Into the hands of the people

An increasing presence in the public realm, computing literally fell into the laps of laypeople when Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg imagined the future of notebook computing in Personal Dynamic Media. The Dynabook vision rightly envisioned personal computers being used by everyone from businessmen to children, both creatively and educationally. The pair did not foresee, however, today’s networked media use of DVD’s and MP3’s on personal laptops.

Seymour Papert had an even greater vision for children in his book Mindstorms, published in 1980. At a time when game consoles were becoming widely available for children’s use, Papert saw great educational potential in software that actually engages children in programming, something he called “constructionism.” Papert rightly predicted that future toys for children would be as technologically adept as million dollar IBM’s selling at the time.`

In Literary Machines, Ted Nelson culminated his ideas of hypertext and Vannear Bush’s conception of the memex in something called Xanadu. Xanadu is the “ultimate archive” that has characteristics of anarchy and navigation. While some aspects of Nelson’s Xanadu vision have come to fruition in reality, others have not; Nelson remains active today in continuing to push forward his ideas such as “ZigZag” and “transcopyrighting.”

The new media technologies realized by visionaries of the 1960’s and ‘70s spread into the public sphere in the ‘80s. In 1983, Ben Bagdikian took on the role of understanding and predicting what the hold of business would be on the emerging new media sphere in The Endless Chain. Bagdikian was precient in his prediction of increasing horizontal and vertical integration of companies and emerging monopolies over new media technology and distribution.

Today, direct manipulation interfaces are omnipresent, found in applications such as Photoshop as well as within internet browsers and sites. Ben Schneiderman in his 1983 essay “Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Languages,” describes how trends will move away from computer users employing a command language and toward direct manipulation interfaces, where computer activity will imitate activity in the user’s world via a metaphor system.

Direct manipulation interfaces were especially influential in the development of video games, where operators could move control devices and directly affect movement in the game interface. In her 1984 book, The Second Self, Sherry Turkle uses video games as a social laboratory to study human-computer interaction and concludes that humans and the perception of self are influenced by encounters with computers in distinct psychological ways.

Donna Haraway has been a huge presence in the last thirty years with her socialist-feminist inspired theories of social construction in this age of science and technology. Possibly her greatest work, Cyborg Manifesto, was published in 1985. The “mythology” describes the human’s place and position as a cyborg, part organism and part machine. While some people at the time were concerned about societies movement into the unknown of technology, Haraway argued that by imagining ourselves as part machine and products of technology allows for blurred boundaries and a greater approach to locating positional objectivity.

In 1984, Richard Stallman and other computer programmers saw their free software begin to slip away as AT&T announced that UNIX would no longer be free. Programmers found themselves in a position where they could no longer manipulate programs and, due to proprietary liscensing restrictions, they were unable to share programs with others. These changes inspired Stallman to create GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) In 1985, a project that spearheaded “copyleft” and the Free Software Foundation. Stallman and his projects still fight for shared sources and software freedom today.

While so much attention had been focused on Artificial Intelligence and the ability of humans to communicate with computers, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores wrote Understanding Computers and Cognition in 1986 to emphasize computers as tools for design.