An orientation to the approaches in the course, focusing on understanding computational, media, and communication technologies through their design principles, implementation of functions, and social-technical systems and networks.

Defining kinds of technologies, and differentiating the cognitive and symbolic technologies (media, information, and communication technologies) from general and instrumental technologies. Learning the methods for exposing and refuting technological determinist assumptions and how to develop descriptions and analyses for a more complete view of media technologies as implementations of human cognitive abilities and agency.

Students will begin learning how to develop conceptual tools for understanding technology that can be mobilized for "myth-busting" (countering misconceptions) and "de-blackboxing" (opening a technology through its system of interdependent social-technical components, histories of development, and distributed agency).

Major topics, concepts, and themes through the course:

• Technologies as architectures for ongoing combinations of implementable design concepts or abstract models (from tools and writing to complex machines, computation, and software-based media).
• Modular design principles and the logic of combinatoriality and hybridization.
• Media and computational technologies as combinatorial symbolic artefacts.
• De-blackboxing technologies that are received as closed totalities in consumer or business products: why "transparency" makes all technologies opaque for ordinary users.
• All dimensions of mediation and interface: social, technical, cultural, political, economic
• The mediating functions of computers, software, pan-digital platforms: media, mediations, and computer devices as a metamedium
• The continuum of technical implementations and cognitive externalizations: from language and symbolic capabilities to writing, the cumulative histories of media forms, and computer code.
• The analog-digital-analog continuum: contemporary experience of embedded and externalized media and computational technologies.
• Understanding major design concepts in computation, software, and digital networks so that you can participate in important debates about the future and betters uses of technology.

Busted Myths

• Utopian and Dystopian projections of technology
• Progressivist and other determinist futures for technology

Learning Objectives:

“What can be studied is always a relationship or an infinite regress of relationships. Never a ‘thing.’ ” -- Gregory Bateson

This unit will provide a framework for the main concepts and approaches used in the course. Through an interdisciplinary overview, students will learn important concepts, terms, and analytical tools for describing and understanding media, communication, and computational technologies as developed in recent research and theory. This framework provides powerful tools for "myth-busting" erroneous views about technology and for "de-blackboxing" everyday technologies by using their analyzing their interconnected components as interfaces to the larger system of dependencies -- their social and technical networks -- that allow them to work.

This week we'll begin learning how to apply important principles that, working together, produce the "effects" we often attribute to communication and computational technologies. We'll discover how and why "what's invisible is (often) the most powerful" in our technologies, and develop methods for opening up what's ordinarily invisible or hidden from view:

• understanding technologies not as single or isolated "products" but as connecting nodes in larger social- technical and economic networks that follow network "laws"
• the cumulative effects of combinatorial design principles for combining existing and prior technologies, methods, and functions in new combinatorial designs
• cognitive extension and off-loading onto artefacts: a primary function of all forms of symbolic expression -- from writing and images to computation and digital communication media -- is extending our cognitive abilities, intentions, and expressions through collective technical mediation

This framework also opens up larger and longer-term forces in human social history. Social and technical history over many centuries shows that there's a built-in "ratchet effect" in human systems of symbolic artefacts and communication technologies. Technologies like writing and material media for communications don't have to be reinvented by every generation of people in a society: the state of technical implementations hold in place (like locking in place a gear position on a ratchet) their cumulative history of development, and, further, enable ongoing development by those who extend and combine functions as new technologies emerge. Digital media and graphical displays in all our computational devices are great examples of the results of cumulative development and design principles for recombining technical mediation and social functions.

Introducing Key Concepts and Terms

• Combinatoriality and cumulative combinations
• Network effects in use of technologies
• Cognitive artefacts and cognitive technology
• Social construction of technology
• Metamedium (media designed for representing other media; e.g., windows-based display interfaces, mobile device screens, tablets)
• Deep Remix/Remixability (open recombinability as properties of digital media and software)

Learning Objectives and Main Topics:

Learning the major concepts and design principles of modular design in systems thinking for understanding the design and implementation of media, communication, computation, and information technologies.

Key Terms and Concepts:

• Modularity, modular design
• Complex system
• Decomposition, decomposable system (decomposing complex system/network into modules)
• Abstraction, abstraction layer or level (in hierarchy of modules and system functions)
• Combinatorial Design

Learning the major conceptual frameworks for communication and information theory as defined and used in electronics and computation, and ways to critique inherited models to advance more useful concepts for our communication and media environment today. Learning the concepts behind the engineering definition of information and communication is essential for understanding how all information and media technologies work, but because the engineering definitions are necessarily "pre-semantic" (or non-semantic) and bracket off the meanings of digitally encoded information units, the engineering model is not applicable for describing how we encode meaning and the many contexts of meaning that motivate and frame transmitted signals. We need other models of communication from linguistics, semiotics, and cognitive science to complete the description of human meaning making in artefactual communication and media representations.

