Speech at European Commission public private dialogue.
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 22 November 2009
On 27 November 2009 I will be in Brussels speaking at a conference organized by the European Commission. My contribution is below… Read the rest of this entry »
Measures to prevent the spread of violent material on the Net across the EU?
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 3 November 2009
The IIEA and the European Commission have just signed a contract to begin a study on non-legislative measures that might prevent the spread of violent radical content on the Internet. Our job is to examine the measures currently in practice, determine whether any are appropriate and functional, and whether these would work if applied across the EU. Press release below…
ICANN becomes Independent!
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 1 October 2009
Yesterday’s announcement from ICANN ends a lingering point of controversy surrounding the governance of the Internet: the United States’ continued control of the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). ICANN’s announcement of 30 September 2009 ends that controversy. A relevant snippet from the forthcoming book gives the background to ICANN, the controversy, and the importance of the new announcement. Read the rest of this entry »
The Big Idea: the death of the center and the new centrifugal trend
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 21 September 2009
Now that it is complete, a clear narrative has emerged from the forthcoming book. The Internet, like many readers of the book itself, is a child of the industrial era. Long before digital communications, the steam engine, telegraph pole, and coalmine quickened the pace of the world. Industrialized commerce, communications and war spun the globe ever faster, and increasingly to a centripetal beat. Control in the industrialized world was put at the centre. The furthest reaches of the globe came under the sway of centers of power. Massive urbanization and a flight from the land created monstrous cities in the great nations. Training of workmen, the precise measurement of a pistol barrel’s caliber, mass assembly of automobiles, all were a regimented, standardized in conformity with the centripetal imperative. The industrial revolution created a world of centralization and organized hierarchy. Its defining pattern was a single, central dot to which all strands led. The emerging digital age is different.
The defining pattern of the digital age is the absence of the central dot. In its place a mesh of many points is evolving, each linked by webs and networks. This story is about the death of the center and Read the rest of this entry »
IIEA needs an intern (Digital Future)
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 11 September 2009
WE WANT YOU TO JOIN OUR TEAM
http://www.iiea.com/job-opportunities
Job spec: RESEARCH intern on The Digital Future
Payment: unpaid – opportunity to compete for paid position may arise Read the rest of this entry »
World of Warcraft, WTF?
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 5 September 2009
For the forthcoming book it was inevitable that I would look at World of Warcraft.
‘World of Warcraft’ is by any standard is the most popular computer game of all time. Since its release in 2005 it has built a steadily increasing following of loyal subscribers. 11.5 million people across the globe were paid subscribers as of December 2008. Nor is the subscription cost negligible. Subscribers in the EU pay approximately €131.88 per year, and incur additional charges Read the rest of this entry »
Al Gore and the Internet
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 23 August 2009
With the forthcoming book almost complete, there are one or two matters that I had to get to the bottom of. Foremost among them, Al Gore’s involvement in the development of the Internet, and the controversy that surrounded this question in the 2000 presidential election…
For a brief moment during the 2000 presidential election in the United States the history of the Internet became an issue of much debate. Al Gore, the Democratic Party candidate, came under attack because, it was reported, he had claimed to have invented the Internet. According to one estimate more than 4,800 television, newspaper and magazine items made reference Read the rest of this entry »
Civic Hacking (citizen activism online, and very 2.0)
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 18 August 2009
Researching two-way politics and online citizen activism in the US for the forthcoming book, I spoke to John Tauberer recently. Josh set up the website GovTrack.us, an “independent, nonpartisan website that started the “civic hacking” movement in the United States”. The site contains data on the status of legislation, voting records of senators and congressmen, and a Q&A system that allows visitors to ask questions about a bill and see whether others have the answer. It also has a very promising bill viewer tool that shows changes to legislation as it passes through the law making machinery.
