Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at an the 40th birthday of the internet.

I began writing this online message 40 years to the minute when the internet went live.

At 7:00 pm on Oct. 29, 1969 UCLA computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock, who organized the internet’s first day, had one of his programmers, Charley Kline, send a message from his computer at UCLA’s engineering school to his colleague Bill Duvall, who was sitting at a second computer at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Palo Alto. Kline typed LOG, one slow character at a time, and Duvall’s computer was to supply the IN to form the complete command, login, which would connect the machines. Duvall was also connected by telephone to Kline, and he reported each letter as it got through. First the “L,” then the “O.” But when Klein typed the “G,” the Stanford computer crashed. That makes LO the first electronic message.

A month later, the University of California at Santa Barbara joined the first computer network, called ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Network, and in December, the University of Utah was added. Eventually the loose configuration of computers at research facilities around the country, and then around the world, came to be called the internet, or as Dr. House would have it, the interweb.

120 years earlier, Henry David Thoreau, skeptical of the telegraph — which we sometimes refer to in retrospect as the Victorian internet — wrote in Walden, “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

The telegraph succeeded despite Thoreau’s complaint, but Samuel Morse, the telegraph’s inventor, thought Bell’s telephone was just a pretty toy. Morse was convinced that no one would want an invention that was unable to provide a permanent, written record of a conversation. These minutes from a Western Union meeting clarify concerns that no one would use the telephone to communicate anything important: “Bell’s instrument uses nothing but the voice, which cannot be captured in concrete form. . . . We leave it to you to judge whether any sensible man would transact his affairs by such a means of communications.”

And so not everyone was excited when UCLA spoke to Stanford. Kleinrock has noted the almost prophetic nature of that first message, “Lo,” as in “Lo and behold.” But except for programmers, most people in 1969 had little use for one computer, let alone two hooked together. What could these machines — electronic brains or electronic toys — possibly have to say to one another?

The internet may be 40 years old today, and no one reading this post would dream of starting their day without checking email, Facebook, and one or more online news sources, but until the 1990s few people used the Net. For all anyone knew, it was little more than a series of tubes.

In the time-honored tradition of distrusting new communications devices, in those early days computer giant IBM and telecom monopolist AT&T saw no future for networked computers and refused to bid to develop that first Interface Message Processor. In order for the internet to spread, they reasoned, managers would have to type. Even computer programmers wrote with pencil and paper, not on their mainframes, which were designed to crunch numbers, not words. Typing was for secretaries and the odd hunt-and-peck writer who didn’t have access to the typing pool.

Several things helped the internet take off when it finally did, not in 1969 but in the 1990s. Affordable, user-friendly personal computers, like the 1984 Apple Macintosh; easy-to-use email programs like Eudora (1988) that worked like word processors; and browsers like Mosaic, launched in 1993, which enabled ordinary people to search the web without a computer science degree. Without those developments, the Net would have remained the province of researchers and nerds instead of a welcoming home for almost 1.7 billion people around the world, everyone from honest citizens like you and me, to stalkers and spies, dollar-hungry marketers, hate-mongers, pornographers, and Nigerian scammers.

Talking about the internet’s birthday, Kleinrock told CNN, “We didn’t anticipate the level of the dark side we see today. The culture of the early Internet was one of trust. . . . I knew every user on the Internet in those early days.” Back in 1969 no one suspected that the internet would even have a dark side. But no one knew, either, that along with “What hath God wrought,” and “Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you,” and “Fiat lux,” “LO” would go down in history as the start of a great communications revolution whose dark side is but a minor annoyance compared to the enlightenment and the fun-filled hours it brings to us, and allows us to bring to others.

And no one suspected, back in 1969, that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of computers would produce, not “Hamlet,” but HamBASIC.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at an article from Seed magazine claiming that soon we’ll all be authors.

Researchers are predicting that Twitter is going global: in just four years, everyone on the planet–some 10 billion people–will be tweeting.

Writing in Seed magazine, neuroscientist Denis G. Pelli and graphic designer Charles Bigelow (he co-designed the Lucida font) find that the internet has brought us to the brink of universal literacy, and we’re also fast approaching universal authorship: “Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish.”

To illustrate this writing revolution, Pelli and Bigelow have assembled what can only be called an “authorgraph,” a chart plotting the number of book authors from the middle ages to the present, and the far greater number of authors using new media–blogs, Facebook, and Twitter–since the year 2000.

The researchers find that only 50 authors published a book in 1400 (a serious undercount). Then, thanks to the printing press, which came on line in the 1440s, book publication grew steadily over the centuries and peaked at just over a million book authors per year around 2000.

In contrast, the new genres enabled by the internet have shown massive growth in authorship over a far shorter time span. Pelli and Bigelow observe that before the printing press it took a scribe a year to produce a bible, while today you can tweet or update your Facebook status in seconds. They conclude, “The new media are growing 100 times faster than books.”

