Everybody likes to think that their work matters. I'm no exception in that regard. Tens of thousands of Ph.D. dissertations are published each year, so many that libraries eventually pull them off the shelves to make room for new ones. Usually, the only shelf they wind up on is the library of the university the writer graduated from, and the only people who read them are the dissertation committee that approved them and the family of the writer. Occasionally, a dissertation does better than that. There is at least some evidence that this dissertation is one of them. The reasons for this have less to do with any inate quality in the work than with its timeliness. After nearly ten years of research, I pushed a study of computer conferencing in one of the earliest large scale networks to hook up with what we now call the "Internet" just as the Internet exploded into the public eye. As a result, there is (or at least was) a copy of this dissertatation floating around in the Library of Congress and in a number of other libraries around the world.
It has always been my intention to write one or more books based on the content of this dissertation. I've never written any of them. Part of this reflects a busy and productive life which is documented in my hypermedia resume. Part of it is the continuing evolution of some of the ideas that I put forward in this document. Part of it is the complexity of parsing the two major studies (more on that in a moment) in this document apart from one another. But when all is said and done, I simply haven't created the time to do the job. I have, over the last few years, increasingly turned my focus to creating this content as web content. Mediaspace contains much of this incomplete effort. Oddly enough, turning to the web is actually a return to some of the original ideas that drove this dissertations construction.
This dissertation really started in 1982, when I showed my dissertation committee the transcript of a computer conference that I had participated in using my recently acquired IBM PC and what at that time seemed like an incredibly fast 300 Baud modem. We agreed on a general direction, that literature would be sparse for what was clearly a brand new way of communicating, and that we would take a "jazz" approach of allowing discovery to set the direction of the study rather than an a priori hypothesis. In late 1983, I lucked into a job at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center working in the group, led by Jerry Waldbaum and Dave Chess, that was pioneering computer conferencing as a productivity tool in IBM. Their primary focus, the IBMPC computer conferencing facility, became the focus of this study, but neither IBMPC nor this study was my job, and the study frequently took a back seat to teaching seminars and classes, consulting to users on their PC-related problems, and creating some very successful software.
One of my more successful efforts, which started in 1984, one of the first PC-based hypermedia programs. HELP, as it was called, was the hypertext on-line help facility of one of the first preloaded PC software environments, the Yorktown PC User's Workbench. HELP had a very productive life. It shipped as a part of several IBM products. It was the design basis for the OS/2 Help Manager (for which I co-wrote the specification). It was probably the first tag-based hypermedia program (with origins in GML, the predecessor of SGML) and was almost certainly the first hypermedia program to be run from multiple cross-referenced servers in a distributed network environment. It may even have been somewhat influential in building support for Berners-Lee's efforts to build HTML at CERN. I still remember the night Mike Cowlishaw and I sat down for dinner at a Seafood restaurant on Jersey, Channel Islands with a group of folks from the IT department at CERN and discussed the prospects for something I called "networked hypertext". Tim Berners-Lee wasn't there and has no knowledge of the meeting, but it is interesting how much HTML syntax looks like HELP syntax (they even use the "href" tag in the same way). Great minds think alike, I guess. :-)
In any case, HELP was also a substantial influence on this study, which I attempted to port into hypermedia, using HELP, several times in the 1980's. Hypermedia always seemed like the right way to put the "Jazz" in a jazz dissertation, and at the time, HELP was one of the more widely used hypermedia programs anywhere. All that has changed, of course. Even the widely touted "HyperCard" has all but dissappeared in the face of the widespread acceptance of HTML and the Web. And now, at last, I have acheived the minor dream of creating a hypertext rendition of my dissertation, using HTML and JavaScript. I have people to thank for making this rendition possible, including my management in IBM Global Services, who (intentionally or not) created time for me to complete the work, and Bucky Pope, who is finishing his own dissertation right now and would like to reference this one. Bucky isn't the only person who has asked for a copy in the last few years, but he has been a good friend for a long time and has been persistent in pushing me to create an electronic rendition.
I believe this document remains relevant today as the Internet continues to evolve. The observations on rules and the enforcement of rules remain topical on an Internet that is still figuring out how to regulate itself. The observations on the evolution of media, the nature of problems in new media, the proliferation of genre in successful media, the changing profile of media use, and the evolution of on-line communities anticipate a wide range of developments that are clearly visible on today's Internet. The retelling of the events associated with SHUTTLE FORUM remains compelling and emotionally involving. Finally, the theory of the evolution of media, which organizes this dissertation and grew out of its observations, appears to have substantial power in describing how a set of mediators can be organized in such a way as to create a medium with a set of characteristics , an associated set of effects, and an accepted set of practices.
I describe this theory of media somewhat differently these days (the dissertation marks my first exploration of that theoretical space). The "effects" space has been particularly active in reforming in a different way, and the concept of "genre" has become a critical element of the theoretical space. The theory still hangs together as stated here, however, and I'm pleased to have it published where just about anyone can find it. Indeed, publishing the whole dissertation as a hypermedia space takes a monkey off my back. With the content readily available on the web, I can now freely reference it in works that focus on other ideas. Perhaps I can get some of those books done now after all.
In the meantime, I continue to develop my web materials, which are rooted on a Prodigy Internet web server. I only have 6 Meg there, but I'm only filling about 2 Meg of space right now, so the biggest impediment is not being able to set up server side application code. I have hopes of having my own internet server sometime soon, so watch this space.