by John Freeman
Baran’s ideas were eventually embraced at RAND, but, as with Morse and his telegram, the world did not leap to assist him. Five years and numerous meetings with AT&T later, in which the long-distance carrier refused to even allow RAND to test its wires, Baran gave up and moved on. As with the telegram, it turned out that Baran was not alone with his invention. Over in Britain, Donald Watts Davies of the National Physical Laboratory had been playing with a very similar idea, which he decided to call packet switching. Finally, back in the United States, a third man, Leonard Kleinrock, had written a dissertation that put together a mathematical theory of packet switching, which would prove essential to the Internet, and was developing early thoughts about how to put it into action.
Through luck and smart hiring, these men and their ideas all came to bear on a fledgling research agency started up in the Defense Department called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which was formed in 1958 in direct response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. Within two years of its creation, though, when all space-related research was transferred to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), also created in 1958, ARPA had nearly become redundant. The agency’s response was to begin directing its energy to exploratory research programs—and after many long hours and false starts, ARPANET, the world’s first operational packet-switching network, was one of its finest results. The first message was sent across the network on October 29, 1969.
This written record shows a log of the first message sent; it is not the first e-mail ever sent. Messaging between terminals linked to a mainframe computer had existed since the early 1960s, and by the late 1960s more than a thousand people used this tool at MIT alone. But sending messages from one separate computer to the next over a network was new and the beginning of a brand-new age of communication. In 1973, Ray Tomlinson would make it even easier by using the @ symbol to separate an address from the domain name, making e-mail addresses easier to write out; it was as if suddenly e-mails had a zip code system. E-mail was on its way.
As a network, though, ARPANET still had a long way to go before achieving the dream of simultaneous computing. But on one front it was an immediate and almost instant success. In 1973, a study was commissioned to see how the new network was being used. As it turned out, people weren’t using it so much to share computing power, as intended. In fact, the eggheads who had access to it were doing something else entirely, not always productively, in a precursor to our situation today: 75 percent of the traffic over ARPANET was e-mail.
Plug In, Tune In, and Log On
Over the next two decades, the creation of additional networks; cheaper connectivity costs; the codification of universal mail protocol, which allowed different systems and machines to pass messages along; and the development of faster connection speeds turned e-mail from a techie toy into a household hobby. Telenet, a civilian equivalent of ARPANET, was launched in 1974 by Larry Roberts, one of the men who had shepherded ARPANET into existence, and it had enough promise that GTE bought it in 1979; Usenet, which allowed remote users to access bulletin boards, was launched by two Duke University graduate students that same year. By the early 1980s, there were dozens of networks in existence, and the number of host computers—essentially, machines connected to the Internet— most of which, by a large margin, were in North America, exploded from 213 in 1981 to 28,174 in 1987 to 313,000 in 1990. Users followed. In 1988, just 10 percent of the 19 million PCs worldwide were connected to the Internet; by 2006, Intel estimated that more than 1 billion PCs were connected, a growth made possible by rapidly decreasing PC costs and the introduction of good browsers.
The online universe that came into being from this amalgamation has radically altered human life in more ways than simply making it easier to purchase movie tickets. It altered our sense of time and space just as radically as the telegram did; ushered in an era of continuous news, since online news sites could be updated from minute to minute; and made it easier than ever to communicate at letter length at such little cost that it quickly spawned a culture of e-mail overload. Why bother sending a letter when you can just fire off an e-mail for free and have it get there instantly? More important, though, it brought people into an ever-tighter embrace with machines, which, from the beginning, were intended to blur the boundary between “inside” and “outside,” a confusion that would later make it an irresistible medium for advertisers (in the form of spam).
It’s worthwhile to detour for a moment to think about the PC’s role in bringing this about. As John Markoff describes in What the Dormouse Said, the PC grew out of the counter-cultural environment of California in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when computer research, clinical trials of psychedelics, and the literary experiments of the Beat movement combined and overlapped in groups that bounced between San Francisco and Palo Alto to the East Bay. The goal of the PC—like that of Jack Kerouac’s “The Scripture of the Golden Eternity”—was mind expansion, so much so that Douglas Engelbart, the Stanford Research Institute researcher who coinvented the mouse and did more than any designer to affect how computers present themselves to us, titled his seminal paper about the future of computing “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” The computer was not just an expensive calculator in Engelbart’s vision; it should and could become an intimate, essential part of our thinking tasks.
Four decades on, Engelbart’s vision of the man-computer embrace is a reality. How many of us can imagine going to work without one now? Can we even imagine working on a PC without Internet access? Not since the typewriter has a piece of machinery and what it’s capable of changed work life in such a dramatic way. A typewriter helped you type faster. It also made word processing easier, especially once erase and edit functions were added, tilting the machine toward a word processor. The standardized keyboard on typewriters also introduced a new interface to writing—for the first time in the history of writing since pencils and pens became widely available.