Key Terms and Concepts:

• Information (as a unit of probability and differentiation from other possibilities)
• The Transmission model of Communication and Information
• Dominant metaphors: signal, conduit, container, channel, source, destination
• The meaning contexts of messages and information

Backgrounds: Why the Key Concepts of Information Theory are Important

Communication and information theory from the 1950s-80s is widely taken for granted in discussions of media, technology, and computation. The signal-code-transmission model of information theory has been the foundation of signal and message transmission systems in all communication technology from the telegraph to the Internet and digital wireless signals. Originally developed as models for transmitting error-free electronic signals in telecommunications, these theories and concepts have also also informed models of meaning communication in culture more broadly (with severe limitations on how meaning can be explained).

It's essential to understand how the signal transmission model works and why it's important for all the digital technologies that we use. It provides an essential abstraction layer in all electronic and digital systems. We also need to understand that it is not a model for the larger sense of communication and meaning systems that our symbolic-cognitive technologies allow us to implement. We'll need to understand why meaning and social uses of communication are left out of the signal transmission model and how we use signals and coded information units within the systems of meaning that motivate them.

How do we get "meanings" into and from bits and data? The meaning networks of communicators and information users (for anything expressed in any medium) are understood, assumed, and encoded in signal mediums but are not properties of their material form. (This is the basic feature of human symbols, which is the main subject of semiotics: meaning is not a property of perceptible signals but is what is enacted by cognitive agents who use collectively understood material signs.) In any model of information and communication, we also need to account for contexts in two senses of the term: both the sender's and receiver's context (world of meanings and kinds of expressions assumed), and the message's contexts (its relation to other messages both near and far in time).

Examples: We know when information units/data have been transmitted and received successfully because we recognize the symbolic units (meaning units) that are being encoded! The background technologies are designed to send and receive signals (e.g., radio waves, bits and bytes) without error (or reduction in error for probable decoding). But we would only design this kind of system because we are encoding symbolic expressions or representations already understood as meaningful. Think about the fact that we recognize as meaningful:

• the text in text messages (after the information is interpreted in software for rendering on our displays): meaning is what motivated the encoded information;
• the spatial array of visual information in a photograph after display
• the sounds that we recognize as a musical genre when it plays through audio devices.

We see many other limitations in the linear one-way transmission models for describing communication: all of our communications have production and reception contexts that form networks of meaning, use, and purposes that must be accounted for in other ways. Further, what kind of models can account for all the communication "modalities": one to one, one-many, many-one, many-many, and dialog (one-other, mutually assumed); synchronous (at the same time) and asynchronous (delays in reception-response, short time span or very long).

The transmission model of information is essential to understand, but can't be used for extrapolating to a model for communication and meaning (as it often is in some schools of thought). The signal transmission theory is constrained by a signal-unit point-to-point model. It can't account for the fact that in living human communication there is never only one message to be communicated or one unit of communication/information but, rather, a message unit appears in a dense network of prior, contemporaneous, and future messages surrounding anything communicated. The motivation context of a message includes essential meta-information known to communicators using a medium (kinds/genres of messages, social conventions, assumed background knowledge). We will investigate how this works more fully next week.

Learning Objectives and Topics:

Gaining a foundation in the significance of the research generated by the study of symbolic cognition in intersecting disciplines and sciences--linguistics, anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science more broadly--and how this developing knowledge base allows up to ask better informed questions about technology and mediated communication systems. Learning the main topics of research and debate in cognitive science fields on mind-brain / machine-computer parallels and why the models for computation and cognition have been so interconnected.

Research in many fields continues to discover more and more about the consequences of being the Symbolic Species in Terrence Deacon's term. This week, you will learn the main concepts from cognitive science research for describing the "cognitive continuum" from language and symbolic representation to multiple levels of abstraction in any symbolic representation (spanning writing, mathematics, symbolic media like images and combinations in film and multimedia, and computation and code). The human ability for making meaning in any kind of symbolic expression and embodying meaningful, collectively understood expression in media technologies depends on the use of symbols and the advantages of symbolic cognition.

We will follow a major direction in recent research that studies media, communication, and computational technologies in a continuum of accumulating cognitive advances that have enabled a cascading series of human capabilities afforded by symbolic cognition: the ability of abstract thought and the reflexive use of symbols, off-loading cognitive tasks and memory by extension in artefacts, externalized media storage, and automated computational processes.

