This chapter comprises four sections. This first section features an excellent and interesting overview by James W. Dow of early work by applied anthropologists with electronic communications, and places current work in its recent historical and developmental context.

The three sections following describe and review current Internet work of interest to applied and practicing anthropologists. Section Two highlights applied anthropology on the Internet through several "mini-case" studies. The activities represent an array of applications and projects within the discipline. The third section features online papers from outside the applied context. The fourth section presents Web sites of primarily an international focus that demonstrate how the Internet is being harnessed at the grassroots level in a variety of meaningful ways.

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Sometime in 1979, I used a 300 baud teletype terminal to connect to a conference system at the University of Michigan.¹ It was my first experience with electronic communication, and it was an incredible experience. My colleagues and I watched the printout of messages from all over the country and thrilled at the potential for information exchange that was opening up before us. It was expensive and slow, but bridged space and time as never before. Up to about the mid-eighties, these conferencing systems dominated computer communication, and some anthropologists such as H. Russel Bernard used and studied them.

The Apple-II computer was introduced in 1977 and the IBM PC in 1981. Microcomputers began to have an impact on anthropology (Bernard and Evans 1983). However, the only impact that microcomputers had on electronic communication was to make connections to main-frames easier and cheaper, because only the main-frame computers were connected to digital networks at that time.

The reason for applied anthropologists to use electronic communication was stated simply to me in 1985. Ted Downing, who was to become President of the Society for Applied Anthropology, said "Applied anthropologists work all over the world and get together only a couple of times a year. Wouldn't it be great to have a way of easily keeping in touch between these meetings, which are spaced so far apart." Ted was very much into computers at that time and knew that a great potential existed in them.

Although computer to computer electronic communication was far more difficult then than it is today, we could see that it would benefit the out-of-touch applied anthropologists. The Internet did not exist, but there were dozens of ideas, and implementations, for computers to talk to each other. One of these, ARPA Net, was destined to grow into the Internet, but without lucrative military contracts, anthropologists could not connect to it. It was reserved for the scientific elite.

In the 1980s anthropologists who wanted to get started with electronic communication relied on the technophiles.² At that time, hacker was a good word that meant someone who put theoretical computer science and programming together to make computers do something useful and exciting. The hackers had created a way around the closedness of the ARPA Net. Much of this was not what we think of today as 'networking.' because it used non-Internet technology. These ancient systems had one advantage, they were cheap at a time when hardware and CPU cycles were expensive.

The UNIX operating system was a great boon to networking. It was at the forefront of hacking activities. The first Email I sent made use of the UUCP system that had been built into the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. This was the UNIX to UNIX (UUCP) copy facility that permitted you to send mail to a user on another machine. In the address of the message, you used a "!" (called a 'bang' instead of the now familiar "." or 'dot'). You had to know the exact path the message was going to take from machine to machine. I communicated with Lee Sailer, an anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh. Lee was putting together a publication on computers in anthropology for Practicing Anthropology (Sailer, et al 1984). Working out the connection between Rochester, MI, and Pittsburgh, PA was quite tricky, since the computers that lay between us were not always permanently connected. We made use of what was called PhoneNet, a scheme that would forward the mail from one UNIX machine to another with regular phone calls. I remember that we kept alert for any good souls who would keep a link open between machines on ARPA Net. If you found a couple of computers that were linked by ARPA Net, up and running 24 hours a day, then you could make gigantic leaps around the country by putting their names in the bang list.

Here is a snippet of Email I received from Lee in 1985:

 From sailer Thu Aug 15 09:59 EDT 1985

Computer networks were proliferating but few people knew about them. The 'usenet' to which he refers, still exists as the news system to which one can connect with a browser such as Netscape. It is still run primarily by UNIX software. CAAN was the Computer-Assisted Anthropology News a newsletter that Lee, Rodney Kirk, and myself published between 1984 and 1989

There were so many ways to send Email in the mid-eighties that it is hard to remember them all: I think we tried them all. In the back of our minds was the ideal of cheap world-wide communications that would link not only anthropologists but their colleagues and informants throughout the world. There were three ways to do it: (1) You could send Email from one computer to another across a network. (2) You could send mail from computer to computer using dialed up intermittent connections. (3) And, you just use the same computer that everyone else used. This latter method required long-distance phone calls, but it was the only method that was reliable and simple enough to attract ordinary users.

The Electronic Communication Committee (ECC) of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) delivered a report to the November 1985 Board meeting. It noted the following:

On the use of Email

The members carried out their ECC work by means of electronic communication itself. Communications were passed between ECC members via the CompuServe network, UUCP mail on UNIX computers, and BITNET mail. This enabled a coordination of the work. The ECC spent most of its time gathering information on available mail and conferencing systems and discussing the best course of action for the SfAA. The ECC is trying out as many communication systems as it can.

