Yes, internet has a patron saint

Isidore Glass painted by Iris Gerritsen, Delft, private collection, 2005. 

Today in 636, Isidore of Seville, patron saint of libraries and internet, died. You might wonder why he became the patron saint of internet. 

The Roman Catholic Church has a legion of canonized and fantasy saints; saints for any day and any event in life. Saint Isidore was canonized in 653 in Toledo as he was an example to Christians and non-Christians, played a role in the church as the bishop of Seville and he was a theologian and scholar. Pope John Paul II designated him, besides being already the patron of written and print products such as catalogues and libraries, in 2005 as the patron saint of the digital medium internet. He received this title for the encyclopaedic work he undertook by compiling a summa of universal knowledge, the Etymologiae. This encyclopaedia is better known as Origines and consists of a compilation of 448 chapters in 20 volumes. Personally I like this saint as I recognise resemblances with his life.

During the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633 Isidore ordered seminaries at the Spanish cathedrals. He made Greek, Hebrew and the liberal arts compulsory subjects there, while promoting law and medicine. I studied at  minor and major seminaries in my youth and was educated in Greek and Latin, philosophy and theology and graduated as a Master of Divinity (MDiv) from Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, La in 1970.

 

Having completed my studies, I declined a clerical career, returned to The Netherlands and got into publishing general reference works; a stint which lasted 10 years. In 1970 I joined a publishing company which was setting up a new 25 volumes general encyclopaedia and in the second publishing company we even produced a weekly part work encyclopaedia, named Summa.

In 1980 I got into the new media business, first in online ASCII and videotext, later into offline media as magnetic and optical discs, until internet came about in the nineties. In online as well as in offline I remained interested in encyclopaedias such as the printed 21-volumes Academic American Encyclopaedia, which was turned into electronic products by Grolier and distributed online by The New York Times Information Bank, the Dow Jones News/Retrieval and Compuserve and offline on CD-ROM. As a Dutch native I saw with interest the publication of the Interactive Encyclopaedia on CD-I by Philips. IN 1994 internet came around in in 1994 as an all-round knowledge medium with search engines such as AltaVista and Yahoo, to be pushed aside by Google, which started in 1998 and by the free encyclopaedia Wikipedia in 2001.

There is a lot of likeness between Isidore and me, but he is a saint and I am not. He is the patron saint of written and printed catalogues and print libraries and since this century of the digital medium internet. I am a  librarian of a knowledge wall of 20 printed multi-volumes encyclopaedias and a curator of pre-internet’s online streams such as ASCII, videotex and a depot of  some offline information carriers such as floppy discs, videodiscs, CD-ROMs and CD-I’s.

BPN 1742: 30 Years of open internet in The Netherlands

Last week on November 17, it was 30 years, since The Netherlands as the first European country linked up to the open internet through the US National Science Foundation. An update of a blog posting of 17 November 2013 with the original permission e-mail and a video (subtitled in English) by CWI, the internet pioneer in The Netherlands

Dutch internet pioneers Jaap Akkerhuis, Daniel Karrenberg, Teus Hagen en Piet Beertema (right) at the pensioning event of  Piet Beertema on 16 September 2004. Source: CWI.

In the Netherlands, the Mathematical Centre (MC) in Amsterdam in 1982 was in contact with Arpanet and played a role  an important role in the UUCP network of European universities. MC became the network gateway between the US and Europe. Domain names were released by Arpanet, but in 1986 a shortage of the domain names threatened for the 25,000 computers connected to the UUCP network of universities and the Arpanet. Piet Beertema, employee at MC (but from 1983 onwards CWI, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) came up with the solution of a country suffix in the domain name. John Postel from the Stanford Research Institute, responsible for the domain names, approved the country suffix dot country code as a proper instrument.

