The Distinctive Qualities of Computers and Internet

Abstract: Given that the Internet is an engineered system like any other, why should we distinguish "Internet research" from any other study of technology? One answer is that computers are distinctive in their direct and systematic relationship to language. Another is that the Internet, through its layered architecture, is highly appropriable. Even so, the Internet does not cause a revolution or define a wholly separate "cyber" sphere. Instead, due to its distinctive qualities, it participates in somewhat distinctive ways in the ongoing political life of institutions.

When I was going to graduate school at MIT, most of the professors around me were embarrassed to be called computer scientists. Their complaint was this: why should there be a separate field of computer science, any more than there is a separate field of refrigerator science? In their view, computers were just complex physical artifacts like any others. Following Simon (1969), they argued that design principles such as modularity are not specific to software, but are properties of the universe in general. The structures that evolve are modular because modular structures are more stable than others. Computers were simply a special case of these universal laws.

This perspective on computer science differs from the view in most textbooks. In the textbooks, a computer is a device that can compute any function that any particular Turing machine can compute. The professors at MIT would have none of this. Of course the mathematics of computability was interesting, but it reflected only one corner of a much larger space of inquiry. What they found most interesting was not the mapping from single inputs to single outputs but the relationship between the structure of a computational device and the organization of the computational process that arose when the device was set running.

The physical realization of computational processes was, however, only half the story. The other half lay in the

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