Hyperlinks vs. the web

In the previous post on the 1968 Mother of all Demos by Doug Engelbart and company, I mentioned stumbling on the fact that Andries van Dam and Ted Nelson had put together HES, which is generally regarded as the first hypertext system, the year before.

All the parts of that were familiar. I've written extensively, though not always favorably, about Nelson's later project, Xanadu. Foley, van Dam et. al.'s Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice was on the shelf at the first place I coded for money, and I'm pretty sure I've run across the idea of hypertext at some point over the years. What I hadn't realized was that Nelson and van Dam had worked together, and that hypertext went back quite that far.

To be fair, I wasn't exactly shocked that hypertext dated to 1967, particularly in the context of Engelbart & co.'s demo, which included what were recognizably hyperlinks. What did catch my attention was that all the building blocks of Web 1.0 were in place in 1968, twenty-three years before the first actual web servers appeared in 1991:

• the concept of hyperlinks and hypertext
• the realization of that concept in running code
• connectivity between computers in different physical locations (ARPANET itself would come along a bit later, but computers were already talking to each other)
• interactive graphic displays
• the mouse

The bullet point I didn't quite add is file servers, but FTP dates to 1971. I haven't dug up solid evidence that there was such a thing as a file server in 1968, but I certainly wouldn't bet against it. If you prefer to put the "Web 1.0 could just as well have happened" point at 1971 and say it was only twenty years later that it actually happened, fine.

What took so long? According to van Dam's account, the people who saw the Mother of all Demos were generally impressed, but the overall reaction was to say "Wow, that was some demo" and then get back to work. Was this a failure of the imagination, that the computer researchers of the time couldn't wrap their heads around something that wasn't 80-column punched cards, even if they'd seen it with their own eyes?

Possibly, but there were also more mundane concerns. That list of pieces in place comes with a few disclaimers:

• Connectivity was generally at 1200 Baud, or approximately one millionth of a gigabit per second. This will deliver text faster than you can read it, but it amounts to a megabyte every two minutes. You can actually fit quite a bit of information into a megabyte, and 1.5Mb/s T1 lines were available, (for a hefty charge, generally to institutions or large corporations), but you're not going to run YouTube or Netflix on the bandwidth available at the time.
• Interactive graphic displays were a thing, but they were normally vector-based (think Asteroids, if you've heard of that) and in any case they were expensive specialized equipment. Graphic displays (bitmapped) didn't become commonplace until the 80s. Even then they weren't cheap and they looked absolutely primitive by today's standards

I think it's fair to say that in 1968 you could have put something together that looked quite a bit like Web 1.0, but it would have been a curiosity: slow, expensive and without anywhere near enough content to make for a compelling experience.

The first actual web servers were intended as an easier way to get to the content that had accumulated on various FTP/Gopher/UUCP/... servers over the years, which was getting to the point where it was hard to just know where something you were interested in was located. Not too long after that (AltaVista came along in 1995), there were enough index pages that it was hard to keep track of where a good index for what you were looking for was, much less the data itself, and web search was born.

So it wasn't simply a matter of the world turning its back on the wonderful potential of Engelbart's NES and Nelson and van Dam's HES and then suddenly waking up in 1991 to realize what they should have known all along. Things were happening in the meantime:

• Computing power, storage and bandwidth were increasing exponentially (as in, actually exponentially, at a more-or-less constant proportion per unit time, and not just "by a lot")
• As both a driving cause and an effect, the number of people with access to computing power, and the amount of data they wanted stored, also increased exponentially
• People continued to experiment with ways of organizing information and navigating complex webs of connections (1987's HyperCard comes to mind, but it's not the only example)

I think this is a common thread in technology in general: Things take a while to develop. It's not enough just to have a good concept, or even a working realization of it. You generally need a certain amount of infrastructure and a growing need that your new concept will meet, and some partial successes along the way.

Some other examples that come to mind:

• SketchPad, which anticipated several major developments, particularly the Graphical User Interface, was written in 1963, GUIs weren't really widespread until the 1980s
• The object-oriented language Simula came out in 1962 and SmallTalk in 1972. Objective-C was introduced in 1984, but OO languages didn't really get major traction until the mid 1990s
• The concept of a neural network dates back to 1943, at least. Perceptrons were introduced in 1969. Hopfield networks were a topic of research in the 1980s. Transformers were proposed in 2017, now eight years ago. ChatGPT came out five years later.

It shouldn't be surprising that concepts run ahead of implementation. Concepts are a lot easier to come up with. More interesting is how we get from (some) concepts to widespread implementation, and which concepts get there.

Tell us about the olden days

The previous post talked in generalities about how the web and internet may or may not have changed how we communicate and live. To go along with that, I thought it might be interesting to consider some specific examples. Since these are drawn from personal experience, this post will show my age more than most do, but so be it. If you find it amusing to append old man to the questions here, well, I don't suppose I can stop you.

I'm going to answer these on the assumption that you have no memory of anything before, say, the 1990s, so please bear with me if some of this is already obvious. I'm honestly not sure how much of this will be "wow, I didn't know that" to a typical reader and how much will be "well, yeah, no kidding." Also, though I'll generally write in past tense, many of the things I'll mention are still true. I'll call that out here and there, but not necessarily everywhere, so if you find yourself thinking "but ... they still have those", you're probably right.

If nothing else, this post will probably serve as a reminder that as much as I grumble about kidstechnology these days, a lot of this stuff is nice to have.

What did you do before GPS and mapping apps?

I grew up in a midwestern town that was built on a grid. The north/south blocks were long (eight to a mile) and the east-west blocks were short (twelve to a mile), so most addresses were on the north/south streets. First street was at the south end, running east-west, then second street and so on. The north-south streets had names in alphabetical order from east to west.

The first digit or digits of an address on a north-south street were the number of the nearest numbered street to the south. The last two digits of the address were 00 for the northeast corner lot and 01 for the northwest corner and generally increased by 4 per house from there. If I lived at 1234 Elm street and I knew your address was 2133 Maple, I knew to go nine blocks north (just over a mile) and, um, several blocks west, and your house would be on the west side of the street, toward the north end.

The main thoroughfares were a mile apart, since they'd started out as section roads, so you knew you could take 3rd, 11th, 19th or (later, as things got built out) 27th to get across town from east to west, and Cedar, Oak or (again later) Agate to get from north to south. A lot of towns were laid out using some version of this kind of scheme, and for that matter so were a lot of cities. San Francisco is a notable example -- a lot of folks would have built streets to follow the contour of the hills (to be fair, some do).

I say "were" and "could", but of course they didn't rename or renumber anything just because GPS came along, though it does certainly seem to matter less now. I currently live in an area with a large-scale grid of section roads, and many of the towns are on small-scale grids, but I've never bothered to learn the exact numbering schemes, even in my own neighborhood, because GPS is just easier. I do know the section roads reasonably well.

My first answer, in other words, was "you just got to know your way around town" and "the addresses were set up to make that easier".

That worked fine until I moved to an area on the East Coast where nothing was on a grid. At that point MapQuest was around, but I didn't have a smartphone. I ended up doing a fair bit of printing out directions off the web, trying to mostly memorize the way before starting out, peeking at the directions while stopped at stoplights and keeping a weather eye out for street signs and house numbers.

And getting lost fairly often.

Gradually, I learned the main roads and how they connected together, and how the smaller connectors connected to those, and where the main places I wanted to get to related to all that, and things got easier. People would also give general directions like "It's near Chestnut and Amethyst where the main library is. Turn left on Locust Street after the light and Smith Court will be a few streets down". If you already knew where the main library was, or even where Chestnut and Amethyst were, you had a pretty good shot.

There were also some clues like the common pattern of naming a main road after a city it was headed toward. For example, Richmond Road in Twickenham goes toward Richmond and Mortlake Road in Richmond goes toward Mortlake, and it's probably not a coincidence that in both cases you're heading toward London proper (there is no Twickenham Road in Richmond or Richmond Road in Mortlake, but on the other hand, back Stateside, Chapel Hill Road in Durham goes toward Chapel Hill, where it becomes Durham Road in Chapel Hill ...).

Later, I realized that learning the main road/smaller road pattern was something I'd dealt with before before, traveling in Europe, except that instead of main streets it was usually the public transit system -- get on the subway at your stop, follow the subway maps to your destination stop, find your actual destination from there.

