Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2023.2238254
Martin Fomasi, Deborah Barcella, E. Benecchi, G. Balbi
Abstract Web and Internet historians have never been able to consider the sources preserved at CERN because of a 30-year closure law. The WWW collection is of major importance not only because it is located where the Web was born but, more importantly, because it preserves documents produced during the early and little-known stages of its development. Our study has a qualitative approach and is based on in-person discussions, e-mail exchanges, and a focus group we conducted with five main actors responsible for the birth and development of the WWW collection at CERN. Through this method, we co-constructed with them a discourse, which we later analysed through inductive thematic analysis. We extracted six main topics reflecting the principal themes represented in the collection: reasons for creating a specific collection of web-related documents; salient moments in the history of the collection; discussion about its naming; issues about the originality of the documents; and future digitisation projects. This paper may be of interest to web historians and archivists looking for an overview and hidden reasons for the creation of the collection.
{"title":"Genealogy of an archive. The birth, construction, and development of the World Wide Web collection at CERN","authors":"Martin Fomasi, Deborah Barcella, E. Benecchi, G. Balbi","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2023.2238254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2023.2238254","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Web and Internet historians have never been able to consider the sources preserved at CERN because of a 30-year closure law. The WWW collection is of major importance not only because it is located where the Web was born but, more importantly, because it preserves documents produced during the early and little-known stages of its development. Our study has a qualitative approach and is based on in-person discussions, e-mail exchanges, and a focus group we conducted with five main actors responsible for the birth and development of the WWW collection at CERN. Through this method, we co-constructed with them a discourse, which we later analysed through inductive thematic analysis. We extracted six main topics reflecting the principal themes represented in the collection: reasons for creating a specific collection of web-related documents; salient moments in the history of the collection; discussion about its naming; issues about the originality of the documents; and future digitisation projects. This paper may be of interest to web historians and archivists looking for an overview and hidden reasons for the creation of the collection.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49104012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-22DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2023.2214466
Nicholas A. John, Dekel Katz
Abstract Online spaces provide opportunities for creating ties with other people, allowing us to communicate and share content with them. Sometimes, though, we wish to break some of these ties; we wish not only to friend and to follow, but to unfriend and unfollow as well. In this paper, we present a history of the many features for online interpersonal disconnectivity, showing how they have developed over time. We present five main findings: the language of tie breaking is consistently bureaucratic; over time, the features for tie breaking tend to operate on the feed rather than on social ties themselves; platforms are more reactive than proactive when it comes to tie breaking features; new ways for preventing interactions are launched over time; and the features for tie breaking sometimes create what we call “impossible social situations.” This approach shines a spotlight on a neglected aspect of social media, and opens up new ways of thinking about how the platforms conceive of–and construct–online sociability.
{"title":"A history of features for online tie breaking, 1997-2021","authors":"Nicholas A. John, Dekel Katz","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2023.2214466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2023.2214466","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Online spaces provide opportunities for creating ties with other people, allowing us to communicate and share content with them. Sometimes, though, we wish to break some of these ties; we wish not only to friend and to follow, but to unfriend and unfollow as well. In this paper, we present a history of the many features for online interpersonal disconnectivity, showing how they have developed over time. We present five main findings: the language of tie breaking is consistently bureaucratic; over time, the features for tie breaking tend to operate on the feed rather than on social ties themselves; platforms are more reactive than proactive when it comes to tie breaking features; new ways for preventing interactions are launched over time; and the features for tie breaking sometimes create what we call “impossible social situations.” This approach shines a spotlight on a neglected aspect of social media, and opens up new ways of thinking about how the platforms conceive of–and construct–online sociability.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44250539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2023.2188765
M. Kurzmeier
{"title":"Resistance to the current: the dialectics of hacking","authors":"M. Kurzmeier","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2023.2188765","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2023.2188765","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45003292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-03DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2023.2183643
K. Nabben
Abstract Existing scholarship on cryptoeconomics describes this field as a new and emergent phenomenon. In this paper, I claim that crypto anarchists and cryptoeconomists design and build decentralised networks as governance systems according to the common principles of cryptography, economics, and engineering, and thus, cryptoeconomics is not new but has historical intellectual roots in the political ideology of Crypto Anarchy. Cryptoeconomics is a multidisciplinary field of study concerned with the design of decentralised systems that facilitate the coordination of multiple actors. Practitioners of crypteoconomics, known as “cryptoeconomists,” employ engineering and economic methods to create institutional infrastructure for social coordination. Crypto Anarchy is a political ideology that emphasises autonomy and anonymity and the practice of self-organising through technical means largely attributed to a counter-cultural subgroup known as the “cypherpunks”. I demonstrate the link between Crypto Anarchy and cryptoeconomics through the analysis of empirical evidence from primary archival sources, secondary sources, and academic literature. The implication of these findings is a deeper understanding of what the creation of cryptoeconomic systems does in enabling a political economy of distributed, autonomous coordination. What cryptoeconomists did not adopt and perpetuate is a value for anonymity, which is where the social outcomes of Crypto Anarchy and cryptoeconomics diverge.
