ARPANET and the birth of the Internet

The Internet is the never-ending rhythm of our collective consciousness expanding onto itself; all of our individual thoughts, ideas, morals, and beliefs are unified into one common consciousness network. The visible connectedness of the web passes through memes, trends, and calculations – up close, an individual’s thoughts, ideas, morals, and beliefs are easily perceptible. This incredible level of networked activity occasionally gives me the feeling that, if I were picked up off the ground and given a top-down view of this interactivity, the vast, celestial display of the entire Internet’s sprawling, interconnected data routes would begin to obscure the line between the self and the collective. Before the explosion of cyberspace, the idea of an expanded, simultaneous consciousness was well alive. In the 1960s, multiple, interconnected counter-culture movements such as the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, and the environmental movement transcended existing limited conventions and ushered in their own cultures, attitudes, and norms. Although there is no direct causative connection between these socio-cultural transformation movements and the modern vastness of Web 2.0, both represent an expansion of our consciousness and the formation of organic communities.

During the 60s counterculture, an experimental network of four computers known as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), was commissioned by the U.S. government to link researchers over great distances between each computer. To connect this nascent network of researchers and graduate students together, gargantuan computers of toggle switches, flashing buttons, and reel-to-reel tapes filled the spaces of modest university basements or classrooms. By the end of the decade, a message was transmitted and received between two ARPANET computers: “LO” (a portion of “LOGIN,” but the computers crashed after the first two letters.). “LO”, reminiscent of the latter portion of the greeting “hello,” or, perhaps, “Lo’ and behold!” - the very first message sent over the internet. A few years after ARPA’s first transmission, the TCP/IP application-layer protocol, a network communication language, was brought into existence, enabling the creation of the surfin’ World Wide Web. Initially confined to the realm of research and military purposes as part of the ARPANET, the World Wide Web precipitated the first virtual communities of non-technical users on a webpage infrastructure, or as the LA Times described it in 94’: “an arcane cyberspace party land for wonks.” (Morris)

Early internet communities and the “Information Superhighway”

For most of the post-web era of the 90s, hackers, geeks, programmers, and other early technologically literate individuals populated the largely text-based pages, chatrooms, multiuser dungeons (MUDs), and bulletin-board systems (BBS) of the internet. As the pioneers of the internet, they paved the way for larger communities to take hold by building the tools and interfaces that made the Internet’s barrier to entry much less steep for the average user. At the same time, the “Information Superhighway” rhetoric was being disseminated by the mass media, who fueled the hype for these early Internet-based communications and functions. As an anonymous user described in 1994, the Information Superhighway was a lot like the Internet, except “It's a lot more expensive, …. and there's no alt.sex or alt.drugs.” (Wired Staff) The Information Superhighway clashed with the pioneers’ vision for the World Wide Web – at the time, most Internet users were not being charged to access information. If implemented, the Information SuperHighway would likely be based upon a pay-per-use model (Brook and Boal). At some point, the highway jargon fell out of favor and the general population came to use and understand the Internet on their own. Internet veterans were joined by a more representative population of the global community and the collective consciousness of our humanness became perceptible. With the advent of broadband and wifi, growth on the internet soared; boundaries were permeated, a diverse number of people were exposed to one another, and connections switched between multiple networks. Although individual experiences on the internet differ in content, the ways that we interact are very similar; after bumping into each other enough times in cyberspace, most of us fall into virtual communities that are composed of like-minded people that share our interests and/or needs. Even in its informational capacity, the internet began to be viewed as a source of entertainment and socializing.

Simply defined, an online community is members interacting with each other virtually, rather than face-to-face. While the public release of the World Wide Web was certainly the first major climacteric in the history of online communities, social activity on the Internet existed in ARPANET times, interlinked in the threads of computerized bulletin board systems. Afterward, a multitude of Web-based services like social media, instant messaging, forums, blogs, and wikis were developed in the wake of the Internet’s explosive growth, each unique in its motivations, purposes, and interests and ranging from a handful to billions of users. Like its face-to-face counterpart, online communities require certain conditions under which to emerge and are influenced by factors that impact their success/sustainment in the cyberspace realm. There is no empirical recipe for success for an online community, however – as can be observed anywhere on the Internet, online communities grow organically and tend to follow their own rules and customs. There are, however, variables that can influence the atmosphere of an online community: are individuals held accountable for their behavior, or can they easily conceal themselves under the cloak of Internet anonymity? If anonymity is not allowed, change or progress within the community can be attributed to certain members, thus increasing the attractiveness of participation and contribution (Kindsmüller et al. 2901). Additionally, intentionally selected and designed interactive elements can preclude problems like social loafing or production blocking from occurring. Kindsmüller et al. conclude that, for an online community to subsist, it must “offer possibilities of creating and managing relationships by supporting continuous interaction between their members.” (2902)

