Z.KARVALICS, LASZLO

Internet: the real pre-history and its consequences for the social theory

Abstract

Internet: the real pre-history and its consequences for the social theory Laszlo Z. Karvalics BMGE-UNESCO Information Society and Trend Research Institute Tel: 36-1-4632526 Fax: 36-1- 4634035 Mail: zkl@lucy.tgi.bme.hu Arpanet, Darpanet, Licklider, Kahn, Cerf and all the others: when the topic is the pre-history of the Internet, almost always the same words and names are jostling in front of us. But what about the pre-history of the Internet? In the technical literature bits from the history of computers or perhaps some colorful cultural historical pieces from the world of telephony can be found most of the time as though the Internet were merely about the history of technology. Thus, socially, economically and politically embedded developments, which could be approached not through technological virtuosity, but from the network principle like Stafford Beer's torso Cybersyn project in Chile or Andrew Targowski's similarly uncompleted Infostrada in Poland in the early 70s are hardly ever mentioned. Minitel is also treated quite unfairly, and the history of technology simply ignores the more than 40-year-old strange history of mail-art that has by now salvaged itself from the postcard world to the Internet. While today everybody admits that the Internet is a human network with specific functions, attributes and topologies, the pre-history of these functions, attributes and topologies is a blank area on the map that rarely attracts attention. We can sometimes traditionally hear the name of Vannevar Bush as the prophet of the hypertext Corpus Digitalis of "As we may think", but we never deal with Paul Otlet and the torso world library experiment by Mundaneum, which are only a kind of 20th-century improvements of Konrad Gesner's 16th-century Bibliotheca Universalis. The fact that beginning from the 20s the early radio amateur movement has developed several elements of nowadays' network culture and function is almost completely unprocessed. Even the multipoint-multipoint-structured communication was invented before the Internet; and the correspondence network in the 15th century hall-marked by Erasmus could create this structure for itself as well as the Spanish diplomacy in the 17th century. The professional news delivery techniques of the guilds can be considered identical to early newsgroups from all aspects. The forerunners of non-linear communication management can be traced back to the ancient times (in the form of the Bible and the first lexicons), and besides the great innovators of the 60s and 70s, it is high time to place other master minds thinking about the boundaries and opportunities of the global spaces for knowledge in the Internet's pantheon of the history of ideas from Condorcet to Buckminster Fuller through Victor Vasarely, who had the prophetic dream about the "lumino-cinetic Screen". In case these historical chapters are also written and become parts of theoretical discourses, plenty of the Internet's characteristics will immediately get into another refraction of light. Just take a prism in your hand!