Heritage Lists for the Internet Age?

This week celebrated the 42nd anniversary of the first ARPANET message (which was 'the birth of the internet', depending on how you keep score). UCLA is planning to restore the room where it happened - 3420 Boelter Hall - to its 1969 vintage appearance and open the space to the public as the Kleinrock Internet Heritage Site and Archive. Leonard Kleinrock was the guy that pressed 'send' on that first message (though he himself is humble enough to acknowledge that the net has many fathers and mothers). It's a cool idea. Or is it? I'm not sure yet.

Anytime there's a big historical transformation, our culture has to pick which events to remember as milestone, and figure out how to turn it into 'heritage' (by which I mean the 'official selection' of historically important places and things). The internet generation saw nerd culture rise to dominate and transform our world, which poses some odd problems for making a list of 'heritage' that needs 'protection'.

First of all, nerd spaces look like crap! They're not monumental or even especially pretty. I mean, any third-rate European castle with absolutely no historical relevance looks way better than any of the places from where the nerds have unleashed a new civilization. To demonstrate, a tour of some potential 'heritage sites' for the digital age:

Steve Jobs' garage in Los Altos, California, where he and Wozniak built the Apple I in 1976:

Photo Cicorp

And the garage in Menlo Park, California, where Google was founded:

Here's Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook, surrounded by garbage and flipping the bird in his squalid Harvard dorm room:

 Here's the cubicle at PayPal where YouTube got started after hours:

I want to puke just looking at these pictures. Ranch houses, dorm rooms, and cubicles: these are the paragons of American architectural mediocrity that launched a billion facebook stalkers, iphone obsessives, and cute kitten videos. But places are important, so I'm gonna calm the gag reflex and think about them. They're all modest, closed in, unremarkable, normal spaces. No surprises. Almost every American has been to one of these.

These 'heritage' places of the internet age say nothing, not power, not wealth, not authority. They were the nondescript vessels of something transformative, mute witnesses of events that their architectural surroundings were never intended to facilitate - events that their architects could not even have comprehended. Even the lamest, most irrelevant medieval castle in Europe has these places beat hands down for architectural drama.

But something different is going down here, too - the difference between the cubicle and the castle is that it's a moment of invention that's being fetishized, rather than an aesthetic system or social class. Most monuments on the World Heritage List were built to sustain these kind of ideas, in an effort to make power grabs seem like something permanent. Here's where the 'heritage' model gets kind of warped and twisted:  the moments and places where something new is launched are usually pretty run down and uninspiring compared to the events that take place there. Finding a fit setting for the great stories of history is something else entirely.
 
UNESCO, in fact, has some ideas about preserving Internet Heritage, though a lot of it involved vapid comments like "digital heritage is likely to become more important and more widespread over time". Duh. But they're mostly talking about media, the portable stuff - not the monuments. When will the great centers of computer innovation get on the World Heritage List? Or is the strangeness of that question are an argument that the monument is dead as a cultural form?

A Brief History of Social Games

From game designer John Radoff comes a great poster that combines seriation and typology of social games, from knucklebone divination to XBOX and MMORPGs (via Kotaku).



Click on the image for a printable full-size version.

There's a lot to like here from the archaeologist's point of view. Radoff understands that sociocultural change is multilineal - in other words, it's not a question of one thing leading to another in a tidy sequence, but of multiple influences combining to spark changes in cultural forms. He's also captured a lot of forgotten pastimes, like play-by-mail strategy games, that were destroyed by the advent of the internet. One thing that is missing is a sense of spatial or geographical causality: i.e. how exactly do Go, Senet, and Leela connect to Monopoly historically, besides having some similar cognitive or gameplay aspects? Correlation does not imply causation.

I'm also a little curious why, given the elaborate historical paths he devises, why the modern social network games are all grouped together indiscriminately at the bottom - it gives a hint of the teleological fallacy, as if all of history was somehow a prelude to Mafia Wars, music pets, and the big-boobied princesses that are apparently the entire population of Evony. To be fair I don't think that's Radoff's point exactly - he's starting from contemporary social gaming and working backwards, rather than trying to show some kind of causal connection. (He probably could have shown this better by putting the modern social games at the top!)

Anyway, that's me being kind of hard on what's really a fun historical chart. Radoff includes a historical essay that makes some good points about the role of D&D in the evolution of social game culture:

1974 was perhaps the most important year in modern game history; this is when Dungeons and Dragons came to market. It integrated the ideas of abstracting tactical combat along with storytelling and a unique social aspect in which individual players used their imagination and creativity to contribute to the ongoing game. From D&D, you can trace a history through early mainframe computer games, to MUDs (multiuser dungeons) to MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft. Meanwhile, many people were looking to engage in asynchronous games that wouldn’t require groups to gather at set points in time, giving rise to play-by-mail games. The earliest implementations of online PBM games (aside from their manifestation as play-by-email games) were BBS “Door” games. Trade Wars is probably one of the most famous; and I wrote a game in this market called Space Empire a long time ago. A lot of these play-patterns are similar to what you’ll find in current Web-based and social-network games.

Read the rest!

The Ruins of Friendster

Vital coverage from the Onion. They actually discuss some quite important theoretical issues.


Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of 'Friendster' Civilization

More archaeology coverage from the Onion:
"Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World"
"Early Humans Finally Drunk Enough To Invent Dancing"