Chapter 32:Cemeteries, Oak Trees, and Black and White Cows: Newcomers' Understandings of the Networked World

The internet, in its proliferating forms, continues to attract an increasingly diverse set of users. Since the explosion of the World Wide Web and the broadening of internet access in the mid-1990s, the internet is no longer dominated by Euro-American software developers, academics, and government agencies. It is currently estimated that 10% of the world’s population is online—an astonishing figure that includes a large proportion of youth in many countries, as well as many seniors like those in our study (Cyberatlas, 2003). Over half of the Internet’s users are from non-English-speaking countries (Global internet statistics by language, 2003). And of course, most of today’s users of the internet are not professionals or students in computer science and related fields, as was the case in the early years of networked computing. Diversification of populations with internet access will continue, as will the influx of internet newcomers spanning a wide social and cultural range. When newcomers make their first online forays, they are confronted with a strange and often incomprehensible “networked world”, a social, technical, and cultural system built up through an idiosyncratic history and shaped by the unique perspectives and backgrounds of early participants. While the technical and social features of the internet are in perpetual flux, many of the deeply embedded technical and cultural assumptions that have been part of the internet since its inception continue to shape user experience. For example, the ASCII encoding of text makes it easy to exchange e-mail or documents in European languages, but it is a real ordeal to do the same thing in Japanese, since ASCII is not large enough to encompass the Japanese character set (Nolan, 2005). Similarly, Lessig (1999) points out that the early design decision to make networking protocols decentralized (so the network itself would be more resistant to total failure) also makes it difficult for corporate interests to police network traffic, as we have seen in recent music industry cases. In numerous instances, the technological choices and assumptions of the early internet are associated with cultural biases of one kind or another. Manuel Castells (2001) argues