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 partly fits their vision through its distributed/decentralized nature:
The authors criticized the limitations of a "single access computer", arguing that this model could not scale efficiently
and would inccur too much overall costs, and instead proposed to setup "an experimental network of multiaccess computers"
for communication and sharing of intellectual resources.

However, it doesn't fit the bill for the kind of real-time collaboration that they envisaged:
Usenet is old school text, asynchronous and doesn't implement any concepts of "cooperative modelling", alignment of mental models, or rich interactivity as outlined in their paper.
One can argue that the segmentation of topics into nested groups is still a step forward in this direction.