Overview of Topics and Themes:
Symbolic Cognition, Sign Systems, Mediation > Cognitive Technologies

Within a broad cluster of fields--ranging from neuroscience to cognitive linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and computational models of cognition and artificial intelligence research--there has been a major convergence on questions and interdisciplinary methods for studying cognition, human meaning-making and the "symbolic faculty" generally, including all our cumulative mediations and externalizations in "cognitive technologies." Cognitive science has been closely related to computer science in seeking computational models for brain and cognitive processes, and proposing hypotheses that explain cognition as a form of computation (the "computational theory of mind/brain"), and attempts to model complex parallel software processes on what we know about the neural bases of cognition ("cognitive computing").

For the study of human symbolic cognition and meaning making in sign systems, many disciplines now converge around the major question of how our technically mediated meaning systems function with analogous and parallel "architectures" that must include (1) rules for combinatoriality of components (an underlying syntax for forming complex and recursive expressions of meaning units), (2) intersubjective preconditions "built-in" to the meaning system for collective and shared cognition, and (3) material symbolic-cognitive externalizations (e.g., writing, images, artefacts) transmitted by means of "cognitive technologies" (everything from writing to digital media and computer code) which enable human cultures and cultural memory. This recent interdisciplinary research is a "game changer" for the way we think about human communication and media technologies.

Synthesizing views, we can say that the human symbolic faculty has generated a continuum of functions from language and abstract symbolic thought to machines, media technologies, and computation:

The mainstream disciplines in communication and media studies are very conservative (remaining within a demarcated field in the humanities and social sciences) and have not yet incorporated recent advances in cognitive science fields that are directly relevant to core assumptions and research questions on language, symbolic culture, and media technologies. We therefore have an open opportunity to learn from cognitive science fields and reconfigure the inter- and transdisciplinary field in promising ways for both theoretical and applied work.

Related Principles in all Symbolic Systems and Technologies: Combinatoriality, Compositionality, Componentiality, Recursion, Externalized Memory in symbols and artefacts, Intersubjective and Collective foundation of meaning.

Learning Objectives

Gaining a foundation in the influential theories, key terms, concepts, and interdisciplinary approaches for the study of media and symbolic, technical mediation that have shaped research and popular conceptualization from the 1960s to the present.

The cluster of terms for media and interface are used in so many ways that we need to unpack the history of the concepts and find useful ways of using terms in descriptions and analysis. What is "new" about new media, software controlled media, and network mediation, and what aspects can we understand as a continuum in re-combinatorial functions and processes? How can we best understand, describe, and analyze the concepts and implementations for interfaces and multimodal forms? How do interfaces go "meta" in combinatoriality and presentation frameworks (computer devices and digital display screens as a metamedium, a medium for other media)? How do media technologies media social agency and how do they become major nodes in distributed agency and cognition?

Key terms and concepts:

• Medium/media as social-technical implementations of communication and meaning functions maintained by roles in a larger cultural, economic, and political system
• Mediation as a function of a medium (e.g, text/print, image technologies, media industries)
• Interface as the physical-material contact point for technical mediation with users (social-cognitive agents) of media
• Technical Mediation (in Latour's terms) as the means of distributing agency in a social-technical network
• Media System as the interdependent social configuration of technologies and institutions
• Communication vs. Transmission (in Debray's terms): differentiating media technologies and their functions for almost synchronous communication within a cultural group (e.g., telephone, email, TV, radio) vs. technologies for transmission of meaning and cultural identity over long time spans (e.g., written artefacts, books, recorded media, computer memory storage, museums, archives).

Learning how we got from the model of computation and computers as general logical-symbolic processors to the idea of "personal" computers for any human-software interaction and computational processes for creating, combining, processing, displaying, storing, and transmitting of human symbolic representation in any digitizable medium.

Learning the symbolic and cognitive functions of media supports and interfaces in the history of implementations, and the affordances of computationally (software-based) represented media. What can we learn about abstractable re-implementable functions in the continuum of symbolically mediating material supports from passive interfaces (writing and image surfaces, substrates, recordable media) to metamedia (computer screens, graphical and touch interfaces for controlling software) for representing other media? Can you describe and trace the substrate function (the symbolic use of supports, substrates, surface material media for inscription and memory, images, photographic) to graphical "windows"-based computer displays (functioning as a meta-substrate or metamedium, a surface medium for representing and interpreting other media). How can other, new combinations of media and software emerge from these key design principles?

