Transcript for The Evolution of Digital Communities

We're going to jump in and talk on this panel about the future of digital community

and I've been asked to

try to provide some context by providing

a little bit of the history of digital community.

And this is an interesting thing to do in front of a room full of broadcasters

because the truth is

journalists are pretty good at writing the rough draft of history

and as a result, most of us know who famous journalists are.

On the other hand, geeks are really bad at history

and even the geeks in the room for the most part

cannot tell you who these men up on the screen are.

I will tell you, they are the guys at BBN who came up with the Interface Message Processor

which was basically the first internet router.

These guys, not Al Gore, are the actual fathers of the internet.

I want to talk about the fact that, literally,

from the moment people have connected computers to one another

we have been using them to talk to one another.

In fact, even before that

the internet, as we know it, came into being in 1969.

But email, as we know it, came into being in 1965.

Even when people were sharing a single machine at MIT

they figured out they needed to talk to one another.

And so what happened as the internet, first ARPANET,

came into play

the first packets were set in 1969.

By 1971, email was in use on the network.

By 1973, it was the main thing people used the network for.

So this is a good example

of how people put computers towards the purpose of communication

even if the network wasn't designed for it.

And what you're looking at up here

is the very first internet mailing list in 1975

and it will come as no surprise to any of you

that the second message sent out on the first internet mailing list

is an apology from the system administrator

for the fact that he's doing a lousy job

of keeping up with everybody's concerns.

Some things really don't change over time.

For people of my generation

internet community meant bulletin board systems.

It mean these computers that you dialed into

to borrow software that others had found somewhere

that you might use.

And in fact the first BBS came up in 1978,

it was called CBBS.

It was put together by a guy named Ward Christianson.

And the story is that Ward got snowed in

in Chicago

and over the course of 2 weeks wrote a program

on this miserable machine here

which let people come in and share old IBM CPM software.

So that's 1978.

By '79, we had Usenet

and this is the precursor to all

the threaded message boards anyone has ever used on the web.

Usenet had thousands and thousands and thousands of topics

most of which were completely irrelevant

even to the people who participated in them!

Also in 1979 we had a wonderful phenomenon,

MUDs - Multi-User Dungeons.

The ability to walk around in little text spaces

and kill dragons with other people,

and most of us thought it this was completely irrelevant

until we started having basically the same thing

with really pretty pictures, and people said it was really really important,

and they call them Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

This is World of Warcraft that we're looking at.

But again, 1979...

This is the time in internet history

where we invented the emoticon, right?

You know we actually see it for the first time...

I'm sorry I don't have it in here...

But it's just a dash and a pren

was meant to be 'tongue-in-cheek'

We don't actually get eyes attached to it for another 2 years.

Look, in 1982 we have a critical moment in the development of online chat

we have Minitel.

This is what happens when you let a national government engineer the internet,

it's little and pink and very hard to type on.

But what happened with Minitel,

was Minitel introduced a chess program

and the chess program had a chat feature

and people quickly discovered that you could flirt with people you'd never met before in the chat feature,

and this is the birth of IM as we know it today.

In fact there's a lot of people from a certain generation in France

who all you have to do is say 3165

and they refer to anything as 3165

as being about sexual content

because that was the number you dialed on Minitel to get the chat lines.

We haven't come so far...

In 1990 we get the World Wide Web

and some people start realizing that this is something

that isn't just used by people who look like me!

And this is the first homepage we get at CERN.

It actually looks very much like this today.

In 1995, we suddenly have companies like Geocitites and Tripod

allowing anybody to build pages

that should look look like this

and instead end up looking like this!

And despite the fact that in 1995

most of the web does in fact look like this,

we have in 1997 people dedicating themselves

to trying to find the best within this mess

and putting it together in something that they call weblogs

where they're annotating what they think are the best bits of it.

And by pointing all of these blogs at one another

we get this sort of emergent community of people pointing to one another.

If everyone stands here and points to somebody else

we basically get the same sort of community we're used to having in the blogosphere

You can all try it right now, you're now a blogger.

Ward Cunningham, 1995,

figures it's not enough just to have one person edit a webpage,

why not have everybody edit a webpage?

Which sounds like a phenomenally stupid idea

until you try to run an encyclopedia on top of it

which works remarkably well

and it actually turns out that if you put

dozens and dozens and hundreds of monkeys together in a room

they actually write encyclopedias.

And they're pretty good.

So, why now, at the end of this internet history

where I'm trying to make the point that

a lot of the really interesting community stuff

was invented in 1982 or 1979...

Are we all suddenly paying attention to it?

The simple answer is that there's a whole lot of graphs

that look like this one.

This is the graph of hosts connected to the internet

but you could make a graph of total internet connectivity,

you could make a graph of total number of webpages,

you could make a graph of total number of web users...

They all look more or less like this one.

And what this leads us to

is a world in which %68.6 of Americans

are currently connected to the internet.

Some of us seem to be connected

%68.6 of the total hours of our lives.

And this leads to things like

hundreds of millions of people creating pages on things like MySpace

and otherwise semi-sensible news organizations paying $600 million for it.

Which leads us to our panel today.