In a 1999 BBC interview (right), David Bowie talks about the end of a “singularity” in world culture, which produced the internet. So instead of the usual narrative about the medium affecting society, he’s saying that a social situation created the medium.
I don’t think we’ve seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable, We’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.
Well into the 21st century, universal access to computer networks is becoming a reality. In North America, 80 percent have access, as might be expected. It’s 68% in Australia, 63% in Europe, 40% in the Middle East, 27% in Asia and 15% in Africa.
Thanks to the open software movement and free speech protection, the global internet is the most socially constructed technology in history, with human vision driving its development for good and ill. This is in opposition to the technologically deterministic view that people adapt to the inevitable march of progress, with little control over technologies that are largely autonomous.
Meanwhile…
International regulation of the internet is becoming highly contentious. Vint Cerf, one of the early originators of open networks, had this to say about proposals to regulate the internet at the UN level: (May 25, 2012, New York Times)
When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash. What secret sauce powered its success? The Net prospered precisely because governments — for the most part — allowed the Internet to grow organically, with civil society, academia, private sector and voluntary standards bodies collaborating on development, operation and governance.In contrast, the I.T.U. creates significant barriers to civil society participation. A specialized agency of the United Nations, it grew out of the International Telegraph Union, which was established in 1865. The treaty governing the agency, last amended in 1988, established practices that left the Internet largely unaffected.
In 2019 — thirty years after the World Wide Web was invented — Tim Berners-Lee reflected on its successes and problems:
While the web has created opportunity, given marginalized groups a voice and made our daily lives easier,” he writes, “it has also created opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred and made all kinds of crime easier to commit.
According to Berners-Lee, problems involve:
- Deliberate, malicious intent such as government hacks
- Perverse incentives such as ad-based revenue models that reward the spread of misinformation
- Services that may have been created for good reasons but result in negative outcomes, “such as the outraged and polarized tone” of online discussions.
Discussion questions
- Replacing universities: Why did H.G. Wells say that universities are highly conservative and resistant? How did he think they could be replaced? Do you agree with Clay Shirky‘s (a speaker on TED) essay about universities and “cost disease”?
- Curves in the road: How did AT&T miss the curve in the road with DARPA? What about the mass media? How did they miss the curve in the road with the World Wide Web?
- Changes in mass media traffic patterns: Consider the information traffic diagram (right) that shows the difference between top-down programs and other kinds of media. List examples of other new and old media companies in each of the four categories. (Click on the diagram to enlarge it).
- Cyberspace Independence: Originally, the Internet was supposed to transcend and then transform governments. How much has it lived up to its potential?
- The power of intellectual capital: How on earth would one guy, working alone, be able to digitize over 22 million newspaper pages, for free, when the Library of Congress got about 5 million pages in the same time period for about $15 million. See this video to visualize the contrast.
- The Internet hall of fame has a lot of likely suspects, but is it as complete as it might be? Who is missing?
People & Events
Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, H.G. Wells, Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Martin Greenberger, Ted Nelson, Len Klienrock, Vint Cerf, John Perry Barlow, Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings, Larry Page, Sergei Brin
Teletex, Minitel, Prestel, Prodigy, America On Line, World Wide Web, Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, laws of network value, Amazon, Netflix, Google, crowdsourcing, social capital, Streisand effect,
Documentary videos
- Triumph of the Nerds 2.0 describes the early years of network development, from the Defense Department to the development of the World Wide Web at CERN. An excellent and entertaining documentary, probably too long to show in full during class.
- Evolving Personalized Information Construct – EPIC (Spanish audio only) – A tongue-in-cheek history about the decline of real media in the face of “Googlezon.” The news wars of 2010 are notable for the fact that no actual news organizations take part… In 2014, New York Times goes offline …
- Larry Page and Sergi Brin on the founding of Google — TED Talk from 2004.
- YouTube has dozens of videos about the history of computing. One of the most interesting is a 1974 interview with an Australian Broadcasting Corp. reporter and Arthur C. Clark talking about the future of the internet in a room full of computers. (Embedded on this page) or Clark’s ideas about the internet. Another is Bill Moyer’s 1988 interview Isaac Asimov about how computers and networks have the potential to greatly improve education.
Podcasts and OPEN courses
- The Future of the Internet, Stanford Continuing Studies Program
- Internet History, Technology, and Security, Charles Severance, University of Michigan / Coursera
Further reading
General histories of the Internet
- Social media is 2,000 years old, says Tom Standage.
