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25 DOI: 10.7330/9780874218909.c01 1 How Counterculture Helped Put the “Vernacular” in Vernacular Webs Robert Glenn Howard In 1964 students converged on the University of California’s Sproul Hall. Protesting new policies that radically limited political speech on campus , some of these students wore punch cards, used to input data into the era’s computers, around their necks. One protestor had a sign suggesting computers were a mechanism of oppressive institutional power: “I am a UC Berkeley student. Please do not fold, bend, spindle, or mutilate me” (Turner 2006, 2). In 1964 the computer could be invoked as a symbol of oppression . Some twenty years later, however, it had been transformed into a symbol of freedom. In January of 1984, Apple Computer announced its new Macintosh computer system. In a now iconic commercial, the Macintosh was presented as the liberating force that would keep George Orwell’s dystopian vision of an autocratic future in his book 1984 from becoming a reality. The commercial depicts what seem to be automatons watching a huge projection of a man orating, “We have created, for the first time in all history , a garden of pure ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths . . . Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion!” As the man speaks, a woman with short, blond hair bursts into the auditorium , with helmeted guards in close pursuit. She wears bright red running shorts and a tank top bearing the new Macintosh logo. With a powerful swing, she hurls a sledgehammer through the screen and shatters it. A blinding flash of white light washes over the startled automatons. The commercial concludes, “On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce 26 Robert Glenn Howard Macintosh. And you will see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’” (“Apple’s 1984 Commercial” 2011). What happened? How had computer technologies been transformed from the oppressive mechanism of institutional control to a liberating force of empowered individualism? The simple answer to that question has farreaching implications. Only institutions with significant financial resources (like governments, large corporations, and major research universities and institutes) could afford to operate the expensive, large, and operationally complex computers of the 1960s. A decade later, individuals influenced by the counterculture movement of the 1960s developed personal computer (PC) and Internet technologies, infusing them with a sense of anti-institutionalism. Because the development of these two key technologies shifted the computer industry’s focus away from institutions toward everyday people, the forms of online communication we see today bear traces of an ideology that values the “folk,” or vernacular, over the institutional. The iconic Apple Computer commercial explicitly conveyed this ethos some ten years after the creation of the first personal computers. Today’s computer users have been empowered by this ethos to create and consume their own complex media content alongside, but apart from, the content created by powerful institutions. The dynamic and interlocking networks of everyday personal connection that we create online now constitute powerful new webs of vernacular communication. This chapter traces how a valuation of the vernacular came to be embedded in network communication. I first locate a rhetoric of vernacular authority that emerges in an amateur publication highly influential among hobbyist computer users of the 1970s: the underground introduction to computer programming and manifesto Computer Lib (Nelson 1974). This publication first popularized the idea of hypertext as a technology that could wrest the power of computers from institutions and bring it to the people. Ultimately, hypertext would become the basic technology that made vernacular webs possible. I next examine the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter. Here, another group of computer enthusiasts expressed the same valuation of the vernacular as they sought to create a personal computer that anyone could own and use. Prominent newsletter readers included Microsoft founder Bill Gates as well as the founders of Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. From the Homebrew newsletter, the second key technology of vernacular webs took shape: the personal computer itself. How Counterculture Helped Put the “Vernacular” in Vernacular Webs 27 Next, I describe how these communities’ vernacular ethos emerged in the institutionally funded development of the basic computer code behind all Internet communication. But it was not until institutionally funded websites emerged that vernacular webs became observable online. Only afterward did it become possible to see the difference between everyday Internet use and more formal institutional Internet use. Finally, I demonstrate how the hybridization between institutional...

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