But comparing books to tweets leads to skewed figures. Plenty of writers in the age of print wrote not books but songs, poems, news articles, chronicles, laws, essays, and plays; they too must be considered authors (and of course scribes copied bibles, they didn’t write them, so they don’t count as authors). And, since books are still a presence in the internet age, we should remember that even in the age of Google and Wikipedia it still takes an author a year or more to write a book (yes, there’s Sarah Palin’s four-month wonder Going Rogue–but I’m only counting books with actual content).

That’s not to deny the impressive impact of the internet on authorship. Pelli and Bigelow’s figures show that blogging takes only five years to go from 60 bloggers to a million. Then social media sites take off, and Facebookers jump from an initial 50,000 to 75 million in just four years. Twitter authorship grows even faster, exploding from10,000 tweeters to a million in only three years and no end in sight–and here’s where Pelli and Bigelow go off the rails: “Extrapolation of the Twitter-author curve (the dashed line) predicts that every person will publish in 2013.”

Even hard-core fans of the internet must realize that’s just not going to happen.

I too have made the claim that because of the internet, everyone’s an author. Computers and the internet mean that more and more people are creating text and publishing it, and the internet has shown a robust ability to connect writers with readers in ways we never before imagined.

I’ve said more than once, as well, that thanks to the digital revolution, all you need to be an author is a laptop, a wi-fi card, and a place to sit at Starbucks. But my claims are hyperbolic.

Assuming that by “everyone” we mean people all over the globe, then we’re far from “nearly everyone” reading, and farther still from “nearly everyone” publishing. Pelli and Bigelow concede that authors today constitute 0.1 percent of the world’s population (according to their standards, an author is someone whose text reaches at least 100 readers, a number which excludes many bloggers and tweeters), but they’re optimistic that “Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.”

That’s going to take a lot longer than four more years. True, the internet opens the possibility of authorship to the other 99.9% of the world’s 10 billion people, but first many of them will have to survive infancy, find a source of clean drinking water, learn to read and write, acquire a computer, find a reliable source of electricity, and, oh yes, locate an internet service provider. That’s assuming they’re motivated to become authors in the first place. And they live in a country where the government doesn’t block Twitter.

And even if all that happens, we’ve still got to increase the capacity of Twitter to handle all that traffic without triggering the fail whale, and we’re still a long, long way from the day when there are enough Starbucks so that everyone will have a place to sit and tweet–plus somebody’s gotta make the latte.

Paolo Mazzarello graduated from medical school with honors from the University of Pavia, Italy, and earned a PhD in neurological sciences from the University of Milan.  He has since been a researcher for the National Research Council at the Institute of Molecular Genetics in Pavia, Italy and is currently Professor of History of Medicine at the University of Pavia, Italy.  His most recent book, Golgi: A Biography of the Founder of Modern Neuroscience, looks at an extraordinary intellectual who explored three major fields of biology and medicine, namely neuroscience, emerging cell biology, and the new science of medical microbiology.   In the excerpt below we learn a little bit about Golgi’s key discovery, the black reaction.

One winter day at the end of 1872, or the beginning of 1873, a scientist sat down to work at his microscope in the unlikely setting of an asylum for lunatics in northern Italy, after focusing back and forth for a while…

What a fantastic sight! On a yellow, completely transparent background, there appear sparsely scattered black fibers, smooth and small or thick and prickly, as well as black, triangular, star- or rod-shaped bodies!  Just like fine India ink drawings on transparent Japanese paper.  The scientist gazes upon it in astonishment.  He is more accustomed to the chaotic images produced by carminic acid and hematoxylin, which yield one dubious interpretation after another.  Here, on the other hand, everything is absolutely clear, without any possibility of confusion.  There is nothing more to interpret; one need only observe and note these cells, with their different, ramified extensions, like plants in the morning frost, covering an astonishingly large space in wavy lines; thse smooth and uniform extensions which, springing from the cell, cover great distances, before suddenly splitting up into a bunch of innumerable fibers…The delighted and astonished gaze cannot tear itself away from this fantastic sight.  Methodic wishful thinking has become reality.  Metal impregnation has produced a magnificent and unexpected slide.

This is how the renowned Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal imagined the scene that, on that day, must have presented itself to the eyes of Camillo Golgi, the young chief physician of the Pie Case degli Incurabili (Charitable Home for Incurables) of Abbiategrasso.  This was the moment of the discovery of the “reazione nera” (black reaction), a revolutionary method for studying the structure of the nervous system.  This discovery contributed, more than thirty years later, to the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Medicine to Golgi.

For every student of medicine or biology, the name Golgi is synonymous with one of the basic structures in the cell: the Golgi Apparatus or Golgi Complex.  But this is only one of the many discoveries and achievements, particularly in the neurosciences, for which Golgi’s name deserves to be known by a much wider public than just devotees of biomedical sciences.  Unfortunately, his scientific fame lags far behind the historical significance of his discoveries.  The historical-critical literature on Golgi is scanty and the appraisal of his scientific work has been negatively affected by his rejection of the theory of the neuron and by the erroneous idea that his discovery of the black reaction was the result of pure chance.

