Historicizing "New Media"

An important event in television history:

The first televised US presidential debates in the 1960s

Presidential debates featured

• Richard Nixon

• John F. Kennedy

Debate was seen as an indicator of the power of

Television to shape public opinion based on politicians’ images

Some accounts of the history of computing begin with

Ancient tallies (over 20,000 YA)

Key functions of ancient tallies

• Counting

• Preservation of quantitative information

Babbage’s Analytical Engine was conceptualized in

1833

What was Babbage’s Analytical Engine

Machine that was intended to conduct mathematical operations at a rapid speed

Babbage’s Analytical Engine had two separate components

• “Mill”: processing

• “Store”: memory

Mathematician _ wrote notes to accompany an account of Babbage’s inventions

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace is credited with producing what some historians have called the first

Computer algorithm: a published descriptions of sequence of operations that could be used to solve mathematical problems on the Analytical Engine

Lovelace presented the idea that numbers could be used to

Represent information other than quantities

Babbage and Lovelace got inspiration from the

Jacquard Loom

Who introduced the Jacquard Loom

Joseph Marie Jacquard

The loom wove fabric in decorative patterns according to operations on

Punch cards

The loom was akin to hardware, the punch cards to

Software: they could be used to make the machine perform different functions

The loom was one instance of a development that was fundamental to the

Industrial Revolution: the introduction of machines that would perform what was formerly manual labour

The mechanization of the textile industry was met with

Sometimes violent opposition and protest from Luddites

Early institutional use of the computer

Hollerith’s census tabulating machine

Hollerith’s machine was able to

Count combined facts, using overlapping categories (age, sex, race, job, etc.)

Punched-card data processing became an industry—Hollerith founded a company that eventually became

IBM

The growing use of data processing was part of what sociologist Max Weber referred to as

“the rationalization of society”: development of new, impersonal criteria for categorizing people

WW2:_ and _were important military functions of computers

Coding and codebreaking

Example of why coding and codebreaking were important for WW2

Alan Turing worked in cryptanalysis for Britain, cracking German Enigma code with his Bombe machine

ENIAC, an electronic general-purpose computer was used to perform

Calculations regarding artillery firing and the hydrogen bomb

ARPAnet is a

US military computer network that would eventually expand to form the internet

By the mid-1070s, other nations, including Canada, were beginning to develop their own

Government-run networks

Computer technologies began to be marketed to individuals as well as corporations as

Home computers

Often, rigid and traditional gender roles were promoted in these ads:

Men checking stock prices, women cooking or engaging in household administrative labour

When did consumer market for computers expand rapidly

80s and 90s

In 1991: the _ introduced by who

World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee

In the mid 1990s: Internet service providers began offering

Commercial internet services to a mass market of computer users