B2-92 is an independent FM radio station based in Belgrade, which has won a number of international press and media awards. Their broadcasts and music and uncensored news heard across Serbia through a network of local partner stations. Their signal was also picked up by the BBC World Service and retransmitted via satellite around the world. In December 1996, B2-92 began using technology to stream live audio broadcasts and short video clips over the Internet.
Strategies and Policies
From its start as a terrestrial broadcaster B2-92 has been a respected source of independent news in the Balkans. Although B2-92 has been constantly subjected to repression and threat by government authorities it continued to provide music and news. When in December 1996 B2-92 was banned from broadcasting it began to distribute its content via streaming audio and video on its website. A web savvy support group was formed helping B2-92 to continue its distribution of news. Anonymous e-mail lists were developed to protect the identity of those wishing to express their views about the war, as well as a message boards linking to the Help B2-92 Campaign site. Furthermore encrypted e-mail services were provided for journalists and others in the former Yugoslavia who found themselves under threat. B2-92 also co-operates with various media activists and support groups and networks, which help B2-92 to continue its content distribution.
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1904
First broadcast talk
1918
Invention of the short-wave radio
1929
Invention of television in Germany and Russia
1941
Invention of microwave transmission
1946
Long-distance coaxial cable systems and mobile telephone services are introduced in the USA.
1957
First data transmissions over regular phone circuits.
At the beginning of the story of today's global data networks is the story of the development of
In 1955 President Eisenhower announced the USA's intention to launch a satellite. But it in the end it was the Soviet Union, which launched the first satellite in 1957: Sputnik I. After Sputnik's launch it became evident that the Cold War was also a race for leadership in the application of state-of-the-art technology to defense. As the US Department of Defense encouraged the formation of high-tech companies, it laid the ground to Silicon Valley, the hot spot of the world's computer industry.
The same year as the USA launched their first satellite - Explorer I - data was transmitted over regular phone circuits for the first time, thus laying the ground for today's global data networks.
Today's satellites may record weather data, scan the planet with powerful cameras, offer global positioning and monitoring services, and relay high-speed data transmissions. Yet up to now, most satellites are designed for military purposes such as reconnaissance.
1969
ARPAnet was the small network of individual computers connected by leased lines that marked the beginning of today's global data networks. An experimental network it mainly served the purpose of testing the feasibility of
In 1969 ARPANET went online and linked the first two computers, one located at the University of California, Los Angeles, the other at the Stanford Research Institute.
Yet ARPAnet did not become widely accepted before it was demonstrated in action to a public of computer experts at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication in Washington, D. C. in 1972.
Before it was decommissioned in 1990,
In the USA it was already in 1994 that commercial users outnumbered military and academic users.
Despite the rapid growth of the Net, most computers linked to it are still located in the United States.
1971
Invention of
1979
Introduction of
1992
Launch of the
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While the digital divide might bring up the idea that enterprises will be able to sell more and more computers during the next years another truth looks as if there was no hope for a certain percentage of the population to get out of their marginalization, their position of being "have nots".
Studies show that the issue of different colors of skin play a role in this, but more than "racial" issues it is income, age and education that decides about the have and have nots.
There exist ~ 103 million households in the USA.
~6 million do not even have telephone access. Why should they care about computers?
The digital divide cuts the world into centers and peripheries, not into nations, as it runs through the boarder between the North and the South as well as through nations.
The most different institutions with various interests in their background work in that field; not rarely paid by governments, which are interested in inhabitants, connected to the net and economy.
see also:
Searching information about the digital divide one will find informations saying that it is growing all the time whereas other studies suggest the contrary, like this one
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As within the traditional media landscape, Internet content providers have two primary means of generating revenue: Direct sales or subscriptions, and advertising. Especially as charging Internet users for access to content - with all the free material available - has proven problematic, advertising is seen as the best solution for creating revenues in the short term. Therefore intense competition has started among Internet content providers and access services to attract advertising money.
Table: Web-Sites Seeking Advertising
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Source: Adknowledge eAnalytics. Online Advertising Report
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The idea of hybrid beings between man and non-human entities can be traced back to mythology: mythologies, European and non-European are populated with beings which are both human and non-human, and which, because of this non-humanness, have served as reference points in the human endeavour of understanding what it means to be human. Perhaps "being human" is not even a meaningful phrase without the possibility to identify ourselves also with the negation of humanness, that is, to be human through the very possibility of identification with the non-human.
While in classical mythology, such being were usually between the man and animal kingdoms, or between the human and the divine, the advent of modern technology in the past two centuries has countered any such irrational representations of humanness. The very same supremacy of rationality which deposited the hybrid beings of mythology (and of religion) on the garbage heap of the modern period and which attempted a "pure" understanding of humanness, has also been responsible for the rapid advance of technology and which in turn prepared a "technical" understanding of the human.
The only non-human world which remains beyond the animal and divine worlds is the world of technology. The very attempt of a purist definition of the human ran encountered difficulty; the theories of Darwin and Freud undermined the believe that there was something essentially human in human beings, something that could be defined without references to the non-human.
Early representations of half man - half machine creatures echo the fear of the violent use of machinery, as in wars. Mary Shelley published
What human minds have later dreamed up about - usually hostile - artificial beings has segmented in the literary genre of science fiction. Science fiction seems to have provided the "last" protected zone for the strong emotions and hard values which in standard fiction literature would relegate a story into the realm of kitsch. Violent battles, strong heroes, daring explorations, infinity and solitude, clashes of right and wrong and whatever else makes up the aesthetic repertoire of metaphysics has survived unscathed in science fiction.