Key Concepts and terms:

• Interface (for human interaction with, and control of, software representations and outputs)
• Graphical User Interface (GUI) and screen interfaces
• Metamedium / Metamedia
• Substrate Function (for symbolic representations)
• Continuum of symbolic functions and the Meta function in computation and digital information/media

Learning Objectives and Topics:

This unit will focus more on the concepts and designs behind the hardware of our computational devices. Understanding the cumulative steps in the development of the computer from military, university engineering research, and business communities to a wide consumer base and multiple devices that take advantage of component miniaturization and networks. How did the computer "disappear" into consumer media appliances? The unanticipated convergence of telecommunications, computing, and methods for digitizing media (text, audio, graphics and images, photography, film/video). The transition to embedded computation and smaller processing chips in everyday use (examples: sensors, consumer devices, transportation systems).

Continuing with our ongoing case study of the iPhone:

Understanding the combinatorial path of technologies leading to the iPhone and other multipurpose mobile devices. Understanding the design demands of complex interdependent modular systems and the underlying non-technical and social-technical dependencies and agencies in a device like an iPhone. Analyzing technical components as interfaces to the larger dependency network of design principles and the social, institutional, and political-economic forces that have made the components and modular combination possible in this implementation.

Learning how to describe and understand digital media and the affordances and constraints of expressions and artefacts in digital form. We will focus on digital music and photography for understanding the technical specifications and formats, and the use of these media artefacts socially and culturally. By connecting the readings this week with earlier units in the course, you should be able to answer these questions:

• What happens in digitization of media (text, images, music, film/video), and what are the consequences and affordances of digital media platforms, interfaces, metamedia devices (mobile, tablets)?
• What are the differences between digitized media created in analogue platforms and "new" media "born digital"?
• How are digital media formats and production/playback/display software interfaces designed to re-mediate prior forms and re-implement their social-cultural-political functions (texts, images, photography, film/video/TV, music, news media).
• How do expose more clearly the analog-digital-analog continuum of contemporary media experience, and the significance of designing and programming "digital media" to simulate or emulate "analog media"?

Backgrounds

The analog-digital-analog continuum
We've seen much debate across many disciplines over the past 25 years about the status, properties, and functions of digital media -- as objects of culture (differences in artefacts with various uses and distribution), law (status of creative expression as copyrightable intellectual property), and economics (business and commercial value, monetization of everything digital). Fixation on things digital obscures a fundamental reality: we now live in an analog-digital-analog continuum -- with ongoing looping back and forth, among and between, the material and symbolic states.

What is digitization? The need for a basic conceptual foundation in how digital sampling works
The first readings provide some basic backgrounds in the common technical means for encoding/ representing light properties (like photographic images captured on sensors in a digital camera) and audio and music (encoding continuous acoustic waves in an audio file). The trick we do in digitizing is representing mathematically what occurs in perceptible forms like visual representations and sounds by taking many time-stamped snapshots or slices (samples) of these continuous time and energy states (known as "analog"), using software to calculate all the various energy values at each defined sliced time sequence (a sample, say, in milliseconds), and then encode these sections or slices of continuous states as discrete time representations with quantifiable values. (There -- you have the basic definition a "digital medium"!) The details get technical and mathematical very quickly, but learn as much as you can to demystify the basics of digitization. Of course, when we display or play back the digitally encoded information (using software for reversing the process and hardware for rendering media in perceptible forms) we are back in our analog perceptible-symbolic-material world. Wikipedia has useful explanations for:

• The Nyquist-Shannon sampling formula (the basis for all digital media representations)
• The Fourier Discrete Time transform (the mathematics behind how and why digital sampling of continuous time energy values works)
• The Analog-Digital and Digital-Analog Converters (in all devices and PCs, usually called DACs)

Digital media expose the real power of our symbolic systems that was "black boxed" in analog!
Our creation and perception of digital media artefacts (songs, photographs, film/video, computer files, Web pages, mobile app displays) begins, ends, and is motivated by the humanly perceived, socially embedded, material-symbolic forms that we can now see not as forms tied to a material substrate like paper, film or a recording medium, but as symbols capable of multiple implementations or instantiations. Writing, text, images, symbolic sounds, even 3D artefacts were never really functions of their traditional or historical media or their past substrates of representation, storage, and transmission. Writing, text, and images have now become more powerful and more widely distributed symbolic forms than ever before. Our digital technologies now expose what was always hidden in plain sight about our symbolic representations: they are empowered by social and cultural functions, not by the state of their material forms. There are definitely many "messages" in the material form of a medium: one of them is the how media technologies can reshape and re-mediate symbolic forms and social uses of communication that preexist any specific, historical configuration of technical mediation systems themselves.

