or clear prediction of what the future media potential of the network could be; this means, in other words, that even the practical use of the Internet medium is basically open.

The Internet embraces the very latest technological developments and the invention of alternative ways to use it: often the desire for a new use has resulted in the development of specific programs. But the network is open only, and possibly above all, in two directions. The Internet is actually interactive in a central sense. Just as with decentralization and non-closure, the interactivity of the medium of the Internet is applied as a technical principle. In other words: right from the start, the communication structure designed for the Internet, based on the need for flexibility, was created in such a way that a user could be both sender and receiver at the same time. Communication is interactive by definition, and its conversion into a medium – here the key words are letter and telephone – has generated a different type of interactivity for each medium. The distinguishing features of the Internet are, first of all, the fact that it unites the most diverse types of interactive communication in a single medium, secondly, the fact that it enables us to exchange information at the same time or at different times and lastly, the fact that we can do the above for any type of digital or digitizable information whatsoever: text, images, sounds. Furthermore, the Internet is not only a communication medium, at the same time it is a medium for distribution and archiving, even though the classic media for dissemination and archiving are not interactive at all. The possibility of using the Internet to interactively disseminate or communicate data saved in a memory is therefore a novelty, and has given us, and continues to give us a reason to hope we will be able to establish and learn to utilize the network for democratic information exchange.

The history of the electronic media can unreservedly be seen as the history of democratic utopia that accompanied the birth of each new medium: one just has to recall Brecht’s famous theory of the radio! There’s a simple reason why neither radio, nor later television managed to fulfil the political aspirations that had been their response for a certain period of time: the two great, fortunate media of the twentieth century were technically created as One-Way-Media: radio and television programmes could only be broadcast to a passive audience. If the latter wanted to convey a part of themselves through this means, they first had to learn to use the necessary technology. In comparison to the Internet, this represented a relatively difficult and costly task. Furthermore, in principle it is possible to control the station, but if the right frequencies are not synchronised, the smallest interference would be enough to interrupt the programme. The story of the many adventures of Belgrade’s independent radio station that had to shut down programmes four times during the Milosevic’s regime is a recent, but interesting example of the above: after the broadcasting station was occupied by the regime’s troops, B92 presented its activities on the Internet with increasing success… Radio and television’s lack of interactivity has been a determining factor not just because it failed to fulfil utopian dreams, but because it has also represented the most significant guarantee of their success. In short: relinquishing interactivity is the prerequisite to extending the potential of the mass media. However, this also means that even though there is very widespread use of the Internet, the definition of the latter as a means of mass communication is incorrect. To be more precise: under specific conditions the network can be utilised as a mass media (to broadcast live pop concerts, for example) but it cannot be defined to be a mass media (because unlike the classic mass media it can be used in a different way each time). It is wrong to think that it could become predominantly used as a mass media, because no Archimedes point has been envisaged in the network’s decentralised structure, that is to say a single point from which it would be possible to supply the Netizens with a mass- media.

Ideal and Factual

Uncontrollable, essentially open and unyieldingly interactive, right from the start the Internet was the ideal platform for alternative political ideas. Radical-democratic, yes, anarchic: the myth of the Internet was born on the confines of the network, in a circle of hippy programmers linked up through American universities and the first hackers of the Seventies’ grass-root movement. Thirty years later, and not simply due its commercialisation following the launch of the , it is clear that the myth, the promised saviour of a truly different type of utopian world, is dead. Now, on the other hand, it is also clear that any fair criticism of the myth of the Internet is a criticism of the mistaken transformation of an idealism that belonged to the Internet, precisely because it has been implemented technically. In its turn, however, this also means that if the utopian stimuli of the network community do not move towards the needs of the community, by the same token, the Internet will never be able to fully integrate with the same community, and thus follow political, social or economic rules. In short, the Internet bears the signature of a difference that is as intrinsic as it is unyielding: the difference between what the network of networks (also) is from a technical point of view and what it resembles (at least) in reality. This difference is fuelled by the tension between the Internet’s anarchic potential and the regulations governing the surrounding environment. This difference is intrinsic because the ideals at the basis its anarchic potential are technically implemented in the medium. At the same time unyielding because these ideals cannot be realized by any type of pragmatic society. Therefore, the difference between ideal and factual continues to be confirmed in predictions of the future use of the Internet. The relationship between the Internet medium and society is, to use Derrida’s expression, impressed by a logic of the supplement: how society will respond to any stimulus from the Internet with new regulations, to attempts towards integration by society, the network will react with new forms of subversive infiltration (take, for example, Napster: immediately after legislation had paralysed, de facto, the exchange of songs, a huge number of links to alternative servers sprung up, some of which worked even better than the original one: their further development is uncertain if Bertelsmann is to reap the profits he expected from his acquisition of Napster …) The apparent result is that the Internet continues to be uncontrollable, open and interactive, otherwise it might as well not exist. (only a totalitarian metropolis could control the anarchic potential of the network: by turning it off).