There is a feeling of renewed hope in the air that the public interest will find a way of dominating the decision processes that shape the future. . . . It is a feeling one experiences at the console. The information revolution is bringing with it a key that may open the door to a new era of involvement and participation. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information and knowledge through a good console connected through a good network to a good computer.

Internet pioneer Joseph Licklider1

Introduction

In a now-legendary moment in the history of the internet, when ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) Director Jack P. Ruina was searching for someone to oversee the Department of Defense's research efforts in computing in 1962, he turned to J. C. R. Licklider. Ruina said Licklider "used to tell me how he liked to spend a lot of time at a computer console. . . . He said he would get hung up on it and become sort of addicted."2 Today, in the early twenty-first century, that peculiar feeling of interacting with computers is familiar to millions; whether through computer games, web surfing, or actual programming, people across the globe have experienced versions of the compulsive absorption, the "addiction," that can sometimes come with computing. Hit some keys, get a response, hit again, another response, again, again, again. The little responses the computer offers―some numbers, an error message, an image, a sound―do not resolve things. Rather, they are just enough to invite the user to try again, ever in hope, in anticipation of getting it right, of finding what's next.

In the early 1960s, however, only a handful of people in the world had actually had the experience of interacting with a computer; computers were few, and only a small fraction of them allowed direct interaction through a keyboard and screen. Much of Licklider's uniqueness came from the fact that, among the very few who had directly experienced an interactive computer, he saw this "holding power"3 as a potentially positive force; he eventually called it "the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network computer"4 and famously proposed that it would eventually lead to more effective and rational human behaviors. As head of ARPA's computing project for most of the 1960s, Licklider went on to fund much of the research that laid the foundation for the internet.

Felt experience, as a rule, is generated by the interaction of embodied phenomena with cultural contexts. Ingesting peyote buttons, for example, can be experienced by American college students as a form of entertainment and by Southwestern Native American shamans as a connection with the ancestors. A mountain climber may experience the physical exhaustion of an arduous and life-threatening climb as supremely exhilarating; a war refugee fleeing her homeland might experience physiologically similar stress as a feeling of the darkest despair. The same is true of the compulsive experience of interacting with a computer. Computers exist in cultural contexts, in the equivalents of shamanistic rituals or college dorm rooms, and people give meaning to the technology accordingly.

This is not to say that computers do not have material effects apart from what the culture believes about them. In fact, it is probably the case that, economically and socially, the computers with the most impact on our lives are the ones that hum away quietly out of sight in large institutions, calculating our bank statements, connecting our phone calls, maintaining our payrolls, and the like. If those computers suddenly disappeared, our economic world would collapse. But if the computers on our desks, the ones we directly interact with and talk so much about, suddenly disappeared, for many of us it arguably would be little more than an inconvenience to go back to using telephones, typewriters, file cabinets, and photocopiers.5

For a technology to be integrated into society, however, especially when much of its activity is invisible, it has to be given meanings that can relate it to dominant social values, to everyday life, and to bodily experience.6 Those often intricate meanings, in turn, shape over time what the technology becomes. Technology, in other words, is necessarily mediated by culturally embedded human experience. The meanings associated with the strange draw of the interactive computer are fluid. The fact that some see it is as an addiction while others see it as a potential source of human liberation, we shall see, is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the various readings of the feel of interactivity. But the fluidity of these meanings is not random. They emerge out of particular historical and social contexts. . . .