Anniversaries are wonderful things. They help us reflect on our past, present, and future. Anniversaries can be complicated though. (My spouse and I have three of them, but that’s another story!) While Internet denizens celebrate the web’s “official” 25^th anniversary today, we might pause to recognize how confusing and uncertain “inventions” and “births” sometimes are: is this about sowing an idea, convincing a boss of the idea’s viability, coding a computer program, connecting a web server, uploading the first webpage, logging in users, clicking links? Meanwhile, in the midst of spying, surveillance, and privacy concerns, we might remind ourselves that the web, from the beginning, has been a technology of connections. So what to make of the past 25 years?

Today’s “Happy 25^th, Web” (the Web At 25) actually celebrates the publication of a document by the web’s primary inventor, Tim Berners-Lee: “Information Management: A Proposal.” Deemed “vague but exciting,” it proposed a solution to the problem of keeping track of all those little pieces that make up large projects at research institutions like CERN, the Swiss physics lab where Berners-Lee worked in the 1980s. The big idea of that proposal, and hence what we are really celebrating today, is global hypertext, nonlinear “linked information systems.” Bringing hypertext to the internet would create a single unified information space in which any document or piece of data, regardless of where or on which internet-connected machine it was located, could be instantly reached with a single mouse click.

Personally, I really do think the proposal (although initially rejected!) was a great idea and is worthy of celebration. The problem  (besides all the other major problems about encryption, privacy, surveillance, etc.) is that the popular birthday narrative leaves out a lot of other things that didn’t make much sense at the time. In his book, Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee describes how hard it was to try to explain this vision to others between 1989-93: “People had to be able to grasp the Web in full, which meant imagining a whole world populated with Websites and browsers. They had to sense the abstract information space that the Web could bring into being. It was a lot to ask.” It WAS a lot to ask. I will admit, as a big internet fan these days, that I totally did not get it at first. (At first!) And I actually think this is an important and historically relevant thing to admit.

To consider what using the Internet was like without the web, check out Brendan Kehoe’s demo (Nov 1993) on the Computer Chronicles (skip to 09:08); we see Gopher, Finger, Telnet, and using Telnet to contact Compact Disc Connection (unfortunately, the system hangs before completing purchase of the Mariah Carey CD). There is no mention of the web, nearly five years after it’s “birth.” How could this even be? Teleological accounts of history assume a kind of forward march, where the past is rewritten in ways that make sense to contemporary minds.

The W3C Team is urging web users to share their “earliest memories” today, and in that spirit, I wanted to share just how hard it was for me (and I wasn’t alone!) to wrap my head around the Internet, let alone the web, when I first tried to connect in the fall of 1995. It was confusing trying to figure this stuff out with my fellow housemates and no tech wizard friends for aid!

Looking forward to investigating this “internet” thing I was hearing about, I bought my first computer at the start of my senior year of college in 1995. Alas, my college tech store didn’t realize I wanted to use the machine to go online, and so the computer had to be returned to IT and taught to speak internet. It was elaborate:

InterSLIP and InterPPP were installed, my computer had to learn TCP/IP, modem ports were configured, many a floppy disk was run. After all was said and done, I used my 14.4k baud modem (think slow, noisy) to at last see the World Wide Web world. It looked like this:

It was probably a few weeks before I realized that “eWorld” wasn’t “World Wide Web.” This was Apple’s (soon to fail) commercial online service, eWorld. When I introduce today’s college students, who no longer make distinctions between the internet, web or various platforms and apps—all is just “online”—to web history, I usually ask them to tell me how they would get to the internet. We take a tour through the town and discuss metaphors, space, each building, all of which were filled with forums, resources, chatrooms available to and for other eWorld users. Wasn’t I “online”? Wasn’t this the eWorld Wide Web? Well, yes and no. I was connected to other paid subscribers of Apple’s commercial online service. This was not the web, I finally realized. (A devoted fan has recreated the eWorld experience online! However, note that this simulation runs MUCH faster than the experience I remember.)

One day, my housemate clicked that tiny little statue holding the globe in the middle of the town, and we found our way out of eWorld and into a much bigger one, a World Wide Web. Once connected to the web, we moved around by gliding across “handwoven” hyperlinks, endless HotLists of Cool Sites. (These lists were filled with the “quality” sites of 1994: the Hawaii dinosaur museum! The Vatican! The Louvre before it was renamed and taken down because it wasn’t actually owned by the Louvre!) One could not count on search engines to lead you to the “best of it,” the useful, interesting, fun stuff—the “cool” sites of the day. You had to rely on the scattered lists of pointers made by other users.

While I am reluctant to embrace a single “anniversary” of the World Wide Web, I do believe that something special was taking shape when Berners-Lee was working out that proposal 25 years ago. It was the beginning framework for a shared (technical and imagined) information space that brought hypertext to the internet.  These components—a collective imagination forged through global hypertext—were what I thought of as “the heart” of the web (once I figured out what that was!).