And on April 25, 1986 the suffix .nl was allocated to the Netherlands. The Netherlands was the first country with its own country code. On May 1, 1986 the first Dutch domain name cwi.nl was registered. The next domains were: nluug.nl (association of professional Open Systems and Open Standards users in the Netherlands); nikhef.nl (The National Institute for Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics); rug.nl (university of Groningen) and sara.nl  (Collaborating academic computing centers). Piet Beertema was the registrar and recorded the domain names. In the first two years he was not very busy, as he only registered 60 domains in his notebook. In 1989 there was only one registered domain name. Apart from academic computer centers companies could also register a domain name, but they had to show their Chamber of Commerce registration paper.

The slow growth was due to the transformation that internet underwent. Arpanet decided to continue as the military internet branch and the National Science Foundation became responsible in 1988 for academic and commercial NSFnet. On November 17, 1988, at 14:30 pm Piet Beertema linked The Netherlands as one of the first countries outside the US to the academic network NSFnet. The Netherlands brought the first, non-military, transatlantic connection to the Web.

This connection did give a boost to internet use in the academic world. But the registration of domain names only really took off from 1993, when the Dutch ISP XS4ALL on May 1 launched its Internet services to consumers on May 1, ending the first day with 500 subscriptions. And the Internet began in earnest, when the Digital City opened its gates and businesses did not know how fast they had to register a domain name in order to have an internet profile. Over the following years registration of domain names increased. In order to keep pace the Foundation for Internet Domain Registration in the Netherlands (SIDN) was founded. On January 31, 1996 the tasks of the CWI were transferred to SIDN.

End of March 2016, more than 5.8 million domain names were registered with SIDN (see  SIDN statistics).

BPN 1640: The Switch to Internet in The Netherlands (1)

During during the coming days I will publish a serialised article on the silent and sudden switch to Internet in the Netherlands. The article will exists of five installments. Jak. 

In 2011 my book on the pre-internet era in The Netherlands[i] was published. The book describes the period of new media, online as well as offline in The Netherlands between 1967 and 1997.

Three conclusions can be drawn from the book:

1.  There was life way before internet; new media started to develop itself some 25 years before the introduction of internet;
2.  Before the introduction of internet services there were commercial online services and offline products since 1980;
3.  Despite a professional information infrastructure and a million guilders annual turn-over of commercial information services, there was a silent and sudden switch in favour of internet by Dutch consumer in less than three years, from 1994 to 1997.

In this series of blogs the development and commercialisation of new media in The Netherlands will be sketched and the question will be posed why internet could take over the existing online world in less than three years: was it the technology, was it the organisation, was it a new user group or was it a combination of these factors?

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[i] Jak Boumans (2011): Toen digitale media nog nieuw waren – Pre-internet in de polder (1967-1997).
Translation title: When digital media were still brand-new - Pre-Internet in the polder (1967-1997)
Media Update ; ISBN 9789078730057. Design cover: Chiara Boeri; graphic design: Collage.
The book is in The Dutch language. Most likely there will be no translation in the English language. This article is a summary of the 320 page book. This is the Table of Content (TOC): 

Introduction: New media present themselves
Part 1: The search (1945-1980)
Chapter 1: US, the cradle of online
Chapter 2: Online differently
Chapter 3: New media in the polder

Part 2: Two stream country in the commercial online

Chapter 4: Commercial ASCII services and databases

Chapter 5: Teletext and videotex

Chapter 6: Packaged bandwidth

Part 3: Disturbed growth

Chapter 7: Growing professionalism

Chapter 8: Internet

Chapter 9: The end for new media, silent switch

Sources

-           Inventory used sources

-           Illustrations

-           Dutch timeline

-           Business and persons’ index

-           Author’s biography 

Instalment 2: Life before Internet

Journalism is changing

Recently the Project for Excellence in Journalism published its annual report.

The pace of change has accelerated. In the last year, the trends reshaping journalism didn’t just quicken, they seemed to be nearing a pivot point. Business model that has financed the news for more than a century — product advertising — still fits the way people consume media. Yet audiences are splintering across ever more platforms, from circulation in print, to ratings in TV, to page views and unique visitors online. Every media sector except for two is now losing popularity.