My main problem then was that I don't have a great sense of overall direction. If a road takes a bend here and a curve there, I might think I'm headed pretty much the same direction I was before, when in fact I've turned almost 90 degrees.

So I really like having GPS available as a backup, even if I wish there were an easy way to say "yeah, I know this part, start giving me directions when we get to this part and just let me listen to my music until then."

The other part, of course, particularly before MapQuest, was knowing how to read a street or road map, which seems to be something of a lost art, a clear sign that GPS is just plain easier (particularly if your brain doesn't deal well with maps).

For long trips you had the Rand McNally Road Atlas, which showed all the interstates, federal highways and main state roads, along with cities and towns, with mileage shown on each segment. The distance between one town or exit and the next was shown as a number halfway between in one color. Some of those waypoints had a special dot in a different color, and the distance between those with special dots was shown in that color, so you didn't have to add up all the segments in between. There was also a schematic depiction of the interstate system with mileage numbers.

In other words, the road atlas encoded exactly the same kind of edge-weighted graph that mapping software uses, and you could use that to figure out the shortest route from point A to point B along main roads. If you had time, you could look for cutoffs on secondary roads. If you were adventurous, you could try to find local shortcuts and hope that at least you could find your way back to something that was on the map.

You might also carry smaller-scale state or regional maps, which you could get at any gas station (maybe still can). If you were staying in a city for a while, you'd pick up a city map, too. The road atlas also included maps of the main roads in most cities, and you could usually get by with that if you were just passing through [re-reading, I realize I forgot to mention that you could also ... stop and ask directions].

Any of these maps would be overlaid with a square grid with numbers in one direction and letters in the other, and there would be an index, so you could find out that Springfield was in square 5A and quickly find exactly where it was and figure out how to get there.

When I lived in the LA area, the Thomas Brothers map worked basically the same way (as does London's A to Z, along with, I'm sure, many, many others), so you could figure out that to get to the Sherman Oaks Galleria you take Wilshire to the 405, get off at the Ventura exit, hang a left on Sepulveda and a right onto Ventura and there you are.

But what about traffic? To this day, many local radio stations will provide frequent updates on road conditions and traffic, and make money off this information by selling ads. Just sayin'

Summing this all up

• Many places were designed to be easy to get around
• Pretty much any city has a system of main roads, secondary roads and side streets that you can just learn if you need to
• There are maps available at several scales. Larger scale maps include distance information and pretty much all have grids and indexes.
• Getting around is easier now, but it wasn't really that hard before smartphones and GPS, because there was already quite a lot of infrastructure to make it easier, particularly if maps are friendly to your brain.

What did you do before cell phones and texting?

Cell phones may have had the most noticeable effect on day-to-day life of all the web/internet/telecommunications advances of the past few decades.

Besides the clothes and hairstyles, one sure-fire sign that a movie is old (or the screenwriter is a bit behind the times) is a plot device that depends on a phone call. Our hero needs to get in touch with someone urgently. Can they make it to a payphone? Will the person they're calling be at home or at their desk? Will the line be busy? Will the wrong person answer the phone? Or maybe the right person is at home but they're afraid to pick up the phone because it might be the villain calling? If the hero had to leave a message, will the other person get home to check their answering machine in time? Will the wrong person overhear them leaving the message on the machine?

None of these really works today because

• Phones are now associated with people, while they used to be associated with places
• Today's phones can do more. For most of the landline era there was no caller ID and most phones could only handle one call at a time
• Messages can now be stored in the cloud rather than locally on analog tape

Since a landline is associated with a place, the vast majority of households had a single phone line, though there might be multiple phones in the house connected to it. If you called the number for that phone, you were calling the house. Someone would answer ("Hello?"), you'd say who you were ("Hi, it's Dave") and, if you wanted to talk to someone else at the house, who you wanted to talk to ("Could I speak to Earl?"). If that person was somewhere else, you could ask the person you were talking to to leave a message.

You could also just hang out and chat with them -- if you know Earl, you probably know Chris, the housemate, or Chris's good friend Sam, who doesn't live there but hangs out enough that everyone's comfortable with them answering the phone. The chance of talking to someone other than the person you were calling for wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though of course it could be.

The other half of a phone being associated with a place was that if you wanted to make a call, you had to get to a phone. That's why there were payphones (still are, here and there, I'm pretty sure). Or you could stop by a friend's house and ask to borrow their phone. In a pinch, you might be able to drop into a nearby business and ask to use their phone, but it had better be an emergency.

You could also call to a payphone, since they each had their own number, but that was pretty rare, to the point that a lot of people weren't aware that you could even do that. You'd mostly see it done in a movie, where the villain tells the hero to wait at the payphone at 12th and Main, and some innocent bystander steps in to make a call at just the wrong moment.

But that also meant that if you were away from a phone, no one could call you and no one expected to be able to. Earl's not home? Cool, I'll try later, or maybe I'll run into him. Likewise, no one expected you to be able to call them. The most likely answer to "Why haven't they called me back??" was "They're not home yet."

Honestly, this was kinda nice. I still miss it from time to time. Sure, you can unplug today, but it's not the default.

Voicemail today is mostly the same as it was fifty years ago. You could record whatever outgoing message you liked. When someone called your phone and the answering machine was turned on, it would play your outgoing message, beep and start recording whatever was on the line until the connection ended or (I'm pretty sure) until you picked up the phone on your end.

Depending on how a switch was set, it would also play what it was recording on its speaker, so you could hear the message that was being left. People who were at home could and did screen calls that way, so leaving a message might look like:

... Please leave your message at the beep

Hey, it's me ...

[picking up phone] Oh hey! I was hoping you'd call

but it might also look like:

... Please leave your message at the beep

Hey, it's me ...

[muttering to self and not picking up phone] Yeah well you can just take that phone and ...

... and I just wanted to say ... again ... I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry

Sure, you can still screen calls and now even block people (which you couldn't do), but there's something special about listening in in real time.

Again, the main difference is that the answering machine is tied to a landline, which is tied to a place, so typically you'd check your answering machine for messages when you got home and either turn it off, or leave it on and screen calls. If you turned it off, you had to remember to turn it back on the next time you left ("Oh no, I'm sorry you couldn't leave a message. I forgot to turn my machine on."). It was also possible to access your voicemail by calling in and using a Touch-Tone™ keypad to put in a PIN, but to do that ... you'd have to get to a phone (and even late in the game, a lot of phones still had rotary dials, so not just any phone).

But of course, and this is the part that surprised me enough I remember discussing it in at least one post here, nobody leaves voicemail any more. I mean, you can still do it, but I'm not sure when I last left a voicemail for a person, as opposed to a business or doctor's office.

It took me a while to understand why. If you call someone and it goes to voicemail, surely it's easier to just say a message than to hang up and type out a text. Fair enough, but it's even easier to just type out the text without calling and waiting for an answer or voicemail. The setup for a voice connection is heavier weight than one might expect.

It's also a lot easier for the receiver to glance at a text than to access voicemail and then listen through. After hearing "Why didn't you just text me?" over and over, voicemail starts to look less and less attractive. With smart keyboards and speech-to-text, texting isn't that hard anyway, at least in my experience. And so came the return of telegram style and enough abbreviations, slang and conventions to (arguably) constitute a new dialect.

So the main differences here are that it's harder to unplug and ... text.

I was going to emphasize how utterly disruptive it is to always be connected but ... maybe not. Yes, I'm reachable by phone most of my waking hours, but I don't actually get that many phone calls. In particular, I don't get a lot of cold calls. Most of the time if someone calls me it's an actual person that's either a friend/family member or someone I'd asked to call me. I don't get a lot of spam calls to begin with, and if I do, I can either decline and let it go to voicemail, to check (and delete) at my leisure, or use a screening feature to ask them to leave a voicemail (which they never do).

I think some of this is regulatory, but spammers/scammers don't generally let regulation get in their way too much, so this must mostly be a matter of there being cheaper and more effective ways to spam and scam.

Most of the interruptions I get, by far, are notifications from apps which I chose to get. Or at least, I didn't diligently ask not to get. Many of these are email notifications. I don't get a ton of email, but I do get a steady stream through the day, just almost enough to want to Do Something About It.  I also get notifications for texts, which are generally from people I know, so I tend to look at them right away, and from a couple of news sources, which are pretty selective about only sending out alerts for major news. The main thing that's bugging me right now is the stream of "hey this movie just came out" notifications that I don't recall asking for, but that seems to have tapered off (or I turned them off?).