During the “Information Superhighway” period, the American public was either completely bewildered by the concept of the Internet or felt a general skepticism/displeasure towards its foreignness and implied complexity. Genres of science-fiction latched onto this new technology and found intriguing ways to tap into the public’s fear of the unknown. Popular imagination was fueled by literature like Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, which imagined cyberspace as “Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.” (128). Far from the premise of Gibson’s novel, however, the Internet is much more embedded in the real world rather than growing apart from it like some distant, computerized hallucination. Online communities have rituals and rules like real-world large and small-group formations and eventually, a culture often forms around the consciousness of members. While identities are created and indexed differently depending on the community, (such as a fantasy/roleplaying forum would likely take a gender-neutral, egalitarian outlook to member identity) a large majority of social platforms enable the user to connect their real-world identity to their virtual profile. To some extent, since communication would be otherwise restricted, every online community shares communicative norms, beliefs, and practices and can be analyzed through an ethnographic lens. Because communities of cyberspace can constitute distinct cultures, an anthropologist may seek to answer questions such as “How does the Internet influence how an online community interacts and co-operates with its neighbors?”, or “How do contexts and frames of communicative practices change in the context of the Internet?”

Online communities in action: r/place

On April Fools’ Day, 2022, the forum website Reddit repeated its experimental social project, r/place - a mass collaboration of online communities that consisted of placing 1-pixel tiles on a 2000 x 2000 pixel canvas every 5 minutes. Minutes after launch, a massive coordinated effort on the part of communities large and small quickly took to drawing flags, logos, and symbols on the blank canvas. Over separate platforms like Discord and Twitch, members convened to strategically discuss the placement of pixels, replace defaced pixels, and superimpose pixels onto already existing ones. Community leaders were assigned as ambassadors with the responsibility of negotiating and compromising with foreign powers, while members were on stand-by at whatever chosen base of operation. r/place veterans, who had participated and fought on the 2017 canvas, were well aware of the politics and outside forces that would inevitably shape the course of the artwork. No matter how powerful or large a community, diplomacy was inevitable to stay established on the map. Livestreamers on Twitch gathered audiences in the tens of thousands and instructed their viewers to destroy or come to the aid of communities. If smaller communities were not able to establish an allyship with their bordering neighbors, they would quickly become consumed by the colorful, random noise in the wake of a livestreamer or by a stronger community’s expansion.

A 192x250 tile made by students and alumni of the University of South Florida during r/place

The final artwork saw over 160 million tiles placed by 10 million individuals over the course of 72 hours. r/place is, perhaps, the most recent and impressive display of the diversity of online communities and their patterns of interaction, communication, and cooperation. In the context of the Internet, it shows how online communities, even when working under constraints, can often organize themselves in complex ways. Outside the canvas, Reddit is a place of open discussion and debate - these communicative practices are, of course, limited by the corporation’s policies that prohibit illegal content, but are otherwise unfettered. r/place introduced a disruption to the typical discourse communities of Reddit by imposing literal boundaries and rulesets to what Redditors were accustomed to. Unsurprisingly, these added in variables influenced how communities began to interact and cooperate with each other; rather than the neutral and harmonious existence of a spectrum of different communities, communities as disparate as r/Germany began battling with subreddits like r/lgbt for a spot on the canvas. When contexts and frames of communicative practices change in the context of the Internet, such as in Reddit’s r/place, communities become dependent upon their members’ degree of intrinsic motivation to participate in its new development and advancement. Overall, the success of online communities on r/place was contingent upon the dedication of its members, and strength often fell in numbers. The greater the rate of social activity and count of total members in a community, the more likely it was to appear and hold a place on the map.