On applied anthropologists using Email

The primary conclusion of the ECC, so far, is that the technology of electronic communication is so complicated and changing so fast that the education of SfAA members on how to use existing systems is more important than entering the fray with our own communication and conferencing network. Once SfAA members have developed some skill in using existing facilities, they will be in a better position to decide whether or not they want to have their own network. For example, the IEEE, the major electronic engineering professional society, with perhaps a hundred times the membership of SfAA has just started its own professional electronic communication network, and these are the people who are on top of the technology.

On electronic forums

Although it is exciting to be able to see what members are thinking at any moment via a bulletin board, this kind of communication can bog down in trivia and is often less useful than electronic mail, which allows the more serious work-oriented cooperation of a few people on a joint project. At the moment, we feel that electronic mail should have a higher priority than a general bulletin board, although we recognize there are strong personal preferences in either direction.

       AND

However, the ECC is looking for a micro- or minicomputer donation to put on line as an experimental bulletin board and communication node. We would regard this as experimental and not likely to take over much serious communication for a while. With the cost of a donation being quite low, we have nothing to lose with a simple microcomputer-based bulletin board. We even consider it worthwhile for the executive committee to spend some money on this in order to generate interest in electronic communication among the membership. The best system seems to be FIDO, because it can be tied into a network of like computers and a national net via late-night computer-to-computer phone calls. Thus it provides inexpensive electronic mail to the other 500+ local public FIDO nodes with a one-day deliver time.

The Electronic Communication Committee of that era consisted of Lee Sailer, Jerome Smith, and myself as chair. A movement toward a centralized microcomputer with which to exchange messages was given impetus by a survey of NAPA (National Association for the Practice of Anthropology) members taken by Robert Trotter. The results were as follows

In the mid eighties several means of electronic communication were developing. The largest information utility of that era, CompuServe, attracted many customers to its centralized service. CompuServe installed its own packet-switching network; however it was available to the public only as a front end to their dial-in services. This network competed with other front-end dial in packet networks such as TYMNET and TELNET. The difference between these networks and the modern Internet is that they only helped people to make a modem phone call to a computer that treated them as a terminal. The Internet, on the other hand, connects computers to each other. With the Internet the computers can interact without a person touching the keyboard.

In comparison with these early communication systems, the Internet is a great improvement. Putting computers to work together as a team has a potential that has hardly been realized. Based on this principle, the World Wide Web has had a tremendous impact, but there is much more that could be done or that has not yet reached public awareness. The limiting factor is social organization. In the social evolution that is taking place around the Internet, the responsibility and social conscience of the actors is a critical ingredient. At present Internet programming is being stimulated by commercial interests. Sophisticated programmers are luring unsophisticated people into their commercial webs -- double meaning intended. Also the tremendous power of computer-to-computer communication has allowed people who lack a social conscience to invade privacy and disrupt information processing in ways that were never possible before. The Internet has its down side as well as its up side.

 The Internet is a full-fledged packet switching network that requires special dedicated mini-computers, called routers, to be in place, all over the world. This system has taken a decade to cover the globe. In the nineteen-eighties, such systems were available only to the military and big businesses. Another simple, inexpensive way of getting computers connected without packet routers appeared in 1985. It was called BITNET. It was supported by IBM working with big universities. At that time IBM donated millions of dollars worth of computer equipment to American universities. Each computer maintained a list of all the other BITNET computers and therefore was able to select a route for a message. One did not have to create bang lists. The computers were connected by leased digital-grade phone lines. Such a system is called a store and forward network. It was very democratic. To join, all your university had to do was to pay for leasing a line to the nearest BITNET computer and to make it possible for others to connect to your computer when they wanted. BITNET was a non-profit operation, which made it very nice in comparison to the present Internet. No commercial messages were allowed, and it was an organization to which corporations could donate tax-free money. However, BITNET was technologically unsophisticated, could not grow beyond a certain point, and was heavily dependent on IBM hardware. When I ask myself why Microsoft has not done something like this, I come up with a rather leery answer. Are they afraid that the creativity they might unleash will put them out of business?

