Internet Histories

Niels Brügger, Gerard Goggin, Ian Milligan, Valérie Schafer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351336093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

In 2017, the new journal Internet Histories was founded. As part of the process of defining a new field, the journal editors approached leading scholars in this dynamic, interdisciplinary area. This book is thus a collection of eighteen short thought-provoking pieces, inviting discussion about Internet histories. They raise and suggest current and future issues in the scholarship, as well as exploring the challenges, opportunities, and tensions that underpin the research terrain. The book explores cultural, political, social, economic, and industrial dynamics, all part of a distinctive historiographical and theoretical approach which underpins this emerging field.

The international specialists reflect upon the scholarly scene, laying out the field's research successes to date, as well as suggest the future possibilities that lie ahead in the field of Internet histories. While the emphasis is on researcher perspectives, interviews with leading luminaries of the Internet's development are also provided. As histories of the Internet become increasingly important, Internet Histories is a useful roadmap for those contemplating how we can write such works. One cannot write many histories of the 1990s or later without thinking of digital media – and we hope that Internet Histories will be an invaluable resource for such studies. This book was originally published as the first issue of the Internet Histories journal.

What and where is the Internet? (Re)defining Internet histories

Janet Abbate

ABSTRACT

The ways in which historians define the Internet profoundly shape the histories we write. Many studies implicitly define the Internet in material terms, as a particular set of hardware and software, and consequently tend to frame the development of the Internet as the spread of these technologies from the United States. This essay explores implications of defining the Internet alternatively in terms of technology, use and local experience. While there is not a single “correct” definition, historians should be aware of the politics of the definitions they use.

1. Introduction

Over the past two decades, the field of Internet history has produced a sophisticated body of research with a global scope. Empirical studies in different national and regional contexts have opened up a broad understanding of what networks can be and the decisions and contingencies that have shaped them. For example, Schafer’s (2015) research on French and European networks demonstrates how design choices were tailored to local and regional user communities and regulatory environments; studies by Gerovitch (2008) and Peters (2016) analyse how networks in the former Soviet Union mirrored the organisational and political dynamics of the Soviet state; and books by Gottlieb and McLelland (2003) and Franklin (2005) demonstrate how Internet technologies have been appropriated and naturalised by residents and diasporas of Japan and the Pacific Islands. Such diverse accounts challenge the US-centric narratives of heroic invention, expansion and transfer found in much popular writing and go beyond genealogies of technical innovations to trace histories of Internet use and governance.

Yet the object at the centre of this collective research effort remains strangely elusive. Haigh, Russell, and Dutton (2015) raise the question, “What is the history of the Internet the history of?” and find answers ranging from a narrow, technical definition of the Internet as a set of routers and protocols enabling network interconnection to a broader notion of the Internet that encompasses “the contents of the networks being interconnected and their users, social practices, and skills” (pp. 143–144). Can we write Internet histories if we do not know what the Internet is? I suggest that it is time to reconsider not only what defines the Internet but the politics of such definitions. The ways in which historians define the Internet shape the geographic and temporal scope of our narratives, the activities we include or ignore, the dominance of certain countries and social groups and the marginality of others. This essay will consider the strengths and limitations of three broad ways of framing Internet histories.

2. The Internet as technology

In actors’ accounts and popular culture, the Internet is defined in terms of hardware and software; a typical example is Wikipedia’s description of the Internet as “the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP).”¹ This framework, which was shared by early histories that sought to explain the origins of network hardware and software, has several advantages. A close focus on technical components allows historians to reconstruct the social shaping of design choices, while not precluding serious consideration of national politics or user agency (Abbate, 1999). Using the framework of systems theory (Hughes, 1987), historical accounts of network creation have raised important questions about the politics of standardisation, interoperability and governance mechanisms (DeNardis, 2009).

