Toward Multiplicity and Complexity: Examining World Wide Webs

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel moves toward longitudinal, cross-cultural, and radically contextualized approaches that consider how web cultures evolve, transform, and stabilize over time. Each paper takes seriously the notion that rather than focus on what is “new” or what is “old,” we might be better served by a “canvassing of the interplay between past and present media” (Peters, 2009: 23). Recognizing continuity and change, the panelists embrace complexity by rethinking central issues in the history and historiography of communication technologies. Taken together, this panel reveals a multiplicity of cultures, practices, and technologies that constitute today’s complex web(s).

Sub Unit

• Communication History

Individual Presentations

• “Virtual Hands Across the Sea”: Intercultural Media Exchange From Pen Pals to e-Pals - Katie Day Good, Miami University

• From “Exceptional” to “Global”: A Short History of the Web in France - Ignacio Siles, Northwestern U

• Printing the Web: From “Yellow Pages” to Art Installations - Rachel Plotnick, U of North Carolina - Charlotte

• A Method for Describing The Evolution of New Media Ecological Systems - Meghan Dougherty, Loyola U Chicago

• The Historical Development of the Danish Web - Niels Brugger, Aarhus U