In other words, being "always on" doesn't seem to require being very "on", and there are a few things I could do to make it less disruptive yet. On the flip side, I can call or text pretty much any time I want, as long as I'm not driving, and even then it's usually not that hard to pull over. If I'm at the grocery store and I want to double-check what a household member wanted, that's easy. If I'm in an accident, I can call 911 (or if I can't, I have bigger problems). And so forth.

It's also easier to meet up, which is nice. I remember arranging to meet friends in Berlin not long after the Wall came down. After a few phone calls (and maybe even letters and postcards?), we arrived at a plan: meet on such-and-such date at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche at high noon. If not everyone was there, come back at 1:00 and so forth, so that whoever was already there wouldn't have to sit around waiting. I don't think we set a time to give up waiting, but it was understood that if it got to be too late, whoever was there would just go on and see the city and whoever couldn't make it couldn't make it.

As it turned out, most of us were there at noon and the others showed up at 1:00 and off we went. During the visit, we'd occasionally arrange a rendezvous point to meet up at if we got separated, which may or may not have actually happened. This was pretty normal and it tended to work pretty well, but again, I'm not sure when was the last time I've made a plan like that, because why bother when you can just text or call? It's still a good trick to keep in mind, though, I think.

So staying connected is disruptive, but not really all that disruptive. Being more connected also has some conveniences, but is it really all that much more convenient? 

What did you do before search?

For the purposes of this post, let's assume that search Just Works: you can easily find any particular bit of information you need, assuming it's on the web somewhere (and "the web" basically means "whatever your search engine can find").

Sometimes, you'd end up just not finding something out. But there were options.

If you wanted a phone number or address, you could look someone up in the phone book. Since phone books were physical things, and fairly hefty ones in many cases, you could really only access them locally, though many libraries had phone books for major cities. In other words, there was an element of privacy protection built in, which tended to be enough for most purposes, though people did get unlisted numbers for various reasons.

Adding on to my claim that changes in how phones work have been among the most disruptive, that whole paragraph is from another age. If I want to call a business, their number is on their web page. If I want to call a person, we'll have exchanged phone numbers (likely by text, of course). My phone will remember my contacts, but that's actually not such a big deal. It doesn't take a lot of space to write down names and addresses of people, and you could get a miniature notebook for just such a purpose (I still have one somewhere).

The main convenience is being able to tap on an icon and have the phone place the call without even having to know the number -- there are only a few numbers I have memorized now, but mostly because I use them for supermarket loyalty programs and such, not because I dial them.

But what would one actually search for?

There are two main categories, I think. One is day-to-day information: Where is there a good restaurant that serves X kind of food? When is the DMV open? Does the local hardware store carry left-handed socket wrenches? (No, that's not a thing).

This is largely a matter of advertising (which, for the purposes of this post, at least, is distinct from search).  Businesses have an incentive to let as many people as possible know that they're around, so there's probably a local restaurant guide that will tell you who serves what, and there are probably multiple copies of it in various drawers in the house, or under the couch, because they just seem to keep turning up and, yikes, maybe they can reproduce?

You probably got something in the mail telling you when local government offices like the DMV are open, and they're probably listed in the yellow pages as well (back to phones ... there were actually two kinds of phone books: the white pages had residential listings for anyone with a phone who didn't opt out, and the yellow pages had paid listings for various businesses and similar entities. It's been so long since I've used one that I almost forgot that DMV would be in there).

Unless you lived in a major city, there probably weren't that many restaurants in town anyway, and it didn't take long to get to know them. As to hours, it was a good bet that anything that was open for business would at least be open between 10:00 and 4:00 on a weekday, and anything retail was at least open on Saturday (though maybe not Sunday, depending on where you were).  Again I say "was" and "would", but as far as I can tell, that's still mostly true.

In other words, if you search for "X restaurant near me", you're not asking something that could only be answered, or only be conveniently answered, once search engines came along. You're asking something that used to be reasonably easy to answer and is now somewhat easier, in principle.

As to what's available for sale where, some outlets would put out catalogs (the Sears Catalog is a famous example -- I hope that when you chase that link it says more about the cultural significance of that catalog) and many stores would put out flyers in the local newspaper saying what they had on sale that week.

Or (once more back to phones) you could call the hardware store and ask whether they had left-handed socket wrenches, and most likely someone would actually pick up the phone on the other end and tell you (and try not to giggle too loudly).

Long story short, most of the "Where can I find this in the physical world right now?" questions could be answered pretty easily, because people had an interest in making them easy to answer, just as they do now. The main difference is that there were more people involved. For example, there were more people working at a typical retail store to help customers and also to answer the phone if someone called. And that was kinda nice. I still miss it from time to time.

The other main thing I use search for is research, for example looking up material to put in a blog post. Having so much material online and searchable changes things considerably, but despite what the cartoon might suggest, it wasn't impossible to find things out.

To be sure, this wasn't something most people could do at home, if it wasn't in the dictionary or encyclopedia that were both much more commonplace then, or in some book or magazine that you happened to have on hand, and it helped, a lot, to have a university library or similar institution in your area. If you could get to one of those, though, there were definitely resources:

• There were probably microfilm copies of major newspapers and magazines plus local and regional publications
• Reference books like The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature would tell you what was in those publications
• There would be copies of major scientific journals
• There would be a large reference section full of reference books on a wide variety of subjects
• And, of course, there would be a large collection of fiction, and non-fiction history, science, art, music and many other subjects
• Along with a card catalog to tell you where to find all of the above
• Your local school library would be a miniature of this, so you could practice finding books in the catalog and maybe even reading a microfilm copy of a news article you found in the Reader's Guide.

The main problem, besides not having access if you didn't live near such a library, is that it's harder to keep a collection of physical texts up to date. Even so, the library would have subscriptions to many major publications, and the Reader's Guide published updates biweekly, so you still could get a pretty good idea of the latest developments.

All this depended on your library carrying the type of information you were interested in and the major reference publishers indexing it. These being human endeavors and resources being limited, there was plenty of room for conscious bias, unconscious bias and plain old budgetary constraints to skew the picture.

Today, of course, you can search anything the major search engines index, major news sources update their pages continuously, preprints are up on ArXiv as soon as the authors want them to be, and information is generally available more widely and more quickly than it used to be. I'm going to steer well clear of how the current web-centric view of the world of information may be biased, and why, but I'll certainly acknowledge that it's a worthy topic of discussion.

But then, how many people are in the business of serious research? For us amateurs, how much does it really matter whether I find out about a new development right away, or in a month or a year when it finds its way into the library system, or a friend mails me a photocopy of someone's lecture notes, or whatever else. For the pros, even a good search engine will only get you so far.

Beyond that, as far as I can tell, you still need a good network of sources, whether primary sources or people who can point you to them or pull together, assess and summarize the information from primary sources. It remains to be seen what role LLMs will end up playing in that, particularly in professional-level research.

Search engines make day-to-day questions more convenient to answer, and they make the amateur researcher's job quite a bit easier, but were those all that hard to begin with?

What did you do before streaming?

Bought CDs, bought/rented DVDs or videotapes, watched TV, went out to movies, not to mention quite a few live shows.

Sometimes even talked to people.

What did you do before LLMs?

Dunno ... what did you do? It hasn't been that long!

What changed?

This is one of those posts that started as one thing, trying to make some sort of Larger Point, but ended up as ... something. It started out on the long-running theme of not-so-disruptive technology, then devolved into a technical exploration as I tried to back that point up, and then went a somewhat different direction because of what I actually found when I went researching, before sorta circling back to the general vicinity of the of the original theme and pulling together some threads from some of the first posts on this blog from, oh, a minute or two ago. Rather than try to polish all this up into some sort of coherent essay, I've decided to leave it pretty much as written. Perhaps as some sort of compensation, I've included a lot more links than I usually do.

Looking back I see that in 2024, I've already doubled my output from 2023 (by a score of two posts to one), so maybe I should quit while I'm ahead. But I had an idea for a post, and after re-reading back to July of 2020 (that is, seven posts), I'm pretty sure I haven't explored this particular point before, at least not recently. Or rather, I have, given that the not-so-disruptive technology tag is in second place behind annoyances, but if I've stepped back and surveyed it from a broader point of view, it hasn't been in the last four years.

