Abstract
In 2019, the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web is celebrated among Internet enthusiasts around the world. It was in 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee, then a computer expert at CERN, wrote the first proposal for a system that would link and access information across different computers using standard Internet protocols.
As the Internet and the web are no longer youngsters, it is timely to start addressing the history, or histories, of the Internet. This is exactly what two recently published books do.
Together, these two books question the classic narratives of Internet histories in which technological breakthrough moments, like the hyperlink proposal, and inventors, like Berners-Lee, are given key roles. Some of the books’ contributions even pose questions about what the Internet really is, is it the technical network, the protocols, or something else, or more? The books show that depending on how we understand the Internet, we may also question what and where its origins lie.
Both books are collections of articles, or essays, and both aim to contribute to establishing a new field of Internet Histories.
The book Internet Histories is edited by Niels Brügger, Gerard Goggin, Ian Milligan and Valérie Schafer and was published in 2018. The chapters were first published in the first issue of the journal Internet Histories (2017). This journal aims to be a platform for the whole field of Internet histories, across approaches, methods and disciplines.
The 19 chapters of the book are short articles, or essays that are meant to be thought-provoking, to invite discussion and to open up the field of Internet histories. The book aims to show how wide this field is. The heterogeneity of the chapters is therefore an important part of the project.
Internet Histories starts out with two articles questioning the dominant understanding of the history of the Internet. Janet Abbate demonstrates that how we define the Internet has political implications. The classic definition of the Internet as a large technological system or infrastructure frames the Internet as ‘a channel for transmitting data, rather than as a field of social practice’ (p. 10). She argues not to see the Internet as a technical entity but also on the myriad of cultural manifestations. In line with this, Kevin Driscoll and Camille Paloque-Berges propose a plural approach to studying net histories. Andrew L Russel argues that existing histories focus primarily on the production of networking technologies and protocols, and the creators and developers of the technology are casted as heroes. He calls for more critical and less hagiographic approaches to Internet histories.
Following this, Marc Weber advocates the need to compare information systems over time. In his view, there have been many information systems even preceding Arpanet (often understood as the origin of the Internet), and the role of these other information systems should be recognised. Steve Jones and Guillaume Latzko-Toth make a similar point by claiming that ‘The Internet was not the beginning of networked communication’ (p. 67) and that we need to also examine pre-Internet forms of network technology to understand the history and context of the Internet.
The book is rich, some of the contributions point to how the field should evolve and argue for the need to develop a cultural history of the Internet (Fred Turner) as well as to study the conviction of the 1990s that Internet technology was inherently democratising (Thomas Streeter), and the early financialisation of big Internet corporations (Greg Elmer).
Several contributors adopt a geographical perspective. This includes Ilhem Allagui, who explains how the Internet in the Middle East developed asymmetrically as the government increased surveillance and limited access to technology. Herman Wasserman illustrates the complex and contradictory developments of the Internet in Africa. And Marc McLelland points to how multilingualism is challenged by invisible infrastructures of the net, such as the QWERTY-keyboard and the dominance of the Roman script.
Internet Histories also reflects on different approaches to studying Internet histories. For example, Bianca C Reisdorf et al. explain that examining survey research questions can show us how social research tends to be driven by the latest technical innovations – while at the same time lagging behind these innovations. Finn Brunton points to the need to look into archives of rejected code, spam and records of the Dark web. Sandra Braman has a special focus on the archives of Internet Request for Comments (RFCs) to study the design process. Gerard Alberts et al. criticise the Internet archive as a source as it reduces websites to mere pages, whereas Richard Rogers explores the possibilities to use the wayback machine to surf the web as it was. In addition, Jane Winters makes a call for researchers in the humanities and social sciences in general to integrate Internet histories into their research, and Leopoldina Fortunati proposes important themes to consider for scholars who want to study Internet histories.
In the final chapter of the book, Valérie Schafer returns to the classic narrative of Internet history and interviews some of the Internet pioneers and developers of the early Internet. This return to the classic narrative and the old heroes is a bit puzzling, given the earlier discussions in the book, which insisted that the Internet is much more than technology and called for more critical perspectives in the study of the heroes of the Internet.
The other book, Web 25: Histories from the First 25 Years of the World Wide Web is also edited by Niels Brügger and was published by Peter Lang in 2018. The book forms part of the same ambition to establish a new field of history research.