So, how de we define "being digital" or "digital being"? Is there a "digital culture"?
We almost always use digital media to simulate, emulate, or reproduce the experience of analog media, that is, representing symbolic forms that can be created and received by human senses and perceptual organs. You frame and shoot a photo on your smart phone with the same eyes and assumptions used for film photos or for viewing photo prints or reproductions in print media. We read digital text with the same eyes and assumptions for reading printed texts. Adobe Photoshop began with, and still incorporates, photo darkroom concepts, processes, and metaphors established in analog lens and film-based photography. Similar analog music and audio conceptual extensions apply to digital audio workstation software (DAWs like Reason, Logic, and Protools) used in music production and in DJ live performance software platforms (usually with an interface that incorporates a virtual turntable look). Your smart phone or PC couldn't play or display digital music or video without a DAC (digital-analog converter hardware and software) and CODEC software for the specific file format to be interpreted for the hardware. On our devices, it all culminates in a transducer, a physical-material interface that converts electronic signals to perceptible images (in the humanly perceptible light spectrum and cinematic frame rate for video) and audio sounds (acoustic wave forms output in the humanly audible range).

“Digital culture” can only mean our social and cultural experience with computational and software technologies embedded in the whole cumulative combination of technologies that we live with. While digital media and software agents often remediate prior functions and agencies and can automate many processes behind the scenes, these technologies all coexist with prior or “traditional” technical mediations and symbolic systems. Our "mediation continuum" includes, subsumes, and folds in, digitizable mediations that we now use to record, store, transform, and distribute all forms of past and present media from text and historical images to film/video and all forms of hybrid media. The real "transform" (in the algorithmic sense) is now found in two additive features: the ability for digital artefacts (any encoded unit of expression) to be open to unlimited additional software processing or interpretation, and the ability to off-load and store all cumulative media representations in digitizable forms for ongoing recall, processing, and interpretation.

Digital music, photography, and video thus begin and end in analog material, perceptible states (except when produced or composed in software as a media object for later output). If we're always in an analog world, what are the important differences in the media states or formats? As Manovich and many others argue convincingly, the difference in the digital artefact is its continual openness to software processing and transformations beyond any initial physical or recorded state. Further, digital media can be produced and output with many layers of digital/software production, and can be totally produced in software. We have post-photography photos and film/video that are either totally abstract (not formed by lens-based captured light and images) or HD hyperreal simulations of photo-optical representations (e.g., the movies Avatar, Life of Pi, and The Avengers). We have all kinds of music with software generated sounds mixed (in software!) with live acoustic (analog) instrument and vocal sounds, and all kinds of hybrid mixed combinations of sound sources. What, then, is the status of the sometimes fixed but mutable digital artefact? How do we best understand the layers and interfaces in all forms of mediation and remediation when our media are always already hybrids?

Key terms and concepts to be learned:

• Analog / Digital
• Digitization
• Sample (sample rate)
• Codec (analog-digital enCODing and DECoding hardware and software)
• Digital artefact / digital object
• Digital media format/standards (e.g., .jpg ; .mp3; .pdf; .doc; .mov)

Key questions:

• What are the differences in the properties of analog and digital media?
• What does it mean to create, capture, or record a medium in a digital form, that is, what is involved in producing a digital representation of an analog medium?
• What are the physical and computational steps in making a digital media form and then displaying or playing it back through our devices and equipment?
• What are the key factors in digital media that determine the quality of the medium as we perceive it?
  

Learning Objectives and Topics:

• Understanding the background history and technical design of the Internet and the "Inter-networking" architecture concept embodied in the open protocols and standards of the Internet.
• Understanding how the Internet is designed as a decentralized network based on a design for "end-to-end" connections.
• Understanding the Internet as a paradigm case of "cumulative orchestrated combinatoriality" (Arthur) with intersecting histories of technical-social-political-economic development and interdependencies.
• Understanding the consequences of the extensible design principles of the Internet and why these principles remain vitally important in the expanding global and international development of all the media, services, and apps that depend on the Internet architecture.

Orientation to the Internet as Socio-Technical System

As users, consumers, citizens, and workers with business functions depending on the Internet, we only see a small interface view of the Internet in the software on our computing devices. Socialization into media and computers, consumerist ideologies, and focus on technology productization keeps the Internet blackboxed and the deeper histories and dependencies closed off from awareness and understanding. The cumulative technologies and bundles of functions that are now so well-integrated in Internet design and digital media have deep histories in the affordances of symbolic mediation in technical artefacts. We see an essential continuum in the design history of symbolic substrates and systems for symbolic representation (the development of ancient tablets up to modern writing technologies) and in the abstraction of symbolic message units into code in the telegraph leading to the latest implementations in mobile devices and computational tablets. All the concepts and media implementations now rolled up into the Internet -- with its affordances for metamedia transmission and representation in multiple interfaces -- are parts of longer histories that we can point to, but only just begin to uncover, while studying the specifics of the technical architectures.

