first edition of this book. It would not have been written without the support of Elizabeth Swayze, my first editor at Wiley-Blackwell. She believed in the importance of the topic and provided ongoing encouragement through multiple drafts. Helpful comments about the content of the book were provided by my longtime friend and co-author on previous book projects, August E. “Augie” Grant, of the University of South Carolina. Amy Reitz and Carol Anderson Reinhardt assisted in editing early chapters and their input is gratefully appreciated. Don Zimmerman of Colorado State University was helpful in providing support from the Center for Research in Writing and Communication Technologies. I would also like to thank the graduate students enrolled in my telecommunication technology seminars for their insightful comments on the book’s first edition.
Assistance in locating photographs for inclusion in the book were provided by Marianne Heilig for her father’s photos, George Despres at MITRE, Lauren Skrabala at RAND, Angela Alvaro at Banco de Espana in Madrid, Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA, Dina Basin at SRI, Mekialaya White at KCNC-TV in Denver, Christine Engelbart and Mary Coppernoll at the Doug Engelbart Institute, Jayne Burke at NYU, Jan Walker at DARPA, Eric Mankin and Claude Zachary at USC, Sophie Tesauri at CERN, and by photographers Patrick Troud-Chastenet, Irene Fertik, and Gary MacFadden. Many images were provided by photographers via the Creative Commons, and this has become a helpful resource for authors and educators worldwide.
1 Immersion in the Digital Universe
In the August 2005 issue of Wired magazine, then-editor Kevin Kelly published an essay titled “We are the Web” that was widely read by its digitally savvy audience.1 In the essay, he made a number of predictions about what he termed “Web 2.0,” the second major iteration of the World Wide Web, which was then underway. He observed that the Web was an emergent technology before the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Netscape in 1995, but cited Eric Schmidt (then Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Sun Microsystems and later at Apple and Google) as noting that the day before the IPO the Web was nothing and afterward it was everything.
Kelly predicted that, with the rapid evolution of the Web at the time, “We would come to live inside this thing.”2 Recall that he made this prediction two years before the advent of the iPhone in 2007. I think he would be astonished to look back at present and realize how prescient he was with this insight. In fact, the term “immersion” is now widely used to describe experiencing a digitally created environment in such a profound manner that users are transported by their senses into that digital universe.
The rapid evolution of the mobile phone into a “smart” phone occurred during the transition from 3G to 4G wireless technologies in the decade between 2009 and 2019.3 I would argue that this transition marked a watershed in digital immersion in that users could download hundreds of new apps that transformed the phone into a portable computer capable of doing almost everything a laptop could do at that time. This key transition, and the evolution to 5G technologies, are addressed in greater detail in Chapter 8 on mobile telephony. However, most mobile device users today take for granted the remarkable number of services provided by their phones. In fact, the first thing that connected users do on arising is check their mobile devices – and heaven forbid that they have forgotten to recharge the battery overnight. Our smart phones often recharge on a bedside table next to a smart speaker that can provide the day’s weather forecast or the news headlines with a simple audible request to Alexa, Siri, or Google for more information. We do “live inside this thing,” as Kevin Kelly stated in 2005, and in ways that even the most ardent technophiles could not have predicted then.
The Social Media Universe
The routine daily use of online social media did not exist in 2005, as Facebook did not allow anyone without an . edu email address to join until 2006. In fact, telecommunication users prior to 2005 would not understand the specific meaning of any of these now-commonplace social media and online communication terms:
| AstroturfingBoomerangCancellingChatbotClickbaitDoxingFOMOFriendingGaslighting | Geotag#HashtagInfluencerInstagrammingNewsjackingPhishingRegramSelfie | StanSubtweetThreadTrollingUnfriendingUpvoteUXVlog |
| See the glossary in the front of this book for definitions to these commonly used words and technical terms and abbreviations in this text. | ||
Technology writer Clive Thompson credits the advent of Twitter as a new social media tool in 2006 with the arrival of a new “Age of Awareness.”4 Twitter was criticized at the time by some of the technocenti as a superficial communication tool due to the then-140-character limit on a single message. Thompson noted that author Tim Ferris referred to Twitter at the outset as “pointless email on steroids” and commented sardonically that Ferris today has 1.54 million Twitter followers. The user who did the most to highlight the power and reach of Twitter was the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. He discovered early in his career as a reality television host between 2004 and 2015, that he could bypass what he termed the “fake” mass media by reaching out directly to his online fan base through Twitter. While political commentators have noted that Twitter is perhaps not an ideal communication tool for conducting foreign policy by a head of government, its usage in the United States has expanded dramatically since its inception in 2006. Twitter’s 126 million daily users now include citizens from all walks-of-life and include media celebrities, companies, athletes, politicians, and media executives.5
Thompson states that the rise of Twitter in 2006 “represented a massive shift in the way that we pay attention to one another. The status update took off and we entered the era we still inhabit: the age of awareness.”6 While emails are often lengthy and infrequent, Twitter messages were brief by comparison and status updates could be posted by the hour. Following someone on Twitter (or other social media sites as they emerged after 2006) was like engaging in a stream of consciousness with that individual. Thompson said that, “It was like hearing them talk out loud all day long,” a trait that critics of then-president Trump complained about – during his first impeachment hearing in the US Senate in 2019, he posted a record 142 Tweets criticizing his trial.7
Trump’s Twitter usage notwithstanding, it has provided a voice for the disenfranchised in both positive and negative ways, as hashtags became shorthand for communication campaigns worldwide. The #blacklivesmatter and #metoo movements used social media to mobilize their activists and communicate their urgent messages to wider publics. In line with the Tao of Technology theme cited throughout this book, that the positive and negative effects of communication technologies are inseparable, the global use of social media provides numerous examples of negative antisocial uses. The #gamergate shaming of female e-game experts and the adoption of social media as a communication tool by hate and terrorist groups worldwide has fueled angst by those who viewed the promise of digital telecommunication as an essential tool to bridge gaps between diverse groups within and between nations.
Another problem with this age of awareness, according to Thompson, is that “it makes us prisoners of the here and now.” In other words, the never-ending 24/7 cycles of constantly “breaking” news and constant social media posts provide little respite from the tidal wave of information accessed on our mobile devices and at home. He cites Canadian media theorist Harold Innis as predicting that modern communication technology would make society “‘present-minded’ and unable to focus on anything except what is happening right now.”8 (see Chapter 7 for more on Innis, telecommunication, and empires). Anyone who has social media alerts transmitted to their mobile phones or their office computers is intimately familiar with the distractions they cause. Table 1.1 charts the global diffusion of social media since 2002.
