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Oxford Internet Institute Announces First Senior Fellow
by Vicki Nash 27 Nov '02

27 Nov '02

Paul A. David, a Professor of Economics and Senior Fellow for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University, has joined the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) as its first Senior Fellow, where he will lead research on the social and institutional dynamics of e-Science. The Director of the OII, Bill Dutton, said: "Professor David is a mentor to some of the world's leading economists. He will be a major force in OII research on such critical issues of policy and practice as standards and intellectual property rights." Professor David, a former chair of the Department of Economics at Stanford, will be a principal investigator on a new OII project which aims to identify key areas for social and policy research on e-Science. Professor David, also an Emeritus Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, sees his appointment as an opportunity to continue his collaboration with collegaues at the University of Oxford while building a new area of social and economic research. According to Professor David, " There is huge scope for a systematic study of the institutional and organisational environments round the world that would be conducive to effectively utilizing the technical capabilities being created by the UK's e-Science programme." Professor Paul Jeffreys, Director of the Oxford University Computing Services and Director of the Oxford University e-Science Centre, sees Paul David's appointment as a "wonderful opportunity to help build an 'e-Science Social Science Virtual Centre' anchored at the University of Oxford in the OII and the Said Business School." Notes. 1. The Oxford Internet Institute is one of the world's first truly multi-disciplnary Internet institutes based in a major university. Exclusively devoted to the study of the impact of the Internet on society, the OII aims to put Oxford, the Uk and Europe at the centre of debates about how the Internet could and should develop. For further information about the OII see http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk 2. e-Science is a new area of technical research on the electronic and other technological infrastructures to support global netwroks that will enable scientists to collaborate and share equipment, data and other knowledge resources from anywhere in the world. See: http://www.research-councils.ac.uk/escience/ 3. Information about the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) can be found at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ 4. For further information about Paul David, see http:www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/david.html -- Dr Victoria Nash Policy and Research Officer Oxford Internet Institute 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS 01865 287231

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Appointment of New Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute
by Vicki Nash 27 Nov '02

27 Nov '02

Peter Davies Joins the Oxford Internet Institute as a Visiting Fellow Mr Peter Davies has left his position as General Counsel of Apple Europe, a post he had held since 1999, to become a Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), and affiliated with Green College, Oxford University. In addition to Apple, Mr Davies has worked in various legal capacities for IBM Europe's Software Division, Microsoft Corporation, Ashton-Tate, and Williams Collins Ltd. He has also served as a research officer for the National Foundation for Educational Research, from 1975-1980. The Director of the OII, Professor Bill Dutton, noted that Peter Davies' appointment helps the Institute realize its aim of building bridges between academia, industry and government: "Peter Davies' advice and participation in OII will further our collaborative research which seeks to inform policy and practice". Peter Davies will be working at the OII through July of 2003, and concentrating his efforts on issues of intellectual property and online commerce. Bill Dutton sees his advice on such OII concerns as the ownership of courseware and the impact of alternative Internet standards as critical to ensuring that the OII's work connects with business and industry. Beyond his research, Peter will be giving several seminars starting in the new year and supporting a variety of OII activities. Peter Davies notes: "I look forward to meeting and advising students at Oxford who are interested in careers in the many burgeoning fields around the Internet and related new media". Mr Davies received his Postgraduate Diploma in Law at City University, London. Notes 1. The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) is one of the world's first truly multidisciplinary Internet institute based in a major university. Exclusively devoted to the study of the impact of the Internet on society, the OII aims to put Oxford, the UK and Europe at the centre of debates about how the Internet could and should develop. For further information about the OII see: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/ . Information about next term's seminars should be posted shortly. -- Dr Victoria Nash Policy and Research Officer Oxford Internet Institute 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS 01865 287231

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History of the Internet
by Maren Hartmann 26 Nov '02

26 Nov '02

In response to the recent - and interesting - postings about the history of the Internet, I'm arguing in my research that it is at least partly a history of Internet research and theorisation rather than of any 'Internet' as such. And yes, there therefore seems to be both - a) a change somewhere in the late 1990s (but not necessairly related to the dot.com crash only), which in terms of theorisation at least has been called first and second generation research and b) the (potential) diversity of developments and their interpretations that were mentioned in the earlier post by Frank. Maren ------------------------------ Maren Hartmann - Researcher @ SMIT - Vrije Universiteit Brussel Pleinlaan 2 - 1050 Brussel - Belgium phone (work): + 32 2 629 2572 - fax: + 32 2 629 2861

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attention Graduate Students - list for you!
by Lisbeth Klastrup 26 Nov '02