More recently, infrastructure studies have offered a rich body of theory and research for unpacking how the Internet – and the more specialised information systems layered over it – function and are defined within social relations. Star and Ruhleder’s (1996) classic definition of infrastructure highlights its socio-technical characteristics: infrastructures depend on the human labour of standardisation in order to interact seamlessly with other systems; infrastructures shape user practices, and vice versa; once learned, infrastructures become transparent to their users until a failure abruptly makes them visible again. But Star and Ruhleder also point out, crucially, that these infrastructural characteristics are not inherent in the technology but only exist in relation to a social group that uses the infrastructure for a shared purpose and whose members have integrated the technology into their conventions of practice. This usefully raises the historical question of how – and for which people and purposes – the Internet has taken on the character of an infrastructure.

Theorising how infrastructures develop over time, Blanchette (2012, p. 33) proposes several “infrastructural dynamics,” such as “persistence” and “drift,” that can help historians explain aspects of the Internet’s technical evolution. Persistence means that “computing resources are repurposed rather than merely replaced” and that change “proceeds conservatively through mutation and hybridisation, rather than outright break with the past,” while the concept of drift acknowledges that infrastructure change is “only partially responsive to rational control” and subject to “the push and pull of competing stakeholders working to shift its evolution in the most advantageous direction” (p. 34). Such propositions about the general characteristics of infrastructure can help counter tendencies to see the Internet as unique or exceptional and invite historians to situate Internet infrastructure in a larger economic or institutional context.

The invisibility of infrastructure described by Star and Ruhleder simultaneously promotes ease of use and difficulty of social or political accountability. Recent work on the politics of algorithms reveals how the hidden calculations behind search engines, news feeds and ad placement can violate privacy and perpetuate social bias (Gillespie, 2014; Halavais, 2008). Labour is often invisible online as well, whether it is the unpaid labour of forum moderators and social media content providers or the obscured labour relations of contingent workers who contract through online labour markets (Scholz, 2012). Making infrastructure invisible is a social and historical process that involves phenomena as diverse as protocol standards, trade secrets, user interfaces and user training. Internet histories can and should unpack how such invisibility is achieved and its social and political consequences.

One limitation of defining the Internet as a large technological system or infrastructure is that this tends to frame the Internet as a channel for transmitting data, rather than as a field of social practice. A systems approach also privileges the role of system builders over users in historical accounts. Perhaps most problematically, tracing the Internet’s history to a particular set of hardware and software innovations reinforces a perception of the United States as the Internet’s centre. The computer communications system that first bore the label “Internet” grew out of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which was funded by and located within the United States; but the persistence of the name “Internet” for today’s global data network should not imply that the ARPANET has been the sole source of its technology, practices or meaning. An instructive example of a non-US-centric infrastructure study is Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (2011), which follows a nationally networked computing project called Cybersyn. Challenging the notion that all innovations in computer communications originate in the global North, Media describes how Cybersyn was locally conceived in 1971, independently of the US ARPANET (which was not yet operational). The fact that Cybersyn did not survive Chile’s political upheaval long enough to join today’s Internet does not negate its significance for Internet history: what did persist were social visions for networking, technical capacities and individual actors who went on to other projects.

3. The Internet as content and social space

While it is clearly important to understand the history of technical infrastructures, much of what is culturally interesting about the Internet involves applications, content, services and interaction – social media, shopping and games, rather than switches, packets and protocols. Early studies of “cyberspace” and “virtual community” highlighted how social groups constructed the Internet as a virtual space for social interaction and individual expression (Rheingold, 1993; Turkle, 1995), and more recent studies of social media and gaming explore similar issues of identity and community (Corneliussen & Rettberg, 2008). Framing the Internet as content or social space usefully highlights the active role of users as content creators as well as the political role of information and its implications for democracy. It shifts the focus away from hardware innovation and thereby potentially decentres the US and highlights local or subcultural content and practices. On the other hand, since many online communities require paid memberships and leisure time, there may be a bias toward economically privileged groups, early adopters (especially young people) and recreational uses of the Internet.

