[Air-L] advice on course readings

[Brian Dear]

Adriana, 

The timing won’t quite work out for your spring course, but next Fall, keep an eye out for my new book “The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture” (working title) from Pantheon Books.

It’s my hope that this book will offer a bit of an electrical jolt to the whole internet research and internet history field, since while PLATO had essentially nothing to do with the internet (although both projects share common funding from ARPA/NSF), much of what internet research explores certainly applies to PLATO, arguably the most significant yet virtually unknown and misunderstood historical antecedent of them all.

A tiny slice of PLATO:
• eLearning from 1960 onward
• time-sharing from early 1961 onward
• online courses offered for college credit from 1962 onward
• gas-plasma flat-panel touch-sensitive hi-res graphical displays from 1972 onward
• instant messaging, chat rooms, message forums from 1973 onward
• email from 1974 onward
• online consulting via chat and remote screen sharing from 73 onward
• ability to leave online comments on any program or aspect of system, something the web still lacks
• multiplayer games starting in 1969, then exploding in 72-73+
• space/flight simulators and graphical MUDs from 1974-75 onward
• virtual goods being bought and sold for real-world cash from ~1977 onward
• a crowdsourced blog / online daily newspaper starting in 1974
• early forms of social group formation/online cliques, before era of social networks
• A community confronting many of the same issues we study today: online addiction, cyber-bullying, cyber-censorship, cyber-surveillance, cyber-privacy, cyber-security (back in an era when the computer was literally a Cyber)

Fasten your seatbelts, 2017 is going to be fun.

- Brian

Brian Dear
PLATO History Project
Santa Fe, NM
brian at platohistory.org

> On Oct 19, 2016, at 6:45 AM, Adriana de Souza e Silva <aasilva at ncsu.edu> wrote:
> 
> All,
> 
> I’m teaching a graduate seminar for MS and PhD students called “internet and society” next spring.
> 
> I’m looking for good readings (book chapters and/or journal articles) on two subjects:
> - history of asynchronous communication platforms (USENET, BBS, blogs, wikis, etc.)
> - history of synchronous communication platforms (MUDs, chat environments, etc.)
> 
> I find a lot of stuff on specific uses of blogs, twitter etc, but very little on their historical antecedents. Any suggestions would be welcome!
> 
> Best,
> Adriana
> ______________________________
> Adriana de Souza e Silva, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor of Communication
> Director of the Communication Rhetoric and Digital Media (CRDM) Ph.D. Program
> NC State University
> http://www.souzaesilva.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
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