FIDO and bulletin boards

FIDO was an clever system devised to get around the high cost and closed policy of the ARPA Net. The FIDO system combined a bulletin board with dial-up connections between computers. Bulletin board systems (BBSs) were the roaring successes of the late nineteen-eighties. They disappeared in the nineties because communication via packet-switching networks became so cheap, but recently Web versions have reappeared. Like the newsgroups, bulletin boards conserved computer memory. When a message was posted on a BBS, only one copy was kept on the host computer. Members then dialed into that computer with terminals and read the community messages. They could post another community message, or leave Email on the host computer. At a predetermined time in the wee hours of the morning, all the FIDO computers would start dialing each other. Early in the morning, regional FIDO centers would receive messages destined for other regions. These would be exchanged, and a final sweep of local machines would bring in messages that had arrived from other regions. The system worked like an amateur radio traffic net. The result was that each bulletin board computer had a national, or even an international, scope. Each FIDO computer was updated with the messages that had been posted to the same group on other FIDO machines. Thus if people were willing to wait a day, they could read world wide messages by just dialing up a local computer. The FIDO system was successful because it used only preexisting phone lines, and it did not require a packet-switching network like the Internet. It had a very serious limitation, the small amount of communication that could be carried by modems over ordinary phone lines.

Marc Feldesman at Portland State University was one of the first anthropologists to realize that microcomputer statistics packages had freed us from the tyranny of large university main-frame computers for our research. Marc was a fan of FIDO and decided to help out by creating a FIDO system for anthropologists. His university provided the phone line and equipment. The ABBS (Anthropologists' Bulletin Board System) went on line in July 1986. It was probably the first anthropological Web-like system. It provided 24 hour service in January 1987 when Portland State approved a dedicated phone line.

The Original ABBS Banner

FIDO(tm) Version 11w
FIDONet(tm) Net 105 Node 20
                     _
The World's First   /  \                A.B.B.S
   BBS Network     /|oo \           Marc Feldesman
   * FIDONet *    (_|  /_)               Sysop
   * A.B.B.S.*     _`@/_ \    _
                  |     | \   \\
                  | (*) |  \   ))   Hours: Weekdays 5pm - 8am Pacific Time
     ______       |__U__| /  \//           Weekends 24 Hours
    / FIDO \       _//|| _\   /     FIDOmail:  2:00 am - 3:30 am 
   (105/020_)     (_/(_|(____/ (jm)

 ABBS contained the following areas in which messages could be left:

 1 ...   Area For Physical Anthropologists
 2 ...   Area For Cultural Anthropologists
 3 ...   Area For Archaeologists
 4 ...   Area for Linguists
 5 ...   Fido Outgoing and Incoming Mail
 6 ...   General Message Area
 7 ...   Sysop's comments on messages at log off
 8 ...   Employment Notices
11 ...   For SfAA Members Only
12 ...   General Message Area
14 ...   CAAN News and Articles
15 ...   Cooperation Area

One could leave a message in any of these areas addressed to everyone (ALL) or just to a particular person. When one signed on one was notified that mail was waiting. Since there was just one phone, the possibility of on-line chats did not exist. Much of what transpired on ABBS was the forerunner of experiences on modern Email lists, news groups, and chat systems. Since ABBS was tied into all the other local FIDO systems, anthropologists began to receive messages from other people interested in the subject. For example, I received the following message relayed from Chico, CA in FIDO Region 119 on Dec. 16, 1986:

Unfortunately the other FIDO boards in the area were echoing many mail messages to each other and ABBS became overloaded with non-anthropological messages. It finally had to be removed from the FIDO echo-mail system. The general rule then, as now, is that computers will be inundated by users until they overload. In a time when a 44 megabyte disk was gigantic, it did not take long. ABBS became an exclusive anthropological BBS.

 ABBS was created under the auspices of the SfAA Committee on Electronic Communications. A few months after it went on line another FIDO anthropology BBS appeared, The National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) BBS at Northern Arizona University. It was called A Bulletin Board for Practicing Anthropologists (BBPA). This one was sponsored by another pioneer in the use of computers for applied anthropological research, Robert Trotter. BBPA carried some interesting communications concerning software for ethnographic research, along with copies of the software. One of the features of this BBS was that you could download software.

BITNET was functioning in 1986 when the Internet was being put together with ARPA Net as the backbone. Electronic mail was terribly exciting. Over BITNET I was able to keep in touch with anthropologists that I seldom chatted with before. Developments in Email were moving rapidly and I happened to be at a university with a main-frame computer that was a clone of the one used by the artificial intelligence department at MIT. Our computer center people were not interested in BITNET. They were hooking up something they called the Internet. Most of my anthropological correspondents couldn't understand what this was about. If I wasn't on BITNET, how could I get Email? The goal of the Internet was to remove the details of the computer connection from the awareness of the users, so that they could concentrate on the content of the communication. I was never able to explain how I was getting and sending the Email, and I barely understood it myself. My Email address at that time was James_Dow%UMich-MTS.Mailnet@MIT-Multics.ARPA What counted was that people were getting Email.