The Internet as a system is our "mother of all case studies" for deblackboxing social-technical systems and questions of distributed agency and distributed cognition. We can pose many useful questions by using the Internet and Web as a paradigm of mediation, agency, and transmission: the significance of the convergence of all digital (digitized) media forms across a global network using common protocols and standards; the industry, policy and technology ecosystems that enable the Internet to function and grow with new innovations. Given that Internet protocols are "open" and standards based on industry collaboration and consensus with confirmation by NGO policy groups (except in cases of monopoly dominance) and that networks are distributed systems with no one center, where are the real sources of power and authority? A major challenge today is working out how we "re-orchestrate" regulatory policy in the political-economy regimes for media, data, entertainment (TV, radio, cable), and communications after convergence on the common platform of the Internet.

Technical Design and Social Systems

To understand the interdependence of the technical and social, we also have to get the underlying technical concepts straight and the properties designed into the Internet as a global "network of networks." You will need to learn some "Internet speak" for how things work technically in the overall architecture.

From the socio-technical complex systems view, the Internet is a global, international "network of networks" connected by computing systems using Internet protocols (the core TCP/IP suite) and client-server architectures designed to support Internet protocols on any kind of computing device (all Web software, smartphone apps, cloud, etc.).

"The Network is the Computer": A large contributor to the success of the Internet network is the design principle for decentralized distribution of computing power through the client/server architecture: our local, small computing devices (called "clients" on a network) don't store a lot of data or have big software programs taking a lot of memory to do complex computations like sorting a Google search which would require even more memory and processing power. The large data storage and complex processing is done on many Internet "servers" that connect to our "clients" by software requests that we activate over the network with interfaces that have the software for Internet and Web protocols built-in (e.g., clicking a link and getting a Web page or screen of information to display, getting media from a server to play in our local device, triggering a network service on an app).

Actually implementing this system design in all the specific hardware and software we use would be impossible without the invisible institutional and political-economic agreements and policies (e.g., international telecom and data traffic agreements, cross-border long-haul data lines), hardware and software standards (defined in standards groups and implemented by major multinational companies like Cisco and Google), regional ISPs and wireless networks, and the multiple dependencies in "agency networks" for everything that happens between--and among--end users and the globally distributed system.

So, the "Internet" isn't a thing or external object that can have "effects" on us: the Internet is a social-technical-political-economic system enacted through distributed agency in one of our most complex "orchestrated combinations of prior combinations." Forming a useful answer to a simple question like "what is the Internet?" takes us into a system of relations that resists reification in an "it" -- no thing or object as a singular referent of the term. This decentralized, distributed "system" (technical - social - political - economic), though weighted at the nodal concentration centers of global power, has many consequences and challenges for simplistic (instrumental, operational) models of agency and power. A big macro, international question today is: how is the Internet--and everything done and enacted through it--to be controlled, governed, regulated, and accessed? Who "owns" the Internet? How can all the actors/agents and their interests be managed in a global and international decentralized system?

Key Concepts and Terms

• Network Architecture
• Protocol and the TCP/IP protocol suite
• Data Packet
• Packet Switching, Packet-Switched Network
• Client / Server
• Internet address (IP address)
• Domain Name System (DNS)

Learning Objectives and Topics:

Most of us experience "the Internet" or "the World Wide Web" from the graphical interface of a Web browser program (both on PCs and mobile devices) and/or through the graphical interface of a dedicated app that accesses specific content and services for presentation in the form factor of a mobile device (the screen dimensions and specific device properties). This unit will take you further in learning the key design principles and means of technical implementation for the World Wide Web and all interface "apps" that use Web and Internet technologies. You will also learn about the consequences of design principles, standards, and architecture, and the social, economic, and political issues that surround the ubiquitous use of Web technologies across multiple devices and networks.

Essential Background

What is the Web?
The World Wide Web as a technical architecture is based on an evolving set of digital media standards and network services for delivery over the common architecture of Web servers (using HTTP protocols) connected over the Internet (TCP/IP). All data content delivered to a Web browser or a mobile app comes wrapped in the document object framework specified in HTML (the markup or coding language of a Web file). Web architecture at all levels has been motivated by integrating all digital media types and interactive features on a common platform with open standards. The Web continues some of the motivations and principles for the interconnected metamedia computing environment envisioned by Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay, but the Web in practice remains fragmented and driven by conflicting objectives for products, services, markets, and user/consumer interests.