Today, to me, these characteristics seem considerably more elusive. As I shuffle through apps on my iPad, I’m often struck by the similarities with the pre-web internet that Kehoe demonstrated as he moved from gopher to telnet to finger and back in 1993. And likewise, as I click on links to web content shared through Facebook, I can’t help but note how hard the links work to keep me cloistered, safe within Facebook’s own little eWorld. Some of these experiences are (ruefully, to me) mandated by the affordances of these platforms. But others, it seems, are a combination of social protocols and habit, the ways we choose or refuse to link and weave our own personal narratives across our web histories and timelines. We must not let linking become a synonym for tagging or hashtags! These are very different technologies of connection. On this “anniversary,” I would just like to urge all of us to not give up on hypertext, to continue to seek new ways to make that kind of connection meaningful.

Everyday life is so awash in explicitly aesthetic appeals (ie, “the most beautiful way to check weather”) that I can instantly imagine an eye-catching infograph that helpfully orders app attributes as values of sensuous desire. We might need to revise Susan Sontag’s famous call for an erotics of art: “in place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of apps!”

How does the technocultural installation of some “gorgeous” layer between internet users and the cycles of life (e.g., sleep, fertility, seasonal, fiscal) shape the way we come to experience and know the world?  And of course, what is “beautiful” anyway? Who gets to define what it looks and feels like? These are questions of aesthetics, though not in the classical sense of pondering the philosophical problems of beauty and art. Once assumed to correspond with universal human values, perceptions of beauty have since been understood as mediated by taste, class, and racial and gendered cultural hierarchies that govern legitimacy.  Cultural studies expanded the field of what counted as “aesthetic” by turning from high art to the literature and popular culture of the working classes. As Raymond Williams puts it, “Culture is ordinary.” How might we probe what’s at stake in the digital beautification of everyday life? In this post, I examine the ambitious 2011 redesign of top global website, Google (Google+, Google Search, Maps, etc.)

Google’s First Aesthetic: Transparency

Built from the start with users in mind (mantra: “focus on the user and all else will follow”), the early Google Aesthetic presents simplicity, technology, usability, and engineering as a form of transparency. When the stark white Google search was introduced in 1998, it must have seemed positively un-designed compared with the bloated portals of the time. No, Google cut the crap by delivering nothing but fast, relevant search results. For a decade, using Google Search was kind of like using a calculator, which is to say, you just used it and expected it to work. With its famous suite of PageRank algorithms under lock and key, Google balanced its technical opacity with a transparent communication style that emphasized openness, accountability, informality, and playfulness, all of which felt algorithmically generated but human-inflected. This aesthetic of transparency isn’t confined to the giant white home page, of course. We catch another glimpse if we approach material like Matt Cutts’s “How Search Works” as an aesthetic performance as much as an instructional one.

There are plenty of advanced technologies here, but the tech layer is mediated through a veneer of “(expert guy)” friendliness: approachable, direct, playful, and above all, crystal clear. From the expansive white space to the affable sketchy wireframes, this Google Aesthetic is presented with such ease that we’re not meant to question this explanation (or indeed, understand this as an aesthetic) at all.  Of course, transparency equally conceals the white dudes’ in casualware who serve as interfaces to certain visions of computing. Ensconced in white space and doodles, Cutts becomes an aesthetic expression of what Siva Vaidhyanathan calls Google’s culture of Aptocracy, a world that rewards merit based on technical competence and quantifiable forms of achievement.

Google’s Aesthetic Turn: The OSbug

Google’s engineering-centric culture had a long reputation for downplaying design in favor of speed and efficiency. Who cares about beauty when your computer is a hulking beige box? But there’s a huge industry surrounding tablets and smart phones, now marketed as aesthetic objects aligned symbolically with gourmet chocolate, fine jewelry or luxury cars. Google was simplicity, technology, usability, engineering… but not beauty.

When Larry Page became Google CEO in April of 2011, he immediately made design Google’s top priority with the mantra: “One simple, beautiful, useful Google” (the “OSbug” for short). For the first time, Google set out to design and engineer a cohesive aesthetic experience that would unify the “look and feel” of the Google universe. It’s worth noting, then, that in the pursuit of “beautiful” interaction, Google designers were drawing inspiration not from the realm of the visual, but from the legacy of “ubiquitous computing” (ubicom) and the aesthetics of invisibility and seamlessness that were a hallmark of that vision.