- PBS Life on the Internet — Timeline 1960 – 1997
- Virtual community by Howard Rheingold, 1993, a classic available now online. “When you think of a title for a book, you are forced to think of something short and evocative, like, well, ‘The Virtual Community,’ even though a more accurate title might be: ‘People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community.'” – HLR
- Explosive power of Networks – At the end of 2021, the top four companies in the world by market capitalization were networked platforms (i.e., Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon), which were 6 out of the top 10 (the above four plus Meta and Tencent).
Early history of the Internet
- Encyclopedia World Brain – HG Wells imagines his early concept of the internet.
- A brief history of email, from MIT’s “mailbox” to the 21st century, by Phrasee.
- Historical maps of early cyberspace
- Teletext — an early form of rich content text information that could be received on television or computer screen. BBC ‘s implementation, Ceefax, begin as early as 1974. Not to be confused with teleprinters, such as the system adopted by the Association Press in 1914, or the “telex” system used in the 1950s – 80s.
- Prestel was British postal service system that was commercially launched in 1979 using Viewdata technology. The system was a British rival to the far more successful Minitel.
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Minitel 1B terminal (Courtesty USC Annenberg Minitel Research Lab).
Minitel was a French national social and commercial internet from the early 1980s to around 2010. It was successful long before the internet began taking off. Minitel began as a government telephone service project in 1980, and by 1990 it had millions of subscribers and tens of thousands of businesses online.
- The Minitel Research Lab is creating a comprehensive independent digital Minitel museum and resource center; exploring the technical, social, political and legal significance of the Minitel network; and making creative use of the machines to incite critical thinking about network design. The lab is based at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
- “A French Internet Revolution,” Business Week, Sept. 29, 1997.
- Radio France International (RFI). “Minitel Lives On,” February 11, 2009
- Library of Congress Internet history links (most redirects work, be patient)
- John Markoff, “When Big Blue Got a Glimpse of the Future,” article about 1970s meeting between IBM execs and network visionaries. The New York Times.
- The Birth of Online, by Walter Isaacson.
Even with the new systems, most average PC owners could not easily join virtual communities. You needed to have access to the Usenet or one of the government-funded networks that were being woven into the Internet. But then, in the early 1980s, a little but explosive innovation came along that led to a new phase in the digital revolution: the modulator-demodulator, known as a modem. Modems could modulate an analog signal, such as a that carried by an ordinary telephone line, so that it could encode digital information, and also reverse the process. In short, it allowed ordinary people to connect their computers using phone lines. The online revolution could now begin.
- Roads & Crossroads of the Internet
- David Carlson’s History of Online news
- Arango, Tim. “How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” The New York Times.
- Early versions of the Web: NAPLPS
- Tim Berners-Lee and the inspirations for the world wide web, a TED talk by Ian Ritchie.
- WeHelpedBuildThat.com — The Wall Street Journal’s take on who is responsible for building the Internet. July 30, 2012.
- Video of what 1995 students expected the internet to become. Went viral in 2012.
- Blockbuster video store’s self-inflicted tragedy. Nov. 13, 2013.
- Ray Tomlinson and the invention of the @ sign for email (Washington Post, March 6 2016)… and some of Tomlinson’s own observations about it.
- Controversy over EMAIL and its inventor.
- John Perry Barlow and the 1996 Declaration of Cyberspace Independence represents an important moment in the history of the internet and free speech. Barlow also discusses beat free spirit, Neal Cassidy, in an article about one of the most interesting intersections of American culture.
- Biography of John Perry Barlow in Mountain Journal, April 2018. “…here was a lyricist for The Grateful Dead; a man who served as a friend and mentor to John F. Kennedy Jr. at Barlow’s ranch in Sublette County during Kennedy’s impressionable adolescence; and a self-styled redneck Libertarian Republican …”Barlow adored “the promise of cyberspace liberating and democratizing the flow of information, ostensibly free of interference and control by governments and corporations,” but “the fact that so much changed was of major horror to Barlow… In utopian theory, the internet offered a way in for everyone, for it belonged to no one like the high seas… In recent years, he grew disappointed, angry and disenchanted by government intelligence eavesdropping and social media entities severely betraying the public trust. More troubling, he lamented, was that the virtual community where ideas and opinions could be shared also brought out the vilest impulses in people.”
Internet and the news media
- Viewtron — Knight-Ridder newspaper chain and AT&T — 1983 – 1986.
- Prodigy plans new features — New York Times, 1990.
- News and Observer nando.net — started in 1993, Nando.net was one of the best attempts by newspapers to come to grips with new media.