The PC, however, introduced an entirely new way of living and doing business by becoming the portal through which all of our work is done. It is now a filing system, data processor, calculator, print shop, editing room, research library, music repository. In recent years, through services such as Skype, it has acted as a telephone and as a videoconferencing chat room. Once Internet browsers that could depict Web sites graphically evolved—programs such as Mosaic and Netscape—the computer became a reading library, a research room, a powerful orienting tool for our whereness in the world. In Interface Culture, Steven Johnson argues that this is such a powerful shift as to blast open an entirely new space: information space.
The mouse and the keyboard became our compasses for navigating this new realm. In the early days of the Internet, there was so little online that the computer was as necessary to modern life as, well, a compass; we use a compass now only if we’re going off the beaten path, exploring. Once the Internet began to fill with electronic representations of every aspect of modern life, from furniture stores to newspapers, and those online portals created a new epistemology, a realm in which information links can be swiftly, instantly followed by the physical click of a mouse—let alone new markets, new friendships, and new ways of doing business—it was impossible to imagine life without it.
Not surprisingly, we now spend an enormous amount of time in front of our machines. Sixty-five percent of North Americans spend more time with their computer than their spouse. Far more than the dream of simultaneous computing has been achieved; this is a marriage. As Johnson points out, this symbiosis has been helped along by the artfulness of modern interface design. (Our partners are pretty!) We no longer need to punch-card code into computers or stare at a horrendous lemonade-colored blinking cursor. The point-and-click mouse design that Engelbart conceived and that was first popularized by the Macintosh, then duplicated in every computer since, bridged our old tangible world with the new virtual one. We have a “trash can” and file folders. We get mail. No longer do we have to put a picture on
our physical desktop of our kids or our spouse; it can be our screen saver. This virtual desktop is our perch, our catbird seat, our platform into the world of information space, a wormhole out of it into other people’s lives and to-do lists.
What this marriage lacks, however, is physical passion. Computers have become handier, cuter, some might even say sexier, but they do very little to engage us as physical beings. They have almost no smell; only the most fanatical have tried licking them. Until recently, their only sounds were blips and bleeps. Clicks of the mouse can be made with the slightest movement of one hand. Indeed, the one sense they engage overwhelmingly is sight. Our eyeballs. Light beams out of the screens and into our eyes, all day for the deskbound. We move the mouse and watch it navigate the desktop; reload Web pages and watch images appear. It is an interactive medium, which is why it’s vastly superior to television, but only along one part of our physical being. The rest of our senses are effectively browned out.
And so the rise of this new way of living and working has given us a somewhat frightening twenty-first-century update to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea that it was possible, in a heightened state of nature, to become a transparent eyeball, to let that which is the world pass through us and obliterate the subject-object dichotomy. “I am nothing,” he wrote. “I see all.”
Today’s eyeball, however, is at the center of the world; it is pitched to, delighted, dazzled, and in control. This iris is made not for eye contact but for receiving and processing. It is—for a vast part of the day—a data processor.
The One-to-Many Rave—from 0 to 35 Trillion
Perhaps we have evolved enough in the past two centuries to enable us to live this way. I don’t believe this is the case. Humans may adapt to our environment, but we also rebel against adaptations that aren’t working; we mark and sabotage. E-mail has become our primary weapon in marking this rapidly expanding, radically desensualized information space with ourselves, to try to make it more human. And it is perfectly suited to the task because it allows us to spread our thoughts and words faster and farther and wider than ever before.
Until the Internet and e-mail came into being, our primary mode of communication existed on a one-to-one level. We wrote a letter to one person; we placed a phone call and were connected. At work, we could copy a memo and send it to several recipients, but even this required a further step of making copies and then physically delivering them, so the message had better be important. As recipients of media, from television to radio to newspaper and book publishing, we were locked into the other end of a one-to-many model. A broadcaster or editor decided what we might like to listen to or watch on television and sent it out over the airwaves.
The Internet and more specifically e-mail radically altered this process. By simply typing an additional address, we could send the same message to as many recipients as we had addresses. We could forward and duplicate messages as fast as the most heavy-duty copier, faster than any interoffice messenger. We have no need for a young Andrew Carnegie. The only limit to the size of our reach was the size of our address book. We could even e-mail the CEO, and chances are—until recently, when e-mail became untenable for many executives (though not all)—he or she would read it. This instantly turned anyone with an e-mail address into a broadcaster on a small scale; a large scale for so-called power users, who in the early days of e-mail were men and women who received two hundred e-mails a day.
This shift, from receiving to generating media, has created an enormous epistemological shift between reading and writing, from talking to writing. Reading, by virtue of the constant interruptions we face due to electronic communication, is harder than ever before, whereas typing and publishing have become easier than at any point in human history. Walk into any café across America, and you will witness a stirring example of this phenomenon. Whereas once cafés were filled with people talking to one another or reading books or newspapers, now you will find people sitting alone before the glowing screen of their laptop, typing e-mails, working on documents, chatting with friends a thousand miles away, or surfing the Internet. Sit down with a friend for a face-to-face chat, and you may be scowled at.
