Search Results

For a decade before the Internet, members of the literary performance group Invisible Seattle pioneered the delights of creativity in social media on their Bulletin Board System (BBS) IN.S.OMNIA. The invisibles conducted a series of rigorous (and often hilarious) literary experiments, asking whether or not this disembodied text could support complex fictions, prose and poetry modes, as well as philosophic inquiry, exploring in microcosm the multi-vocal modes now common. The Invisibles discussed writing practices freed from paper-and-ink with writers such as Jacques Derrida and Harry Mathews. The essay captures the song of the modem -- the flavor of collaboration on the BBS platform -- and connects IN.S.OMNIA to netprov (networked improv narrative) and other contemporary practices.

The InfoZone, a project of the Telluride Institute in southwest Colorado, was an early example-setting community networking initiative, cited for being the first rural Internet PoP in 1992-93, and the first spread-spectrum wireless community-wide network in 1995. The InfoZone began as a First Class BBS network in the late 1980s, before connecting to the Internet, via Colorado Supernet in 1992, with support from the Colorado Advanced Technology Institute. Added early partnership support came from Apple's Library of Tomorrow program, IBM and the NTIA. In summer 1993, Telluride Institute hosted its annual Ideas Festival on “Tele-Community”, bringing together leading thinkers and doers to discuss issues of ‘community’ in the emergent Internetworked society. Before shutting down in the late 1990s, the InfoZone had 1200 subscribers (Telluride population: 1800), hosting online government, healthcare, library services, schools, arts, research, religion, business and tourism information and discussions, and was widely studied.

Community Networking -- The Native American Telecommunications Continuum Computer mediated communications -- has evolved exponentially each decade since the mid-1980’s. Pre-Internet exploration in the era of FidoNet and supported by dial-up modem equipment running over x.25 exchange switching does not seem possible to have existed at all. With three decades of change to reflect upon, questions remain today about whether the impact of technology and telecommunications has advanced tribal nationhood.

System X was an Australian-based dial up BBS, where users created a community of interest with both a variety of text-based conversations and a virtual gallery of images and sound that invited visual and sound artists and musicians to share work and collaborate. System X also sought to originate critical thought about information storage and control, data networks, and art practice in this media. Importantly, it provided a context for community members to upload their own content and to share that content not only with a Sydney-based community, but also with the growing international community. In an interview with Founding Sysop Scot McPhee, this chapter documents the roots of System X in the Sydney electronic music community; System X's role as an art project; the importance of uploading, downloading, manipulating and re-uploading music and images; the user community; the audience; and System X's legacy in the Australian digital arts community.

The use of digital computers to facilitate social interaction has not eclipsed the uses for which they were invented, but it often seems that way. That use requires an ability to network computers to one another, a capability that took several decades after the computer's invention to be realized. The Internet, which emerged out of military-sponsored research done in the 1970s, enabled the creation of sophisticated forms of social interaction. But the personal computer phenomenon was evolving in a parallel universe, with little communication between the two camps. This chapter argues that important first steps toward social media were taken in the arena of the personal computer, which also emerged in the 1970s, but from a different direction. Using devices to connect PCs to the telephone network, and developing so-called “bulletin board” software, personal computer enthusiasts created a framework on which the current Internet-based social world resides.