Map of Online Communities

When the World Wide Web became available to the general population in the 90s, outside of walled gardens like AOL and CompuServe, the cyberspace landscape started filling up with odd and geeky webcomics displayed on clunky HTML formats. In 2006, webcomic artist Randall Munroe began his origin story with the comic “xkcd”, a random four character string title, and amassed a community of people dedicated to reading his weekly quips and relevant observations of the intricacies of life and Internet. Barely a year after his debut, Munroe took on the project of mapping out the Internet, which was still in its infancy. As Munroe describes in a small blurb on the map, each geographic area roughly represented the estimated size of membership for a community in 2007. 15 years later, Munroe’s map resembles a pasty, beige graveyard of long-forgotten Web 1.0 forebearers. The biggest giants, such as AOL, Yahoo, Windows Live, Friendster, and Xanga - have all consigned to oblivion. Three years after Munroe’s 2007 map, the climate and trajectory of the Internet had completely shifted; Facebook had established its place as the dominant social network, beating out Myspace, and big names like Youtube and Twitter were quickly amassing users. To keep up with the pace of the Internet’s evolution, Munroe updated his map to represent the 2010 landscape, a much more detailed and well-plotted visual representation of the Internet. Since its last release in 2010, however, Munroe has not come out with an updated “Map of Online Communities,” leaving us with time gap of over a decade. Whether it was because Munroe needed to maintain the already-fixed release of his regular webcomic, or other obligations impeded his ability to redo the map on a yearly or bi-yearly basis, the “Map of Online Communities” has not been updated.

xkcd’s original Map of Online Communities, 2007

Every year, communities rise and fall, fluctuating with the current trends and conditions of the broader Internet atmosphere. Driven by my interest in tracing the progress from Munroe’s 2010 version, I created a spin-off version of the original “Map of Online Communities” in my best recreation of what the Internet would look like visualized, today (download is required). To illustrate the enormity of online communities in accurate detail, I elected to use a large canvas size (21,000 x 10,000 px), and began drawing out borders, categorizing, and assembling data points in a massive spreadsheet document. The map includes several hundred websites, each grouped in similar categories constituting dozens of unique regions and continents, such as “forums”, “dating websites”, “social networks”, “adult entertainment”, and many more. One of my first responsibilities in this enterprise, I figured, was assigning a definition to an ‘online community’ so that during data collection, only websites that conformed to this criteria would be included. My definition of an online community, for the purposes of this map, is this: “a group of people who exchange words, ideas, or products through the mediation of digital networks. I.e., through likes, posts, polls, shares, comments, reviews, feeds, etc.”. To calculate the total region size of each community, I averaged total time spent (the time a visitor spends on a website before navigating elsewhere) and total monthly visits (the number of visits per month to a website) and converted that number into pixel size. Alongside statistical inference, sources of data include web traffic analysers like Alexa (since retired), Similarweb, released data analytics, Wikipedia lists, and 3rd party website statistics aggregators.

Link to Full-Size Map

Map of Online Communities Observations

As a community-based category, social media platforms are used most intensely. Major players such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok occupy the greater part of the map’s southern hemisphere and are bordered by their correlative neighbors - instant messaging and communication services. The blogosphere, once the buzz of cyberspace, fell out of the mainstream as the adoption of social networks encouraged microstatuses, short updates, and single-click republishing. In the metaphorical graveyard of the World Wide Web, blogs are joined by internet forums. Although forums still provide a venue for niche communities to have discussions, they have been ushered out of the way to make room for the dominance of social network sites. With online video becoming increasingly integrated into online spaces, video sharing and streaming websites have exploded in popularity - and with no indication of slowing down, Youtube, Twitch, and adult streaming sites like Pornhub are undoubtedly some of the most popular entertainment activities for online audiences worldwide. For each category, there are several major corporate players rigidly occupying their respective regions. In public discourse, this has led to mounting accusations of monopolistic behavior and misuse of communities’ data.

Citations

Morris, Charles. “But Is the Information Superhighway a Highway? : Economy: Businesses Are Betting Big Money by Laying New Cable--Which Could Be Obsolete before It’s Used. Maybe It’s an Information Ocean.” Los Angeles Times, 6 Mar. 2019, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-01-02-op-7845-story.html.

Wired Staff. “Q: What Is the Information Superhighway?” Wired, 1 Nov. 1994, www.wired.com/1994/11/q-what-is-the-information-superhighway.

Brook, James, and Iain Boal. Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information. First Edition, City Lights Publishers, 1995, besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Papers/brook-book.html.

Kindsmüller, Martin & Melzer, André & Mentler, Tilo. (2009). Online Communities and Online Community Building.