In On Photography, Susan Sontag wrote about the way that the domestication of photographic technology allowed people to believe that all the world’s images could be indexed, possessed, known. The explosion of e-mail and other text-based communications and the phenomenal ease with which these technologies can be used has done a similar thing to words. If we know something, experience it, see it or do it, complete a task at work, we must record this fact in type and share it with another person. We may not be able to index the known world, but we can create a word-based library of ourselves from moment to moment if we type fast enough and keep in touch with enough people.
Universities, which are stocked with young people eager to chronicle their daily revolutions, were a hothouse for this growth, and it demonstrated how connectivity expands exponentially in an inbox. The explosion of its use on the campus of Simon Fraser University in Canada makes for an interesting test case. SFU was one of the first universities to offer e-mail service to its faculty in 1983, and over the next few years it joined various external networks. In 1986, fifteen hundred students and faculty were using the service, generating between ten and twenty thousand messages per month. Five years later, the number of messages per month had risen to seventy thousand. By 2006, the number of e-mail accounts had increased to forty thousand, but the number of messages had blasted off into an entirely new galaxy. Each month, SFU users were generating 10 million messages—a 14,000 percent increase.
The exponential increase seen at Simon Fraser was witnessed across the Internet and around the world. In 1992, just 2 percent of the U.S. population used e-mail; that jumped to 15 percent in 1997, and by 2001 it was estimated to have leapt to 50 percent, perhaps due largely to the number of people who were wired at work. Early stories about e-mail recall Laurin Zilliacus’s breathless wonder at the journey his letter made from Lapland to the American heartland:
John M. Woram went to his mailbox in Rockville Centre, L.I., recently and mailed a letter to a colleague in the Galápagos Islands, 650 miles off the coast of Ecuador. His letter arrived there in five seconds. A reply was waiting in his mailbox the next morning.
“My, how the mail has evolved,” said Mr. Woram, who is writing a history of the islands made famous by Charles Darwin. “It used to take as long as seven months to get a letter there and back.”
Mr. Woram’s magical new mailbox is inside his personal computer at his home, and his correspondence with the Galápagos now travels at the speed of electricity over the global computer network known as the Internet.
This was in the middle 1990s, the era of the Internet’s explosion, when the U.S. Postal Service’s total number of deliveries was ten times the number of electronic messages worldwide, when just 5 percent of American households had a modem. That would change quickly, as many people discovered how easy and convenient it was to send and receive electronic mail. Not surprisingly, corporations and offices embraced e-mail. Between 2000 and 2002, the number of workers with access to e-mail on the job in the United States almost doubled from 30 million to over 57 million, 98 percent of whom had access to their own account. By 2000, there were 4 trillion e-mails sent globally. In 2007, that number hit 35 trillion—a number that dwarfs the number of text messages (3 trillion) and telephone calls (165 billion minutes in 2005).
Two trends really helped domesticate e-mail. First, it became widely, easily, cheaply available at home through dial-up service, which had indeed existed for more than ten years, but mostly for Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) and owners of specific machines. It truly became an industry in 1995, the year that Prodigy, CompuServe, and especially AOL began offering it over the Internet to customers who were using any kind of PC. In 1995, AOL had 5 million subscribers. By 2003, it was up to 35 million.
The invention of handheld devices played a role in pushing these numbers even hig
her. In the beginning, these tiny machines were merely very small (and very expensive and easily lost) address books. In 1993, Apple introduced the Newton, which it marketed as the ultimate information tool. In terms of communication, people who wanted to communicate wirelessly were far more likely to own a pager. In 1980, when pagers had a short range of communication, there were 3.2 million in use worldwide. As their range expanded, so did their use: by 1994, there were more than 62 million pagers in use around the globe.
The first BlackBerry was introduced in 1999, and though it ran on AA batteries, it could handle e-mail, paging, and a few organizing functions. As the machines improved, their use skyrocketed. Between 2004 and 2008, the percentage of people checking their e-mail on a handheld doubled. In one survey, 59 percent of the people who used such devices read their e-mail as soon as it arrived.
The Virus of Consciousness
Aside from the obvious reasons for this explosion—e-mail is cheap, fast, easy to use, and a lot of people are reachable through it—there is another explanation for this behavior, one that reaches back to the roots of the personal computer and the mind-expansion goals of its creators. The machine did, in fact, become a virtual extension of our minds—an orienting tool, an organizing tool, a tabula rasa upon which we can express our thoughts, and a computing tool all at once. And by virtually extending this surrogate brain into the Internet, we became linked with all the other mind spaces of people who were linked in. In fact, one of the most popular social networking sites on the Internet is called LinkedIn, which allows people to create an online address book of their professional contacts.
