Thematic Topics
From ConvivialTools
Category:Historical Roots
The ideas developed by Ivan Illich in Tools for Conviviality follow on a long tradition of criticism of industrial technology and of a search for viable alternatives. The Historical Roots of the idea of Convivial Tools extend back to the eighteenth century French Enlightenment and the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Twentieth-century precursers include philosophers such as Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, and counter-culture movements such as Whole Earth and Appropriate Technology.
Category:Post-War Cybernetics
During and after the Second World War, emerging tendencies in scientific thought coalesced into a new field which Norbert Wiener called Cybernetics, formed at the crossroads of computer science, electrical engineering, biology and social science. Post-War Cybernetics exercised a major influence on thinking about society, information, the environment and the use of computers. The concepts of Cybernetics were taken up by the Whole Earth movement. More recently, the arrival of the Internet spawned derivative terms such as Cyberspace and Cybernaut.
Category:Whole Earth
The Whole Earth movement began with the publication of the first Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand in 1968. The Whole Earth Catalog, which appeared regularly until 1972 and periodically thereafter, served as the center of an informal community of users and contributors. Due to their interest in Cybernetics, the Whole Earth community spawned influential network-based spin-offs, such as the Internet community called the WELL and the cyber-magazine Wired.
Category:Appropriate Technology
Appropriate Technology was first introduced as Intermediate Technology in the mid-nineteen-sixties by E.F. Schumacher, who is best-known for his book Small is Beautiful.
Category:Convivial Tools
Ivan Illich coined the term Convivial Tools in his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality. Convivial Tools can be defined as tools which allow the user to operate with independent efficiency.
In an earlier book Deschooling Society, Illich looked for ways that citizens could take back the control of their own learning processes. He thus proposed the development of computerized "learning webs," at a time before the Internet existed. In Tools for Conviviality he looked for ways that citizen's could take back the control of technology, and imagined tools that would be developed and maintained by a community of users. This vision influenced members of the Hacker Generation, who developed the first personal computer in the 1970s. One of these was inventor Lee Felsenstein, who helped form the Homebrew Computer Club as a community of do-it-yourself computer developers. This vision of community tool development is embodied in more recent movements such as Free and Open Source Software, Wikis, Open Design and the whole of Web 2.0.
Category:Hacker Generation
The Hacker Generation of the late 1970s was formed by the individuals and communities that created the hardware and software of the personal computer. It includes people such as Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who created the Apple Computer, and Lee Felsenstein, an electronic engineer who along with Wozniak and Jobs was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club.
Category:Cyberspace
The emergence of the Internet lead to the development of a new culture shared by the denizens of Cyberspace, which became mainstream with the development of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.
Category:FOSS - Free and Open Source Software
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is a comprehensive term encompassing both the Free Software and Open Source Software movements. The Free Software movement was created in the early 1980s by Richard Stallman, a member of the Hacker Generation. It went mainstream when the offshoot Open Source Software was formulated nearly two decades later by a group that formed around Eric S. Raymond.
Category:Open Source Culture
The new licences developed by the Free and Open Source Software movement inspired interest in the use of Open Source licenses in all fields of creative activity.
Category:Open Design
Open Design is the application of the principles of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to the design of physical objects such as machines and computer hardware. Open Design is a general term covering a number of specific Open Source movements, such as the Open Source Hardware movement for Open Design of microcomputer chips, and the Open Source Tool Design movement which concerns primarily the Open Design of machines.
Category:Convivial Product
The Convivial Product is a Convivial Tool offered for public use, either by sale or by gift (see Gift Economics). The basic characteristic of the Convivial Product is Usability.
Category:Convivial Websites
Convivial Websites are those which demonstrate the characteristics of the Convivial Product. They may notably include Review Sites, How-to Websites, and other useful websites. Other types of Convivial Websites include wiki websites and Social Software sites (see Web 2.0).
Category:Web 2.0
The Internet has evolved rapidly since the birth of the original World Wide Web in the early 1990s. It has reached a stage that Tim O'Reilly has called Web 2.0, characterized notably by such phenomena as Social Software, Virtual Worlds and Massively Distributed Collaboration.
Category:Web 3.0
What is the web evolving towards? Some say that Web 3.0 will be a Semantic Web, providing machine-facilitated understanding of information to help users perform more productive Data Mining for their own personal profit.