(I also notice that the link to Intermittent Conjecture is for a four-year-old post, probably because that particular feature is no longer particularly supported, because of course it's not. Grandpa, what's a "blogroll"?)

I considered editing that last bit of snark out, especially since annoyances is already well represented, but I think that it's probably in line with the rest of this post, though maybe in a roundabout way.

It's almost an axiom that newly-developed technology will Change the World. I say "almost" because technically an axiom is a statement that you assume to be true because it's essential to the rest of your logical framework, but you don't have any other way to prove it to be true, so you have to just assume it. I'm thinking of mathematical axioms like "a thing is equal to itself" or, more esoterically, "if you have a collection of sets, you can form a new set by choosing one element from each" (it took quite a bit of work to figure out that you can't prove that from other axioms like "two sets are equal if you can match up their elements one-to-one in both directions").

"New technology changes everything" is a statement that people often assume to be true, and it's essential to at least some people's logical frameworks, but I wouldn't call it an axiom because you can actually look at any given new technology and, I claim, come to a reasonable conclusion as to whether it changed everything. And then, maybe, as a followup question, by how much?

To take a couple of easy, well-known examples, it's not hard to argue that, say agriculture changed everything, or antibiotics changed everything. Except ... depending on what you call "agriculture", you could argue that agriculture was around for thousands of years before cities like Shuruppak or Dholavira arose. On a smaller timescale, the first modern antibiotic was extracted from mold growing on a bacterial culture in 1928, but it wasn't available in useful quantities until the early1940s.

It's not the discovery of a technology that makes the difference. There wasn't even any one event that you could call "the discovery of agriculture." There was an event that could be called "the discovery of (modern) antibiotics (that were known to work by killing microbes)", but that in itself didn't change anybody's life greatly.

The point here that simple statements like "agriculture/antibiotics changed everything" turn a bit mushy after even a little prodding. More accurate versions might be "over the millennia, developments in agriculture have had a significant impact on human population and living patterns" or "the development, mass manufacture and widespread deployment of several types of antibiotics in the latter half of the 1900s had a significant impact on human health outcomes."

Clearly there have been significant changes in how people live, and clearly developments in agriculture and medicine, including the development of antibiotics, have played a significant role in that, but it's not a simple matter of "agriculture happened" or "antibiotics happened" followed by "everything changed". The actual stories are full of false starts, backtracks, accidental discoveries, social upheavals, twists of fate and all sorts of other seemingly extraneous factors. Which is the interesting part.

What got me started on all this was thinking about how the web has changed communication, and in particular telecommunication. Except, as soon as I wrote that, I realized that it's more a matter of the internet changing communication, since I've already argued that it's the web of links that makes the web webby, and I'll just claim here that this webbiness hasn't had a large impact on how we communicate with each other.

We could just as well have Skype and Zoom without the web. For that matter, to a large extent each social media platform is its own web, and not "the" web. But that way lies yet another round of fretting over what exactly am I blogging about here ... For now, let's file communication technology under "the web at large" or something and get on with it.

For most of human existence, the only way to communicate detailed information over a long distance was by people moving around. Travelers would bring stories and knowledge and trade items with them and information would diffuse across large areas, but if that traveler wanted to send a specific message to someone they'd met years ago while traveling someplace far from their current location, well, good luck with that. It may not have been impossible, but it couldn't have been commonplace.

Several thousand years ago, digital communication came along and changed this. With writing came the option of moving a written message with the sender's exact words (there wasn't any single "invention of writing", either, but let's just roll with it). Messages could be sealed so that their contents couldn't be easily changed, signed so that you could tell who they came from, and even encrypted so that only the intended reader could read them, or at least that was the idea.

Digital telegraph systems, also dating back thousands of years, could transmit text from point A to point B without even needing a person having to carry it. The Greek phryctoria, a system of towers on mountaintops with torches, are a good example but not the only one.

Two key measures of telecommunication are bandwidth, which is how many bits can be transmitted in a given amount of time, and latency, which is how long it takes to transmit any particular bit from sender to receiver. As usual, the actual definitions are more subtle, particularly for bandwidth, but these will do here. If you're feeling technical, feel free to read bandwidth as bitrate.

For example, if it takes three seconds to switch the torches in a telegraph tower around to show a new letter, and there are 24 possible letters, then the bandwidth is about 4.6/3 bits per second, or about 1.5bps. The latency from one tower to the next, around 30km away, is negligible (about 0.1 milliseconds).

If the message is supposed to be relayed to the next tower in a series of towers, it will take some amount of time for someone to read the arrangement of torches in the sending tower and put the same torches up so the next tower can see them.  Let's say there are two people in the tower, one reading and one putting up torches, and it takes an extra second for the reader to read and announce the next letter, on top of three seconds to arrange the torches. Latency is then four seconds per tower.  That is, if the first tower is sending a message and the second is relaying it to the third, the third tower is getting the message four seconds after it is sent. A fourth tower would be eight seconds behind, and so forth.

Suppose I want to send a message to someone ten towers away. Latency is still pretty good, relatively speaking. The last tower will be 36 seconds behind the sender (nine relays for ten towers). If that receiver sends a reply, I can get it just over a minute after sending my message (in more technical terms, round-trip latency is on the order of a minute). While this is glacial by today's standards, it's outstanding in comparison to a multi-day journey to get from where I am to where the receiver is, and I don't have to worry about someone waylaying my messenger along the way (or my messenger deciding they have better things to do with their time).

Bandwidth, though, is not so great. If I'm sending a short message like "Prepare for attack from the north," that's not a problem. Transmitting that message will take a couple of minutes and my receiver will have the whole thing half a minute after I finish sending it. But suppose I'm sending a trade agreement proposal that amounts to 12,000 bits -- still tiny by today's standards. That will take a couple of hours, which is still doable, though not a lot of fun for anyone involved.

But the people on the other end will want to respond with their own counterproposals, and so on. Pretty soon we're into days, and spare a thought for the twenty people up in the towers shuffling torches around and looking out for torches at other towers through the night  (I'm going to go out on a limb and say this system works better at night).

Probably better to send a trusted emissary with the text of my proposal and maybe some other written instructions. And while they're at it, they could carry messages from other people in my area to people in the receiver's area, or anywhere along the way, and we have ourselves the beginnings of a postal system.  The latency of a postal system is measured in days, but the bandwidth is essentially limited only by how fast people can actually write and read and how many people are sending and receiving messages -- you can fit a lot of sheets of paper onto a horsecart. Not to mention that you can also send drawings and diagrams easily on a sheet of paper.

This may seem like a lot of speculative detail about ancient systems of communication, and it probably is, but it covers the bulk of human history (the written-down part, as opposed to prehistory, which is most of human existence). From ancient times until the late 1800s, long-distance communication was mainly a matter of moving physical texts around, with limited use of alternatives that were much faster (in latency) but also much, much slower (in bandwidth), and quite a bit more expensive. This includes the era of the modern optical telegraph (late 1700s) and electrical telegraph (mid 1800s).

What happens next is interesting. I originally wrote "then came along the telephone," with the idea that it was a major leap to have the bandwidth to carry voice instead of the dots and dashes of morse code. Fortunately, I did a little double-checking and discovered that

• The bandwidth of a telegraph was not that low. A punched-tape system around the time of the telephone's invention could transmit upwards of 400 words per minute. At roughly 12 bits per word, that comes out to about 80 bits per second. That's nothing by modern standards, but it's about 50 times my guess for the phryctoria. Some of that is because Morse code encodes text more efficiently than torches, but most of it is due to the switch to electromagnetic transmission (um, light from torches is also electromagnetic ...).
• The bandwidth of human speech is not that high. In this old post I cited a world record of 10 words per second, or about 120 bits per second, but normal speech is much slower.

In other words, a telephone and a high-speed telegraph are transmitting words at about the same rate, though the telephone has the advantage of carrying tone of voice and not requiring someone to transcribe words onto a paper tape. I suppose this shouldn't be too surprising since both the telephone and telegraph are using the same underlying transmission medium of electromagnetic waves traveling along copper wires or, a little later, over the air.

The same technology could also transmit images. The first facsimile machine (perhaps you've heard of "faxes"?) was developed around the same time as the telephone. Later, in the 1920s, a number of inventors on a number of continents (including Leon Theremin, better known for the musical instrument) developed various systems for transmitting moving images. Early television station WRGB ("RGB" can't be a coincidence, can it?) transmitted 40-line images at 20 frames per second. Let's guess that a 40-line image equates to 1600 8-bit pixels. That comes out to about 260 thousand bits per second (260kbps).

