Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years, London, Bloomsbury, 2013.

« As e-mail systems became standardized and interconnected, interpersonal messaging emerged as one of the most powerful and compelling features of the ARPANET, just as Taylor had anticipated. Very soon after Ray Tomlinson's invention of network e-mail, recalls Vinton Cerf, 'people created mailing lists, one for science fiction and another one for restaurant reviews. And we could see instantly that e-mail was a social medium, in addition to simply being an interoffice memo system.' Mailing lists allowed groups of people with similar interests to share information and engage in discussions using e-mail. Early mailing lists included science fiction lovers, wine tasters, and network hackers. Restaurant reviews, meanwhile, were compiled into a collaborative guide called YUMYUM, which was maintained by researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Any ARPANET user could send in a restaurant review for incorporation into the guide, which was made available for general download. Each reviewer was given a unique identifying number, which was added to the end of each of their reviews, so that readers could determine which reviewers they agreed or disagreed with, without knowing who they were. A version of YUMYUM from 1976 explains how this collective approach to authorship worked.

This edition of YUMYUM lists 480 restaurants of the San Francisco Bay area and some outlying places together with 1,056 opinions from our readers. Many conflict with one another. Rather than attempting to form a 'consensus,' we let them tell it their way. Of course, different people are looking for different things and restaurants change with the passage of time and chefs … With a little experience, you can begin to evaluate the evaluators and draw more reliable conclusions from the opinions given here. We are dependent upon you to provide timely updates and information on interesting new restaurants. When preparing remarks for this guide, please try to express your views concisely and accurately … This guide is organized by geographical regions and types of cuisine. The coverage falls off approximately with the square of the distance from our laboratory. »

Megan Ward, "The Problem With Feedback", The Atlantic, 11 novembre 2018, disponible en ligne.

« Traceable to antiquity, the idea of feedback roared to prominence in the 18th century when the Scottish engineer James Watt figured out how to harness the mighty but irregular power of steam. Watt’s steam governor solved the problem of wasted fuel by feeding the machine’s speed back into the apparatus to control it. When the machine ran too fast, the governor reduced the amount of steam fed to the engine. And when it slowed down, the governor could increase the flow of steam to keep the machine’s speed steady. The steam governor drove the Industrial Revolution by making steam power newly efficient and much more potent. Because it could maintain a relatively stable speed, Watt’s steam engine used up to one-third less energy than previous steam-powered engines. »

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John R. Suler, Psychology of the Digital Age. Humans Become Electric, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 21.

« Years ago I came across an advertisement from Tidal Wave Communications that introduced a new computer accessory called Orecchio. It was a headset, using the Telepathic Internet Data Exchange (TIDE) protocol, that enhanced email functionality by enabling you to send your most important thoughts directly from their source: your mind. “Imagine no more keyboards and achy hands. No more eye strain from the glare of the screen. Just visualize the message you want to send, followed by your send command, and poof! Your email is transmitted to our network for quick delivery to its destination.” Enticed by the opportunity to connect my brain directly to the machine, I would have adopted Orecchio without hesitation, if not for the fact that the advertisement was, of course, an April Fools' joke. The telepathic headset was bogus, but not my realization that truth once again comes out in jest: our minds extend into cyberspace. Years later, research into brain-to-computer and brain-to-brain interfaces suggested that we might indeed control computers with just our minds and perhaps even communicate very simple thoughts and feelings directly bewteen each other's brains via the machine. »