the irrepressible timeline

-1981 Ted Nelson's Literary Machines. This is "a complete outline" of his Xanadu project, an archiving, information-sharing computer network--basically his idea of the world wide web.

-1982 Bill Viola (1951-present)American video artist. His essay "Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?" discusses the philosophy behind his unprecedented work with the video medium.

-1983 Ben Bagdikian (1920-present)Armenian-born (American) educator and journalist. He originally published The Media Monopoly in 1983, and accurately predicted the current reign of mega-corporations over various media. In the first edition, he cited 50 corporations which dominated all mass-media, in 2000, he cited 6.

-1983 Ben Shneiderman (1947-present) American computer scientist/pioneer in the field of human/computer interaction. In his article "Direct Manipulation" he describes a user interface system which is dependent on graphics, rather than programming languages--more like a video game. This idea defined the term "user-friendly."

-1984 Sherry Turkle (1948-present) American clinical psychologist and professor of science and technology at MIT. In her book The Second Self she explored why children play video games and how it affects the way they learn about and experience the world. During a time when video games had reached unprecedented levels of both popularity and criticism, Turkle argued that they might actually be...therapeutic...

-1985 Donna Haraway (1944-present) American professor of feminist theory and "technoscience." Her Cyborg Manifesto united feminism and technology for the first time.

-1985 Richard Stallman (1953-present) American activist and hacker. In 1985 he founded the GNU Project--a free unix-like system created in response to AT&T's decision to charge people for using Unix. Stallman has been a vocal advocate of free software ever since.

-1986 Terry Winograd (1946-present) American professor of computer science. Fernando Flores (1943-present)Chilean philosopher and senator. Their book Understanding Computers and Cognition, though some see it as anti-A.I., proposes simply that we use computers as extensions of ourselves, tools, and only employ AI to the few situations where it would be appropriate to do so.

-1986 (1991) Brenda Laurel. American human/computer interaction researcher and software designer. Both in her 1986 thesis and her 1991 book, Computers as Theatre, Laurel proposes that Aristotle's Poetics is the key to understanding computers.

-1986 Jan L. Bordewijk and Ben van Kaam. (I couldn't find info about them) Their essay "Towards a New Classification of Tele-Information Services" begins to classify various forms if digital communication that emerged with the rise of the internet. Basically, they created classifications for types of media which had not previously existed.

Reaction:
I don't understand why Ted Nelson hates the world wide web. I'm sure it could have been done better but this is the way it is, so don't cry about it man--find ways to improve what already exists--that's what Richard Stallman is doing. I see both sides to the free media argument though, I'm broke, thus I would like everything on the internet to be free...but people also gotta eat...

Bill Viola is amazing.

I have known about Ben Bagdikian's ideas, not through him, but through a documentary entitled "The Merchants of Cool," probably since I was in high school. Today I believe that there are only 5 companies running everything, but I could be mistaken and I don't even remember their names. I remember when the FCC changed the rules about how many "objective" media outlets a private entity could own and it freaked me out. I enjoy the fact that with the internet every individual has a public forum for their own media, but we still need to keep news out of the hands of politicians, corrupt businessmen and special interest groups.

Sherry Turkle's ideas are echoed in a book I just read for my history of media class: Everything Bad is Good for You by Stephen Johnson--who is a faculty member at NYU. It's funny because now, after more than 20 years of bashing video games, the idea that they're not all that bad for you is becoming more current.

As for Brenda Laurel, I'm sorry but I'd be a goddess over a cyborg any day. But for me it would be more about having that kind of power in modern society than about nostalgia for womens' role in ancient mythology.