The theory of the neuron, which was definitively confirmed only after the advent of the electron microscope, is an important example of a revolutionary conceptual transformation in biology. Using the terminology of Thomas S. Kuhn, without necessarily adopting his ideas on the evolution of scientific thought, the theory of the neuron represents a fundamental “paradigm” of the neurosciences in the same sense that atomic-molecular interpretation of matter or the theory of the discrete transmission of hereditary characteristics constitute fundamental paradigms of chemistry and genetics, respectively.  This concept of the neuron (and particularly that of synapses), by virtue of its being the elemental unit of modulation and transmission of information, has also assumed a preeminent role in many disciplines associated with the neurosciences such as informatics and artificial intelligence.  The multidisciplinary significance of the theory of the neuron does not simply represent an automatic extension to the nervous system of the principles of cellular theory, just as quantum mechanics is not simply a consequences of applying classical mechanics to subatomic structures.  Given the biophysical characteristics of neurons, the laws of their reciprocal communication, the complexity of their connections, and the extraordinary nature of the activities to which they give rise, it is evident how this theory constitutes the basis of a new segment of the scientific research that integrates “polyphonically” contributions from physics, electrochemistry, informatics, and clinical medicine, and in addition classical physiology and anatomy-histology.  From this perspective, the theory must be considered one of the great intellectual conquests of the nineteenth century.

To the end of his life Gogli remained a fiery opponent of this theory, despite having contributed materially its formulation, as he recognized explicitly in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  The technical histological revolution that he developed, the black reaction (known also as Golgi’s Method or chrome-silver reaction), which allowed the detailed investigation of the morphology of neurons and the basic architecture of cerebral tissue, was in fact the fundamental prerequisite that made possible the “paradigmatic” generalization of the theory of the neuron.

Often in the history of biology (and even more so in scientific discoveries generally), the introduction of a new technique revolutionizes a whole area of research, radically transforming preexisting disciplines and creating others from scratch.  One is reminded of the effect that monoclonal antibodies had on immunology and other branches of biology, or of the impact that the technology of recombinant DNA had on genetics.  The black reaction represented, for the histology  of the nervous system, a breakthrough of comparable importance, permitting the development of neuroanatomy as an autonomous discipline, and thus contributing to the birth of modern neuroscience.  Only after the introduction of Golgi’s Method, and the extraordinary structural descriptions of the nervous tissues obtained with it, did morphological investigations begin to be connected to physiological and functional investigations…

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at the new FTC regulations concerning bloggers.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued new rules requiring bloggers to disclose any compensation they may receive for product placements, endorsements, and testimonials.

According to the FTC rules, after December 1, “the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

Since it’s only October, I don’t have to tell you yet that I am an Oxford University Press author as well as a regular user of such fine OUP products as The Oxford English Dictionary (online subscription paid for by my university library) and the second edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s fine book, The F-word (Jesse, I haven’t got my free copy yet. If you don’t send it soon, I’ll have to delete this mention from my post – imagine what that will do to your Amazon Sales Rank). I’m telling you this anyway, not because the law requires it, but because I’m a stand-up guy.

Plus the FTC’s ban on endorsements won’t affect me directly, because most of my blogging is satirical, and the makers of the things that I satirize – fans of official English, conservative politicians, researchers who use fMRIs to tell what part of my brain lights up when I blog, and people who are zealous about correct grammar, still refuse to pay me for making fun of them.

But the few bloggers who are actually making money or getting free stuff are worried that they’ll have to disclose the goodies they receive from sponsors for a positive mention online. Book bloggers will have to say, “I love this book and you will too, although you’ll have to pay for your copy and I got mine for free,” which is causing many of them to give up reviewing, or to use the f-word a lot more frequently, hoping they’ll get a mention in the third edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s marvelous book. Did I tell you that it’s called The F-word?

All of this stems from the fact that online product reviews are a booming new phenomenon, a growing genre of literary expression made possible by the existence of Web 2.0 (available in fine stores everywhere). For example, when I go shoe shopping at zappos.com, I can see how many people gave the sneakers I’m looking at how many stars. And I can read comments like “I have been very pleased with the comfort, cushion, and fit,” which prompts me to respond, “That would be great if only I had your feet.” But another reviewer of the same item says, “I hate these shoes,” which doesn’t help either considering that the reviewer has given them a full three stars out of a possible five, which is the online equivalent of grade inflation.

Online reviewers are often anonymous, so I don’t know if the reviewer is a company shill or someone who works for the competition. But this is nothing new – eighteenth-century reviewers writing under pen names routinely plumped their books in newspapers or magazines, or attacked their rivals, and editors, many of whom were already scrounging to find copy for their journals, were only too happy to print whatever came their way. Why should Zappos or Amazon, sites where I frequently shop, be any different today?