Much of this online content and social activity previously existed offline, which raises questions of periodisation. Should the history begin when the activity in question was first moved online, which could imply historical discontinuity or Internet exceptionalism, or should the online version be positioned within a longer history of the activity? And should the historical trajectory centre on technology, providers or users to explain the success and form of online practices? For example, a technology-focused history might include the development shopping-cart software, delivery services and banking and credit systems with their attendant regulations. A business history of e-commerce might examine the economic rationales behind business plans and how online and offline enterprises both compete and complement each other (Aspray & Ceruzzi, 2008). A history focused on how users came to trust and value e-commerce could include mail-order catalogues as a familiarising precedent, lower prices as an incentive to buy online, the ability to locate and economically buy or sell hard-to-find goods (such as used or hand-made items) and mechanisms that lower the perceived risk to buyers (such as secure payments and return policies). Different histories offer different policy lessons.

One important framing of online social space theorises the Internet as a “public sphere,” with political significance as a place in which a collective understanding of public issues can be formed and political action organised (Benkler, 2006). Attention to political activism highlights the connections between online and offline identities and behaviours. The framework of the online public sphere can be used critically to analyse ways in which the Internet fails to measure up to this political ideal, as when social media platforms create “filter bubbles” (Pariser, 2011) that prevent users’ exposure to diverse views. As a historical framework, the concept of the public sphere could also reposition the Internet within the history of the press or of social spaces for information exchange, such as cafes and public squares (Darnton, 2000).

4. The Internet as locally situated experience

The Internet’s infrastructure may be global, but for its users, the Internet is always local. Users experience the Internet through specific, locally situated machines, programs, service providers and cultures, and their service providers respond to local markets and regulatory regimes. Economics partially determine what forms of online experience are locally accessible: the geographical coverage of Internet service is highly uneven and reproduces existing power disparities. Castells (2004) has argued that the “network society” is based on “a binary logic: inclusion/exclusion. Within the network, distance between nodes tends to zero… Between nodes in the network and those outside the network distance is infinite” (p. 4). These disparities also exist within local contexts: where access is mediated by the market, class position shapes which of many possible Internets one experiences. As Warschauer (2003) has argued, meaningful access also requires social capital, which could include competency in English or another language not native to the user and an understanding of what types of online services are available and how they might benefit the individual.

Qiu’s (2009) study of working-class network users in China illustrates how local constraints on physical interfaces can shape what the Internet means to users. While drawing on Castells’s theory of the network society, Qui goes beyond Castells’s binary logic of inclusion/exclusion to argue that access is a matter of degree – his subjects are “have-less” rather than “have-nots” – and that different levels of access produce different user experien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Internet histories
• 1. What and where is the Internet? (Re)defining Internet histories
• 2. Hagiography, revisionism & blasphemy in Internet histories
• 3. A common language
• 4. Can we write a cultural history of the Internet? If so, how?
• 5. Searching for missing “net histories”
• 6. Out from the PLATO cave: uncovering the pre-Internet history of social computing
• 7. Internet histories: the view from the design process
• 8. The Internet as a structure of feeling: 1992–1996
• 9. Precorporation: or what financialisation can tell us about the histories of the Internet
• 10. Internet in the Middle East: an asymmetrical model of development
• 11. The unexplored history of operationalising digital divides: a pilot study
• 12. Early challenges to multilingualism on the Internet: the case of Han character-based scripts
• 13. African histories of the Internet
• 14. Notes from/dev/null
• 15. Archaeology of the Amsterdam digital city; why digital data are dynamic and should be treated accordingly
• 16. Doing Web history with the Internet Archive: screencast documentaries
• 17. Breaking in to the mainstream: demonstrating the value of internet (and web) histories
• 18. For a dynamic and post-digital history of the Internet: a research agenda
• 19. Tell us ...
• Index