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.

Hello,

I believe the vision presented by Licklider and Taylor was a bit more advanced than what Usenet provides.
 On one hand, it is true that Usenet is in the spirit of what they had described in the text:
it allowed its users to find communities that share the same interests as them, and to communicate with them.
 This allowed the users to engage in interactive discussions about topics that they really care about, with people from all around the world.
As described in the text, Usenet managed to “interconnect the separate communities and [...] transform them into a supercommunity”.

On the other hand, unlike what was described in the text, Usenet doesn’t allow us to interact “as much through it as face to face”.
 But their prediction was far from being wrong, since nowadays we can find countless applications that allow us to do so.
Another point that they didn’t get right was the price of communicating, which turned out to be much less of a problem than what they initially thought.

Kind Regards