First technical solutions, then social solutions
Posted: February 12th, 2010 | Filed under: Mobilities at the Interface |
I’ve been really enjoying Waldrop’s book The Dream Machine, which is in part a story of influential researcher Joseph Licklider, but also an account of the whole story of American computing research from SAGE to the modern personal computer.
The book mentions a 1972 film produced to explain Arpanet (the military-funded predecessor to the Internet), and I found it online. The film was produced to display at an event in D.C. where computing researchers from the military, private and educational sectors were invited to see Arpanet in action for the first time.
Interestingly, the film ends with the now-familiar vision of moving to a paper-less society, and the apparently big-thinking Licklider gets the last word by imagining that we ought to get on thinking about social problems instead of technical ones:
The processing and distribution technology and the storage technology are gonna make it possible to get over onto a new technological base for intellectual efforts before our ponderous social processes will let us. I think more people oughta get in there and think about the social processes.
Shades of today’s TED talks, or perhaps some of the fringier current HCI research…or perhaps Social Informatics. Such rhetoric is also familiar to Neoliberalism and its roots in what Fred Turner calls the “New Communalists.” I’m still curious about the various ways in which technical and social heuristics are intertwined in computing history (and not wholly satsified by Turner’s account).
You can catch the last 8 minutes or so of this here. Includes some familiar rhetoric from today’s ebook craze.
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