From “Exceptional” to “Global”: A Short History of the Web in France

• In Event: Toward Multiplicity and Complexity: Examining World Wide Webs

Abstract

This paper examines the development of the web as a technology of subjectivity in France over a 15-year period. I analyze how software developers and web users in this country have enacted particular notions of the self, conceived the publicness of their web appropriation and development practices, and built and utilized media technologies such as websites and software programs to these ends. I focus on three particular processes: the emergence of early websites in the mid- to late 1990s; the stabilization of the blog as the preferred format for performing the self online at the turn of the twenty-first century; and the rise of so-called “microblogging” and “curation” technologies in the late 2000s decade. The study draws on 58 interviews with software developers and users, content and artifact analyses of websites, traditional archival research, and online archival research. I discuss how and why actors in the technology field in France have gradually abandoned traditional makers of exceptionalism that were key in the development of the country’s national identity and favored notions that characterize the United States instead. I argue that, in the context of France’s neoliberalization, web users and developers envisioned French exceptionalism as hindering technological innovation. Instead, American values and notions embodied in Silicon Valley have worked for them as a model for overcoming exceptionalism and thus becoming “global.” To make sense of this process, I elaborate on the mechanisms that shaped the France-U.S. relationship in these three periods, respectively: critique (resisting the values associated with the New Economy through the creation of alternative projects); translation (appropriating notions tied to the web in the United States as a means to solve local problems in France); and template (using notions prevalent in the American context as a benchmark example for turning France into a “global” country).

Author

• Ignacio Siles, Northwestern U