The Cloud Ate My Homework - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 3

their form—low-rise, endlessly bland warehouses—and the sublimity of
real clouds. There is nothing ethereal about these buildings. Moreover,
my reading and conversations pointed to growing tensions in the politi-
cal, economic, social, and aesthetic dimensions of cloud computing. But
at this early stage of its development, most extended treatments remained
limited to technical descriptions.
Although cloud computing did not make an appearance on my personal
radar screen until 2010, I have been researching, writing, and speaking
about computer communication for forty years, including working on
and around predecessors to cloud computing. In the early 1970s, as a
graduate student in sociology at Harvard, I handed over my punch cards
to the central computer facility and hoped to receive a paper printout of
research results using my professor's pioneering General Inquirer software
that, remarkably for its time, analyzed the content of text. At that time,
we were all in the cloud because the personal computer, with its built-
in storage device, was years away. All that we could do was ind time to
enter data in a computer terminal, appropriately referred to as dumb, and
wait for the mainframe to provide results. Ten years later I wrote about
the cloud of its time, videotex, which promised, and in rudimentary ways
delivered, text and images from central computers to enhanced screens
(Mosco 1982). Moving to Canada in 1984, I tried out Telidon, which
Canadian technologists and policy makers insisted was the most advanced
of the new interactive telecommunications services. More importantly, I
learned about the research of Canadian Douglas Parkhill, whose work,
particularly The Challenge of the Computer Utility (1966), is widely rec-
ognized as a forerunner to cloud computing.
Over that time, in addition to addressing many of the issues that are
now emerging in cloud computing, I began to understand the impor-
tance of recognizing problems that inevitably arise from new systems for
storing, processing, and exchanging information. It is tempting to apply
what appear to be the lessons of history to new technologies and, while it
is certainly wise to situate new technologies in their historical context, it
is also essential to recognize that changing technologies and a changing
world also bring about disruptions, disjunctions, and, sometimes, revolu-
tions in historical patterns.
There are now numerous technical guides and primers that offer useful
overviews of the subject, and my topic is certainly indebted to these (Erl,