The current version of HTML (5) allows a flexible, unlimited nesting of content and structure layers, embedded media types, interactive functions, and behind the scenes communication with multiple network sources and services for fetching and updating real-time data -- all customizable for any device, OS, interface, and screen form factor.

Following the design rules of the Internet, the open, standards-based, device-independent architecture for the Web is:

• a distributed network system across unlimited client/server implementations
• massively modular
• extensible for unforeseeable future applications
• a model for interoperability for any software or hardware manufacturer, and
• scalable for adding new users, nodes, agents and Web-deliverable services

for any kind of device or computer interface. The architecture extends to any kind of digital media type and networked device with Web-enabled software (PCs, smartphones, smart TVs, etc.). The designs for the Internet and the Web as an integrative platform are extensible and scalable as new developments and hybrid technologies emerge for the Internet/Web system. This unlimited extensibility results from underlying design decisions universally adopted as principles by all participants in the technologies: the Internet and the Web are designed in layers so that the overall architecture is always independent of applications that can run on it (e.g., email, social networking, searching, shopping, requesting and viewing information, playing media...).

The Web and "Appification"
The Web architecture and framework of HTML5 now also supports the function fragments in mobile apps (special purpose applications designed for network services and the internal system features of a device). Apps and mobile device interfaces allow channeling and fragmenting Internet/Web architecture for commerce, consumerism, and maintaining the focus and attention of users. App development is Web standards-based in principle, but in practice app development is detached from the general Web and designed for the proprietary architectures of corporate brands and manufactures (Apple iOS, Google Android, Microsoft are the major device platforms), so that an app can run as a "native" piece of software in the proprietary device. All mobile device apps must be purchased ("free" apps go through the same gateway) and downloaded onto a device exclusively through the corporate device provider's "store." The app system is designed so that users and other software developers cannot install any other software on a mobile device; all apps must be installed through a direct connection to the provider's app store. Apps thus de-Web the Web on many levels by simultaneously exploiting modularity (and black-boxing a device as one module) and the open architecture of the Web and Internet for bundling specific functions and services that work only on the device-branded app.

The Web and Our Current "Mediasphere"
With the convergence of telecommunications, computing, information science, hardware/software, and digital media, the Web architecture provides a common platform that subsumes our prior media into a new mediasphere and metamedium. This new combinatorial media system is based on ongoing reconfigurations of material technologies, software, content, and the institutions and industries that enable and sustain the "Internet" as such. The realities of the interdependent social-techincal system show, once again, that we must always interpret the attributed "effects" of Internet and Web technologies as outcomes of the system which they mediate and are mediated in.

Main learning objectives:

• Learning how the extensible and scalable design principles of the Internet/Web architecture are continuing to be developed and expanded for any Internet device from large office computers to mobile devices to "smart" TVs.
• Learning the important background history of information and text/media concepts that led to the design of the Web as a hypermedia system for linking files, media content, and accessing complex networked computer services over the Internet.
• Understanding the "orchestrated combinatoriality" in the modular design of the Web.
• Using the methods we are developing, uncovering the components of technical-social system of the Web that are usually blackboxed.

Key terms and concepts

• Client / server (in Web architecture)
• Hypertext / hypermedia
• HTTP: "Hypertext Transport Protocol"
• URL: "Uniform Resource Locator": the human-readable Web file "address" on a server
• HTML: "Hypertext Markup Language"
• Web "browser" or client program
• App: short for "(software) application"; on a mobile device, PC. or smart TV = an interface with controls to use Internet and Web resources (content) and services (server-side software, transactions). Another example of "client" software for interacting with servers on the network.
• HTML5: the current HTML cluster of evolving standards, interoperating Web "languages," and data server architecture for using the Web as an all-purpose platform for connecting any IP-enabled device, any OS, any screen size.

Learning Objectives and Topics:

Understanding the main concepts and design principles behind important Internet/Web technologies that will continue in many future developments and implementations: Cloud Computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and Ambient Computing. Deblackboxing these complex technologies with the accessible concepts and methods of this course so that we can (1) go beyond media hype, mystification, and misunderstanding, (2) go beyond productizing by companies large and small (everyone is marketing a "solution" in one of more of these technology clusters), and (3) becoming informed about the implications and need for wider participation in future developments.

