pages 73- 189 of The New Media Reader

Timeline:
1950's and 60's: "Happenings" organized by Allan Kaprow and others.
1961: First appearance of The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin.
1962: Licklider assumes leadership of ARPA.
1962: Englebart writes Augmenting Human Intellect.
1963: Ivan Sutherland writes his essay on Sketchpad.
1964: Ascott's Construction of Change.
1965: Nelson's A file structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate.
1969: Second ARPANET node constructed.
1988: Englebart publishes A History of Personal Workstations.

I found the most interesting essays in this section of the book to be the essays on easing and encouraging interaction between humans and computers. Namely, Man-Computer Symbiosis and Augmenting Human Intellect. These essays, though written quite early in the computer age, still resound as we continue through the digital revolution. They champion the computer as having incredible potential as the most useful of tools. The essays suggest using the computer to carry out mundane, organization and mathematical tasks which might normally waste the time of a person. Using a computer for these tasks, leaves human researchers with the tasks that they are better suited for, namely creative and intellectual ones. A File Structure for the Complex further expanded on the theme of eased interaction, predicting (rather accurately) a filing system for computers, with many nods back to Bush's idea of the Memex machine.
This theme of human-computer interaction continued through Ivan Sutherland's essay about his Sketchpad program, essentially the progenitor of all modern graphical user interfaces and graphical drawing programs. It is amazing to me that after so long we are still looking for better and more efficient ways to interact with machines. One revolutionary innovation, which I believe will soon take the world by storm, is the use of multi-touch consoles and interfaces (TED video link). These interfaces introduce manual quasi-tactile manipulation to computers, which seems to me the next logical step after graphical user interfaces.
The New York Happenings, while not a digital phenomenon in and of themselves, certainly relate to the advent of the web as a creative and collaborative environment. The most interesting connection I found was that the happenings, much like the current incarnation of the world wide web, did not always have a clear delineation between performer and audience, or between concrete content and improvisation. Much like the web, these happenings were collaborations and conversations between and among the performers and the audiance. One might also draw a connection to virtual environments like Second Life, in which every user must invoke some sort of character in his or her Avatar, and occupy some fictional space.