As for impartial reviews, and there are certainly a lot of these, my sense is that more people will go online to complain than to praise a product. If your new clothes washer is broken, you have lots of free time to grouse in the blogosphere while connected to wi-fi at the laundromat. If it’s working just fine, you’re too busy throwing in another load of laundry and sipping chablis to bother logging on. That makes it hard to know if a preponderance of negative comments is a true warning sign or just a statistical anomaly.

So far as blog-for-pay goes, though, truth in advertising requires that I tell you I work in and for the state of Illinois, a state whose former governor, after instituting a requirement that all state employees pass an annual ethics test, was impeached for attempting to sell Pres. Barack Obama’s newly-vacated senate seat to the highest bidder. The governor before him was convicted of selling drivers licenses while he was Secretary of State. I just completed my annual ethics training, but in contrast to these big players, anything that I have to sell on my blog is small potatoes, which probably explains why advertisers aren’t knocking each other down to get to me, and why I’m not required to report my blogging income, which is ZERO in case you haven’t been paying attention and would like to remedy that situation, to my employer or to the IRS.

News reached us yesterday that Charles Kao, widely regarded as the “Father of Fiber Optic Communications,” shares the Nobel prize for discovering how to transmit light signals long distance through hair-thin glass fibers that led to fiber-optic communication networks that zip video, voice, and high-speed Internet data worldwide in a split-second. We here at Oxford University Press, Inc. wish to congratulate Professor Kao and his fellow Nobel recipients, Willard S. Boyle, and George E. Smith, for their work with optics.

For more information on fiber optics I encourage all to check out Jeff Hecht’s City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics, which references Kao’s work, and visit here.

A fiber-optic timeline is available here.

David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College.  His new book, Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse, is an eloquent assessment of climate destabilization and an urgent call to action.  In the excerpt below we learn about one challenge our government will need to address.

…the hardest tests for our Constitution and democracy are just ahead and have to do with the relationship between governance, politics, and the dramatic changes in Earth systems now under way.  Human actions have set in motion a radical disruption of the biophysical systems of the planet that will undermine the human prospect, perhaps for centuries.  The crucial issues will be decided by how and how well we conduct the public business in the decades and centuries ahead, and now on a planetary scale.  Of the hard realities of governance ahead, five stand out.

The first challenge is that posed by climate change driven by the combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land management.  The Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), the Stern Review (Stern, 2007), the research on the effects of global change on the United States carried out by the National Science and Technology Council (2008), and other scientific evidence indicate that our future will be characterized by:

• -Rising sea levels by perhaps, eventually, as much as five to six meters or more, but no one knows for certain.  What is known is that virtually everything frozen on the planet is melting much more rapidly than anyone though possible even a few years ago.
• -Higher temperatures almost everywhere, but concentrated int he northern latitudes, melting permafrost, an boreal forests turning from weak sinks for carbon into sources of carbon and methane.
• -More drought and severe heat waves, particularly in mid-continent areas.
• -Tropical diseases spreading into regions with previously temperate climates and emergence of new diseases.
• -Degradation of forests and ecosystems due to higher temperatures, drought, and changing diseases.
• -Rapid decline of marine ecosystems threatened by acidification and higher surface water temperatures.
• -Larger (and possibly more frequent) hurricanes, tornadoes and fires.
• -Loss of a significant fraction of biological diversity.

Given our past emission of heat-trapping gases, much of this is simply unavoidable.  Regardless of what we do now, the Earth will warm by another half to a full degree centigrade by midcentury bringing us uncomfortably close to what many scientists believe to be the threshold of disaster.  The climate system has roughly a 30-year thermal lag between the release of heat-trapping gasses and the climate-driven weather events that we experiences.  Hurricane Katrina, for example, grew from a Class I storm to a Class 5 event quite possibly because of the warming effects of carbon released in the late 1970s.  Similarly, the causes behind the weather headlines of the future will likely include the use of fossil fuels and land abuses decades before.  We are already committed to a substantial warming of the Earth, by as much as 1.8 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.

Many credible scientists believe that we still have time to avert the worst, but not a minute to waste.  No one knows for certain what a “safe” threshold of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere might be.  For hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of years, the level of carbon dioxide did not go above ~280 parts per million (ppm), compared to the present level of 387 ppm, with another ~2+ ppm added each year.  Climate scientist James Hansen has recently proposed 350 ppm CO2 as the upper boundary of safety.

