Post by CS234This thread is intended for the students of CS-234: Technologies for democratic society
How does Usenet fit into the vision presented by Licklider and Taylor in
"The Computer as a Communication Device"?
- Which aspects of their vision are realized through Usenet?
- What aspects have evolved differently from what they imagined?
Feel free to respond to comments made by your classmates as well.
In their paper "The Computer as a Communication Device" Licklider and
Taylor focus on how computers should be used to facilitate communication
and collaboration by enabling acces to vast resources and creating online
communities based on shared interest rather than geograpihcal location.
They want to create a platform where there is an interactive, creative
communication, one that enriches everyone involved. Usenet emodies this
by enabling global communication through decentralized discussion forums.
Usenet aligns with their vision in the sense that it is an open community
accessible to all,even people with economic restraints.
There is no central authority who controls the content
or the acces. Another plus is that, Licklider and Taylor acknowledged
that collaboration should be able to occur at any time zones and schedules,
Usenet fulfills this through its asynchronous communication.
However, there are aspects of usenet that evolved differently than what was
envisioned. For example usenet lacks tools such as facetiming,image sharing
which constitute some of the core visions for digital communication of
Licklider and Taylor.It is a text based system which is a limited type of
communication that isnt as fast as face to face communication or
using images. There is also the fact that usenet doesn't have the best user
interface. What Taylor and Licklider predicted was a more
user-friendly and intuitive platform. While usenet is relatively
difficult to navigate for the average user compared to today's social
media and forums which have more accessible features.
Also licklider and taylors vision highlighted a sense of collective
control and moderation by users. Usenet decentralized nature leads to a lack
of moderation that leads to spam, trolling etc.
To conclude, at the time usenet as created it as revolutionary and had some
key alignments ith what licklider and taylor envisioned. But as technology
moved on, it faded into the background because of some other core ideas
(facetiming, instant messaging, filtering) that weren't implemented, as
new technologies emerged.