Students will work toward:

• Understanding the design principles for Cloud Computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Ambient Computing, their system of dependencies, and the possible futures of these technologies as they become implemented and adopted.
• Being able to describe and analyze these recent implementations of network computing on the Web platform according to the principles for extensible and scalable design and as implementations of the ongoing cumulative, combinatorial modular design principles of computational and digital media technologies.
• Being able to describe and analyze how mobile devices with client software and Internet connectivity like the iPhone are now designed to interact with this larger combined system and represent a node in the combinatorial modular design for Cloud and Ambient Computing.
• Being able to describe how Internet and computational principles can be implemented to connect many kinds of "things" (= artefacts and/or physical locations) to IP networks (wired and wireless) for many kinds of automated processes (sensors for monitoring physical processes, geo-location, real-time interactive data).

The Cloud = "The Network is the Computer"

Cloud Computing can sound nebulous and mysterious, but it's an extension of principles in the distributed Internet/Web networked computing architecture for bundling many kinds of behind-the-scenes processes and functions so that they appear -- and are used -- as services and utilities. The "network as a bundle of services" works on many levels, both for end users and for companies providing the services (for example, streaming media and Cloud based apps that run in a Web browser or mobile device). The Cloud computing concept and ways of deploying it in actual systems architecture are other great examples of cumulative, combinatorial, modular design principles. As in other design principles for complex systems that we have studied, modular design in Cloud architecture takes the form of many software layers (abstraction layers) hidden from view that pass on the results of their processes, functions, or tasks to other layers in the system. Network software bundles up the outputs of all the process layers (many of which were done on computers widely distributed anywhere on the system network) to provide the unified, combined results that we experience when using Internet devices and digital media.

There are many technical and social dependencies that enable the Cloud design concepts to be implemented now and in the future, but would not have been possible to implement during earlier phases of the Internet. The Cloud architecture of networked computers takes advantage of (1) faster computation in clusters of servers, (2) computer systems themselves designed specifically as servers to be clustered in data centers, (3) cheaper and almost unlimited memory capacity for software processing on Internet/Web servers, and (4) faster ubiquitous networks with more capacity and routing/switching "intelligence" designed for fiber optic networks. Of course, there are many more layers of dependencies in policies, standards, and industry ecosystems that are continually reconfiguring around new developments as all the conditions required for implementing new technology concepts become aligned.

As with everything in technology, so much depends on standards accepted across industries, institutions, and engineering research communities. Cloud architecture principles require that anything developed must interoperate with all existing Internet/Web systems and standards. Technical specifications for Cloud systems are based on an evolving set of standards for network services that extend the architecture of the Internet and Web as a platform for any network-deliverable service or data content. The Cloud concept re-models the Web and IP networks as a virtual utility or "always-on" service accessible anywhere with an IP-enabled device. The Cloud architecture distributes functions and resources across many kinds of computational processes that don't "live" or "run" on any single server or device. Here's a definition from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that provides a reference point:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services ) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.
(NIST, US Department of Commerce [Read further: NIST document])

The extensible, scalable, modular design principles of the Internet and Web implemented on a platform of open architecture and standards has enabled our current version of the "always on" Web of active behind-the-scenes network services, delivering content and software that runs in our apps and Web windows, and streaming media to any IP enabled device. Instead of relying on the earlier Internet client/server model for everything, the Cloud principle distributes the network "intelligence" across many other networked computational processes on many computers simultaneously.

The End-User's Experience and Interfaces to Cloud Computing

If you use iTunes and Apple iOS apps, do Google searches, use Google apps, shop on Amazon or eBay, view Youtube videos and multimedia web pages, or use mobile device apps to get real-time data, you are interacting with many kinds of behind-the-scenes Internet/Web Cloud Computing architectures. Almost everything we experience when interacting with Web and Internet services today involves interoperating components of Cloud Computing architecture, which essentially bundles many networking, software, and server infrastructure functions into an "always on" utility without the limitations of individual computers in one physical location.

The Cloud = Black Box

Our user view is a seamless integration of results, but the Cloud is intentionally a very closed off and complex black box given a mystical, transcendental name, The Cloud. The Cloud metaphor has been around a long time in engineering for networks, but now the term designates a specialized implementation of Internet/Web architectures and software layers. (We will explore the implications of "The Cloud" = "Black Box".)

Cloud | Internet-of-Things | Big Data | Ambient Computing

The background of Cloud architecture is also presupposed in other Net/Web implementations like the Internet of Things (IoT) and Ambient Computing, a network environment where things with geo-location and sensing chips with wireless IP connectivity can send and receive information and interact with the background of computing processes with or without direct human control. The iPhone and other mobile devices are one kind of end node in the larger Cloud, Ambient, and IoT design concepts.