{"title":"Cryptoeconomics as governance: an intellectual history from “Crypto Anarchy” to “Cryptoeconomics”","authors":"K. Nabben","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2023.2183643","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2023.2183643","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Existing scholarship on cryptoeconomics describes this field as a new and emergent phenomenon. In this paper, I claim that crypto anarchists and cryptoeconomists design and build decentralised networks as governance systems according to the common principles of cryptography, economics, and engineering, and thus, cryptoeconomics is not new but has historical intellectual roots in the political ideology of Crypto Anarchy. Cryptoeconomics is a multidisciplinary field of study concerned with the design of decentralised systems that facilitate the coordination of multiple actors. Practitioners of crypteoconomics, known as “cryptoeconomists,” employ engineering and economic methods to create institutional infrastructure for social coordination. Crypto Anarchy is a political ideology that emphasises autonomy and anonymity and the practice of self-organising through technical means largely attributed to a counter-cultural subgroup known as the “cypherpunks”. I demonstrate the link between Crypto Anarchy and cryptoeconomics through the analysis of empirical evidence from primary archival sources, secondary sources, and academic literature. The implication of these findings is a deeper understanding of what the creation of cryptoeconomic systems does in enabling a political economy of distributed, autonomous coordination. What cryptoeconomists did not adopt and perpetuate is a value for anonymity, which is where the social outcomes of Crypto Anarchy and cryptoeconomics diverge.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46114406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-05DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2153399
F. Clavert, Valérie Schafer
The three research articles in this special issue and the interview with Ronda Hauben are partly the result of the 4 th RESAW conference, that brought together through the RESAW network 1 a community of researchers, web archivists and professionals, united around a common interest, namely web history and web archives. The 4 th RESAW conference, organised on 17 and 18 June 2021 by the C 2 DH (Centre for contemporary and digital history) at the University of Luxembourg, 2 sought to examine the tension between marginal and mainstream in web history, and to go beyond this binary view. The aim was to study all the nuances, shifts in meaning, difficulties in defining and measuring audiences, as well as the evolution over the course of history of digital practices, content, producers, and communities, from the fringes and peripheries to the centre and the core of the Web. The RESAW conference was also an opportunity to launch the HIVI research project 3 , hosted at the C 2 DH, and the topics that were addressed at the conference were also related to virality, as reflected, for example, in Gustavo Gomez-Mejia’s article on “buzz.” 4 Studying online virality and historicising the Web actually raise a number of methodological questions concerning the pro-ducing and user communities, movements between web spaces and socio-digital networks and the challenges of measuring and searchability. These topics could benefit from the issues raised by other web history researchers, such as the question of comments and moderation in the article by Jonathan Paßmann, Anne Helmond and Robert Jansma, that of scaling up and popularising software in the article by Derren Wison and his colleagues, or the question of the vocabulary to qualify phenomena linked to developing digital cultures, thanks to the study of Gustavo Gomez-Mejia on the word “buzz” and its shift from the marketing sphere to the general public sphere, notably via the press. The articles are the result of this meeting in 2021, but also discussions with Ronda Hauben on that occasion, setting out her account on the twenty-fifth
