Frank Beacham's Journal

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is 67 years old today

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is 67 years old today.

In this photo, from the late 1980s, Gates explains his concept of Microsoft’s “office.”

It was then to be a paperless office. That didn’t quite work out.

Photo by Frank Beacham

Tim Berners-Lee is 67 years old today

Tim Berners-Lee is 67 years old today.

Berners-Lee is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March, 1989, and implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid-November of that same year.

Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work.

In June, 2009, then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Berners-Lee would work with the UK Government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force.

Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are the two key figures behind data.gov.uk, a UK government project to open up almost all data acquired for official purposes for free re-use. He was honored as the "Inventor of the World Wide Web" during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared in person, working with a vintage NeXT Computer at the London Olympic Stadium.

He tweeted "This is for everyone," which instantly was spelled out in LCD lights attached to the chairs of the 80,000 people in the audience.

Berners-Lee is one of the pioneer voices in favor of net neutrality, and has expressed the view that ISPs should supply "connectivity with no strings attached" and should neither control nor monitor customers' browsing activities without their expressed consent.

He advocates the idea that net neutrality is a kind of human network right: "Threats to the Internet, such as companies or governments that interfere with or snoop on Internet traffic, compromise basic human network rights."

Photo by Geoff Pugh

Serendipity in Media — A Personal Essay

Serendipity in Media — A Personal Essay

by Frank Beacham

Some observers, such as the late Neil Postman in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, believe that the attention span of humans has decreased as modern technology — especially the internet and television — has increased in volume.

Internet users, especially young ones, can move from web page to web page at astounding speed. Most now spend only seconds on the average website. So today, a major issue for modern media is how to capture and maintain a user’s attention.

Studies have shown that the neural pathways of seasoned internet users are altered as they experience heightened activity in their pre-frontal cortexes (the area of the brain that is mostly responsible for processing complex thoughts, personality expressions, decision making and social behavior).

However, this fundamental “re-wiring” of the human brain as a result of heightened internet use means that “we read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online,” said Nicholas Carr in his seminal Wired article from 2010.

Carr reported that it is not only the span and scope of information that is detrimental to our ability to focus, but the speed and simultaneity at which we are exposed to it.

Hyperlinks, advertisements, share buttons and cues to related content are just some of the distracting influences that drive users away from the seemingly simple act of reading and exploring, not to mention the constant pressure of open chat windows, email updates and social media connectivity.

The bottom line, Carr found, is that attention is a limited resource that must be used wisely on the internet to avoid superfluous visual pathways and exits.

Sadly, this trend subverts the very core idea that Tim Berners-Lee conceived in 1989 when he invented the World Wide Web, the internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing.

The genius of the WWW's hyperlinks was the ability for ordinary computer users to easily discover new places and ideas with a simple click of a computer mouse. The very randomness of discovery through hit and miss surfing is one of the endearing strengths of the web.

Like the best of travel — the kind where there's no preset agenda — open-minded people make personal discoveries through accident and sagacity. It's a modern version of serendipity, the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

The issue of serendipity on the internet unexpectedly evolved into a major topic of discussion a few years ago at symposium at the Media Laboratory on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Peter Sellars, a noted director of theater, opera and film, offered memorable insight on the subject.

Hundreds of years ago, Sellars said, people in search of knowledge went on personal pilgrimages for information. The process, he said, could take years. By not having the information at their fingertips, there was experience attached to the search that made the finding of the information far more meaningful.

"The actual act of finding something had value," he said. "It was a beautiful thing because when you found something it meant something."

Now, said Sellars, "we are getting all this information with no experience attached to it. Where there is no pilgrimage, the information itself is debased, devalued and dehumanized. In a sense the ratio of experience to information content is radically altered. What's irritating about the age of information is that it creates this yuppie denial of experience. We have everything at our fingertips, but we don't value anything."

The "untamed quality" of the basic internet structure appeals to Sellars because it allows the user to wander and discover information through personal experience. "To just meander is one of the pleasures of life," he noted.

To have the audience making wrong turns through the information "is exactly the point," Sellars continued. "That's where the juice is."

Today's electronic media reflects only a single point of view. "A very narrow group of people are creating this insane gridlock" on information about human experience, Sellars said. "We are aware there are many, many voices that we don't hear today at all. The CBS Evening News represents only one voice."

