Christian Sandvig's Seminar Blog

Pencil, M. (1976). Salt Passage Research: The State of the Art. Journal of Communication 26(4).
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=608474701&Fmt=10&clientId=36305&RQT=309&VName=PQD
(This is a ProQuest full-text link and you probably have to be at a UIUC IP address for it to work.)

Favorite fake journal name: Proceedings of the Academy of Wartime Chaplains

Favorite quote:

Hovland, et al. arranged for 112 Army recruits, each sitting alone at one end of a table with salt at the other end, to repeat the utterance, "Please pass the salt," every five minutes for 12 hours. The average distance the salt traveled was .5 inch, which the experimenters explained was due to measurement error.

Of course this kind of humor is even better if you know who Hovland was.

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Keeping up this blog's theme of comparing everything to the Internet, who is the Claude Fischer of Internet Studies? And would a book called "America Surfing" written 60 years from now reach the same conclusion as Fischer? The answer certainly isn't Miller & Slater, who have a very different sort of idea about how technology works.

Picking up on Fischer's idea of "ordinaryness", it is interesting to see the way that the Internet has become ordinary so quickly. A little bit of the Internet has quickly and quietly slipped into everything, making it hard to consider as a discrete technology that has measurable consequences. The academics who set out to specifically study the Internet and its consequences already look sort of odd. For instance: Is the Internet still exciting enough for an Internet Institute? (My answer: Probably.) Is the Internet still distinct enough for something called Internet Research to make sense as a subdiscipline? (My answer: Probably not.) David Silver wrote a nice few pages about this at the beginning of an introduction for a recent book. A quote:

It can be argued that a commonly shared set of theories and methodologies is a sign of an academic field's development and sophistication. It can also be argued that such commonly held approaches signal ossification, stagnation, and lack of imagination. I favor the side of a temporary canonless field of study (Silver 2004). If and when the canon appears, replete with acceptable theories, methods, and methodologies, I surely hopoe its foundations are pliable enough for whatever meets us in the future.

Of course all of this doesn't sound as weird as "Telephone Institute" and "Telephonic Studies," so maybe there is some merit to it still.

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Let's take a page from Susan Douglas's concept of the "inventor-hero" in media coverage of new communication technology. Who are the inventor-heroes of today? My brainstorm:

Sergey Brin (google)
Larry Page (google)
Tim Berners-Lee (web)
Linus Torvalds (linux)
Jeff Bezos (amazon)
David Filo (yahoo)
Jerry Yang (yahoo)

We could even have a separate list for mischievous boy-wonders:

Shawn Fanning (napster)

It is possibly interesting that the Internet itself does not have inventor heroes in the same way the Web and Web-based applications do. I mean, we could say that Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn and their peers are the closest, but there hasn't been the same sort of "founding myth" surrounding the Internet technology itself. Maybe this is because there was little popular awareness of the Internet at the time they were doing their most important work -- the process of invention in this way is a creation of the media coverage for the invention, and not something that depends upon what people like Cerf and Kahn actually did.

One other reason: All (?) of the people I brainstormed in the list above can have a "young tinkerer" story told about them in a way that an academic computer scientist can't. These people were college students and small entrepreneurs, not professional researchers. We love the story of the small independent -- David vs. Goliath -- etc. Jobs and Wozniak at Apple get a kind of cred that Thomas J. Watson (founder of IBM) does not. This is a preference we could trace from American cultural ideas about what kind of technology is good and what kind is bad (see The Machine in the Garden).

It is interesting how little has changed since 1920! Tinkering is still masculine. Youth is still a key component of stories about inventors. The media are still key to promoting invention myths. One reaction (as we discussed) is that Dogulas's idea of a shifting definition of masculinity (c. 1920) that must be satisfied by garage tinkering doesn't make sense. That is: Is urbanization and the move away from the farm suggesting technology as a route to triumph over nature? I'm not sure. If this isn't the motivation for basement inventors today, what is?

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One of the highlights of Monday's discussion for me was our talk about updating Williams's concept of "flow" for the Web. Our idea of a trajectory of flow may not make sense (that is, I don't think Williams thought there could be "more" or "less" flow -- for him planned flow was the defining experience of television). But if you can think of "more" or "less" flow, it seems to me that Web continues to follow the "flow" trajectory of television.

Technically, it was originally designed as a stateless communication system -- from the perspective of the Web provider (not the user) this is about the opposite of flow. But as things have evolved, more and more effort has been spent trying to add different sorts of state information to Web transactions. This continues to change the user experience. In historical Web lore, the first reason given for adding a mechanism for maintaining state was a "shopping cart" (see the first specification for cookies). You could make some of the same arguments Williams made about TV programs and commercials with Web sites and pop-ups. Now, even if YouTube is in some way the opposite of television because of the need to choose each program, multimedia applications have evolved to link programs in the UI (the way that Amazon suggests books, YouTube suggests clips). Also a variety of media (like streaming audio) on the web are already organized into channels that try to get you to listen continuously (like Digitally Imported). I think you could also consider Web "portals" and "dashboards" using Williams.

Small tangent making things more complicated: In the 1980s there was a flowering of research in communication about the "active audience" -- investigators found a variety of things going on when people were watching plain old 1980s television that suggested to them that thinking of television viewers as passive was misguided. These examples of being "active" ranged from biological processes in the brain to cultural strategies of interpretation. This is not a critique of Williams: for him I think flow was a matter of perception, not a process of specific neurons firing.

Even if it is provocative to think of the Web in terms of flow, the Web clearly isn't TV. An open question is: What is the "defining experience" (as Williams has it) of the Web?

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