26 Nov '02

This mail is primarily intended for A.o.I.R Graduate Students* I am happy to announce the very recently established air-grad list, one supplement to the air-list for those among you who are interested in discussing graduate student specific matters and who wants to help build a stronger network between the A.o.I.R graduate student members. For instance by sharing links and information about each others projects, or discussing graduate student initiatives for coming conferences. - An opening discussion could for instance be thoughts on the future use of the list! General information and sign-up for the mailing list can be found at: http://aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-grad Those signed up can post to the list-address air-grad(a)aoir.org. The executive committee has agreed that future air-grad list administrators will be the graduate student member in the executive commitee, which is currently yours truly :). It should also be noted that if you have any complaints about the list as such, they can be directed to list-complaints(a)aoir.org. I hope to read many of you on the list in the future and hear your opinions on how we can strengthen the A.o.I.R graduate student community! greetings, Lisbeth Klastrup * There might be those amongst you who wonder what a graduate student is? (at some point I at least was somewhat confused....). As far as I understand, in U.S. English a graduate student is a student who has completed his/her first degree - this is the equivalent to what is also known as a "postgraduate student" in U.K. English. A graduate student might well be a "Ph.D. candidate" or "Ph.D. Scholar" which is in practice equivalent to a graduate student in some European countries, where an university education normally only yields one degree as "candidate", after which you go on to become a "ph.d. candidate". The list is of course open to graduate students of all forms. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Lisbeth Klastrup Ph. D. scholar Dept. of Digital Aesthetics and Communication IT University of Copenhagen www.itu.dk/people/klastrup

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On stages in studying the Internet
by Barry Wellman 26 Nov '02

26 Nov '02

Re the comments on stages of the Itnernet. Yes, a two-stage theory is oversimplified. David Silver's stages certainly are food for thought. What we were trying to say in that intro chapter was a change in the way people --especially social scientists -- thought about the Internet. Stage 1: Pre 1998 is what I think of as the _Wired_ stage. The Internet was seen as a transcendent body to be utopianly praised or dystopianly feared. Lots of attention paid to Internet-only apps. Fueled of course by the dot.com boom. Much research came out of the CSCW world, with good lab work on what Internet could (or could not) buy you. I think of the good studies presented in the Sproull-Kiesler _Connections_ book as exemplary, as well as the arguments about media presence. Stage 2, from 1998 to about now has seen a lot more ethnographic and survey research relating Internetting to the rest of folks' lives. The Internet is now seen as imminent in people's lives, rather than transcendatlly above them. I'd fit the Homenet study in this approach, as well as the World Internet Project, and the ethnographic and survey studies collected in our Internet in Everyday Life book, the archives on John Robinson's U Maryland Webshop, plus many, many more. To be sure, this is a crude typology, with lots of exception clauses. For example, at Maastricht, I noticed some good Internet-only research continuing, and I certainly don't want to discourage or disparage that. And there was grounded research before 1998. Plus all the early activity that David Silver mentions. (For example, I saw early email, "Project MAC", between Harvard and MIT in 1967, and have been on an email system more or less continuously since the Turoff-Hiltz EIES days of 1976). Yet the two stage summarizing heuristic still makes good sensitizing sense to me. However, not the last word or the last stage. I think we've reached a plateau in documenting the first order questions about how email relates to other forms of community and communication. YMMV, Barry ___________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman(a)chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 ___________________________________________________________________

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Re: Air-l digest, Vol 1 #560 -Internet History/Stages
by Michel J. Menou 26 Nov '02

26 Nov '02

I suspect the time span and the phases depend on the "definition of Internet". If we think of it stricto sensu, that is IP based communications, there is one story. If we use the name in a more generic sense, as David Silver seems to be inclined to, we can go back to earlier attempts at wide, if not global, compunications, including Bitnet, Fidonet, Earnet, etc. etc. and many private/local endeavours in the academic and research as well as in the business worlds. It also depends what one wants to do with this chronology. If it is to understand the evolution of social transformation one may even look to look farther back. After all car traffic and retail are still following paths of old hippomobile traction. Michel

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re: internet history?
by gotved＠mit.edu 26 Nov '02

26 Nov '02

David and others, In my classes, I've used the different waves of users to shape the history of the net; see Guise 1998: 'Looking Backward and Forward at the Internet' in The Information Society 14(3). It's another angle and rather simple - and good to take the discussions beyond the technology in itself. However - sometimes I wonder if it isn't too early to grasp the net's history; we might need some more 'time distance' to recognize/reconstruct the patterns of importance... Stine david silver wrote: > i'm curious about this notion of two stages of the internet. if i'm > reading the paragraph correctly, the authors suggest the net has had two > stages: before and after the dot.com crash. i'm interested in hearing > what others think about this concept of a two-staged internet history.