Thinking, creative people, Sellars said, "must break out of the official information structure" to find new ways to express important subjects that mainstream media refuses to address. "You get the feeling that huge parts of human experience are going undocumented and unrecognized," he continued.

"Aristotle wrote about the attempts to touch the totality of an experience. As human beings, we are complex, divided and multilayered. Therefore, what satisfies us is complex, multilayered and has all these built-in conflicts just as we do. How do with set up (new media) structures that show how we really feel?"

We are only a few years into the science and art of web site design. Are most new web sites simply not complex, divided and multilayered enough to sustain a demanding audience?

Or, perhaps, is it that modern audiences are not as adventurous as they'd like to believe they are — quietly preferring the comfort of simplified, shorthand information delivery over a more demanding, thoughtful exchange of ideas?

These fundamental Internet questions are still on the table and have yet to be answered.

William Gibson is 74 years old today

William Gibson is 74 years old today.

An American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and essayist who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk sub-genre, Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982) and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984).

In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web.

Having changed residence frequently with his family as a child, Gibson became a shy, ungainly teenager who often read science fiction. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding school in Arizona, Gibson evaded the draft during the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada in 1968, where he became immersed in the counterculture.

After settling in Vancouver he eventually became a full-time writer. He retains dual citizenship.

Gibson's early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of cybernetics and computer networks on humans — a "combination of lowlife and high tech." The short stories were published in popular science fiction magazines.

The themes, settings and characters developed in these stories culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered critical and commercial success, effectively initiating the cyberpunk literary genre.

Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained associated with Neuromancer, his work has continued to evolve.

After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the Sprawl trilogy, Gibson became an important author of another science fiction sub-genre — steampunk — with the 1990 alternate history novel The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling.

Gibson has written more than twenty short stories and ten critically acclaimed novels (one in collaboration), and has contributed articles to several major publications and collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers and musicians.

His thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors, design, academia, cyberculture and technology.

Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, is 83 years old today

Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, is 83 years old today.

Brand founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

Brand attended Phillips Exeter Academy, before studying biology at Stanford University, from which he graduated in 1960. As a soldier in the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills. He was later to express the view that his experience in the military had fostered his competence in organizing.

A civilian again in 1962, he studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College and participated in a legitimate scientific study of then-legal LSD in Menlo Park, California.

Brand has lived in California ever since. He and his wife live on Mirene, a 64-foot-long working tugboat. Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a former shipyard in Sausalito.

Brand works in Mary Heartline, a grounded fishing boat about 100 yards away. A favorite item of his is a table on which Otis Redding is said to have written “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay.” Brand acquired it from an antiques dealer in Sausalito.

Through scholarship and by visiting numerous Indian reservations, he familiarized himself with the Native Americans of the West. Native Americans have continued to be an important cultural interest, an interest which has re-emerged in Brand's work in various ways through the years.

By the mid-1960s, he was associated with author Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters." In San Francisco, with his partner, Zach Stewart, Brand produced the Trips Festival, an early effort involving rock music and light shows.

This was one of the first venues at which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. About 10,000 attended and Haight-Ashbury emerged as a community.

Tom Wolfe describes Brand in the beginning of his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

In 1966, Brand campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He distributed buttons for 25 cents each asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" He thought the image of our planet might be a powerful symbol.

In 1967, a satellite took the photo. It adorned the first (Fall, 1968) edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Later in 1968, a NASA astronaut took an Earth photo from Moon orbit, which became the Catalog's next front image in spring, 1969.

In 1970, Earth Day began to be celebrated. During a 2003 interview, Brand explained that the image "gave the sense that Earth’s an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it’s so graphic, this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum."

In late 1968, Brand assisted electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart with The Mother of All Demos, a famous presentation of many revolutionary computer technologies (including hypertext, email and the mouse) to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

Brand surmised that given the necessary consciousness, information and tools, human beings could reshape the world they had made (and were making) for themselves into something environmentally and socially sustainable.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally. In 1968, using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, Brand and his colleagues created issue #1 of The Whole Earth Catalog, a book with the significant subtitle, "access to tools.”

Brand and his wife Lois travelled to communes in a 1963 Dodge truck known as the Whole Earth Truck Store, which moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California.

That first oversize Catalog, and its successors in the 1970s and later, reckoned that many sorts of things were useful "tools": books, maps, garden tools, specialized clothing, carpenters' and masons' tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers and personal computers.