We are clearly in uncharted territory.  Further delay in stabilizing and reducing levels of CO2 poses what economist Nicholas Stern calls a “procrastination penalty” that will grow steadily until we eventually cross a point of no return.  In other words, it will be far cheaper to act now than at some later date when effective action may no longer be possible.  If the warming should occur abruptly “like the ones that are so abundant in the paleoclimate record,” we will have no time to adapt before the catastrophe strikes.  And there is good reason to believe that the climate system is indeed highly sensitive to small changes: “Earth’s climate is extremely sensitive: it is capable of taking inputs that seem small to us and transforming them into outputs that seems large.”

No matter what our personal preferences, politics, or beliefs may be, as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, temperatures will continue to rise until the Earth reaches a new equilibrium.  Even were we to stop emission of CO2 today, sea levels from the thermal expansion of water and increasing mass from the melting glaciers and ice caps would change coast lines for perhaps the next thousand years.  If the rate of melting is rapid or sudden, the migration inland will create hundreds of thousands, or more likely millions, of refugees-like Katrina but on a much larger scale.  Unless we chose to build dikes and can afford to do so, many coastal cities will be flooded possibly within decades or by the end of the century.  A majority of the millions of people who live along the Gulf Coast and eastern seaboard will have to move inland to higher ground.  But we have neither the money necessary to relocate millions of people nor the infrastructure to accommodate them once moved.

The warming of the northern latitudes and oceans means many things, among which is the possibility of triggering positive feedbacks that will cause the release of large amounts of methane from permafrost and the ocean floor.  As with other possible tipping points, a large release of methane to the atmosphere is a wildcard in the deck that hopefully will never be brought into play.  But again the scientific evidence does not permit us to predict accurately. It is clear, however, that the government is ill prepared to handle the social, economic, and political disruption to which we are now committed, to say nothing of the effects of more rapid changes…

Manuel Castells is University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, as well as Research Professor of Information Society at the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona.  He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of Technology and Society at MIT and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford University. In his new book, Communication Power, he analyses the transformation of the global media industry and argues that a new communication stystem, mass self-communication, has emerged, and power relationships have been profoundly modified.  In the excerpt below, Castells shares a personal anecdote about discovering the relationship between power and communication.

I was eighteen years old. My urge for freedom was bumping against the walls that the dictator had erected around life. My life and everybody else’s life. I wrote an article in the Law School’s journal, and the journal was shut down. I acted in Camus’ Caligula, and our theater group was indicted for promoting homosexuality. When I turned on the BBC world news to find a different tune, I could not hear a thing through the stridency of radio interference. When I wanted to read Freud, I had to go to the only library in Barcelona with access to his work and fill out a form explaining why. As for Marx or Sartre or Bakunin, forget it – unless I would travel by bus to Toulouse and conceal the books at the border crossing, risking the unknown if caught transporting subversive propaganda. And so, I decided to take on this suffocating, idiotic, Franquist regime, and joined the underground resistance. At that time, the resistance at the University of Barcelona consisted of only a few dozen students, since police repression had decimated the old democratic opposition, and the new generation born after the Civil War was barely entering adulthood. Yet, the depth of our revolt, and the promise of our hope, gave us strength to engage in the most unequal combat.

And there I was, in the darkness of a movie theater in a working-class neighborhood, ready to awaken the consciousness of the masses by breaking though the communication firewalls within which they were confined – or so I believed. I had a bunch of leaflets in my hand. They were hardly legible as they were printed on a primitive, manual copying device, soaked with purple ink that was the only communication medium available to us in a country blanketed by censorship….So I decided… distributing a few sheets of paper to workers, to reveal how bad their lives really were (as it they would not know it), and call them to action against the dictatorship, all the while keeping an eye on the future overthrow of capitalism, the root of all evil. The idea was to leave the leaflets in the empty seats on my way out of the theater, so that at the end of the session, when the lights came on, the moviegoers would pick up the message – a daring message from the resistance intended to give them enough hope to engage in the struggle for democracy.

I did seven theaters that evening, moving each time to a distant location in another workers’ lair to avoid detection. As naïve as the communication strategy was, it was no child’s game, as being caught meant being beaten up by the police and most likely going to jail, which is what happened to several of my friends. But, of course, we were getting a kick out of our prowess, while hoping to avoid other kinds of kicks. As I finished that revolutionary action for the day (one of many until I ended up in exile in Paris two years later), I called my girlfriend, proud of myself, feeling that the words I had conveyed could change a few minds which could ultimately change the world. I did not know many things at that time. Not that I know substantially more now. But I did not know then that the message is effective only if the receiver is ready for it (most people were not) and if the messenger is identifiable and reliable. And the Workers Front of Catalonia (of whom 95 percent were students) was not as serious a brand as the communists, the socialists, the Catalan nationalists, or any of the established parties, precisely because we wanted to be different – we were searching for identity as the post-Civil War generation.

