Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2057751
Karolina Mikołajewska-Zając, Attila Márton
Abstract This paper describes the history of Couchsurfing, a platform matching free, peer-to-peer hospitality launched in 2004, as a series of four deaths and resurrections. The platform was first brought back to life by its members, in the spirit of open collaboration, then by its leaders, in an effort to legitimize the platform as a US-based charity, then by Silicon Valley investors, seeking to mold it into a profitable startup, and finally by private investors, only to find itself yet again in jeopardy as a result of Covid-19. The aim of the paper is to consider what the history of this niche platform tells us about the changing ecology of the Web as a whole. Through that lens, Couchsurfing’s struggles to respond to drastic changes in its environment are indicative of the growing specialization of the Web into a closed and monetized information ecosystem.
{"title":"The four deaths of Couchsurfing and the changing ecology of the web","authors":"Karolina Mikołajewska-Zając, Attila Márton","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2057751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2057751","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper describes the history of Couchsurfing, a platform matching free, peer-to-peer hospitality launched in 2004, as a series of four deaths and resurrections. The platform was first brought back to life by its members, in the spirit of open collaboration, then by its leaders, in an effort to legitimize the platform as a US-based charity, then by Silicon Valley investors, seeking to mold it into a profitable startup, and finally by private investors, only to find itself yet again in jeopardy as a result of Covid-19. The aim of the paper is to consider what the history of this niche platform tells us about the changing ecology of the Web as a whole. Through that lens, Couchsurfing’s struggles to respond to drastic changes in its environment are indicative of the growing specialization of the Web into a closed and monetized information ecosystem.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43150017","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 : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2071396
Muira McCammon, Diami Virgilio, Cody Ogden, Kevin Ackermann, Ethan Zuckerman, R. Gehl, Saima Akhtar, Sultan Al-Azri, C. Steele, A. M. Hamilton, Anat Ben-David, Sarah L. Wasserman, Sara Namusoga-Kaale, Joy Rankin
Abstract This roundtable, which unfolded over many months in 2021, brought fourteen technologists and scholars together for a full-fledged discussion of platforms and death as a metaphor. The discussion proceeds with each person responding to the previous question and then posing one of their own. Some contributors discuss the ethical quandaries that await researchers attempting to exhume digital lifeworlds of the past. Others contemplate who gets a say in what aspects of platform life are preserved. Reflecting moments of convergence and divergence around the ethics and politics of platform death, the roundtable reads as a kaleidoscope of sociotechnical values and a map of the people fighting for control over digital infrastructure that has fallen apart.
{"title":"Dead-and-dying platforms: a roundtable","authors":"Muira McCammon, Diami Virgilio, Cody Ogden, Kevin Ackermann, Ethan Zuckerman, R. Gehl, Saima Akhtar, Sultan Al-Azri, C. Steele, A. M. Hamilton, Anat Ben-David, Sarah L. Wasserman, Sara Namusoga-Kaale, Joy Rankin","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2071396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2071396","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This roundtable, which unfolded over many months in 2021, brought fourteen technologists and scholars together for a full-fledged discussion of platforms and death as a metaphor. The discussion proceeds with each person responding to the previous question and then posing one of their own. Some contributors discuss the ethical quandaries that await researchers attempting to exhume digital lifeworlds of the past. Others contemplate who gets a say in what aspects of platform life are preserved. Reflecting moments of convergence and divergence around the ethics and politics of platform death, the roundtable reads as a kaleidoscope of sociotechnical values and a map of the people fighting for control over digital infrastructure that has fallen apart.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42189560","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 : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2071395
Muira McCammon, J. Lingel
Abstract This double special issue explores internet histories through the lens of “platform death” as a way of understanding how digital communities grapple with absence, invisibility, and disappearance. Collectively, the contributions in this issue address the cultural, geopolitical, economic, and socio-legal repercussions of what happens when platforms fail, decline, or expire. The manuscripts draw on divergent methods, data, and analytical frameworks; in turn, they address what digital death as a metaphor reveals about the internet’s growth and stagnation, its present and futures, and its multiplicities. This collaboration has drawn on a collective understanding that mortality as a metaphor can serve as a discursive mode of contesting the control and corporatization of the internet. The impetus for it came from a panel in the Communication History Division at the May 2020 International Communication Association’s Annual Conference, entitled “Dead-and-dying platforms: The poetics, politics, and perils of internet history.” We hope its contents inspire other scholars to think creatively and daringly about technological failure, infrastructural precarity, and digital decline.