The influence of these Whole Earth Catalogs on the rural back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, and the communities movement within many cities, was widespread throughout the United States, Canada and Australia. A 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies, and it won the first U.S. National Book Award in category Contemporary Affairs.

To continue this work and also to publish full-length articles on specific topics in the natural sciences and invention, Brand founded the CoEvolution Quarterly (CQ) during 1974. It was aimed primarily at educated laypersons.

In 1985, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded The WELL ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over. The WELL won the 1990 Best Online Publication Award from the Computer Press Association.

Almost certainly the ideas behind the WELL were greatly inspired by Douglas Engelbart's work at SRI International. Brand was acknowledged by Engelbart in "The Mother of All Demos" in 1968 when the computer mouse and video conferencing were introduced.

A few of Brand's aphorisms (on which he has elaborated) are that civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.

These include "Environmental health requires peace, prosperity and continuity,” "Technology can be good for the environment" and (perhaps most famously) "Information wants to be free."

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is 66 years old today

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is 66 years old today.

In this photo, from the late 1980s, Gates explains his concept of Microsoft’s “office.”

It was then to be a paperless office. That didn’t quite work out.

Photo by Frank Beacham

More than two million Chinese government employees alone monitor China’s Twitter-clone, Weibo, the Beijing News has reported

More than two million Chinese government employees alone monitor China’s Twitter-clone, Weibo, the Beijing News has reported.

Not all of these people — rather amusingly called "internet opinion analysts" — are actively censoring web content. Instead they are trawling social media for troubling entries that are indexed and collated and then passed on to a presumably smaller group of actual decision-makers.

All of these people are apparently on the government's payroll.

In July, 1981, I went to China when it first opened to Americans. In those days, there was no internet, but still plenty of censorship. In fact, a guide told me a Chinese citizen could be put in prison for possession of a Playboy magazine. (I gave him one as a parting gift, being very careful in the handoff!)

China may be more modern today, but the reigns of censorship remain tight. The internet there is monitored closely — just as in United States and most other countries. Wherever you are in the world today, be aware.

Above, I pose with two Chinese censors in 1981.

Serendipity in Media — A Personal Essay

Serendipity in Media — A Personal Essay

Some observers, such as the late Neil Postman in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, believe that the attention span of humans has decreased as modern technology — especially the internet and television — has increased in volume.

Internet users, especially young ones, can move from web page to web page at astounding speed. Most now spend only seconds on the average website. So today, a major issue for modern media is how to capture and maintain a user’s attention.

Studies have shown that the neural pathways of seasoned internet users are altered as they experience heightened activity in their pre-frontal cortexes (the area of the brain that is mostly responsible for processing complex thoughts, personality expressions, decision making and social behavior).

However, this fundamental “re-wiring” of the human brain as a result of heightened internet use means that “we read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online,” said Nicholas Carr in his seminal Wired article from 2010.

Carr reported that it is not only the span and scope of information that is detrimental to our ability to focus, but the speed and simultaneity at which we are exposed to it.

Hyperlinks, advertisements, share buttons and cues to related content are just some of the distracting influences that drive users away from the seemingly simple act of reading and exploring, not to mention the constant pressure of open chat windows, email updates and social media connectivity.

The bottom line, Carr found, is that attention is a limited resource that must be used wisely on the internet to avoid superfluous visual pathways and exits.

Sadly, this trend subverts the very core idea that Tim Berners-Lee conceived in 1989 when he invented the World Wide Web, the internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing.

The genius of the WWW's hyperlinks was the ability for ordinary computer users to easily discover new places and ideas with a simple click of a computer mouse. The very randomness of discovery through hit and miss surfing is one of the endearing strengths of the web.

Like the best of travel — the kind where there's no preset agenda — open-minded people make personal discoveries through accident and sagacity. It's a modern version of serendipity, the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

The issue of serendipity on the internet unexpectedly evolved into a major topic of discussion a few years ago at symposium at the Media Laboratory on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Peter Sellars, a noted director of theater, opera and film, offered memorable insight on the subject.

Hundreds of years ago, Sellars said, people in search of knowledge went on personal pilgrimages for information. The process, he said, could take years. By not having the information at their fingertips, there was experience attached to the search that made the finding of the information far more meaningful.

"The actual act of finding something had value," he said. "It was a beautiful thing because when you found something it meant something."