Thus, I doubt that my actual contribution to Spanish democracy was equal to my expectations. And yet, social and political change has always been enacted, everywhere and at all times, from a myriad of gratuitous actions, sometimes uselessly heroic (mine was certainly no that) to the point of being out of proportion to their effectiveness: drops of a steady rain of struggle and sacrifice that ultimately floods the ramparts of oppression when, and if, the walls of incommunication between parallel solitudes start cracking down, and the audience becomes “we the people.” After all, as naïve as my revolutionary hopes were, I did have a point. Why would the regime close down every possible channel of communication outside its control if censorship were not of the essence for the perpetuation of its power…Why did students have to fight for the right to free speech; unions to fight for the right to post information about their company (then on the billboard, now on the website); women to create women’s bookstores; subdued nations to communicate in their own language; Soviet dissidents to distribute samizdat literature; African American in the US, and colonized people around the world, to be allowed to read? What I sensed then, and believe now, is that power is based on the control of communication and information, be it the macro-power of the state and media corporations or the micro-power of organizations of all sorts. And so, my struggle for free communication, my primitive, purple-ink blog of the time, was indeed an act of defiance, and the fascists, from their perspective, were right to try to catch us and shut us off, so closing the channels connecting individual minds to the public mind. Power is more than communication, and communication is more than power. But power relies on the control of communications, as counterpower depends on breaking through such control. And mass communication, the communication that potentially reaches a society at large, is shaped and managed by power relationships, rooted in the business of media and the politics of the state. Communication power is at the heart of the structure and dynamics of society.

Andrew Robinson was literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement from 1994-2006 and is now a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Story of Writing, The Man Who Deciphered Linear B and Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts. His latest book is Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction. Below is an original post by Andrew asking whether the internet will create a universal writing system.

The internet appears to suggest that the dream of universal communication across the barriers of language, nation, and culture by means of writing is within reach. Three centuries ago, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote: “As regards signs, I see … clearly that it is to the interest of the Republic of Letters and especially of students, that learned men should reach agreement on signs.” But the nature of writing systems means that Leibniz’s vision remains an impossible illusion. There is no such thing as a universal writing system, and there never will be.

In the mid-1970s, with increasing international travel, the American Institute of Graphic Arts cooperated with the United States Department of Transportation to design a set of symbols for airports and other travel facilities that would be clear both to travellers in a hurry and those without a command of English. They invented 34 iconic symbols. The design committee made a significant observation: “We are convinced that the effectiveness of symbols is strictly limited. They are most effective when they represent a service or concession that can be represented by an object, such a bus or bar glass. They are much less effective when used to represent a process or activity, such as Ticket Purchase…”.

Pictographic and logographic signs at airports and beside highways are a limited language of universal communication, which belongs to proto-writing, not full writing. Mathematics, too, is a universal language, but it is no use for most purposes of written communication. Painting and music communicate powerfully across cultures, but their meaning is diffuse and ambiguous. To communicate any and all thought always requires phonetic symbols. Wikipedia may have started in English, but it subsequently evolved versions written in over two dozen languages, including Esperanto. Full writing and reading depend on knowing a spoken language. This fact has not been altered by the internet—however many computer icons (and emoticons) we may encounter online.

Until the last few decades, it was generally agreed that over the centuries western civilisation had tried to make writing a closer and closer representation of speech. The alphabet was naturally regarded as the pinnacle of this conscious search; the Chinese script, conversely, was widely thought of as hopelessly defective. The corollary was the belief that as the alphabet spread through the world, so eventually would mass literacy and democracy. Surely, one might think, if a script is easy to learn, then more people will grasp it; and if they come to understand public affairs better, they will be more likely to take part in them and indeed demand a part in them. Scholars thus had a clear conception of writing progressing from cumbersome ancient scripts with multiple signs to simple and superior modern alphabets.

Few are now quite as confident. The superiority of alphabets is no longer taken for granted. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had an ‘alphabet’ of 24 signs nearly 5000 years ago, but apparently chose not to use it alone, and instead developed a logo-consonantal system with over 700 signs in regular use. The Japanese, rather than using their simple syllabic kana more and more frequently, chose to import more and more kanji from the Chinese script, creating a writing system of unrivalled complexity. Mayan glyphs show that the Maya could have used far more purely syllabic spellings, if they had wished, instead of their elaborate logographic and logo-syllabic equivalents.

We might also mention the notorious irregularity of modern English spelling, which is by no means a logical and straightforward representation of speech. George Bernard Shaw left money in his will to invent a rational alphabet for spelling English. But the Shaw alphabet, though ingenious and simple to write, has never been used. It is almost impossible to imagine public acceptance of a wholesale change in English orthography of the kind that was introduced in Turkey in 1928, when the country changed from writing in the Arabic script to writing in the Roman alphabet, or in Korea, with the less abrupt changeover from Chinese characters to Hangul.

The reason why scripts flourish or vanish has more to do with political and cultural considerations than purely linguistic ones. Literacy concerns far more than merely learning how to read and write. A Japanese physics student once outlined for me the genuine linguistic disadvantages of writing only in kana, without kanji, and then added: ‘After all, a long tradition cannot change like that. It will NEVER happen!!’ In other words, writing Japanese in kanji is a key part of Japanese identity.

