Why Internet Histories, Now?

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Proposal

Abstract

This roundtable reflects upon an emerging area of communication history research - Internet histories.

The Internet is relatively young, officially launched in the late 1960s, and still undergoing considerable change as a distinctive area of communication and media. However, the Internet is now central to many domains of contemporary communication, social, political, and cultural life. From its beginnings in a handful of wealthy countries in North America, Europe, and East Asia, the Internet has been reinvented and reimagined across most countries, with take-up and use across a wide range of groups, cultures, and demographics.

Work of Internet histories is expanding, beyond institutional histories and important pioneering studies to a wide variety of research grappling with the complex constitution and protean shapes of Internets globally, as the technology plays an influential role in key dynamics of communication, society, and culture.

Internet histories face particular challenges in archives, methods, and concepts that as yet have not been systematically discussed. Add to which Internet histories has only recently found its way into more established, mainstream communication and media history – and indeed historical research general.

Marking the inauguration of a new journal Internet Histories, the roundtable participants outline, suggest, and debate the issues, challenges, opportunities, tensions, conceptual and research terrain, cultural, political, social, economic, and industrial dynamics, distinctive historiographic and theoretical underpinning that characterize the emergent field of Internet histories.

Featuring leading figures in this nascent venture, the roundtable will take up and discuss key questions, including:

Why Internet histories, now? What is the role and function of historical or diachronic Internet studies in term of current issues for our societies, the historical field, university curricula, and present framing of the development of the Internet?

How might we frame and present the major theoretical, methodological, and/or empirical gaps in existing research on Internet histories?

What are the conceptual and methodological opportunities of doing Internet histories?

What are the limits of Internet, versus other kinds of media, information, communication, technology forms?

What are the challenges for doing Internet histories that are genuinely international in character, given the wide variety of languages, cultural locations, social contexts, and institutional settings?

What are the archival and material conditions of the material of Internet histories?

Sub Unit

• Communication and Technology

Cosponsor

• Communication History

Chair

• Gerard Michael Goggin, The University of Sydney

Individual Presentations

• Out From the PLATO Cave: The Prehistory of Social Computing - Steven Jones, U of Illinois, Chicago; Guillaume Latzkototh, Louis-Jacques-Casault U Laval

• A History of Operationalizing Digital Divides - Bianca Christin Reisdorf, Michigan State U; William H. Dutton

• The Long History of the Internet - Sandra Braman, Texas A&M U

• Notes From /dev/null - Finn Brunton, New York U

• African Histories of the Internet - Herman Wasserman, U of Cape Town

• The Internet as a Structure of Feeling: 1992-1996 - Thomas Streeter, U of Vermont