This is already a remarkable increase in bandwidth*, from a hundred or so bits per second in the mid 1800s to hundreds of thousands in the early 1900s. By the dawn of the internet, let's say 1974 -- fifty years ago -- when the proposal for TCP was published, a leased telephone line could carry around 50kbps (56kbps as I recall and Wikipedia seems to confirm). That was the basic unit -- it was entirely possible, and typical, to lease more than one. By the mid 1980s, NFSNET was using 1.5Mbps T1 lines. Later came T3 lines at 45Mbs (so a T3 is worth 30 T1, go figure), and today we're talking gigabits or more. 

This is all a matter of how bandwidth is sold. The actual transmission cables are much heftier. Fiber optic cables can carry petabits per second (Pbs). A peta is a million gigas, that is, a petabit per second is a quadrillion bits per second, or about 125 thousand bits per second for every person on the planet. Commercially available cables are somewhat smaller, but not much, measured in hundreds of terabits, that is, hundreds of trillions of bits per second.

There are still some specialized applications that can give that much bandwidth a workout, but in human terms the amount of bandwidth available is absolutely ridiculous ("available to whom?" is a fair question). Which brings me back to one of the earliest themes on this blog: limits on human bandwidth. That is, how much information can any individual person deal with? I discussed several aspects of this in this post about, oh, seventeen years ago.

In terms of bits per second, our highest use of bandwidth is probably the visual system,.which processes somewhere around a gigabit per second considered as raw pixels, but there's a lot of redundancy in there. A good MP4-compressed video stream, which includes audio, is more like 10Mbps. Since a format like MP4 is tuned to provide only the information we actually process, it's probably a better measure of how much data the visual system is actually processing.

There's a lot we don't know about our other sensory input -- touch, smell, proprioception and whatever else, but it's clearly operating at a much lower bandwidth (for example, a walking robot does not need a fiber optic cable to tell the CPU how far its knee is bent or how much pressure its foot is exerting).

In other words, there are many, many ordinary houses with much more than enough bandwidth to saturate the sensory input of all the humans in them, if said sensory inputs could all be magically connected to a stream of bits. In practice, it means that there's enough bandwidth for everyone in the place to spend all their time watching video.

But -- and maybe this really is leading to some sort of point about technology changing everything -- that's been true for quite a while, at least since the advent of 24-hour cable TV, which is to say, also about 50 years ago, which I've just called the dawn of the internet. I don't think this is at all a coincidence. Let's try to boil all the stuff about bandwidth down to a few bullet points:

• For most of human existence, long-distance, low-latency bandwidth was zero -- there was no way to get a specific message across a long distance quickly. You could interact with some directly at short distance with high bandwidth and low latency, but that was about it.
• For most of human history, long-distance, low-latency bandwidth has been very low. In some times and places it was possible to quickly transmit a short message over a long distance, but even then, latency was measured in minutes and bandwidth in single-digit bits per second.
• Starting in the 1800s, electromagnetic transmission led to huge increases in low-latency, long-distance bandwidth, from single-digit bits per second to current rates, which are enough to enable video calls between any two internet-connected points.
• In the mid to late 1900s, bandwidth was high enough and cheap enough to enable two innovations:
• Cable TV carrying over a hundred channels 24/7
• Wide-area digital networking

Of the two, digital networking was by far the slower. Early networks mainly transmitted text, whether in human or computer languages. If you had a terminal at home, you could typically connect to your local network at speeds of 110 to 2400 baud (in general a different unit from bits per second, but in this case the same), and hope that you'd remembered to turn off call waiting on your landline. Then, after a long day of hacking, you could flip on the TV and watch at something like a megabit (resolution was lower in those days).

Even backbone connections were very slow by today's standards. This doesn't seem like a technical limitation, since ordinary coax cable could handle megabits, but more a matter of there not being that much digital information to send. If I wanted to talk to a colleague on the other side of the country, I wouldn't have tried to set up a call over the internet at the time. I would just pick up the phone.

The digital convergence that happened gradually over the next couple of decades consisted largely of building up the internet backbone, which was based on telephone and cable technology (mostly telephone, I believe), to the point where it could carry digital information at a rate comparable to the analog technologies that had been around since the beginning of the whole exercise.

Technically, this was revolutionary. For most intents and purposes, anything that was analog in the mid 1900s, particularly television, telephone and radio, is now carried digitally on the same network infrastructure that you can use to send purely digital information like ... text and emails? Source code?

This is a kind of interesting way to look at it. Hiding inside the massive digital network that delivers sound and video to us is a tiny replica of the original internet, albeit expanded from a few thousand researchers to a significant slice of the world's population. Billions are bigger than thousands, of course, a million times bigger, in fact, but overall digital bandwidth has increased by much more than a factor of a million.

(The early internet wasn't just used for email and source or object code. It was also used to transmit scientific data. Some datasets can be quite large, particularly in astronomy and particle physics, large enough to saturate even the modern backbone. But in such cases data is generally transmitted by putting it on physical media, which is then shipped. The postal service still wins on bandwidth. And yes, I am proudly using both data and media as mass nouns here.)

I think what I'm trying to sort out here is that the digital convergence can be looked at two ways. The original vision was to bring the intelligence of the internet to existing audio and video media. A TV cable brings a fixed set of channels into your house and very little back out. An analog phone circuit delivers voice traffic from point A to point B. A digital network can carry information from any number of senders to any number of receivers and do any kind of processing along the way.

On the other hand, technically, the digital convergence was a shift from sending analog data over analog lines (or over the air) to sending the same data over the same lines, or at least the same types of lines plus the cell network (also fundamentally analog), but encoded digitally, then re-encoded into analog signals and likewise decoded and re-decoded on the other end.

Why do that?

The wilder speculations of the 1990s haven't really panned out. A phone call is still a phone call. True, most of the time it's easier just to text, but texting needs much less bandwidth than calling. It certainly does not require a huge buildout of digital bandwidth. All the texts you send in a year would probably amount to a few seconds of audio.

TV shows are still TV shows and movies are still movies. Exciting new possibilities like interactive choose-your-own-adventure TV are an occasional novelty. Live streams allow viewers to interact with the presenter/performer, but so did call-in TV shows.

The difference is control. Outside the occasional news program or sporting event, I'm not sure I can remember the last time I watched something at the same time it was broadcast, if it was ever broadcast at all. I haven't bought an album in years, even in digital form. I stream what I want to watch or listen to, and I'm hardly a bleeding-edge early adopter. If I want to participate in a livestream, I can choose that. More importantly, if a creator wants to put on a live stream, they can easily do that. If I want to set up a video call with some people at work (or not at work), that's easy, too.

Some of these might be possible with the old technology. I could imagine a high-bandwidth phone service that would allow you to call a special number to connect to a video server and pick out what to watch on your video-enabled phone terminal, but putting everything on a digital network that handles data as bits regardless of its content or where it's going has made all of this much easier.

This is all sliced finely enough that individual people can decide which individual people to communicate with, from friend group to celebrity influencers to major organizations and whatever else. I'm personally not sure how much the behavior that this has enabled is new and how much is stuff that people were doing anyway. I explored that theme fairly early on, here, here and here for example, but I don't really do much with social media, even if you count blogging and the occasional visit to LinkedIn.

I think "Digital communication has changed everything" is true in about the same way as "Agriculture has changed everything". On the one hand, it has to be true. Being able to communicate instantly with any of billions of people has to be different from only being able to communicate instantly with the people around you. Being able to transmit high-resolution video across the world with negligible delay has to be different from being able to send a letter across a continent in days or weeks.

Being able to stream from a wide collection of audio and video is certainly different from having to buy or borrow books, records/CDs and videotapes/DVDs, and since that shift has happened well within living memory, it can certainly seem like things are changing rapidly.

But on the other hand, digital technology, including digital telecommunication, has been around for thousands of years. Analog telecommunication has been around for about a century and a half. What we might call the digital revolution is a change in how we transmit and access information, primarily audio and video, that had previously been analog, sitting on top of a huge increase in overall telecommunication bandwidth that began happening over a hundred years ago.