In contrast to Internet Histories, which has short essays that invite discussion, Web25 is a more typical anthology with 14 chapters presenting separate studies. Most of the chapters are case studies about a specific historical development, issue or phase. In addition, some chapters reflect more generally on methodology in studies of Internet histories, especially the use of archives.
The first section of the book concerns the early web. The section is introduced by a chapter by Niels Brügger, who points at the hyperlink as one of the defining features of the web. He traces the origins of the hyperlink, going all the way back to tablets, through hand-written manuscripts to printed books and newspapers before he introduces the digital computer. In this way, he shows that the textuality, mediacy and connections of the hyperlink have long roots.
Simone Natale and Paolo Bory in the next chapter examine the narratives and myths around the web’s history. Similar to Russel’s article in Internet Histories, they argue that the narratives and autobiographies of the inventors of the web follow the script of a story of a hero.
In a way, this is a good description of the next chapter, in which Jean Marie Deken presents a study of how the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) happened to have the first website outside Europe (the first website was CERN in Geneva). The story presented is one of heroes and perfect timing.
Another story about the early web is how it was initially presented to the general public. Marguerite Barry has done a discourse analysis of how the Internet was portrayed in some newspapers in the early years. She shows how readers could initially find stories about the Internet’s great potential in the business pages. Later, other perspectives, utopian ideals, claims and counterclaims were introduced more widely. In contrast to the common narrative about the web, Barry places the birth of the web not to the day Berners-Lee wrote the proposal for the hypertext project in 1989, but to the day he sent an email to the alt.hypertext newsgroup in 1991, describing the www project.
The second section of the book is called ‘The web of culture and media’. This section consists of three quite specific historical case studies illustrating different cultural settings: China, Italy and Australia. Michel Hockx writes about how the web of China is not primarily about censorship and repression, but also a creative arena consisting of blogs, microblog forums and literature. Elisabeth Locatelli presents a study about blogging in Italy and how that developed through the early 2000s, and Sybil Nolan writes about how the first Australian online paper came about.
The third section is about methodological reflections. Matthew S. Weber addresses some of the challenges facing researchers working with web data, such as how the scope of the web challenges size and time dimensions, how the nature of web data points to questions regarding reliability and validity of the data, and how the type of data on the web poses questions about ethics in research.
Anne Helmond uses an analysis of the New York Times’ website to illustrate that websites must be analysed not as pages, but as ecologies looking at the dynamic and shifting relations between websites and third parties. She proposes studies of source code and use of software to detect and track such networks.
Anwesha Chakraborty and Federico Nanni trace the development of museum websites from information leaflets to virtual museums to spaces for user engagements with blogs and so on. Through this study, they illustrate how the web archive and the wayback machine can be used together with oral histories.
The fourth and final section goes deeper into how web archives can be used as historical sources. Peter Webster tells the story of large-scale archiving of the web over time. Paul Koerbin looks more closely at the National Library of Australia’s PANDORA archive to understand how web archives are formed by individuals and the institutional context. This is underlined by Ditte Laursen and Per Møldrup-Dalum in their study of the Danish web archive. They argue that the particular history of such an archive is relevant for users of the archive because archives are never neutral, objective or impartial. Web archiving shapes what it records. In the final chapter of the book, Camille Paloque-Berges suggests that Usenet archives can be used as resources for Internet and web histories and proposes a layered approach to taking advantage of such data.
The title of this other book, Web25, is intriguing. The book is about the first 25 years of the World Wide Web. The book does, however, never conclude which years are the first 25. As we have already seen, CERN celebrated 1989 as the year it all started. Brügger is less specific and takes as his point of departure the period between 1989 and 1994. Barry presents 1991 as the birth-year in his chapter. The contributions of the two books reviewed here illustrate that when one considers the web to be born depends on how the web is defined. The more the web is defined primarily as technology or code, the easier it is to agree on the time of birth. The more definitions point at social use and practices, the more gradual the process will be, and the more difficult it becomes to present a specific date or place of birth.
Together, the two books do establish Internet histories, or Web histories, as fields of research with common themes and concerns. Internet Histories is the provocative book and has more food for thought in what shapes this new field. Web25 gives more thorough examples of studies of Internet histories, and also a closer discussion of different kinds of archives.
Maybe the most important insight that the books provide is that we need multiple perspectives to understanding the Internet. The Internet is both a technological infrastructure and a field of social practices. Both the technological and the social are necessary for the Internet to exist – and we need perspectives along both lines in order to understand the histories of the Internet – and the Internet today.