{"title":"Between marginal and mainstream. Communities and ecosystems at stake","authors":"F. Clavert, Valérie Schafer","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2153399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2153399","url":null,"abstract":"The three research articles in this special issue and the interview with Ronda Hauben are partly the result of the 4 th RESAW conference, that brought together through the RESAW network 1 a community of researchers, web archivists and professionals, united around a common interest, namely web history and web archives. The 4 th RESAW conference, organised on 17 and 18 June 2021 by the C 2 DH (Centre for contemporary and digital history) at the University of Luxembourg, 2 sought to examine the tension between marginal and mainstream in web history, and to go beyond this binary view. The aim was to study all the nuances, shifts in meaning, difficulties in defining and measuring audiences, as well as the evolution over the course of history of digital practices, content, producers, and communities, from the fringes and peripheries to the centre and the core of the Web. The RESAW conference was also an opportunity to launch the HIVI research project 3 , hosted at the C 2 DH, and the topics that were addressed at the conference were also related to virality, as reflected, for example, in Gustavo Gomez-Mejia’s article on “buzz.” 4 Studying online virality and historicising the Web actually raise a number of methodological questions concerning the pro-ducing and user communities, movements between web spaces and socio-digital networks and the challenges of measuring and searchability. These topics could benefit from the issues raised by other web history researchers, such as the question of comments and moderation in the article by Jonathan Paßmann, Anne Helmond and Robert Jansma, that of scaling up and popularising software in the article by Derren Wison and his colleagues, or the question of the vocabulary to qualify phenomena linked to developing digital cultures, thanks to the study of Gustavo Gomez-Mejia on the word “buzz” and its shift from the marketing sphere to the general public sphere, notably via the press. The articles are the result of this meeting in 2021, but also discussions with Ronda Hauben on that occasion, setting out her account on the twenty-fifth","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43650195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-16DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2146569
Niels Brügger, G. Goggin, Ian Milligan, Valérie Schafer
Abstract This special issue is the result of our second call for the Internet Histories Early Career Researcher Award. For the second time, in 2021, the journal Internet Histories has invited any interested early career researchers (masters students, doctoral students, and post-doctoral researchers) whose research focuses on the history of the Internet and/or the Web, and histories of digital cultures — or any historical topic within the scope of the Internet Histories journal, to apply for the award and to submit an original article.
{"title":"Internet histories second early career researcher award","authors":"Niels Brügger, G. Goggin, Ian Milligan, Valérie Schafer","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2146569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2146569","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This special issue is the result of our second call for the Internet Histories Early Career Researcher Award. For the second time, in 2021, the journal Internet Histories has invited any interested early career researchers (masters students, doctoral students, and post-doctoral researchers) whose research focuses on the history of the Internet and/or the Web, and histories of digital cultures — or any historical topic within the scope of the Internet Histories journal, to apply for the award and to submit an original article.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41391139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-26DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2137756
Dmitry Mikhailov, Nikolay Ternov, I. Bobrov
Abstract During the mid-1990s the Pro-European concept of the Russian nation was formed in the post-Soviet ideological space, contrary to the prevailing traditionalist, soil-based forms of Russian nationalism, mainly focused on the search for a “special way”. The former is based on the values of democracy and individualism while the main emphasis of the ideology is the leadership of intellectuals in political life. This article studies the genesis of aforementioned trend in contemporary Russian nationalism in the context of two historical circumstances: the ideological and social status of post-Soviet intellectuals and the Russian-language Internet at the stage of transition to social networks. A key element of the transition period is the emergence of mass online communication, anticipating the beginning of social networks era. Combination of elitism and emphasis on the text were combined with increasing popularity and anonymity, where all these qualities were embodied in guest books. Thus, we will try to show how the communicative environment of the early Runet was arranged and how it influenced rhetorical strategies, styles of public behavior and ideology of contemporary Russian nationalists. As an example in our work, we will consider Dmitry Galkovsky’s Internet resource “Samizdat”, which was functioning in the late 1990s.