Many scholars of writing today have an increasing respect for the intelligence behind ancient scripts. Down with the monolithic ‘triumph of the alphabet’, they say, and up with Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan glyphs, with their hybrid mixtures of pictographic, logographic and phonetic signs. Their conviction has in turn nurtured a new awareness of writing systems as being enmeshed within societies, rather than viewing them somewhat aridly as different kinds of technical solution to the problem of efficient visual representation of a particular language.

While I personally remain sceptical about the expressive virtues of pictograms and logograms, this growing holistic view of writing systems strikes me as a healthy development that reflects the real relationship between writing and society in all its subtlety and complexity. The transmission of my intimate thoughts to the minds of others in many cultures via intricate marks on a piece of paper or a computer screen, continues to amaze me as a kind of barely explicable magic.

Douglas E. Phillips is the author of The Software License Unveiled: How Legislation by License Controls Software Access, which reframes the debate between proprietary and free software to ask whether “legislation by license” should control either kind of software access. In the article below he answers the question: Can I legally make my PC think it’s a Mac?  Read other OUPblog articles by Phillips here.

Apple boasts that a new Mac can run Windows natively, just as if the Mac were a PC. But what if you want to run Apple’s operating system on a PC, so the PC thinks it’s a Mac?

If you watch Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads, you might think a Mac-like PC could only be a good thing, because it would work better than a PC. And if you watch Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” commercials (which reportedly were created on a Mac), you might also think a Mac-like PC would be a good thing, because it would be cheaper than a Mac.

But if you do manage to run the Apple OS X operating system on a PC, the people you meet won’t be John Hodgman and Justin Long. They’ll be Apple’s legal team, and it’s possible they will sue you.

The software license agreement for OS X Leopard declares: “You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer or enable another to do so.” You can be sure that, when Snow Leopard debuts this fall, the same language, or something a lot like it, will bar you from using the new latest and greatest Mac OS on anything that isn’t adorned with the Apple logo.

Does Apple mean what the license says? Ask Psystar, a Florida company that makes and sells computers with OS X preinstalled. Apple has sued Psystar for violating the OS X license agreement and for infringing Apple copyrights and trademarks. Psystar filed for bankruptcy, but last month, the bankruptcy court ruled that Apple’s case could go forward. (Psystar then moved to withdraw its bankruptcy petition.) If Apple prevails on the merits, watch for more litigation in which not just public copyright law, but also the private law of Apple’s software license, plays a key role.

According to Apple’s lawyers, Psystar managed to make its hackintosh only by using a modified version of OS X. With or without the Apple-only hardware requirement in Apple’s license, modifying copyrighted software without permission is clear copyright infringement. On the horizon, though, is a new method that apparently doesn’t involve changing the Apple software at all. An Apple legal effort to block this method could place the software license front-and-center.

Apple uses Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) in Intel Macs. EFI replaces the older Basic Input/Output System (BIOS). Early IBM PC clone makers of the 1980s had to reverse engineer the IBM BIOS, using clean room methods to avoid infringement. EFI, in contrast, is a publicly-available industry-wide specification. The EFI layer, sandwiched between the PC’s firmware and the operating system, includes a boot manager that loads the operating system. With the EFI layer, you can boot an Intel Mac in OS X.

A new device, the EFi-X, implements the EFI specification – making it possible to boot an unmodified retail copy of Apple OS on a PC – with a $189 dongle. (“Dongle” is a hardware device needed to run a piece of software, originally used to fight piracy. Ironically, this dongle opens the door to doing what Apple’s software license seeks to stop.)

If person buys a PC, an EFi-X, and a retail copy of OS X, running the software might not involve any copyright infringement. If that’s the case, then to block the practice, Apple would have to enforce the software license agreement. Making clear that the license legally binds may be one reason Apple is so vigorously pursuing Psystar, which on its own seems like a pin-prick.

After all, it’s hard to believe that Psystar is making even a dent in Apple’s sales or its reputation. According to Apple’s complaint, commentators have said “that Psystar’s Open Computer is ‘missing stuff like iLife, Bluetooth, an IR receiver, DVD burning and the ability to update your computer,’ is ‘LOUD, Crazy Loud,’ it ‘breaks the OS’s automatic updates, and that ‘video was DOA right out of the box.’” These comments don’t exactly make the machine sound like a computer “for the rest of us.”

If the allegations about Psystar in Apple’s complaint are even partly true, the competitive cost to Apple must be well below the cost of its legal fees. But Psystar may be the ideal defendant, from Apple’s perspective, for making clear that Apple can enforce the Apple-only hardware clause in its license. No one wants a crazy loud machine, but what if devices like EFi-X or built-in EFI hardware make it possible to run OS X on a stylish Sony that costs hundreds less than a comparable Apple-branded machine?