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Internet history/stages
by Gochenouer, John 26 Nov '02

26 Nov '02

I was happy to see how yesterday's discussion progressed. Yes there was an I1 and I2, and yes there was an Arpanet and we should consider the more expansive view that includes all communications technology diffusion (thanks, Frank). Since this thread is headed toward a more expansive look, let's take it into the realm of biology. Human reality is no different from the biological process of increasing complexity through layers of simplicity and the Internet is a small part of that. We are destined to network and increase our connectivity. Trillions of poorly organized cells in the fetus become the dynamic network of billions of neurons that form the human brain. But, remember the individual cells in the mature brain are the survivors of a much larger group of undifferentiated fetal neurons and they survived because they became connected, part of the network. They are part of a greater life that they are not even aware of. It is easy to extrapolate this concept out to humanity and our frantic efforts to build communication infrastructures --- some that are reabsorbed and some that become part of us. This is a popular science fiction theme as witnessed by the Star Trek's Borg and the ancient concept of the Gaea (or Gaia). I1 and I2 represent a humble step in understanding where this is all headed. I covered all of this in a lecture in Jamaica back in 1995. It was hard for the students to follow, back then, but maybe now they can see a glimmer of the networked future. It would be interesting to have a doctoral student study the biological parallels in the evolution of the Web. John Gochenouer Southwest State University 1501 State St. Marshall, MN 56258 Email: Gochenouer(a)southwest.msus.edu

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Internet History/Stages, was Internet in Everyday Life
by david silver 26 Nov '02

26 Nov '02

Hi Folks, i just returned after giving a class lecture which featured an abbreviated history of the internet and found barry's post quite interesting. besides information about his and caroline haythornthwaite's book, he included the following excerpt from the introduction: *** Excerpts from the Editors' Introduction, Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite: _The Internet in Everyday Life_ is about the second age of the Internet as it descends from the firmament and becomes embedded in everyday life. The first age of the Internet was a bright light shining above everyday concerns. In the euphoria, many analysts lost their perspective. The rapid contraction of the dot.com economy has brought down to earth the once-euphoric belief in the infinite possibility of Internet life. *** i'm curious about this notion of two stages of the internet. if i'm reading the paragraph correctly, the authors suggest the net has had two stages: before and after the dot.com crash. i'm interested in hearing what others think about this concept of a two-staged internet history. in my own lecture this morning, i tracked a number of stages, all of which contain, i believe, significant differences between them. for example (and this is the abridged version): 1960s/early 1970s - ARPANET 1975 - a more social internet with lists like SF-Lovers 1979 - a more public internet (here i'm defining the internet more expansively) with the introduction of usenet groups late 1980s/early 1990s - mass influx of users via prodigy/compuserve/aol 1991 - a more distributive (and later graphical) turn with berners-lee's world wide web, followed by mosaic (1993), and netscape (1994) 1995 - netscape goes public, wall street goes crazy, dot.com daze begins etc etc etc. (like all historical stages, these are complex and reflect an interesting intersection among social and cultural contexts, technological developments, economic conditions, etc.) thoughts? david silver http://faculty.washington.edu/dsilver/

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"VIRTUAL ART" by Oliver Grau: Lecture Series
by Patrick Hutsch 26 Nov '02

26 Nov '02

VIRTUAL ART: From Illusion to Immersion' by Oliver Grau (forthcoming from MIT Press) See TOUR DATES below Although many people view virtual and mixed realities as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. The search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion and shows how each epoch used the technical means available to produce maximum illusion from Pompeiis Villa dei Misteri via baroque frescoes, panoramas, immersive cinema to the CAVE. He describes the metamorphosis of the concepts of art and the image and relates those concepts to interactive art, interface design, agents, telepresence, and image evolution. Grau retells art history as media history, helping us to understand the phenomenon of immersion beyond the hype. Doing that, Grau draws on the work of contemporary artists like Maurice Benayoun, Charlotte Davies, Monika Fleischmann, Eduardo Kac, Christa Sommerer, Michael Naimark, Simon Penny, Daniela Plewe, Jeffrey Shaw et al. Oliver Grau is lecturer in Art History at Humboldt University, Berlin, and head of the German Science Foundation's project on "Immersive Art". He is creating the International Database of Virtual Art with the aid of the Federal Ministry of Education and Science. Grau is visiting professor in Linz. LECTURE TOUR (sponsored by Goethe Institute and various hosts). San Francisco, UC Berkeley, Monday Dec. 2 The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium 160 Kroeber Hall Curated by Ken Goldberg with ATC Advisory Board 7:30-9:00pm Stanford University, Tuesday Dec. 3 4:15 pm Stanford University, Lane History Building 200, Room 307 Los Angeles, UCLA (Department of Design and Media Arts), Wednesday Dec. 4 6 pm - 7 pm Kinross North Bldg. Room 104 - EDA Chicago, School of the Art Institute, Friday Dec. 6 Noon talk from 12-1p.m. SAIC Auditorium 280 S. Columbus Dr. (Corner of Jackson and Columbus Dr.) Toronto, Goethe-Institut, Sunday Dec. 8 Goethe-Institut Toronto 11:00 am, New Media ,Frühstück' 163 King St. W. Ann Arbor, UMICH/School of Art and Design, Monday Dec. 9 Art & Architecture Building, 5:15 p.m. North Campus, Bonisteel Boulevard New York, Parsons School of Design, Tuesday Dec. 10 Parsons School of Design, Tishman Auditorium 66 West 12th Street, 7 p.m. Moderated by Christiane Paul, the Whitney's adjunct curator of new media arts. (For more information: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=26570CB6-AB47-414B-A78…)

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