{"title":"Emigration to the internet: “Samizdat” and the genesis of contemporary Russian nationalism","authors":"Dmitry Mikhailov, Nikolay Ternov, I. Bobrov","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2137756","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2137756","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract During the mid-1990s the Pro-European concept of the Russian nation was formed in the post-Soviet ideological space, contrary to the prevailing traditionalist, soil-based forms of Russian nationalism, mainly focused on the search for a “special way”. The former is based on the values of democracy and individualism while the main emphasis of the ideology is the leadership of intellectuals in political life. This article studies the genesis of aforementioned trend in contemporary Russian nationalism in the context of two historical circumstances: the ideological and social status of post-Soviet intellectuals and the Russian-language Internet at the stage of transition to social networks. A key element of the transition period is the emergence of mass online communication, anticipating the beginning of social networks era. Combination of elitism and emphasis on the text were combined with increasing popularity and anonymity, where all these qualities were embodied in guest books. Thus, we will try to show how the communicative environment of the early Runet was arranged and how it influenced rhetorical strategies, styles of public behavior and ideology of contemporary Russian nationalists. As an example in our work, we will consider Dmitry Galkovsky’s Internet resource “Samizdat”, which was functioning in the late 1990s.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49468929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Netizens, Michael and Ronda Hauben’s foundational treatise on Usenet and the Internet, was first published in print 25 years ago. In this piece, we trace the history and impact of the book and of Usenet itself, contextualising them within the contemporary and modern-day scholarship on virtual communities, online culture, and Internet history. We discuss the Net as a tool of empowerment, and touch on the social, technical, and economic issues related to the maintenance of shared network infrastructures and to the preservation and commodification of Usenet archives. Our interview with Ronda Hauben offers a retrospective look at the development of online communities, their impact, and how they are studied. She recounts her own introduction to the online world, as well as the impetus and writing process for Netizens. She presents Michael Hauben’s conception of “netizens” as contributory citizens of the Net (rather than mere users of it) and the “electronic commons” they built up, and argues that this collaborative and collectivist model has been overwhelmed and endangered by the privatisation and commercialisation of the Internet and its communities.
{"title":"Remembering Netizens: an interview with Ronda Hauben, co-author of Netizens: on the history and impact of Usenet and the Internet (1997)","authors":"Tristan Miller, Camille Paloque-Bergès, Avery Dame-Griff","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2123120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2123120","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Netizens, Michael and Ronda Hauben’s foundational treatise on Usenet and the Internet, was first published in print 25 years ago. In this piece, we trace the history and impact of the book and of Usenet itself, contextualising them within the contemporary and modern-day scholarship on virtual communities, online culture, and Internet history. We discuss the Net as a tool of empowerment, and touch on the social, technical, and economic issues related to the maintenance of shared network infrastructures and to the preservation and commodification of Usenet archives. Our interview with Ronda Hauben offers a retrospective look at the development of online communities, their impact, and how they are studied. She recounts her own introduction to the online world, as well as the impetus and writing process for Netizens. She presents Michael Hauben’s conception of “netizens” as contributory citizens of the Net (rather than mere users of it) and the “electronic commons” they built up, and argues that this collaborative and collectivist model has been overwhelmed and endangered by the privatisation and commercialisation of the Internet and its communities.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42839237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-27DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2109285
R. Jansma
Abstract De Digitale Stad was a pioneering website of the early Dutch web. Historical study of its remnants has required extensive system knowledge, which may pose a new challenge for digital humanity researchers. The study of remnants is covered by the metaphor of “archaeology.” In view of software character of web artefacts, the metaphor “web archaeology” is implicitly limiting. An approach is proposed that considers the working character of the software, “software archaeology.” In a case study it is shown by the example of “metadata dating” how the software archaeological approach can be brought to bear on born digital artefacts. The case illustrates the historical value of extracting time-related metadata from digital artefacts, “metadata dating.” Metadata dating is performed on three archives related to De Digitale Stad. By aggregation of time-related metadata, new historical insights into De Digitale Stad have been gained. Whereas the early internet has often been presented as ever changing, novel and revolutionary, the results bring to light strong continuities in the usage patterns shown in De Digitale Stad. Contrary to expectations, it is observed that the citizens of De Digitale Stad, were primarily interested in the preservation of the traditional content in their files, and less in the results of their own coding efforts.
{"title":"Metadata dating the digital city: a software archaeological approach","authors":"R. Jansma","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2109285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2109285","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract De Digitale Stad was a pioneering website of the early Dutch web. Historical study of its remnants has required extensive system knowledge, which may pose a new challenge for digital humanity researchers. The study of remnants is covered by the metaphor of “archaeology.” In view of software character of web artefacts, the metaphor “web archaeology” is implicitly limiting. An approach is proposed that considers the working character of the software, “software archaeology.” In a case study it is shown by the example of “metadata dating” how the software archaeological approach can be brought to bear on born digital artefacts. The case illustrates the historical value of extracting time-related metadata from digital artefacts, “metadata dating.” Metadata dating is performed on three archives related to De Digitale Stad. By aggregation of time-related metadata, new historical insights into De Digitale Stad have been gained. Whereas the early internet has often been presented as ever changing, novel and revolutionary, the results bring to light strong continuities in the usage patterns shown in De Digitale Stad. Contrary to expectations, it is observed that the citizens of De Digitale Stad, were primarily interested in the preservation of the traditional content in their files, and less in the results of their own coding efforts.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43178815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}