HISTORY OF CMC

History of CMC [Part 1]

This part focuses on the history of CMC vis a vis the Internet technology. The other part will trace the history of CMC stressing on the mobile phone technology.

As backgrounds to further discussions, some introduction to the history of computer mediated communication is useful. The connections in place for the most widely discussed computer network, the Internet were formed in the 1960s and early 19770s when the U.S. Department of Defense and several research Universities, via; DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Program Agency) linked computers. The resulting network, Arpanet, allowed for access to each site’s computers not only for communication but for research. The later role, though, took a back seat to the use of Arpanet as a means for researchers to share information by way of electronic mail. Initially such mailing was in the form we are accustomed to from using the post office; individual messages are sent from one person to another.

            However, it quickly became clear that messages often contained information to be shared by many users and thus mailing lists were created. These lists allowed one person to mail one message to a central point from which that message was ‘bounced’ or ‘reflected’ to others who subscribed to the list. Eventually lists became specialized to particular topics, and the terms “bulleting board” and “mailing list” came to have some interchangeability. Bulleting boards, though generally referred to computers one could reach by dialing through standard phone lines with a computer modem and linking with another computer. The effect of each, board and list, was similar in many ways, as both provided news and information to users and came to be subsumed under the category of a newsgroup:.

            Newsgroups gather the messages posted by users in a centralized fashion and permit interaction with posted messages by way of simple means of reply. Lengthy threads are created by individual messages that generate dozens even hundred, of replies. The largest manifestation of newsgroups is known as the Usenet, a massive repository of thousand of newsgroups accessible from most any computer with a connection to the Internet.

            Other computer Internet grew during the 1970s and various software and hardware protocols were developed that enabled them to connect to Arpanet, and it in turn, morphed into the Internet; thanks to the National Science Foundation’s appropriation of advanced computing.

            The Internet essentially serves as the main connecting point for many other networks. It has in a sense come to be a ‘backbone’ by which networks link up with each other. In mid 1990s, it was estimated that there were over 30,000 computer networks with over 1.5 million computers connected through the Internet, and the number of information ‘hosts’ on the Internet, or “the Net” grew at a monthly rate of 8% to 10% within the US and 150,000 new users were joining over 20,000,000 existing users each month (New York Times 1994; Oni, 2002). With the ever continuous adoption and diffusion of communication technologies across the world, there are global statistics of Internet usage [http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm] which point to the popular trend and support both early and contemporary assertions (Rafaeli, 1986; cited in Jaffe et al., 2005) that some CMC formats deserve the title “mass medium”.

            The Internet is a decentralized network, and its management occurs via the NSF. However, no one group manages it. Instead, a variety of groups, such as the Internet Societies and interNIC, circulate information, resolution and do research on the network’s needs.