Re: CS-234 Discussion

CS234 <cs234@lhmerino.dont-email.me> wrote:

This thread is intended for the students of CS-234: Technologies for democratic society
 
How does Usenet fit into the vision presented by Licklider and Taylor in
"The Computer as a Communication Device"?
 
Reflect on:
- Which aspects of their vision are realized through Usenet?
- What aspects have evolved differently from what they imagined?
 
Feel free to respond to comments made by your classmates as well.

- Usenet aligns with the world communicating about very specific subject in order to share knowledge.
This is made very practical by making the discussions threaded around a given subject.
In the reading, the author argued that this was a form of creative communication as opposed
to what phone calls for example.
- One point that evolved rather differently from what the author imagined is that people due to
being anonymous might also create a toxic environnement for the subgroups they don't like.
This is something that was rather difficult to imagine as the concept of anonymity wasn't
really in people's daily life when the article was written.
- I also think the author was very optimistic about the future of communication and couldn't have guessed
about how people were going to interact with the new technologies in a bad way.