Just as there is no particular beginning of agriculture, there is no particular beginning of digital communication. Even if you could pinpoint the first time a person deliberately planted a seed with the intention of harvesting food later, or the first time a person deliberately made marks to represent words with the intention of someone else reading them later, it wouldn't tell you much. What matters isn't the particular starting point, but the long history of development and use over the millennia.

So far, advances in communication have been about people communicating with people. Machines do communicate with other machines without direct human involvement, but this is mainly in service of people communicating with people. This may change, but that's for another blog.

As far as people communicating with people, the limiting factor is mainly the people themselves. There are only so many conversations one can have and so many people to have them with. The whole point of a video conversation is to make the call as much like talking face to face as possible, that is, to accommodate our limitations in how we communicate. There are now ways of broadcasting a message from one person to millions of people, or even a billion, but even if one person can broadcast a message to a billion people instantly, those billion people will make sense of it in terms of their own lives, their own views and their own desires. 

The how of communicating with other people has changed greatly over the millennia, and particularly greatly in recent decades. This in turn has significantly affected whom we can communicate with. But what we talk about, even if we're talking about how quickly things appear to be changing, doesn't really seem to have changed much at all.

One of the earliest themes of this blog was trying to understand what effect the web and the internet would have on how we talk to each other. My instinct has been generally been to push back against "It's all different now" narratives, and I think my instinct has largely been borne out (but then, I would think that, wouldn't I?).

And yet, I can't believe that nothing has changed. A lot has changed. Some part of me wishes that, after nearly two decades, I could arrive at some sort of grand summing-up of What The Web Is About and what effect it's had, but after all this time, I'm not sure I have much beyond my original take: "It's not nothing, but I'm not sure what it is, except whatever it is doesn't line up that well with the hype."

What's in a headline? Find out here

Goodness, it looks like 2023 was an all-time low for this blog, with one (1) post.  Not sure how that happened.  I honestly thought I'd posted at least one more.  On the other hand, I suppose it's consistent with the overall handwringing about whether there's even anything to post here.  But this post won't be that.

When I was in journalism class in high school, which was more than a few years ago to be sure, I was taught the "inverted pyramid": put the most important information, the who, what, where, when, why and how at the top of the article, then the important detail, then other background information.  The headline should concisely sum up the most important facts at the top.

Some typical headlines might be

• Pat's Diner closing after 30 years
• New ordinance bans parking on Thursdays
• Midtown high senior wins Journalism award

If you've noticed that the titles (that is, headlines) of posts here don't exactly follow that rule, that's because I'm writing opinion here, not news.  That's my story, and I'm sticking with it even as I go on to complain about other people's headlines.

One of the worst sins in old-school journalism was to "bury the lede", that is, to put the most important facts late in the story (lead as in lead paragraph is spelled lede, probably going back to the days of lead type where the usual spelling might invite confusion).  If Pat's diner is closing, you don't start with a headline of Local diner closing and a paragraph about how much people love their local diners and only later mention that it's Pat's diner that's closing.

Except, of course, that's exactly what happens a lot of the time.  Here are some examples from the articles currently on my phone:

• Windows 11 looks to be getting a key Linux tool added in the future
• Nearly 1 in 5 eligible taxpayers don't claim this 'valuable credit', IRS says
• 46-year old early retiree who had $X in passive income heads back to work -- here's why

I've tried to get out of the habit of clicking on articles like these, not because I think it will change the world (though if everybody did the same ...), but because I almost always find it irritating to click through on something to find out that they could have just put the important part in the headline:

• Linux sudo command may be added to Windows 11
• Nearly 1 in 5 eligible taxpayers don't claim earned income credit, IRS says
• Early retiree with $X in passive income back to work after house purchase and child

One of these rewrites is noticeably shorter than the original and the other two are about the same length, but they all include important information that the original leaves out: which Linux tool?; which tax credit?; why go back to work?

The lack of information in the originals isn't an oversight, of course.  The information is missing so you'll click through on the article and read the accompanying ads.  The headlines aren't pure clickbait, but they do live in a sort of twilight zone between clickbait and real headline.  If you do get to the end of the article, you'll probably see several more links worth of pure clickbait, which is an art form in itself.

Real headlines aren't dead, though.  Actual news outlets that use a subscription model tend to have traditional headlines above traditional inverted-pyramid articles.  They probably do this for the same reason that newspapers did: Subscribers appreciate being able to skim the headline and maybe the lede and then read the rest of the article if they're interested, and that sells subscriptions.

I'm pretty sure half-clickbait headlines aren't even new.  The newspaper "feature story" has been around considerably longer than the web.  Its whole purpose is to draw the reader in for longer and tempt them to browse around -- and either subscribe for the features or spend more time on the same page as ads, or both.  For that matter, I'm pretty sure a brief survey of tabloid publications in the last couple of centuries would confirm that lede-burying clickbait isn't exactly new.

I started out writing this with the idea that the ad-driven model of most web-based media has driven out old-fashioned informative journalism, and also those kids need to get off my lawn, but I think I'm now back to my not-so-disruptive technology take: Clickbait and semi-clickbait aren't new, and the inverted pyramid with an informative headline isn't dead.  In fact, when I checked, most of the articles in my feed did have informative headlines.

In part, that's probably because I've stopped clicking on semi-clickbait so much, which is probably changing the mix in my feed.  But it's probably also because the web hasn't changed things as much as we might like to think.  All three kinds of headline/article (informative, semi-clickbait, pure clickbait) are older than the web, and so are both the subscription and ad-based business models (though subscription print publications often had ads as well).  It's not too surprising that all of these would carry through.

Economics of anonymity -- but whose economics?

Re-reading the posts I've tagged with the anonymity label, I think I finally put my finger on something that had been bothering me pretty much from the beginning.  I'd argued (here, for example) that economic considerations should make it hard to successfully run an anonymizer -- a service that allows you to connect with sites on the internet without giving away who or where you are.  And yet they exist.

The argument was that the whole point of an anonymizer is that whoever's connecting to a given site could be anyone using the anonymizer, that is, if you're using the anonymizer, you could be associated with anything that anyone on the anonymizer was doing.  Since some things that people want to do anonymously are risky, an anonymizer is, in some sense, distributing risk.  People doing risky things should be happy to participate, but people doing less risky things may not be so willing.  As a result, there may not be enough people participating to provide adequate cover.

However, this assumes that anyone can be (mis)taken for anyone else.  At the technical level of IP addresses, this is true, but at the level of who's actually doing what, which is what really matters if The Man comes knocking, it's less applicable.

There are lots of reasons to want anonymity -- the principle of the thing, the ability to do stuff you're not supposed to be able to do at work, wanting to hide embarrassing activity from the people around you, wanting to blow the whistle on an organization, communicating to the outside world from a repressive regime, dealing in illicit trade, planning acts of violence and many others.  The fact of using an anonymizer says little about why you might be doing it.

If I'm anonymously connecting to FaceSpace at work, there's little chance that the authorities in whatever repressive regime will come after me for plotting to blow up their government buildings, and vice versa (mutatis mutandis et cetera.).  In other words, there's probably not much added risk for people doing relatively innocuous things in places where using an anonymizer is not itself illegal.

On the other hand, this is little comfort to someone trying to, say, send information out of a place where use of the internet, and probably anonymizers in particular, is restricted.  The local authorities will probably know exactly which hosts are connecting with the anonymizer's servers and make it their business to find out who's associated with those hosts -- a much smaller task than tracking down all users of the anonymizer.

This is much the same situation as, say, spies in WWII trying to send radio messages out before the local authorities can triangulate their position.   Many of the same techniques should apply -- never setting up in the same place twice, limiting the number of people you communicate with and how much you know about them, limiting the amount of information you know, and so forth.

So I suppose I'll be filing this under not-so-disruptive technology as well as anonymity.

I'm on a party line

There have been headlines lately about new FCC regulations allowing internet service providers to sell information about what sites you visit.  From the summary I read in The Verge, which looks well put together and overall plausible, the situation is a bit more complicated than that, but certainly ISPs have access to quite a bit of information about what sites a particular IP address under their management connects to, and they have to have access to that information in order to provide good service.

I'm not going to offer an opinion here on whether this is good, bad, indifferent or some combination.  Instead I wanted to take a look at privacy in general.