We discussed three questions. (click the link to read on) Read the rest of this entry »
New Audiences and the digital fourth wall
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 25 July 2009
Working on the forthcoming book. Here’s a teaser the changed media environment…
The theatres of the Elizabethan and Stuart eras were venues where ‘a thousand townsemen, gentlemen and whores, porters and serving–men together throng’. The decorum of the modern theatre did not apply. Heckles and sometimes projectiles came at the players from every direction. To the fore of the playhouse, massed before the stage stood the ‘groundlings’, poor people who stood exposed to the elements in the centre of the theatre, and who due to their rich aroma in warmer conditions were known as ‘stinkards’ in summer. Above and about the stage were the elite, only slightly less rowdy, sitting in sheltered areas variously assigned to lords, who sat behind the stage itself; to gentlemen, who sat in raised side areas about the stage; and those who could afford a seat and sheltered vantage in the tiered gallery that faced the stage over the heads of the groundlings. In the midst of all of these people, suffering their outbursts and vying for their attention, were the playwright and actors. Read the rest of this entry »
The origins of “smart casual”?
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 22 July 2009
Short teaser from the forthcoming book… The tailored suit has a long history. The coat, waistcoat, and breeches gradually became the gentleman’s mainstay from the English Restoration in the 1660s onward, when the elaborate dress common at European courts fell out of favor. Embroidery and silk died out from the middle of the 18th century and wool became the norm, particularly in circles with a democratic axe to grind. Benjamin Franklin made a splash at the French Court by turning up in the somber suit of a Quaker. (More rustic still, he wore his own hair rather than a wig.) In the wake of the French Revolution even French nobles lost their enthusiasm for aristocratic dress.
By this time the plain linen three-piece suit already marked the height of gentlemen’s fashion in England. Despite the rapid deterioration in the European sartorial standard, the business suit remained the gentleman’s mainstay from Charles II’s reign in the 17th century to James Bond and Gordon Gekko in the late 20th. Then, in 1996, Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, the company that had made the biggest IPO in history the year before, appeared on the cover of Time Magazine sitting on a throne in bare feet. He wore a polo shirt and jeans. Three centuries of the suit were forgotten.
The bubble… (eBay, Amazon, Netscape, Webvan, Pets.com…)
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 18 July 2009
Continuing from the earlier snippet about the Dot Com Collapse… this is a continuing piece from the forthcoming book. (feedback welcome)
The collapse had been foreseen by a shrewd few. In early December 1996, Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, attended a dinner in his honor at the American Enterprise Institute. After the guests had finished eating, Greenspan rose to make a long speech on the Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society. In the last few paragraphs of his speech, Greenspan injected words of caution. He accepted that sustained low inflation and lower risk premiums were driving up stock prices. Yet at the same time, he noted the growing distance between investors’ expectation returns from stock and how much those stocks were actually earning. Greenspan asked:
…how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?
Short note on the virulent growth of WWW + Internet, 1988-1997
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 15 July 2009
Some data from the book.
On 25 July 1994, the front cover of Time Magazine announced ‘the strange new world of the Internet’. The Internet was of course only new to those who had not known of it previously. What was new was the WWW, which put a user friendly face on the network. Also new was an explosion in the number of connected networks thanks to the initiatives of the National Science Foundation’s network. Over the six years of the NSF MERIT backbone the number of connected networks grew from 240 in 1988 to 32,400 in 1994. Between 150 and 300 networks joined the Internet each week. In 1992 traffic on the network grew at 11% each month, and 6,000 networks were connected, two thirds of them in the US. By October 1994 3.8 million computers were connected to the Internet. By July 1995, 6.6 million were online. Even as network use grew, the WWW increasingly became the focus of interest. In April 1995 the traffic generated by WWW surpassed even the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Read the rest of this entry »
Communities beyond geography: Phone phreakers
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 14 July 2009