Designers’ were asked what beauty means to Google and concluded it “involved the idea of simplicity, and deeper than that, of invisibility.”  For ChromeCast users, for example, “the beauty comes from the fact that it delights you and you don’t see it.” This disappearing act represents a downgrading of the primacy of the visual in favor of haptics, feedback, sound, navigational cues, etc., that work to create a cohesive sensation of a unified space (the OSbug). The shift to seamlessness or “invisibility” is not necessarily a bad thing: who wants to feel frustrated by devices and interfaces? But seamless is a double-edged sword. UX designers are thinking carefully about how users are embedded not just in the apps we use, but complex social framework of daily activity.

But it also raises some crucial questions: if we can no longer feel the seams, do we risk becoming so comfortable in our skin that “beautiful”  layers between us and the world begin to seem more and more like common sense? How might different users feel oriented (or disoriented) within information space? What kind of gendered or racial assumptions might “beautiful” interaction uphold or challenge? Whose needs and desires are being optimized by this particular expression of “beauty”?

This is the fifth post in Antenna’s new series The Aesthetic Turn, which examines questions of cultural studies and media aesthetics. If you missed any of the earlier posts in the series, they can be read here. Look out for regular posts in the series (most) every other Wednesday in January and beyond.

The Information Superhighway: Interactive television

A deal that will indelibly alter our media landscape, throw the future of broadcast into question, promise new distribution models, expand interactive and “addressable” advertising… a deal that will fundamentally redefine television.  No, I’m not talking about the Comcast-NBC Universal announcement that made waves last week.  This was the hype surrounding the “information superhighway” of 1993.

I admit, as someone writing a dissertation on web practices in the dot-com bubble, I probably spend way too much time with my head stuck in the 90’s. But noting all of the mentions of the AOL-Time Warner merger as a deathly omen hanging over the Comcast/NBCU agreement—heightened by this week’s official divorce—I couldn’t help but think that a more apt comparison might be the cable-phone mania that swept the country in 1993 in a clamor for interactive television. Or at the very least, it provides a good back-story for today’s media maneuverings.

“Pipe Dreams”

Back then, telecommunication providers were lining up to build the infrastructure that would bring glorious things into our living rooms and onto our television screens:  500 channels!  Videogames!  Video-on-demand!  Home shopping!  24 hr access to a Cover Girl cosmetics center where consumers can learn—on the spot!—which Cover Girl nail polish matches the lipstick she saw in a commercial!  (OK, that last one perhaps less glorious, but promised nonetheless).  True, there would be high hurdles ahead. “Just wait until John Q. Public tries to click his remote control to ‘launch’ ‘Laverne and Shirley’ and he gets an error message saying, ‘insufficient memory,’ one commentator speculated. But these potential snafus hardly dampened the ambitious plans and alliances being forged.

The Information Superhighway, a nationwide high capacity fiber optic network of phone, cable and computer networks, was being pitched as super-interactive television, and it would reinvent home entertainment, changing the way we accessed and thought about media.  But neither cable companies nor phone companies alone were equipped to bring these services into the home.  Cable companies could pump in the content, but couldn’t help viewers interact with it.  Phone companies didn’t have high capacity lines, but they were masters of switching information in all directions over a network.  Hence, “cable-phone mania”: USWest teamed up with Time Warner, Southwestern Bell united with Cox cable, and most spectacularly, regional phone company Bell Atlantic and cable giant TCI announced a $33 billion merger that would lay the lines that would make the information superhighway a reality.  It failed four months later.

The aborted merger, the technological difficulties in actually getting this stuff to work, and the overwhelming response of consumers to interactive tv and on-demand viewing (”who has time for all the interactive mumbo jumbo”?) all worked to shelve the pipe dreams of the information superhighway as interactive TV. And anyway, by this time everyone was waking up to the idea that the information superhighway was already here, accessible via computer screen and modem. When TCI was purchased by AT&T five years later, the driving logic didn’t have anything to do with interactive TV.  Nobody wanted 500 channels; they wanted internet access.

Fast-forward sixteen years: the high tech future is here!  Video on demand (check), home shopping (check), networked gaming (check), 24 hour Cover Girl access (check!)  So what to make of the long journey to get here? Today “redefining television” isn’t about bringing the media universe to our home set; it’s about setting television loose into cyberspace—accessible “anytime, anywhere”—and watching media industries scramble to bottle up some revenue.

Now, like then, distribution is key… just not the only key.  Guarding against a future where cable is a bunch of “dumb pipes,” Comcast wants in on the content game.  But despite technological breakthroughs and changing attitudes about media use, some of those very early questions are still unresolved plot points in an ongoing storyline about the post-TV era. Is broadcast really over?  Can new technologies like authentication systems successfully herd viewers into gated revenue-friendly media zones? Will viewers go down without a fight?  Will the technology actually work?  Will marketers freak out about the future of ad-supported television? How will audiences be measured?  Can a merger of media giants harness the competing logics of cable and the internet?  Will there ever really be a post-TV era?  Or will Comcast-NBCU turn up as roadkill on the TV Everywhere Infobahn?

ABC News, Sep. 30 1993