[access-uk] The Secret History of Social Networking
- From: Colin r. Howard <colin@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:33:24 +0000
Greetings,
A very interesting program on Radio 4 Wednesday 11:02 until 11:30, first of
three, called The Secret History of Social Networking
The listen link is:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xw14v
I do not know if there will be a podcast but obviously it will be available
via listen again for 7 days after about 13:00 today.
On the program page it says:
In the first instalment of a three-part series, Rory Cellan-Jones traces the
roots of social networking from the counterculture of the 1970s through
early bulletin board systems such as California's The WELL and the first
networks on the World Wide Web, finding out how a geeky hobby became a mass
phenomenon.
Forty years ago, hippies and hackers came together to produce the first
attempts at online community. Rory visits the scene of perhaps the first
computer social network open to the general public. Community Memory was a
series of terminals in Berkeley and the San Francisco Bay area which opened
for business in 1973.
It never picked up more than a handful of users, but as personal computers
became more common in the 1980s, a host of online bulletin board systems
sprang up around the world - although The WELL was perhaps the most
influential. An offshoot of the Whole Earth Catalog, The WELL's discussion
forums interested journalists as well as computer nerds and showed how
computer networks might impact offline life.
And Rory follows the trend through to the arrival of the World Wide Web, the
thing that turned a mass audience on to the internet and online social
networking.
Millions signed up for early sites like SixDegrees and Friendster. But the
lack of digital cameras and ubiquitous internet access in its late-90s
heyday limited the usefulness of SixDegrees as a networking tool. And
Friendster's sheer popularity in the early 2000s caused tech problems that
the company struggled to overcome. It wouldn't be too long, however, before
social networking hit the mainstream. Part 1 of 3.
Interviewees include:
Lee Felsenstein, co-founder, Community Memory
Larry Brilliant, co-founder, The WELL
Stewart Brand, co-founder The WELL
Howard Rheingold, early WELL user, author of The Virtual Community
John Perry Barlow, early WELL user, co-founder Electronic Frontier
Foundation
Marc Weber, founding curator, Computer History Museum
Andrew Weinrich, founder, SixDegrees.com
Jonathan Abrams, co-founder, Friendster.
From Colin Howard, who lives near Southampton in
Southern England.
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