More for the book… In 1957, a blind, five year old boy named Joe Engressia first realized that he could control the phone system and make long distance phone calls at no cost by whistling a specific pitch down the phone line. The AT&T phone network used twelve combinations of six audio tones as control signals. Engressia’s whistles through the mouthpiece were interpreted as the phone company’s own control tones. Engressia was one of a scattered group of technologically curious young teenagers across the United States who spent their free time experimenting with controlling the phone system. These kids called them selves ‘phone phreaks’. Many were blind and were, to some extent, socially isolated among kids of their own age. It was the phreaks, however, who first liberated themselves from reliance on their proximate peers. Theirs would be a community drawn together by the attraction of common interest rather than the strictures of geography. Read the rest of this entry »
1840s – Byron’s daughter becomes world’s first programmer
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 9 July 2009
(Not sure whether to include this in the book…) On 12 February 1812, Lord Byron, perhaps the most outrageous and disreputable of the English poets, took the floor at the House of Lords to begin his maiden speech. A bill had recently been introduced that would impose a death penalty in response to the Luddites, the textile artisans rioting in opposition to the industrial revolution and wreaking mechanized looms. Byron made his maiden speech in defense of the artisans and decried industrialization. It might seem odd then that Byron’s daughter should be in the avant garde of the next wave of disruptive technologies –computing. Odder still, considering the stereotype of programmers: Byron himself was a promiscuous bi-sexual, the most flamboyant figure of the romantic movement, constantly in debt, and ever surrounded by scandal. Yet his only legitimate daughter was a mathematical genius and would be remembered as history’s first computer programmer. Read the rest of this entry »
Newspaper circulation decline
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 28 June 2009
The decline in newspaper circulation is a topic I’ve begun to explore for the forthcoming book on the history of the Internet. In May 2009, the Newspaper Association of America issued figures revealing a 29.7% decline in US newspapers’ print advertising revenues in a single quarter at the beginning of 2009. This presumably is partly due to a gathering economic crisis affecting the economy at large. Indeed, the newspapers’ online advertising revenue also declined, but by only 13.4%. Yet figures for the first quarter of the previous year, 2008, reveal the trend: print advertising had declined 14.38% while the newspapers’ online advertising rose by 7.20%.
Data on the rise and fall in newspaper circulation between 1940 and 2008 reveals a trend that correlates with Internet expansion. Newspaper circulation grew steadily from the 1940s to the 1990s. In 1989 newspaper circulation reached over 62,000,000 and remained in this bracket until 1995 when it began a gradual annual decline. Note here that 1995 marks the privatization of the Internet and an explosion in the number of computers connected to the Internet from 3.8 million in late 1994 to 12.8 million in mid 1996. Between 1995 and 2003 circulation fell to 58,500,000. In 2004 the decline gathered pace, plummeting to 49,115,000 in 2008.
By 2008 the number of newspapers sold in the United States was the same as in 1966. More anon…
Quick note on ‘Openness’
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 23 June 2009
The word ‘Openness’ is attractive as the keystone of the book’s title. And yet it is controversial.
It may even be inaccurate. The ‘Open’ word as I am using it first came to me when I read interviews with Paul Baran in which he talked about two startling things: first, how RAND published his secret research because they believed it necessary to share it with the Soviets, and thereby limit the possibility of a nuclear conflagration; and second, Read the rest of this entry »
Silicon Valley Landmark: Zott’s and the packet radio test
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 9 June 2009
San Francisco features disproportionately in the history of the digital age. Yet despite the historical coverage it receives, little attention has been given to one of its landmarks, a small wood paneled tavern known as “Zott’s” – officially named “The Alpine Inn” Read the rest of this entry »
Models of state research spending: Vannevar Bush v Mike Mansfield
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 6 June 2009
A new statement from Ireland’s Science Advisory Counsel calls for an exploration of how “Ireland can maximise the revenue potential of its investment in STI”. The Irish Science Advisory Counsel is composed of senior figures in industry and research including Sean Baker of IONA and Roger Whatmore of the Tyndall Institute. The question coming to the fore is to what extent should Government direct strategic research funding to advance the national economic interest? Two examples worth examining for its pros and cons is the post war US model established by Vannevar Bush, and also the countervailing approach that embodied in the Mansfield Amendment introduced of 1969. Read the rest of this entry »
Internet growth before WWW
Posted by: johnnyryan on: 5 June 2009
Some figures on Internet growth from 1981 to 1993. This is growth in the Internet before WWW.
Date—-Hosts
08/81—213
10/85—1,961
10/89—159,000
10/93—-2,056,000
Twitter
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- johnnyryan: Measures to curb violent radical material on the Net in the EU? Can any work? Are any relevant? http://tinyurl.com/yaunrz7
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