The Networked Context
In the late 1960s, engineers working primarily in governmental and university contexts connected a handful of computers and equipped them to communicate with one another. During the 1970s, the Internet grew and became multifaceted and global. In the 1980s, computers became more widespread; more and more, companies relied on computers across their systems and services. Computer access in colleges and universities spread, and more and more K–12 institutions had a computer in some of the classrooms. For instance, in the school I attended in the mid-1980s, we had one computer in just one classroom shared by sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, that sat in the back of the room, unused the majority of the time. Because we had a Commodore 64 in the home, I knew the basics of using a computer, and figured out how to boot up and play the one game that came with the school’s computer. As far as I remember, that was the only use the computer got in 1984.
In the early 1990s, when the Internet was still text-only and exclusively hierarchical-menu-based, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for what would eventually become HTML and create an expansion to the Internet; this expansion was the Web (Hafner; Isaacson). By the mid-1990s, Web writers could hyperlink across pages and spaces, and embed images onto the pages they created. URLs became more commonplace than Internet protocols, and Web traffic sped past the activity of the Internet. In the early 2000s, “Web 2.0” emerged, anchored by more social, collaborative, networked approaches to content development and sharing.
To hone in on the networked aspects of digital writing and one particular Web 2.0 space, in July 2009, “Tom” had 264,987,947 friends on MySpace. In October, he had 268,880,678 friends. Tom made almost 4 million friends in less than three months. On MySpace, millions of people embraced the networked capabilities of the Web—posting updates, sharing experiences, adding photos, showing identity affiliations (by connecting with bands, actors, etc.), and more. By January 2012, however, Tom had 11,806,655 friends on MySpace. Tom had lost more than 257 million friends in just over three years; three years of Internet time happens at light speed. During this time, new spaces emerged and invited participation. New digital places were developed and allowed for different kinds of networked experiences. Facebook, during this time, transitioned from a school-specific (Harvard) site, to a national student-oriented site, to an open and public space. In late 2017, Facebook is home to more than 2 billion active users.
Another digital networked space is WordPress, which hosts more than 1.5 million new posts daily. Writers use this space to read, write, post, comment, upload, search, embed video, connect to other media spaces (such as Flickr, Twitter, and Instagram) and more. The first tweet was sent on March 21, 2006. In late 2016, more than 10,000 tweets were sent every second. In an interesting moment of digital–analog convergence, the Library of Congress (LoC) began archiving all public tweets in April 2010. In a white paper released almost three years into the project, the LoC eloquently noted:
As society turns to social media as a primary method of communication and creative expression, social media is supplementing and in some cases supplanting letters, journals, serial publications and other sources routinely collected by research libraries … Archiving and preserving outlets such as Twitter will enable future researchers’ access to a fuller picture of today’s cultural norms, dialogue, trends and events to inform scholarship, the legislative process, new works of authorship, education and other purposes. (Allen; Library of Congress)
As of late 2016, however, the project was still stalled. Andrew McGill, in an August 2016 article in The Atlantic, asked, “Can Twitter Fit Inside the Library of Congress?” The issue isn’t with storing what’s happening across networked, digital spaces. The issue relates to making the cultural ephemera—expressed in more than 500 million public tweets per day—usable, accessible, and understandable. McGill further pointed out that when the LoC began archiving public tweets, only 5 million or so were sent per day, and those were text-only. Twitter today supports the embedding of images and video, and hashtags themselves have emerged as a unique language. Preservation becomes a bigger issue than storing tweets on a server; making this big data accessible requires anchors to cultural norms, historic trends, and complex ways of parsing the data tweets contain.
Another networked space that has truly transformed the media landscape is YouTube, which launched in 2005. Traditionally, with conventional media, users are viewers. The majority of people who watch movies, watch television, and listen to radio do so in a fairly passive, consumerist role. With networked, digital media, however, users engage their roles in broad ways— consuming, producing, remixing, sharing, revising, and more (Dubisar and Palmeri; Fulwiler and Middleton; Halbritter; Morain and Swarts; Verzosa Hurley and Kimme Hea). On YouTube, users upload 24 hours of video every minute.
Digital is networked, and this network connectivity can, potentially, have a big impact on our classrooms. Jeff Grabill—a rhetoric and writing studies scholar, business owner, digital writing innovator, and software developer—has argued: “I just happen to be a writing teacher interested in the digital at the greatest moment in human history to be interested in both writing and the digital.” Grabill notes that the “dramatic and revolutionary transformation in our lives is the network. It’s the combination of computing and networking that allow us to write in radically new ways.”