Now, said Sellars, "we are getting all this information with no experience attached to it. Where there is no pilgrimage, the information itself is debased, devalued and dehumanized. In a sense the ratio of experience to information content is radically altered. What's irritating about the age of information is that it creates this yuppie denial of experience. We have everything at our fingertips, but we don't value anything."

The "untamed quality" of the basic internet structure appeals to Sellars because it allows the user to wander and discover information through personal experience. "To just meander is one of the pleasures of life," he noted.

To have the audience making wrong turns through the information "is exactly the point," Sellars continued. "That's where the juice is."

Today's electronic media reflects only a single point of view. "A very narrow group of people are creating this insane gridlock" on information about human experience, Sellars said. "We are aware there are many, many voices that we don't hear today at all. The CBS Evening News represents only one voice."

Thinking, creative people, Sellars said, "must break out of the official information structure" to find new ways to express important subjects that mainstream media refuses to address. "You get the feeling that huge parts of human experience are going undocumented and unrecognized," he continued.

"Aristotle wrote about the attempts to touch the totality of an experience. As human beings, we are complex, divided and multilayered. Therefore, what satisfies us is complex, multilayered and has all these built-in conflicts just as we do. How do with set up (new media) structures that show how we really feel?"

We are only a few years into the science and art of web site design. Are most new web sites simply not complex, divided and multilayered enough to sustain a demanding audience?

Or, perhaps, is it that modern audiences are not as adventurous as they'd like to believe they are — quietly preferring the comfort of simplified, shorthand information delivery over a more demanding, thoughtful exchange of ideas?

These fundamental Internet questions are still on the table and have yet to be answered.

On this day in 1861 — 159 years ago — the Western Union Telegraph Company linked the eastern and western telegraph networks of the nation at Salt Lake City, Utah, completing a transcontinental line that allowed instantaneous nationwide communication

On this day in 1861 — 159 years ago — workers of the Western Union Telegraph Company linked the eastern and western telegraph networks of the nation at Salt Lake City, Utah, completing a transcontinental line that for the first time allowed instantaneous communication between Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

Stephen J. Field, chief justice of California, sent the first transcontinental telegram to President Abraham Lincoln, predicting that the new communication link would help ensure the loyalty of the western states to the Union during the Civil War.

The push to create a transcontinental telegraph line had begun only a little more than year before when Congress authorized a subsidy of $40,000 a year to any company building a telegraph line that would join the eastern and western networks.

The Western Union Telegraph Company, as its name suggests, took up the challenge, and the company immediately began work on the critical link that would span the territory between the western edge of Missouri and Salt Lake City.

The obstacles to building the line over the sparsely populated and isolated western plains and mountains were huge. Wire and glass insulators had to be shipped by sea to San Francisco and carried eastward by horse-drawn wagons over the Sierra Nevada.

Supplying the thousands of telegraph poles needed was an equally daunting challenge in the largely treeless Plains country, and these too had to be shipped from the western mountains. In the summer of 1861, a party of Sioux warriors cut part of the line that had been completed and took a long section of wire for making bracelets.

Later, however, some of the Sioux wearing the telegraph-wire bracelets became sick, and a Sioux medicine man convinced them that the great spirit of the "talking wire" had avenged its desecration.

Thereafter, the Sioux left the line alone, and the Western Union was able to connect the East and West Coasts of the nation much earlier than anyone had expected and a full eight years before the transcontinental railroad would be completed.

The Telegraph Office in the photo below shows where the east and west coasts lines were joined in 1861.

More than two million Chinese government employees alone monitor China’s Twitter-clone, Weibo, the Beijing News has reported.

Not all of these people — rather amusingly called "internet opinion analysts" — are actively censoring web content. Instead they are trawling social media for troubling entries that are indexed and collated and then passed on to a presumably smaller group of actual decision-makers.

All of these people are apparently on the government's payroll.

In July, 1981, I went to China when it first opened to Americans. In those days, there was no internet, but still plenty of censorship. In fact, a guide told me a Chinese citizen could be put in prison for possession of a Playboy magazine. (I gave him one as a parting gift, being very careful in the handoff!)

China may be more modern today, but the reigns of censorship remain tight. The internet there is monitored closely — just as in United States and most other countries. Wherever you are in the world today, be aware.

Here I pose with two Chinese censors in 1981.