Chapter 1: A History of Information Highways and Byways

The Social Role of Communications Networks
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To understand the Internet, we first need to understand the social role human networks have played historically. It is easy to think of networks solely as a computer concept--as in "local area network"--and to forget the fact that computer networks, including the Internet, were designed to enhance communication and timely sharing of information. In fact, one of the earliest sustained and widely read discussion groups on the Internet's precursor, ARPANET, was a mailing list called Human-Nets.2 Posters to Human-Nets discussed computer-aided human-to-human communications but tended to focus less on issues of computer hardware and programming and reflected instead on their preoccupation with how people would actually use the new network, which in a prophetic moment they referred to as "WorldNet."3 A regular poster to Human-Nets recalls, "It was a very interesting mailing list and possible only due to the ability of the network itself to permit those interested in this obscure topic to communicate."4

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