{"title":"Situating dead-and-dying platforms: technological failure, infrastructural precarity, and digital decline","authors":"Muira McCammon, J. Lingel","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2071395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2071395","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This double special issue explores internet histories through the lens of “platform death” as a way of understanding how digital communities grapple with absence, invisibility, and disappearance. Collectively, the contributions in this issue address the cultural, geopolitical, economic, and socio-legal repercussions of what happens when platforms fail, decline, or expire. The manuscripts draw on divergent methods, data, and analytical frameworks; in turn, they address what digital death as a metaphor reveals about the internet’s growth and stagnation, its present and futures, and its multiplicities. This collaboration has drawn on a collective understanding that mortality as a metaphor can serve as a discursive mode of contesting the control and corporatization of the internet. The impetus for it came from a panel in the Communication History Division at the May 2020 International Communication Association’s Annual Conference, entitled “Dead-and-dying platforms: The poetics, politics, and perils of internet history.” We hope its contents inspire other scholars to think creatively and daringly about technological failure, infrastructural precarity, and digital decline.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45419773","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 : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2065153
Lianrui Jia
Abstract Founded in 2005, Renren was a popular and leading Chinese social media network, especially among college students. However, after reaching its heyday in 2011, user growth dwindled and advertisers fled. By 2018, Renren morphed from a social network to a secondhand car sale business. This paper reconstructs the history of Renren and documents its failed transformation from a social network to a platform. Grounded in platform studies and a political economy theoretical framework, this paper traces Renren’s platform evolution from two perspectives: first, from an end user’s point of view, it examines how Renren’s user interface registered and mirrored shifting corporate strategies and platformisation processes writ large; second, given Renren’s status as a privately-owned, publicly-traded and for-profit business entity, the paper examines how Renren pursued different strategies in search of a viable business model and later on in managing shareholder value and profitability. Ultimately, this paper presents the rise and fall of Renren first and foremost as a platform historiography project. It then discusses Renren’s demise by looking retrospectively at changing interface design, business strategies, and financialisation against the broader dynamics and shifting sociocultural uses of the commercial Chinese internet.
{"title":"Forgotten passwords and Long-Gone exes: the life and death of Renren","authors":"Lianrui Jia","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2065153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2065153","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Founded in 2005, Renren was a popular and leading Chinese social media network, especially among college students. However, after reaching its heyday in 2011, user growth dwindled and advertisers fled. By 2018, Renren morphed from a social network to a secondhand car sale business. This paper reconstructs the history of Renren and documents its failed transformation from a social network to a platform. Grounded in platform studies and a political economy theoretical framework, this paper traces Renren’s platform evolution from two perspectives: first, from an end user’s point of view, it examines how Renren’s user interface registered and mirrored shifting corporate strategies and platformisation processes writ large; second, given Renren’s status as a privately-owned, publicly-traded and for-profit business entity, the paper examines how Renren pursued different strategies in search of a viable business model and later on in managing shareholder value and profitability. Ultimately, this paper presents the rise and fall of Renren first and foremost as a platform historiography project. It then discusses Renren’s demise by looking retrospectively at changing interface design, business strategies, and financialisation against the broader dynamics and shifting sociocultural uses of the commercial Chinese internet.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47419297","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 : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2057752
R. Wilken
Abstract This article builds an historical account of the rise and fall of US mapping firm MapQuest. It charts the emergence and rapid rise of MapQuest as a popular early provider of online maps – detailing notable innovations, key developments, and successive ownership changes, and the significance of these for MapQuest – and it documents its equally rapid fall. The article draws on political economy of communication (and geographic political economy) approaches in its analysis of MapQuest. This critical framework is valuable for the way that it draws attention to the different stakeholders involved in controlling and commercialising MapQuest’s applications for web-based and mobile devices, and the structural factors that shape and influence the industries in which it operates. From this analysis, it is argued that a range of factors led to MapQuest’s dramatically diminished market share within the field of online mapping. These included: a lack of revenue generation opportunities; significant map data quality issues; loss of consumer visibility due to search algorithm interference; and a reactive rather than proactive approach to innovation under consecutive owners. This account of MapQuest is important in two ways. First, while MapQuest is a significant firm in the history of contemporary digital mapping, particularly as a pioneer of online distributed mapping, the firm’s history and its contribution to digital mapping remains under-represented in internet histories scholarship. Second, this article contributes to growing interest in and deepening critical understanding of platform precarity, asking: What becomes of platforms when they falter? And what are the factors that contribute to their decline?