However, science fiction also seems to mark the final sequence of pure fiction: the
In the Flesh Machine the
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Fiber-optic cable networks may become the dominant method for high-speed Internet connections. Since the first fiber-optic cable was laid across the Atlantic in 1988, the demand for faster Internet connections is growing, fuelled by the growing network traffic, partly due to increasing implementation of corporate networks spanning the globe and to the use of graphics-heavy contents on the
Fiber-optic cables have not much more in common with copper wires than the capacity to transmit information. As copper wires, they can be terrestrial and submarine connections, but they allow much higher transmission rates. Copper wires allow 32 telephone calls at the same time, but fiber-optic cable can carry 40,000 calls at the same time. A capacity,
Copper wires will not come out of use in the foreseeable future because of technologies as
For technical information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica on telecommunication cables, click
An entertaining report of the laying of the FLAG submarine cable, up to now the longest fiber-optic cable on earth, including detailed background information on the cable industry and its history, Neal Stephenson has written for Wired: Mother Earth Mother Board. Click
Susan Dumett has written a short history of undersea cables for Pretext magazine, Evolution of a Wired World. Click
A timeline history of submarine cables and a detailed list of seemingly all submarine cables of the world, operational, planned and out of service, can be found on the Web site of the
For maps of fiber-optic cable networks see the website of
Communications satellites are relay stations for radio signals and provide reliable and distance-independent high-speed connections even at remote locations without high-bandwidth infrastructure.
On point-to-point transmission, the transmission method originally employed on, satellites face increasing competition from
In the future, satellites will become stronger, cheaper and their orbits will be lower; their services might become as common as satellite TV is today.
For more information about satellites, see How Satellites Work (
Universally accepted system of writing used by and for blind persons and consisting of a code of 63 characters, each made up of one to six raised dots arranged in a six-position matrix or cell. These Braille characters are embossed in lines on paper and read by passing the fingers lightly over the manuscript. Louis Braille, who was blinded at the age of three, invented the system in 1824 while a student at the Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles (National Institute for Blind Children), Paris.
Writing and calculating came into being at about the same time. The first pictographs carved into clay tablets are used for administrative purposes. As an instrument for the administrative bodies of early empires, who began to rely on the collection, storage, processing and transmission of data, the skill of writing was restricted to a few. Being more or less separated tasks, writing and calculating converge in today's computers.
Letters are invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent, says Saint Augustine. The invention of writing made it possible to transmit and store information. No longer the ear predominates; face-to-face communication becomes more and more obsolete for administration and bureaucracy. Standardization and centralization become the constituents of high culture and vast empires as Sumer and China.
As can be read in the Convention's preamble, the member states of the Council of Europe, the European Convention on Human Rights is intended as a follow-up of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948 and as an official act of "securing the universal and effective recognition and observance of the Rights therein declared." Because it is stated "that the aim of the Council of Europe is the achievement of greater unity between its Members and that one of the methods by which the aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realization of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms", the European Convention on Human Rights can be read as the political sibling to the biblical Ten Commandments on which effective and legitimate European democratic government are based. The European Convention on Human Rights is intended to represent the essence of the common heritage of European political traditions and ideals.
Signed in Rome on November 4, 1950, the Convention is supplemented by five protocols dated from March 20, 1952 (Paris), May 6, 1963, September 16, 1963, and January 20, 1966 (Strasbourg).
http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html
Gutenberg's printing press, an innovative aggregation of inventions known for centuries before Gutenberg: the olive oil press, oil-based ink, block-print technology, and movable types, allowed the mass production of the movable type used to reproduce a page of text and increased the production rate enormously. During the Middle Ages monks took at least a year over making a handwriting copy of a book. Gutenberg printed about 300 sheets per day. Because parchment was too costly for mass production - often for the production of one copy of a medieval book a whole flock of sheep was used - it was substituted by cheap paper made from recycled clothing left over from the massive number of dead caused by the Great Plague.
Within forty-five years, in 1500, already ten million copies were available for a few hundred thousand literate. Because individuals could examine a range of opinions now, the printed Bible, especially after having been translated into German by Martin Luther, and increasing literacy added to the subversion of clerical authorities. The interest in books increased with the rise of vernacular, non-Latin literary texts, beginning with Dante's Divine Comedy, the first literary text written in Italian.
Among others, the improvement of the distribution and the production of books and increased literacy made the development of print mass media possible.
Michael Giesecke (Sinnenwandel Sprachwandel Kulturwandel. Studien zur Vorgeschichte der Informationsgesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992) has shown that due to a division of labor among authors, printers and typesetters Gutenberg's invention increasingly led to a standardization of - written and unwritten - language in form of orthography, grammar and signs. To communicate one's ideas became linked to the use of a kind of code, and reading became a kind of rite of passage, in every human's life an important step towards independency.
With the increasing linkage of knowledge to wide reading and learnedness, the history of knowledge becomes the history of readings, of readings dependent on chance and on circumstance.
For further details see:
Martin Warnke, Text und Technik,
Bruce Jones, Manuscripts, Books, and Maps: The Printing Press and a Changing World,