Apple probably doesn’t have to worry too much. It might have to stop supplying those cool logo stickers with every copy of OS X, in case a user slaps one of them on a Dell to show that it’s really an “Apple-labeled” computer after all. (If you only put it on your own machine, you can’t really be infringing Apple’s trademark.) But with a little rewording, Apple could make clear that the license allows you to use OS X only on a machine that has been given its Apple label by Apple itself. The courts have left little doubt in recent years that such a license term will be enforced. Whether it should be – so that running Windows in a virtual machine on a Mac is a one-way privilege – is another question.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. He’s the author of the forthcoming OUP book A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, look for it in September. On his website The Web of Language, Baron looks at Amazon’s actions over the weekend, pulling copies of George Orwell novels from Kindles. That post is reprinted here for our readers.

In a move worthy of George Orwell’s Big Brother, Amazon.com sent its thought police into Kindles everywhere to erase copies of “1984″ and “Animal Farm.”

A few months ago, Amazon got into trouble with its customers for silently placing books about homosexuality in the “adult materials” category and removing their sales rankings. After a Twitter campaign under the rubric #amazonfail generated massive amounts of negative publicity, the bookseller reversed course, claiming that the problem resulted from a cataloging error, not a change in policy towards gays and lesbians.

Now, in a move that would seem to constitute not digital discrimination but electronic breaking and entering, they’ve done it again. After erasing the Orwells from Amazon’s popular and pricey Kindle e-book reader, the nation’s largest bookseller informed customers in a brief email that it was refunding their purchase price ($0.99 for each book) because the publisher had recalled the e-books. It later announced that the texts were actually pirated versions of the novels and had been made available by Amazon in error (legal versions of both e-books, copyrighted by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, are still available from Amazon).

Amazingly enough, some Kindle users felt that Amazon’s actions were justified – after all, they confessed, they had received stolen property, and once Amazon had refunded their money, the company was surely within its rights to take back its property.

But others were outraged by Amazon’s arrogant big-brotherism (apparently the company has silently deleted bootleg Harry Potters and Ayn Rand novels from Kindles as well). One Kindler unhappy over Amazon’s invasion of privacy posed this hypothetical: What if Barnes & Noble sold you a book, but later, discovering that they sold it without the copyright owner’s permission, they broke into your house and took it back, leaving a refund on your kitchen table? Maybe not a plot worthy of Law and Order, but in most states, B&E’s still a felony.

Web 2.0 is a wonderful thing, permitting 2-way interaction between surfers and the websites they visit. Since it replaced the earlier, one-way internet, we’ve been living our online lives by downloading material from websites and uploading our own content in turn. The newest two-way superhighway is why Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia are so popular, and why a Minnesota woman was recently fined $1.92 million for illegal file sharing.

In the file sharing case, the RIAA took action against a woman that it considered a “copyright scofflaw” by hauling her into court, where she was defended by lawyers who are now appealing her fine. Amazon chose a more direct, less legalistic, route. Taking advantage of Web 2.0’s interactivity, it silently grabbed content from customers’ e-readers, despite the fact that they had purchased the texts in good faith and that the Kindle’s terms-of-service agreement “grants customers the right to keep a ‘permanent copy of the applicable digital content.’”

The Kindle story just broke, and with details still a little vague, we’ll have to wait for further developments to clarify the seriousness and legality of Amazon’s actions. But its significance is already clear. Between Amazon and the Google book project, two privately-owned, for-profit digital giants are poised to promote our literacy – to make books available to everyone, everywhere. But they’re also poised to control that literacy, limiting through their monopolistic influences exactly which books we can and cannot see. Amazon’s even gone so far as to pick our pockets to remove texts that they’ve decided we have no right to possess.

Yes, there are massive and indisputable benefits to the Web’s interactivity, but they come at a price, a reconfiguration of public and private space that is so dramatic as to be hard to miss, and yet sometimes so subtle that it’s easy for us to forget about. The internet allows us to go out into the world from the privacy of our desktops, to surf sites and to create them, to upload and to access information, in ways and at speeds never before possible. But our surfing also opens those private desktops to public view, by letting us publish our private thoughts, but also by creating a visible record of our keystrokes and our searches open not just to hackers and spies but also to retailers and advertisers who visit our hard drives, and sometimes, as Amazon has done, alter or remove their contents.

When the government reads our emails or tracks our web searches in the interests of national security, we cry big-brotherism and worry about the erosion of civil liberties. When corporations like Amazon and Google track us, ostensibly to better anticipate what we might want to buy, we tend to praise their ingenuity as hi-tech capitalism at its best. Amazon’s latest fail should remind us that Big Brother is watching not from the CIA’s bricks-and-mortar headquarters in Reston, but from corporate headquarters somewhere, everywhere, in cyberspace, and that we must defend our civil liberties from corporate as well as government abuse.