If you live in a house with separate rooms with doors that close and may even lock, it's easy to think of having a room of one's own as the natural state of things, but that's not universally the case.  There are plenty of examples of people sharing space, whether in a one-room house or a portable structure such as a tent, yurt or tipi.  Or think of an un-air-conditioned apartment block in summer.  If everyone's window is open onto the same courtyard, privacy is going to be a bit limited.  Enhanced privacy isn't the most obvious benefit of air conditioning, but it would certainly appear to be one.

Even if doors and windows can close, living in a small community, particularly one that has to be fairly self-sufficient, means getting to know more than one might care to about one's neighbors, and having them know details about one's own life.  Arguably this is actually the normal state of things.  Urbanization is a fairly recent phenomenon in human history.

Again, not saying any of this is good or bad, just that privacy is not necessarily something that we once had, but lost once technology came along.

For that matter, and back at the title, in the earlier days of telephony, many customers had a party line arrangement, meaning that a number of households shared the same physical phone line.  This meant that if someone else was making a call and you picked up your phone, you would hear them talking, at which point you might hang up and try again later, or perhaps ask them if they would be done soon ... or just listen in for a while.

Even placing a call meant, at least in some cases, calling an operator and telling them whom you wanted to call, so they could patch the call through -- literally using a patch cord.  That process was eventually automated, but the phone company still needed to keep records, at least of long-distance calls, in order to bill for them.  Those records could be subpoenaed in the course of criminal investigations and in any case were available to at least some company employees.

People seemed largely OK with all this, perhaps because the convenience of the telephone outweighed the lack of privacy, perhaps because people figured out ways of minimizing the intrusion (some interesting game theory/economics there), and probably for other reasons.


We're also social animals.  To some extent we want to share things about ourselves and have others share with us.  It's not clear to me whether social media have amplified this kind of behavior so much as reflected it.

What seems different about modern technological privacy is that the people with access to one's private information are strangers with their own incentives and plans.  In a small, tight-knit community information flows both ways.  "Everybody knows everything about everybody."  With a 20th-century phone company or a 21st-century ISP this isn't the case, and generally the entity in question is in business to make money.

One can argue that such businesses have a strong incentive to respect their customer's privacy on the grounds that failing to respect it would be bad for business, but that doesn't always seem particularly comforting.  On the other hand, the basic issues are clearly older than the internet, so at least we've had some time to work them out.  I could have added 19th-century telegraph companies or maybe even 18th-century messenger services to the paragraph above.

I think the problem decreases as you go back in time, since communicating via commercial services run by strangers becomes less pervasive, but the telephone was a pretty integral part of 20th-century life, particularly in the second half.  It's not clear to me how much more integral the net is.  I'm sure it is to some extent, but not how much.

I honestly don't know what to conclude from all that, but I did at least want to offer the perspective that, as in other cases, the internet doesn't necessarily change everything.  Some things, almost certainly, but the real fun lies in figuring out exactly what.

On the responsibility of "flash mobs"

Hmm ... where did I put that big honking I AM NOT A LAWYER disclaimer?  Ah ... here it is.

OK ... where was I?

In an old post about a pillow fight that got out of hand, I speculated about the responsibilities of flash mobs.  One point that the original post only mentions in passing is that the pillow fight was only a flash mob activity by the loosest of interpretations.  It was, after all, already an annual event, pretty much the opposite of a spontaneous occurrence.

So why call it a "flash mob"?  While the event was scheduled for a definite place and time (Valentine's Day in Justin Herman Plaza) and now even has a Facebook page, the event itself is open to anyone who happens to show up.  There are no tickets and there is no official organizer or organizing body.  If you show up with a pillow on Valentine's day and start swinging, you're in.  Otherwise you're not.

Leaving aside some interesting questions of identity and language usage for the other blog, it seems that the key point here is that people sometimes gather unofficially to do things, they've been doing that forever, and, most important, being unofficial does not absolve anyone of responsibility.  If I get together with ten close friends and twenty people they invited and 35 people those people invited, it doesn't matter whether we did this over the web, or whether I know everyone there.  It matters what we do.

If we decide to go clean up a city park, good for us.  If we decide to trash the same park, we're responsible for that instead.  Which is why the original headline, "S.F. may crack down on 'flash mob' antics" misses the point.  As the article itself made clear, the city had a particular case of how to deal with a not-officially-sanctioned group of people making a mess.  Nothing particularly flash-mobby or webby about it.

My phone, then and now (or: Maybe coverage is the new coverage?)

(August? Really?  This must be a record gap even for the new, unhurried Field Notes.  Oh well ... it's been busy)

Re-reading through the blog, I ran across a short post on wireless carriers' advertising having shifted from coverage to bandwidth.  Most old posts seem to hold up well, but this one seemed remarkably out of date:

• With 4G building out, coverage is very much an issue -- at least in ads
• At the time I was using a "feature phone", mainly as an alarm clock and ... as a phone.  I finally took the plunge with a proper smart phone a while back.  I use it as ... 
• An alarm clock
• A phone
• A GPS
• A way to check email
• A camera (but I also used the old feature phone as that)
• A way to browse news stories, check sports scores, weather etc.
• A way to text -- it's noticeably easier to text with autocomplete, though not miraculously so
• A way to schedule appointments and to check my schedule and reminders
• A way to look up stuff quickly on the web
• A few other random applications

It's interesting that even feature phones had several of those -- phone, clock, text, camera, calendar -- and probably more or less the right set of them to get the most out of the limited bandwidth and CPU.  The newer iterations are generally better (auto backup of photos to the cloud comes to mind), but not mind-blowingly, night-and-day better.

My attitude at the time was "Meh ... I'm usually near my laptop and it has a bigger screen"  While I find I use my phone quite a bit during the day, I'm still near my laptop most of the time, and I'd only really miss the phone for really "mobile" applications, like

• phone
• GPS
• camera
• receiving texts anywhere
• checking email everywhere

Oh ... and as an alarm clock.

What do we mean "mobile device"?

It's pretty clear that mobile devices ... hang on a sec.  What's a mobile device?  According to Wikipedia, it's, um, a small electronic device you can carry around.  But not a laptop.  So a smart phone, a not-so-smart phone, a tablet computer, a camera, an MP3 player, a handheld video game, a pager ...

A few of those have been around a long time, at least by electronic standards.  Somehow, I don't think that most people have devices like this in mind when they speak of mobile devices.  For practical purposes, "mobile devices" means "smart phones, tablets and stuff like that".  More precisely, it's not just mobility that people care about.  It's mobile connectivity, the idea that your mobile device can connect to the world at large and interact with it in arbitrary ways.  The mobile web, that is.

So where was I?

It's pretty clear that mobile devices are playing a bigger and bigger role in people's lives these days.  Lots and lots and lots of people have cell phones, quite a few people have tablets, and more and more do every day(*).  It's also clear that people have adapted to having ready access to the web.  One sure way to know you're out in the boonies, whether for the good of getting away from it all or the ill of being cut off from it all, is not having any bars.

When I was a kid, not that long ago, I like to think, if you wanted to meet someone at a large public place, you would have to pre-arrange -- "Meet me on the west side of the station near the stairs for the subway line."  Now you can just call up your party and ask "Um, hey, where are you? ... oh, there I see you."  If you broke down at the side of the interstate, you'd have to wait for someone come by (unless you had a CB, and a lot of people did, though not necessarily for that particular reason).  Now you just call someone.  And, of course, all the behavioral changes brought on by the web, like pulling down news you're interested in instead of waiting for the evening paper or news broadcast, are possible whether or not you happen to be near home.

So if a mobile device is something mobile that can hook you up to the web, then what we have is a series of less-tethered-to-a-particular-place ways of connecting:

• Ancient times:  If you could connect to a remote system at all, it was through work, or a university or other such institution.  Maybe you could dial in to that system from home, using a honking big dumb terminal.  One way or another you were essentially going over phone lines (even the backbone of the time was a bunch of T1 lines, if I understand correctly).
• BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) and online services such as Compu$erve begin to appear and personal computers with modems become commercially available.  Now you can connect from home, generally to a world completely different from what you'd encounter at work, assuming your line of work even involved the internet.
• Laptops become widespread.  Now you can connect from anywhere you can lug your laptop, assuming you can tie up a phone line.  By this time you can also plug your laptop in to people's local networks.  Cell phones exist, but using them to connect to the internet is cumbersome at best, and almost certainly very expensive.  Internet cafes pop up.
• WiFi becomes widespread.  With municipalities airports, hotels and commercial chains putting up hotspots here and there, the concept of an "internet cafe" becomes somewhat moot.  Many people can connect from wherever they are much of the time.  Phones are becoming webbier, but in a limited way.
• Present day: Smart phones become widespread.  Apps are developed so that you can interact with your favorite sites without squinting at a web site through a browser.  Phones have enough horsepower to provide a nice, snappy experience, at least where you have coverage.