- Microsoft and NBC launch a cable channel called MSNBC in 1996.
- News aggregation and the law — NiemanLab article, Sept. 8, 2010.
- RCFP briefing on “hot news misappropriation” copyright issues. d Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 2012.
- Google closing its news aggregation in Spain over tax issues – Huff Post, Dec. 12, 2014.
- Americans feel better informed, thanks to the Internet. Pew Research Project, Dec. 8, 2014.
- NY Times website at 20
- After a multi-year experiment, Facebook parts ways with the news.
- CRJ muses about what the info wars mean for journalists.
- 200 papers quietly sue big tech.
Emerging Networks (2000 – present)
- Bob Metcalfe, “Metcalfe’s Law Recurses Down the Long Tail of Social Networks” 18 August 2006.
- David Reed, That Sneaky Exponential – Metcalfe’s law to the power of community building, Context magazine, Spring 1999.
- Rod Beckstrom, The Economics of Networks and Cybersecurity, US Dept. of Homeland Security, Dec. 12, 2008.
- Video Game and New Media History links
- “The Top 500 sites on the web,” www.alexa.com
- Alpert, Jesse and Nissan Hajaj. “We Knew the Web Was Big . . . ” The Official Google Blog, 2008.
- Anderson, Chris and Michael Wolf. “The Web is Dead,” Wired magazine, August, 2010.
- Pew Research Center for People & the Press, “Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Outlet,” December 23, 2008.
- Anderson, Janna and Lee Rainie. “The Future of the Internet,” Pew Internet and American Life Project, February 19, 2010.
- Citizen Media Business Issues: Traffic Rankings, Search Engines, and Search Engine Optimization – Center for Citizen Media
- N. Negroponte: “Being Digital”, Bits and Atoms, Chapter 1
- FTC said to prepare review of Apple tactics in mobile ad market
- Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin, The Guardian, April 15, 2012.
- Inside Washington’s high risk mission to beat web censors Oliver Berkeman, The Guardian, April 15, 2012.
- Americans pay too much for high speed internet, Washington Post, Oct. 28, 2013. Similar international comparisons were made between a century beforehand between the cost of a telegram in European government-owned systems and a telegram sent by the private Western Union monopoly in the US. The European rates were one half to one third the US rates.
- Crowdsourcing goes mainstream in typhoon response. Nature. Nov. 2013.
- The Streisand effect — When an attempt to censor information has the effect of publicizing it more widely. Named for an attempt to censor photos of Barbara Streisand’s home. (Wikipedia)
- Our Machine Masters — David Brooks, NY Times, Oct 13, 2014.
- No, Mr. Trump, the US is not turning over control of the internet to the Russians and Chinese, LA Times Sept 28, 2016
- Henry Jenkins argues that media convergence goes beyond a mere technological shift, insisting that it also represents a shift in industrial, cultural, and social paradigms, where “consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content.” – Future Learn
- “Lightning in His Hand: The Life Story of Nikola Tesla” by Inez Hunt, Wanetta W. Draper (Sage Books, 1964)
When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
Original Source: Collier’s Illustrated Weekly, Volume 77 (1926)
- Clay Shirky – an expert on networks and how they are used today – argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible — with deep social and political implications.
Structure of the networked world
- Why it’s hard to estimate the number of “bots” on Twitter. May 23, 2022. The Conversation. By Kai-Cheng Yang and Filippo Menczer.
- Anti-Trust enforcement needs to evolve. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Feb. 2019.
- The Apple – Amazon – Justice Dept. anti-trust suite of 2012 “is not about saving literature or the sanctity of the literary world, it is about the publishers’ business model (be patient with link),” says Hoyt Hilsman in the Chicago Trib (April 26). “Since the advent of digital technology, the book business — along with the music business, the film business and a slew of other traditional businesses — has been broken.”
- European Union competition watchdogs began an investigation into Google in November, 2010 and the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened its own probe into the company’s lucrative search and advertising business in June, 2011. Google under scrutiny. Reuters, Sept. 20, 2011.
- It’s silicon valley against the baby Bells as the FCC proposes public wifi networks. Washington Post, Feb. 24, 2013
- The builder of the 5G network is just like TikTok – a Chinese based company – and it invites the same security questions.
- Speeds beyond the 5G network.