{"title":"The rise and fall of MapQuest","authors":"R. Wilken","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2057752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2057752","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article builds an historical account of the rise and fall of US mapping firm MapQuest. It charts the emergence and rapid rise of MapQuest as a popular early provider of online maps – detailing notable innovations, key developments, and successive ownership changes, and the significance of these for MapQuest – and it documents its equally rapid fall. The article draws on political economy of communication (and geographic political economy) approaches in its analysis of MapQuest. This critical framework is valuable for the way that it draws attention to the different stakeholders involved in controlling and commercialising MapQuest’s applications for web-based and mobile devices, and the structural factors that shape and influence the industries in which it operates. From this analysis, it is argued that a range of factors led to MapQuest’s dramatically diminished market share within the field of online mapping. These included: a lack of revenue generation opportunities; significant map data quality issues; loss of consumer visibility due to search algorithm interference; and a reactive rather than proactive approach to innovation under consecutive owners. This account of MapQuest is important in two ways. First, while MapQuest is a significant firm in the history of contemporary digital mapping, particularly as a pioneer of online distributed mapping, the firm’s history and its contribution to digital mapping remains under-represented in internet histories scholarship. Second, this article contributes to growing interest in and deepening critical understanding of platform precarity, asking: What becomes of platforms when they falter? And what are the factors that contribute to their decline?","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44674129","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 : 2022-03-31DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2055274
Derren Wilson, Saeed-Ul Hassan, N. Aljohani, Anna Visvizi, R. Nawaz
Abstract Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) express the visual design of a website through code and remain an understudied area of web history. Although CSS was proposed as a method of adding a design layer to HTML documents early on in the development of the web, they only crossed from a marginal position to mainstream usage after a long period of proselytising by web designers working towards “web standards”. The CSS Zen Garden grassroots initiative aimed at negotiating, mainstreaming and archiving possible methods of CSS web design, while dealing with varying levels of browser support for the technology. Using the source code of the CSS Zen Garden and the accompanying book, this paper demonstrates that while the visual designs were complex and sophisticated, the CSS lived within an ecosystem of related platforms, i.e., web browsers, screen sizes and design software, which constrained its use and required enormous sensitivity to the possibilities browser ecosystems could reliably provide. As the CSS Zen Garden was maintained for over ten years, it also acts as a unique site to trace the continuing development of web design, and the imaginaries expressed in the Zen Garden can also be related to ethical dimensions that influence the process of web design. Compared to Flash-based web design, work implemented using CSS required a greater willingness to negotiate source code configurations between browser platforms. Following the history of the individuals responsible for creating and contributing to the CSS Zen Garden shows the continuing influence of layer-based metaphors of design separated from content within web source code.
层叠样式表(CSS)通过代码表达网站的视觉设计，在web历史上仍然是一个未被充分研究的领域。尽管在web开发的早期，CSS被提议作为在HTML文档中添加设计层的一种方法，但经过长期致力于“web标准”的网页设计师的传教，它们才从边缘位置跨越到主流使用。CSS禅宗花园的基层倡议旨在协商、主流化和存档CSS网页设计的可能方法，同时处理不同级别的浏览器对该技术的支持。本文使用CSS禅宗花园的源代码和随附的书，证明了虽然视觉设计是复杂而复杂的，CSS生活在一个相关平台的生态系统中，即web浏览器，屏幕尺寸和设计软件，这限制了它的使用，并且需要对浏览器生态系统可以可靠地提供的可能性具有极大的敏感性。由于CSS禅宗花园维持了十多年，它也是一个独特的网站，可以追溯网页设计的持续发展，禅宗花园所表达的想象也可以与影响网页设计过程的伦理维度有关。与基于flash的网页设计相比，使用CSS实现的工作需要更大的意愿在浏览器平台之间协商源代码配置。跟随那些负责创建和贡献CSS Zen Garden的个人的历史，我们可以看到基于层的设计隐喻与web源代码中的内容分离的持续影响。
