[rohrpost] Re: <nettime> thesis on Amsterdam's Digital City: "Rise and Fall of DDS"

[Axel Diederich]

At 19.11.01 15:35, you wrote:
>Hi Nettime,
>
>Geert asked me to post an announcement here that I wrote a thesis on
>DDS. You can download it in 5 different formats at
>http://reinder.rustema.nl/dds/ ranging in size from 1MB for RTF to
>96Kb as doc for your Palm handheld.
>
>The thesis is an historical study in combination with an evaluation.
>
>The history of DDS is cut in four periods: the experimental 10 weeks
>in 1994, the transformation into an institution in 1995, the
>competition with the internet in 1996-2000 and finally the
>commercialisation. You should know that DDS became an ordinary
>discount ISP a few months ago and completely dropped any commitment
>to the public domain.
>
>The 4 periods are evaluated in relation to four themes: social
>cohesion, third place, freedom of information and democratisation.
>That is 'third place' indeed, and not public place or public sphere a
>la Habermas. A minor but hopefully interesting difference.
>
>What I have learned from writing this whole thing is that it is
>incredibly difficult to institutionalise whatever collaborative
>'space' in cyberspace if you want to do justice to the beautiful
>internet culture. You know, the old fashioned one, with a
>gift-economy etcetera. If you want to do this you can at best make
>sure that the protocols and software licenses you use are open, free
>and compatible and decisions are made on the internet itself in
>discussions. The problems really start when you come up with
>interfaces nobody but some central authority can alter. Like in the
>case of DDS and their WWW interface. An on-line community also should
>not grow to big. At best it should have a few hundred members, but
>once you want to become as big as possible (why should you? to
>attract advertisers?) the whole community falls apart.
>
>Anyway, that's what I learned from this study but if you read it
>yourself you probably will get lots of other and/or interesting ideas.
>
>I tried to avoid difficult words as much as possible (English is not
>even my first language, so that helps as a crap filter) and there are
>some entertaining parts. I hope.
>
>It's 77 pages to print from the PDF, but if you leave out appendix 5
>and 6 (which are in Dutch) you need only 60 pages. I don't know how
>the difference translates into dead trees.
>
>About me: I am somebody. In the beginning of 2001 I launched the idea
>to buy DDS as inhabitants in order to resue it. This resulted in an
>association with the name Open Domein (Open Domain) which is now
>trying to live up to the old DDS ideals. One day something
>interesting might grow out of it I think.
>
>
>--
>ReindeR
>
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