Evolution of the Internet
Resource List
The Assignment
On the Internet
From Class Notes
- Different Models of Evolution
- Life, Entropy, & the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
- In entropy, everything gets messier / spreads out spontaneously.
- Things falling apart make other things come together (order/disorder, expansion/contraction, speciation).
- Things get messier until someone does something.
- Within a closed system, entropy applies.
- Everythign is constantly changing. There were over a billion years between these steps (single cell --> multi, etc.).
- Common Descent & Natural Selection
- Clumpy diversity leads to theory of common descent.
- Evolution: interplay between randomness and linear natural selection.
- Rhizomatic
- Evolution/de-evolution of art -- nonlinear.
- Rhizomatic process crushed into linear model.
- Is the sequence of simple single cell, complex single cell, multicell a process of becoming better adapted? No! These things all still exist. Who's to say what's better?
- The development of something new creates a niche which had never existed before.
On Paper
- Deleuze, Gilles with Felix Guatarri. "Rhizome Versus Tree." The Deleuze Reader. Constantin V. Boundas, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
- p. 30: "A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles."
- p. 33: "...evolutionary schemas may be forced to abandon the old model of the tree and descent."
- p. 33: "aparallel evolution" -- the cat & the babboon evolve alongside each other but separately
- p. 35: rhizome- "unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature
- Mayr, Ernst. What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
- p. 7: "...the evidence for the conclusion that the world is not constant but is forever changing became so overwhelming that it could no longer be denied." ("continuous flux")
- p. 8: "Evolution is change in the properties of populations of organisms over time." (population as "unit" of evolution)
- p. 21: all organisms on Earth had common ancestors and that probably all life on Earth had started with a single origin of life."
- p. 22: "Their similarities were due to the heritage they had receieved from this ancestor, and the differences had been acquired since the ancestral lines had split."
- p. 30: vestigial structures
- p. 213: "Does selection lead to progress and perfection?"
- Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999.
- p. 1: Between the 1960s and 80s, the computer was "reborn as a means of communication."
- p. 1: From 1960s-1990s, "the Internet grew from a single experimental network serving a dozen sites in the United Sates to a globe-spanning system linking millions of computers."
- p. 2: Evolution of system occured "through an unusual... alliance between military and civilian interests.
- p. 3: "The history of the Internet is not, therefore, a story of a few heroic inventors; it is a tale of collaboration and conflict among a remarkable variety of players."
- p. 4: "The mergence of... the World Wide Web continues the trend of informal, decentralized, user-driven development"
- p. 4: "In computing, especially, systems and organizations have had to adapt to survive the relentless pace of technological change."
- p. 6: Use of the Internet for communication was not inevitable: "it was constructed through a series of social choices."
- p. 84: In the beginning, there were so few users that there was limited interaction among users in cyberspace.
- p. 113: "Over the course of a decade, the ARPANET (a single network that connected a few dozen sites) would be transformed into the Internet (a system of many interconnected networks, capable of almost indefinite expansion)."
- p. 215: "It took more than an inspired invention, however, to create an application that would bring the Internet mass popularity. It also required the right environment: widespread access to the Internet (made possible by privatization) and the technical means for uses to run the Web software (provided by the personal computer)."
- p. 220: "If the Internet is to continue as an innovative means of collaboration, discovery, and social interaction, it will need to draw on its legacy of adaptability and participatory design."
This page was created by Lauren Friedman for personal reference.
(This has been a fedira! production.)