{"title":"Demonstrating and negotiating the adoption of web design technologies: Cascading Style Sheets and the CSS Zen Garden","authors":"Derren Wilson, Saeed-Ul Hassan, N. Aljohani, Anna Visvizi, R. Nawaz","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2055274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2055274","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) express the visual design of a website through code and remain an understudied area of web history. Although CSS was proposed as a method of adding a design layer to HTML documents early on in the development of the web, they only crossed from a marginal position to mainstream usage after a long period of proselytising by web designers working towards “web standards”. The CSS Zen Garden grassroots initiative aimed at negotiating, mainstreaming and archiving possible methods of CSS web design, while dealing with varying levels of browser support for the technology. Using the source code of the CSS Zen Garden and the accompanying book, this paper demonstrates that while the visual designs were complex and sophisticated, the CSS lived within an ecosystem of related platforms, i.e., web browsers, screen sizes and design software, which constrained its use and required enormous sensitivity to the possibilities browser ecosystems could reliably provide. As the CSS Zen Garden was maintained for over ten years, it also acts as a unique site to trace the continuing development of web design, and the imaginaries expressed in the Zen Garden can also be related to ethical dimensions that influence the process of web design. Compared to Flash-based web design, work implemented using CSS required a greater willingness to negotiate source code configurations between browser platforms. Following the history of the individuals responsible for creating and contributing to the CSS Zen Garden shows the continuing influence of layer-based metaphors of design separated from content within web source code.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43586061","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 : 2022-03-17DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2051331
Katie Mackinnon
Abstract GeoCities was once one of the most popular platforms on the web. This free web-hosting site was a place where people from a range of geographic and socio-cultural locations could build their own websites and communities online. In 1999, Yahoo! acquired the platform in a historic USD$3.7B transaction, but the following decade saw the platform decline into a state of near total non-use. In 2009, it was taken offline. This paper demonstrates how the GeoCities web archives can be used to find digital traces of destroyed web pages and “platform eulogies” from the user’s perspective that provide insights into the tensions that ultimately led to GeoCities death.
{"title":"The death of GeoCities: seeking destruction and platform eulogies in Web archives","authors":"Katie Mackinnon","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2051331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2051331","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract GeoCities was once one of the most popular platforms on the web. This free web-hosting site was a place where people from a range of geographic and socio-cultural locations could build their own websites and communities online. In 1999, Yahoo! acquired the platform in a historic USD$3.7B transaction, but the following decade saw the platform decline into a state of near total non-use. In 2009, it was taken offline. This paper demonstrates how the GeoCities web archives can be used to find digital traces of destroyed web pages and “platform eulogies” from the user’s perspective that provide insights into the tensions that ultimately led to GeoCities death.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42707631","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 : 2022-03-11DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2049069
Tamara Kneese
Abstract Launched in 1993, the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV), located in Blacksburg, Virginia and connected to Virginia Tech, was an experiment in community computing. Through its funding models and technologies, the BEV united government, municipal, corporate, and university interests. While it received media attention and scholarly engagement in its prime, the BEV has not yet been reconsidered as part of the larger critical history of virtual communities and platforms. Through primary and secondary accounts of the BEV, I argue that the BEV’s trajectory is emblematic of how communities learn to negotiate going online for the first time, balancing the visions of designers and funders with those of users. The BEV was both a prototype and, later, a laboratory for participatory design, connecting an entire town to the World Wide Web. Its online listings of local businesses and e-commerce hub, known as the Village Mall, applications like MOOSburg—a multi-user domain—and an interactive Virtual School wired the town. The BEV was a small, rural, geographically-situated community used by senior citizens and college students alike, but it was not always inclusive. I point to critical scholarship about the BEV and other early electronic communities to situate the BEV within larger theoretical considerations regarding the relationship between electronic communities and local geographies, the different expectations of designers versus users, and the problems of inclusion, moderation, and control, even when access is provided.
