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 exemplifies Leicklider and Taylor describe in ‘The Computer as a Communication Device’ that is distributed communication whereby users can
engage in conversations regardless of the distance between the parties. It is threaded discussions that explain the ‘cooperative modeling’ they had
expected, permitting the user to build and expand their thoughts, and communities who share those thoughts can be created irrespective of distance.
In this way, global communities of shared interest were formed rather than relying on physical proximity.

Yet Usenet contradicted their vision in several respects. While Licklider and Taylor's future had high-level personal assistants, such as "OLIVER,"
to help users sift and organize the material, Usenet provided no filtering and support by individual means for any purposeful exchange. Last but not
least, the very text-oriented and asynchronous nature of Usenet was a far cry from Graphical User Interfaces and real-time collaboration that the
authors had envisioned. Instead of a structured and concentrated system of communication, Usenet faced the information overload problem: it became
gradually harder for users to sift through the snowfall of posted messages and retrieve useful pieces of information. Not helping matters was the
lack of moderation that furthered the problems of spam and misinformation, thus degrading user experience and generating disappointment in the
functionality and organization of the platform-or so it could be.