If mobile connectivity is more important than whether a device will fit in your shirt pocket, and I think in this context it is, then mobility starts somewhere around the spread of laptops.  Certainly by the time WiFi is widespread and home "broadband" access is commercially available, the difference from the present day is more degree than kind (understanding that a big enough difference in degree is essentially a difference in kind).

That's not to say we're not entering a new phase.  We are.  A location-aware phone that is always on and always with you is significantly different from a laptop you have to plug in, power on, log in, etc.  From a technical point of view, designing for a small touch screen is significantly different from a laptop screen, much less a 30" monitor.  Nonetheless, the current phase is just the latest in a series of steps making it easier and easier to connect from anywhere.

(*) It's not always clear what "lots of people" or "widespread" should mean.  Widespread among affluent technophiles?  Lots of people in the developed world?  Widespread in a large portion of the world -- which may be ahead of parts of the developed world when it comes to mobile communication?  I'm bravely sidestepping such questions here, but I wanted to at least call them out.

Fitting Twitter into the bigger picture

I've just re-read the nineteen previous posts labelled Twitter on this blog and I think I've sufficiently hammered on two main points:

• There's no more reason to believe a "Twitter and new media will supplant traditional news media" narrative than in so many other "Everything is Different Now" cases that have come along.
• Twitter is not particularly self-correcting and there's no clear way to sort fact from fantasy beyond good old-fashioned skepticism -- or referring back to other sources.

So once we dismiss the usual strawmen, where does that leave us?  What is the real relationship between Twitter and traditional media (which themselves have adapted significantly to the web)?  The easy answer is "it's complicated", which seems true as far as it goes but really doesn't say much.  So how about a few random data points?

Item: Tweeting is now a standard part of the celebrity publicity machine.  In turn, gossip magazines and sites routinely report on celebrity's tweets.  It would be interesting to know to what extent celebrities and their publicists are tweeting directly to fans and to what extent they're tweeting to magazine/web site editors.

Item: In the recent scandal leading to the resignation of George Entwistle the head of the BBC, one of the more devastating points of John Humphrys' interview of the soon-to-be-outgoing head was Entwistle's admission that he was unaware of a highly relevant tweet about an upcoming BBC Newsnight documentary (that, and his also having been unaware of the documentary itself).  Humphrys goes on to assert that even if Entwistle hadn't been personally following Twitter, someone on his staff should have been.

With further prompting from Humphrys, Entwistle then goes on to admit he also missed the front-page story in the Guardian denouncing the Newsnight piece, leaving one to wonder what, if anything, Entwistle was aware of.  Nonetheless the presumption, coming from a well-respected traditional journalist in a rather high-stakes context, was that Twitter was something that the head of the BBC, and journalists in general, should pay serious attention to.  (Lest this post present too one-sided a view of Entwistle, here's a transcript of the interview -- the Torygraph uses a less annoying format than the Grauniad article I complained about.)

Item:  Swirling in the same cloud of scandal, was the shockingly prolific criminal behavior of a recently deceased well-known television personality.  The resulting public outrage included, as one would expect by now, a major Twitter storm.

Item: Twitter continues to be an important means of smuggling information out of repressive states.  I'm glad to say that Google's Speak2Tweet service has played a role in helping bypass state internet crackdowns, most recently in Syria (I have nothing personally to do with providing this service, and I don't know anything about it that you don't, but I'm happy to be associated with it indirectly as a Googler).  On the other hand, a fair bit of mis- and dis- information makes its way into the unfiltered feed.  Considering the stakes, it seems wise to be more cautious than usual in judging the reliability of tweets, to say nothing of acting on them.

Item: A recent Twitter spat between an American economist and the president of Estonia is being made into an opera.  The opera will premiere in Tallinn, to be performed by an Estonian mezzo-soprano, so one can imagine that the Estonian side might come off rather better.

For the most part, Twitter seems more like a parallel channel to the traditional media, rather than something likely to supplant them.  In all but one case, Twitter looks like one more tool in the box.  Publicists have always promoted their clients by any means available, the public has always complained by whatever means is at hand, dissidents have always found ways to get their story out, and pop-culture oriented artists have always grabbed on to whatever was floating by.  To the extent that it's harder for regimes to prevent suppressed information from leaking out, credit should go mostly to the internet and web as a whole, acknowledging that Twitter has been particularly effective.

The second item is more intriguing.  In this case, Twitter looks more like something new intruding in the traditional media game.  Imagine radio journalists in the mid twentieth century realizing that they needed to pay attention to this wild and wooly new "television" thing, and print journalists some time before that realizing that there really was something to these new "radio" devices or, for that matter, the current interplay between traditional outlets and blogs.

The key here is not the technology, but who's involved and how.  In the first item, Twitter is effectively acting as a new medium in the traditional publicity structure.  Likewise, in the last three items, the people, or the artists, are making use of Twitter as they would any other medium.  In the second item, the whole point is that Entwistle should have been treating Twitter as another medium for gathering information (or perhaps he did, by ignoring it).  The implication, really, is that treating Twitter as another medium among many is the normal thing to do, and by not doing so, Entwistle showed himself to be woefully out of touch.

Is it OK to tweet "fire" in a crowded theater?

Evidently not.

Or at least, it's not a good idea to tweet in jest that you'll blow an airport sky-high if it remains closed for snow, so preventing you from visiting your girlfriend.  Paul Chambers of Doncaster, England found this out the hard way, paying a fine of £1000, gaining a criminal record and losing his job in the bargain.  His appeal will be heard before the high court of the UK and his defense has had at least one high-profile fundraiser, but it's all a bit sobering, to say the least.

This lack of humo(u)r on the part of airport security is not new, by the way, nor limited to the UK.  I remember as a kid -- so, ahem, well before 9/11 -- noticing a sign at the airport we were flying out of saying it was a federal crime even to joke about hijacking, bombs and such, and promptly blanching and making a mental note not to make any smart comments to the nice folks by the metal detector.

With that in mind, the remarkable aspect of the case isn't so much that it involves Twitter, though it is one of the first such cases, but that the authorities chose to prosecute for this particular remark at all.  I don't know how often such cases are prosecuted, but I'd guess it's not too often.  They certainly don't seem to make the press much.  I doubt the story would have been less remarkable had Mr. Chambers been brought in for making the same remark in person at the ticket counter.

In any case, caveat tweetor.

[Paul Chambers' conviction was eventually quashed, two and a half years later on the third appeal, the case having attracted considerable attention and celebrity involvement.  It's not clear if his job was reinstated, but according to Wikipedia he and his girlfriend did eventually marry.]

Does there have to be an app for that?

Weddings are generally public affairs, and they always have been.  I doubt it's ever been particularly difficult to find out who's planning a public wedding and when in a given area.  With the advent of online wedding planning it's now perhaps a bit easier yet, and if you're looking for a wedding to crash, well, there's an app for that.

Now, I'm with the author of the article in thinking that the kind of person who would use such a thing has -- how shall we say -- issues, but the flip side of that is, who's actually going to use it, as opposed to just having a laugh looking up one's friends and acquaintances?  Or more precisely, who's going to use it who wouldn't have been willing and able to crash a given wedding anyway?

In general, there's a lot of gray area when it comes to "enabling technologies", not to mention the larger sticky issue of to what extent technology can or should be considered without considering its potential consequences.  On the one hand, it's easy to say "The real problem is the wedding sites' privacy models.  The app just pulls together information that's already available."  But that's a cop-out.  As we've seen, pulling together information that's already available and making it universally accessible (if not useful) can make a significant difference.  Sometimes this is good, sometimes not, and just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be.

Just how much of a difference pulling together existing information and making it easy to get to can make depends on what the information is, how hidden it was, who wants to know and a host of other factors.  In this particular case, I doubt the app will make much difference.  That's not to condone wedding crashing, or the app, or to excuse its creators.  If your wedding is crashed by some tech-savvy boor who would otherwise have missed out, you have my sympathies, for whatever that's worth.