{"title":"“They’re describing Yelp in 1992!”: revisiting the Blacksburg Electronic Village","authors":"Tamara Kneese","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2049069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2049069","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Launched in 1993, the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV), located in Blacksburg, Virginia and connected to Virginia Tech, was an experiment in community computing. Through its funding models and technologies, the BEV united government, municipal, corporate, and university interests. While it received media attention and scholarly engagement in its prime, the BEV has not yet been reconsidered as part of the larger critical history of virtual communities and platforms. Through primary and secondary accounts of the BEV, I argue that the BEV’s trajectory is emblematic of how communities learn to negotiate going online for the first time, balancing the visions of designers and funders with those of users. The BEV was both a prototype and, later, a laboratory for participatory design, connecting an entire town to the World Wide Web. Its online listings of local businesses and e-commerce hub, known as the Village Mall, applications like MOOSburg—a multi-user domain—and an interactive Virtual School wired the town. The BEV was a small, rural, geographically-situated community used by senior citizens and college students alike, but it was not always inclusive. I point to critical scholarship about the BEV and other early electronic communities to situate the BEV within larger theoretical considerations regarding the relationship between electronic communities and local geographies, the different expectations of designers versus users, and the problems of inclusion, moderation, and control, even when access is provided.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42144653","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 : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2038867
Alexis de Coning
Abstract This article challenges a narrow, teleological approach to ‘platform death’ by looking at discursive continuity of a ‘dead’ men’s rights Usenet newsgroup. Using a data set of 1250 posts spanning 1994 − 2002, I track three thematic trends in the data: the ‘special treatment’ women and minorities receive that deny men their rights, the inverse relationship between men’s rights and responsibilities, and men’s anxieties around gendered roles in the family and at work. However, the ‘prelife’ and ‘afterlife’ of these themes in the men’s rights movement indicates the ways in which discourses persist across time and media formats despite ‘platform death.’ This has implications for how we understand and contextualize the contemporary men’s rights movement and highlights the limitations of platform-focused responses to online misogyny and extremism.
{"title":"A ‘lifetime of indentured servitude:’ rights, labor, and gender anxieties in a dead men’s rights newsgroup","authors":"Alexis de Coning","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2022.2038867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2038867","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article challenges a narrow, teleological approach to ‘platform death’ by looking at discursive continuity of a ‘dead’ men’s rights Usenet newsgroup. Using a data set of 1250 posts spanning 1994 − 2002, I track three thematic trends in the data: the ‘special treatment’ women and minorities receive that deny men their rights, the inverse relationship between men’s rights and responsibilities, and men’s anxieties around gendered roles in the family and at work. However, the ‘prelife’ and ‘afterlife’ of these themes in the men’s rights movement indicates the ways in which discourses persist across time and media formats despite ‘platform death.’ This has implications for how we understand and contextualize the contemporary men’s rights movement and highlights the limitations of platform-focused responses to online misogyny and extremism.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46737960","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 : 2022-02-07DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2021.1992992
Mato Brautović
Abstract The history of computer networks is relatively well described in Western literature but some parts of the world have been neglected. This paper explores the first ways in which computer networks were used in Yugoslavia, since these are different from the modes used in the West or Russia, because the dissolution of the country – mixed with its transition from communism to democracy and the wars for independence – created an environment which allowed computer networks to be used in unprecedented ways. The paper uses a mix of historical method, computational methods for collecting and analysing USENET data, semi-structured interview, archival research, and qualitative online observation. The main findings show that access to Western technology and participation in academic networks enabled Yugoslavian STEM academia and hackers to use computer networks for the first computer networks’ propaganda war. Slovenians, Croatians, and Serbians created electronic mailing lists through which they tried to manipulate international actors and to bond the diaspora for a common cause, and they additionally fought in USENET discussion groups by implementing trolling techniques.
{"title":"The first propaganda war through computer networks: STEM academia and the breakup of Yugoslavia","authors":"Mato Brautović","doi":"10.1080/24701475.2021.1992992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2021.1992992","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The history of computer networks is relatively well described in Western literature but some parts of the world have been neglected. This paper explores the first ways in which computer networks were used in Yugoslavia, since these are different from the modes used in the West or Russia, because the dissolution of the country – mixed with its transition from communism to democracy and the wars for independence – created an environment which allowed computer networks to be used in unprecedented ways. The paper uses a mix of historical method, computational methods for collecting and analysing USENET data, semi-structured interview, archival research, and qualitative online observation. The main findings show that access to Western technology and participation in academic networks enabled Yugoslavian STEM academia and hackers to use computer networks for the first computer networks’ propaganda war. Slovenians, Croatians, and Serbians created electronic mailing lists through which they tried to manipulate international actors and to bond the diaspora for a common cause, and they additionally fought in USENET discussion groups by implementing trolling techniques.","PeriodicalId":52252,"journal":{"name":"Internet Histories","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42597793","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}
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