- US Senate Judiciary Committee, September 21, 2011: “The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?” See especially testimony of Jeff Katz, founder of Orbitz:
“In 2002 this openness and competitive aspect of the internet was also available to the founders of Nextag. They began to invest around Google’s ideas, and technology. But what Google engineering giveth, Google marketing taketh away. Google abandoned these core principles when they started interfering with profits and profit growth. Today, Google doesn’t play fair. Google rigs its results, biasing in favor of Google Shopping and against competitors like us.” - Many rural areas lack internet, and it’s up to the states to connect them. Some states are less effective than others.
Big trouble, Social Media
- “We are experiencing in our times a loss of depth — a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth. A sense of the deep and natural connectedness of things is a function of vertical consciousness. Its apotheosis is what was once called wisdom… We suspect people who use such words (as truth, meaning, soul, destiny) of being soft and nostalgic. We prefer the deflating one-liner that reassures us that nothing need be taken seriously; we inhale the atmospheres of irony. Except, of course, when our systems break down …” Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies. 1994. Farrar Strauss. (p. 74 of the paperback edition).
- The secret lives of Facebook moderators. This is NOT a fun job.
- Robespierre’s America. Twitter and shaming. NY Times, July 5, 2019.
- False news flies faster — MIT Tech Reviews
Networked education
- Clay Shirky on how universities got “cost disease” and what it will mean. November 2012. Highly recommended read.
- College disrupted – Unbundling Higher Ed
- Shorenstein Center’s Jan. 2013 list of links on Massive Online Open Courses
- On the closing of library.nu – by Christopher Kelty, UCLA, March, 2012 — “The publishers think it is a great success in the war on piracy … The pirates think that shutting down library.nu will only lead to a thousand more … But both are missing the point: the global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry. It cannot be, not with the current business models and the prices. The users of library.nu – these barbarians at the gate of the publishing industry and the university – are legion.”
- Congress financing high speed public school networks. Dec. 11, 2014.
- Harnessing our digital future – Unbundling Higher Ed
- The Trust Project and the Credibility Coalition seek to bring clarity to the web.
Net neutrality and copyright
- Zero Day — Washington Post series
- ISPs are becoming copryight police — LA Times / February 26, 2013
- Comic-book approach to explaining net neutrality issues.
- The Oatmeal explains Net Neutrality in terms so simple that even a US Senator like Ted Cruz could understand it.
- Net Neutrality and the future of journalism – FreePress
- Aaraon Swarts and the PACER episode – EFF, Aug. 2014
- Why is it so hard to get local TV on internet? Why does cable have a blanket statutory license to capture local signals? – EFF, July, 2016
- Jimmy Wales – We are the media
Effects of digital literacy and illiteracy
- Isaac Asimov, The Cult of Ignorance , In 1980, scientist and writer Isaac Asimov argued in an essay that “there is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.” Today, the availability of free resources on the internet has made self-education a reality for many people, and certainly for most Americans. But perhaps not even Isaac Asimov could have foreseen the bitter polarization and disinformation campaigns that technology has also enabled. Open Culture essay by Josh Jones.
- Steven Birkert, The Gutenberg Elegies. 1994: “We are experiencing … a loss of depth — a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth. A sense of the deep and natural connectedness of things is a function of vertical consciousness. Its apotheosis (highest point) is what was once called wisdom… We suspect people who use … words (such as truth, meaning, soul, destiny) of being soft and nostalgic. We prefer the deflating one-liner that reassures us that nothing need be taken seriously; we inhale the atmospheres of irony.” —
- “There is another feature of the 21st century too-often unremarked upon, one only made possible by the rapid spread of information technology. Vast digital archives of primary sources open up to ordinary users, archives once only available to historians, promising the possibility, at least, of a far more egalitarian spread of both information and knowledge.” — Open Culture essay by Josh Jones
- How America lost its faith in expertise, and why that’s a giant problem,” Tom Nichols, April 2017, Foreign Affairs. “Ask an expert about the death of expertise, and you will probably get a rant about the influence of the Internet. People who once had to turn to specialists in any given field now plug search terms into a Web browser and get answers in seconds—so why should they rely on some remote clerisy of snooty eggheads? Information technology, however, is not the primary problem. The digital age has simply accelerated the collapse of communication between experts and laypeople by offering an apparent shortcut to erudition. It has allowed people to mimic intellectual accomplishment by indulging in an illusion of expertise provided by a limitless supply of facts.”
- The Casandra of the Internet Age, NY Times Feb 4 2021, Michael Goldhaber, who came up with the idea of the “attention economy.”
