Personal Computing and the Whole Earth Catalog

Although I don't recall seeing a computer -- let alone compiler -- anywhere in my classic edition of The Whole Earth Catalog, there's no argument that there's a link between personal computers and the groundbreaking catalog. No less than Apple's Steve Jobs has described the Catalog as a conceptual forerunner of a Web search engine.

Launched in 1968 by Stewart Brand and colleagues, the Catalog was more than pile of paper. Indeed, it was the basis of the social networking and virtual communities that's emerging today. Or as described by Fred Turner in his recently released book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism:

In the fall of 1968, Stewart Brand published a 61-page miscellany of hand tools, books, and other gear. A generation of long-hairs was heading "back to the land" and Brand aimed to give them the tools they’d need to get there. While most rural communes soon failed, the ideals and the social networks Brand and his colleagues built up around the Catalog would last a lifetime. Over the next forty years, they transformed American notions of technology and particularly, of computers. They shaped the defining notions of our digital world, including "personal" computing, virtual community, and the vision of cyberspace as an electronic frontier. They helped give rise to such influential venues as the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (or WELL) and Wired magazine. And in the process, they transformed the ideals of the generation of 1968 into a deeply optimistic vision of the social potential of digital technologies.

What makes this noteworthy is the November 9, 2006 symposium "From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog" which will trace today's cyberculture roots. Symposium participants include Brand and two other figures who prominently have embraced the social potential of digital technologies: Kevin Kelly, former executive editor of Wired magazine and author of Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization and New Rules for the New Economy, and Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

The symposium, which will be moderated by Turner, will be held from 7:00 to 8:30 PM. in Cubberley Auditorium on the Stanford University campus.

The event is sponsored by Stanford University Libraries, the Department of Communication and the American Studies Program. The libraries' Special Collections department holds the archive of records from the Whole Earth Catalog and related publications including editorial files, reader correspondence, photographs, memorabilia and other material.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 02:21 PM  Permalink