The definitions of enemy and ally in the news business are changing. Newspapers have begun to partner, for instance, with classified-job-listing Web sites they once denounced, brought together by mutual fear of free sites such as Craigslist.

With fundamentals shifting, we sense the news business entering a new phase heading into 2007—a phase of more limited ambition. Rather than try to manage decline, many news organizations have taken the next step of starting to redefine their appeal and their purpose based on diminished capacity. Increasingly outlets are looking for “brand” or “franchise” areas of coverage to build audience around.

For some, the new brand is what Wall Street calls “hyper localism” (consider the end of foreign bureaus at the Boston Globe or the narrowing of the coverage area at the Atlanta Journal Constitution). For others, it is personality and opinion. For still others it is personal involvement. For an emerging cohort of Web sites it is the involvement of everyday people (some alternative news sites now come closer than ever to the promise of authentic citizen media).
In a sense all news organizations are becoming more niche players, basing their appeal less on how they cover the news and more on what they cover.

The consequences of this narrowing of focus involve more risk than we sense the business has considered. Concepts like hyper localism, pursued in the most literal sense, can be marketing speak for simply doing less. Branding can also be a mask for bias. Handled badly, the new strategy might also render a big city metro paper irrelevant. The recent history of the news industry is marked by caution and continuity more than innovation. The character of the next era, far from inevitable, will likely depend heavily on the quality of leadership in the newsroom and boardroom. If history is a guide, it will require renegades and risk-takers to break from the conventional path and create new directions.

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing The Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care,” the paper’s publisher and chairman of the New York Times Company, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., told an interviewer earlier this year. The head of country’s most esteemed news company meant to sound an optimistic tone about journalism’s future, but the statement, like the industry, seemed to teeter between boldness and uncertainty.

This is the fourth edition of our annual report on the state of the news media — the status and health of journalism in America. The broad context outlined in earlier editions remains the same: the transformation facing journalism is epochal, as momentous as the invention of television or the telegraph, perhaps on the order of the printing press itself. (See Previous Reports).

The effect is more than just audiences migrating to new delivery systems. Technology is redefining the role of the citizen — endowing the individual with more responsibility and command over how he or she consumes information — and that new role is only beginning to be understood.

Our sense remains, too, that traditional journalism is not, as some suggest, becoming irrelevant. There is more evidence now that new technology companies have had either limited success in news gathering (Yahoo, AOL), or have avoided it altogether (Google). Whoever owns them, old newsrooms now seem more likely than a few years ago to be the foundations for the newsrooms of the future.

But practicing journalism has become far more difficult and demands new vision. Journalism is becoming a smaller part of people’s information mix. The press is no longer gatekeeper over what the public knows.

Journalists have reacted relatively slowly. They are only now beginning to re-imagine their role. Their companies failed to see “search” as a kind of journalism. Their industry has spent comparatively little on R&D. They have been tentative about pressing for new economic models, and that has left them fearful and defensive. Some of the most interesting experiments in new journalism continue to come from outside the profession — sites such as Global Voices, which mixes approved volunteer “reporters” from around the world with professional editors.
There are signs, meanwhile, that those the press is charged with monitoring, including the government, corporations and activists, have reacted more quickly. Politicians, interest groups and corporate public relations people tell Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) they have bloggers now on secret retainer — and they are delighted with the results.

These are a few of the conclusions we arrive at about The State of the News Media 2007. Each year, we try to identify new key trends facing the media. In the past, among others, we have noted that journalism’s challenge is not from technology or lack of interest in news but from diminished economic potential; that power is moving to those who make news away from those who cover it; that there are now several competing models of journalism, with cheaper, less accurate ones gaining momentum; that while there are more outlets delivering news, that has generally not meant covering a broader range of stories.

Blog Posting Number: 711

Tags:journalism, television, radio, newspapers