Meanwhile ABBS was set up to automatically exchange messages with BBPA. Then, the ARTIFACTS board mentioned in the previous quoted message wanted to link into the growing anthropological FIDO network. They were not professional anthropologists but were full of burning questions like "how much human nature is determined by external conditions such as culture, physical environment, relationship with other cultures, etc."

This was the first appearance in anthropology of a problem that besets all professional networks. How can one accommodate curious lay persons who are very interested in the subject but who are relatively uneducated in it, or whose education is particularly self-directed and narrow? It turned out to be a bigger problem for anthropology than it was for other fields. The answer so far for anthropology has been to separate the bulletin boards, news groups, listservs, etc. into two groups, those that accept communications from any interested party and those that do not. These styles are generally called open and closed. Some prominent and well-educated anthropologists who like to communicate to the public participate in the open system. Others whose time is limited prefer the closed system.

The demise of the Fido Boards was caused by BITNET, which became the universal electronic link between American universities in 1989. Sending by BITNET was rapid and free to faculty members. Applied anthropologists who wanted to communicate usually kept computer accounts at local universities where they might lecture from time to time, or to which they had some other professional connection. The other agencies and businesses with which applied anthropologists worked had no digital links. BITNET also took over the functions of the bulletin boards by creating Email lists. IBM programmers developed a program called LISTSERV that would reflect mail to everyone on the list. Thus the BBS system was replaced by mass mailings to a predetermined group. Anyone in the group could mass mail to others in the group. Anthropologists took to BITNET rather than to the nascent Internet or the UNIX newsgroups primarily because it was still an academic discipline and tied to the apron strings of the universities that had nourished it. While the engineering and hard science departments of universities were developing the Internet, the humanities and social science departments were left with BITNET.

One of the problems in the early years of electronic communication was that the communicators were primarily interested in the technology rather than in the subject of the communication. Most of the communication traffic dealt with computer technology. It was almost impossible to get anthropologists interested enough in the technology to be able to use it for their work. This is still a problem. Using computers to communicate is almost like learning a new language, and the Internet is still full of people interested in computer technology.

Fortunately, a division of labor stimulated by the commercial applications of the Internet has set in. The computer whizzes have been put to work making computers easier to use for the rest of us. The big breakthroughs have been the result of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that transfer linguistic memory tasks to the visible computer screen. This occurred in the Macintosh for the terminal and in the program Mosaic, later to become Netscape, for the World Wide Web (WWW).

As the Internet developed, a number of useful features were adapted to WWW hypertext. Hypertext is text that allows you to jump from a selected word or phrase to another document. When I first heard of the WWW, I couldn't understand what the fuss was about. I could use all its features, such as FTP, WAIS, and GOPHER, independently. It just added the hypertext interface, but, when a GUI was added to Mosaic, the final contact with the public was made. Now the human memory requirements and the complexity of the technology could be hidden behind lovely, colorful computer displays. The computer disappeared and a new virtual reality emerged.

Conclusions

Electronic communication, like any form of communication, is a linguistic phenomenon. Anthropologists, applied and otherwise, have never been at the forefront of the invention of new languages. Perhaps they should be, because they do comprehend the systems that are involved. Instead of creating new languages and vehicles of communication, anthropologists try to understand the past ones. There were among anthropologists some people who made an effort to utilize the new technology. We don't know if they were more or fewer than those in other scientific fields. The main problem was that these early anthropological communicators did not have the funding nor an army of computer science graduate students to help them set up something that the average anthropologist could use. They had to rely on developments in computer engineering to do the job. As these developments took place, applied anthropologists began to use the facilities, apparently a rate no more or less than other social scientists.

Notes

1. This article covers a period in which there were many rapid technological changes. I can write about it only from my own experience and cannot cover all that was taking place. There are many people who were moving anthropology toward the new electronic communication and there is no space in this article to mention them all. Whenever I use a term such as "early" or a phrase such as "in those days," I am talking about a time only a dozen years, or less, ago, a time that is actually recent history, but in technological terms because of the rapid technological change that is taking place, virtually in the Dark Ages.

2. Technophiles, are the eager adopters of new technology and technophobes, are those who are upset by rapid change in technology (Westrum 1991). When dealing with computers the latter are still the majority in American society (Weil and Rosen 1997).

References

Bernard, H. R. and M. J. Evans. (1983). New Microcomputer Techniques for Anthropologists. Human Organization 42:182-185.

Sailer, Lee (1984). Computer-Assisted Anthropology. Practicing Anthropology 6(2):5-16.

Weil, Michelle M. and Larry D. Rosen. (1997). TechnoStress: Coping With Technology @WORK @HOME @PLAY. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Westrum, Ron. (1991). Technologies and Society. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.