- UVA Study –
“The ideal of an educated public capable of sorting through these complex, divergent messages, and Americans coming to their own conclusions independently of this cacophony of news and inormation from so many different sources – the idea that most Americans are prepared to do that hard work is a myth,” Hunter says. “What people do is they find the kind of information that aligns with their own prejudices, and they stay there.” He adds that there’s a deep distrust of mainstream media, and we don’t have much faith in corporations. So what can this country do about the lack of social unity? Hunter suggests more funding for education and a new celebration of public service.
Cool net stuff
- Ten Unforgettable Web Memes — Fail, cats, dancing baby, flash mob, jump the shark and others we’ll probably find embarrassing in 10 years. Also, Memes and the spread of ideas — Smithsonian magazine.
- The future of computers is an Iron Man helmet.
Digital Privacy, Ethics, and Government
- Government overreach?
- Twitter finally took a stand against Alex Jones. Is that a blueprint to civilize the internet?
- When the people responsible for passwords lose them, is anything safe?
- A highway closed in Nevada. Waze recalculated a detour through the even more dangerous mountains.Ethically, what the best course of action?
- The government steps in to help clarify election disinformation.
- The FCC paves the way for tech companies to consolidate.
- And then changes course and sues Facebook for crushing competition. The American Economic Liberties Project has a handy timeline that breaks it all down.
- Lina Khan looks to older antitrust law to fight Amazon.
- Google tracks you everywhere you go, including abortion clinics. They finally thought it was a good idea to remove that from the location history.
- Are the big companies actually good for consumers?
- Douglass Rushkoff wants to use the tools of the internet to form an “Open-Source Democracy”.
- The government addresses misinformation and rumors online.
- Criticizing the constitution is nothing new. Calls to abandon it are nothing new. But Trump is doing it in an attempt to grab power.
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power – Shoshana Zuboff, Public Affairs, 2020
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called surveillance capitalism, and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new behavioral futures markets, where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new means of behavioral modification.
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a Big Other operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled hive of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit — at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future — if we let it.
Monetization
- Facebook will now verify anyone’s account…for $12 dollars a month.
- Apple already charges virtual content creators 30%. Now Meta wants 47.5%.
Harnessed for Hate
- The media inadvertently created a monster.
- A mere ten publishers are responsible for 69% of climate denier propaganda.
- Ever felt like you can’t have a debate with a conservative? Maybe they are just trying to own you.
- Samantha Bee – PragerU – as real a college as Monsters University
- The rise of Breitbart in the run up to the 2016 election.
- A woman shoots up YouTube HQ because her workout and vegetarian videos were banned.
- Resisting the worst of the web is not futile –
“The increasing dangers from the amplification and weaponization of social media platforms by malevolent players and — more important — the sloppy management of these powerful systems by their creators, who hid behind flimsy excuses for their abrogation of responsibility.” – NYT
Cultural Paradigm Shifts and Tech
- Two pandoras boxes
“There was a failure of imagination when social networks were unleashed and then a failure to responsibly respond to their unimagined consequences once they permeated the lives of billions of people,” Dov Seidman, the founder and chairman of the HOW Institute for Society and LRN, told me. “We lost a lot of time — and our way — in utopian thinking that only good things could come from social networks, from just connecting people and giving people a voice. We cannot afford similar failures with artificial intelligence.”
- Musk Twitter takeover = far more right wing, far less left wing
- America we have a problem – Trump faction
- Google was instrumental in changing corporate culture, but now it’s hype woman regrets her part in it. “The work you do can have meaning, but the company you work for shouldn’t.” “Work will not love you back.”
- The internet humbles the music industry.
- Yet now, the industry has embraced streaming.
- It used to be that only humans control the articles suggested to you. Now it’s mostly code (NYT 2011). Think about how America has become so much more divided and angry since this opinion was published. Is that something we should leave to machines?
- End of an era 2023
Jezebel was feeling its way in a new world, one in which digital analytics had switched on the lights in the darkened room of distribution, leaving writers and their readers suddenly seeing one another clearly. They could speak to one another directly, first in the comments section and later on social media. This offered an approximation of intimacy and made it easier to identify with a writer — or feel betrayed by her. Small media dramas played out in public. Standard, unspoken operating procedures, such as Photoshopping away Ms. Hill’s freckles and laugh lines and relying on anonymous White House sources, were open to furious challenge. The results across media were more honest, diverse, combustible.
The writers’ own self-exposure also helped make Jezebel feel so new. That apparently intimate relationship between the writer and her audience helped make Jezebel feel like a high-wire act of writing, and it would become utterly familiar to journalists when, a couple of years later, Twitter began to overtake the profession. - AI can function like a search engine, but without ads. Where does that leaave Google?