“If You Build It, They Will Come”: Lusk, Wyoming, and the Information Highway Imaginaire, 1989-1999

• In Event: Reuse, Revision, and Repurposing: Across the Lifespan of Digital Communication Technologies, Infrastructures, and Practices

Abstract

In a 1999 television advertisement, software giant Microsoft celebrated the tiny town of Lusk, Wyoming that had “strung fiber optic cable for the future of high-speed internet.” Following the commercial’s airing, the media challenged Microsoft’s portrayal, calling Lusk’s advanced telecommunications “a high-tech on-ramp into nowhere” (Sorensen, 1999) and representing Lusk’s system as a failure. This project analyzes Lusk’s network using Flichy’s Internet imaginaire (2007), Schiffer’s cultural imperative concept (1993), and Lipartito’s reframing of the idea of failure (2003). To conduct this analysis, town council meeting minutes from 1989 to 1999 and local and national newspaper articles are used.

Although some criticized Lusk’s project as a “failure,” research finds a town that continually reimagined and repurposed an idea and a network to meet present and future information needs. Spurred by customer dissatisfaction with the incumbent cable company in the late 1980s, the town took up the task of creating a municipal cable system. A new imperative, however, soon eclipsed the original plan. This new vision was the “information superhighway,” promulgated by technological luminaries as well as Al Gore and Bill Clinton leading up to the presidential campaign of 1996. The town’s mayor revised his plans and set about creating an information highway. Frustrated by a lack of funding and local technical expertise, however, this plan stalled, leading to an unintentional outcome but one that ultimately provided Lusk with high-speed internet access in 2000. While the mayor and the town embraced one cultural imperative, the technologies and strategies they used to arrive at their vision fluctuated. This case challenges the notion of “failure,” illustrates the interpretive flexibility surrounding cultural imperatives, and complicates the common historical narrative of the internet.

Author

• Nadine Irene Kozak, U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee