Abstract
One of the first posts I read on new social media platform BlueSky was by user @nicetryofficer which said ‘There used to be one Twitter than we all hated and now there's four Twitters we hate for special reasons’. This was in reference to the acquisition of Twitter (now ‘X’) by Elon Musk and the emergence of and mass-joining of other, similar sites. I raise this, because The Modem World came across my desk to review at a particularly apposite moment in social media history, where old communities seem to be fragmenting, and gives a timely and prescient account of where social media came from but also where it might be headed.
The Modem World by Kevin Driscoll claims to tell the ‘untold’ history of how ‘The Web’ came to be and, more specifically, how it became social. It opens with an account from Richard Mark who remembers logging onto the supposedly brand new ‘Information Super Highway’ (a beloved phrase of Al Gore) and becoming immersed in a sense of disconnectedness and loneliness. As he clicked from page to page, he recalls thinking to himself ‘I was here, but where is everyone else?’ Mark was the administrator (or sysop) of a legendary Bulletin Board System Dragon Keep International, and thus was particularly well-placed to identify this lack of sociability. As Driscoll meticulously and skilfully establishes in the early part of the book, such Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were the early pre-cursor to what eventually would become known as the social web and then social media. The opening chapters document the emergence of this ‘pre-internet’ in fascinating detail. It is rare to find what you could call an academic page-turner but the way this is written, with so many fascinating facts and anecdotes, which evoked such a sense of nostalgia for my own early years on the internet, meant I rattled through the first two chapters, barely looking up.
Chapter 2 opens with a delightful story about how two Chicago-based computer hobbyists, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, got caught in the snow in January 1978 and decided to invent social media. This is, of course, a gross over-simplification but the retelling of the tale is beguiling, and signifies the chance encounters and off-the-cuff decisions that shaped this pre-history of social media that are also documented elsewhere in the book. After a bad storm has them stuck home from work, Christensen calls Suess and suggested they make a start on an idea Christensen had been toying with for some time – what they termed a ‘computerised bulletin board system’. They worked out a rough design by the end of the day and a few weeks later it was up and running – the first home-based dial-up BBS, running right out of Suess's basement. This early system worked like a cross between a telephone answering machine and a cork-and-pin board like the one at the physical meet-ups of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists Exchange the two men were members of.
In the early part of the book Driscoll also makes the case for how essential revealing this hidden history is. He recounts how he often asks his students how the internet came to be. In line with popular perceptions, they will often respond with comments about the Cold War, the military or one student who just said simply ‘Bill Gates’. As Driscoll outlines at the end of this book, this reflects how for most people the internet seemed to emerge fully-formed in the summer of 1995 with media stories of ‘cyber-sex’, ‘cyber-wars’ and Windows 95 promising to get everyone on the Web. An account of the ordinary people who build online communities for the love of it, is far less well-known. This book bridges that gap admirably.
Chapter 3 delves more deeply into how the BBS became more democratised – moving away from just the people who had programming knowledge and soldering irons. It charts the problem of long-distance dialling and the emergence of networks such as FidoNet – a BBS to BBS system which allowed for cross-regional communication in the United States, a pivotal part of the evolution of the internet in freeing users from their physical location, and from that the rise of Echomail. This allowed for more discoverability for outside users and allowed for each ‘Echo’ to be given a nickname for the topic of the feed or list. This could range from ‘TECH’ to ‘POLITICS’ the more general ‘CHATTER’. Later, Echoes for record collecting, witchcraft and polyamory emerged – becoming something we might recognise on a social media platform such as Reddit today.
Chapter 4 talks about sharing and the problems that arose from this new affordance of online life. It charts the rise of image sharing that came with faster internet and the questions that arose around ownership of these images. One jaw-dropping story is Playboy suing Event Horizons. This was a BBS which started off as one sharing images of planets and stars from NASA but eventually became known for pornography trading off the pun ‘heavenly bodies (p. 129)’. They were hosting nine Playboy images on this BBS and Playboy sued them – settling out of court for a reported $500k. This shows the huge shift in how traditional media now interact with social media. Traditional media now regularly try to Break the Internet by actively getting users to share stories and images from their outlets.
Chapter 5 and 6 explore in more depth how these spaces became ‘social’ and more universal. FidoNet and other similar networks were by this point all either disappearing or being folded into the World Wide Web. This enabled BBS's to increasingly create spaces for online communities that were not bound by geography but interest. This opened up spaces for marginalised groups who were not given a platform on TV and radio, such as LGBT, gender, religious and lifestyle minorities, as well as boards which shared information and support around, for example, HIV and AIDS (although Driscoll is keen to point out that the early internet was not a utopia and the stereotype of the computer geek is to some extent anchored in truth). This in turn meant that by this stage the internet was for everyone, which meant there was scope for personal computers and a programme such as Windows 95 which enabled anyone to get online.
For such a readable book, at a few points I did struggle with some of the jargon, occasionally finding myself wishing for a glossary. However, The Modem World provides rich context for anyone who is interested in the internet or who thinks about it critically, and will undoubtedly broaden one's understanding of the problems social media are beset with today, as well as potential solutions. It also sparked useful methodological thoughts. In a methodological note at the start it reflects on the challenges in documenting platforms and practices that to all intents and purposes no longer exist. With more and more talk of ‘platform death’ (reference or page number?) among digital media scholars this provides us with a cautionary tale about archiving and documenting other important instances in internet history even as they may feel current or enduring. As a Media Studies scholar, I also found the accounts of how traditional media reacted to each new emergence in the Web fascinating – from the early enthusiasm in the trade presses to the antagonism of some larger outlets. We can still see this suspicion and, conversely, perhaps too great a tendency to jump on new social media bandwagons today.
It finishes on an important reflection, namely that the problems that emerged from these boards still exist. On many platforms, moderators can get criticized and burnt out. Although these boards offered a space for alternative voices, they were not a utopia and the forms that come after are not either. Still, the sysops had more control over their spaces than for example, a Facebook group admin does now and if the Internet starts to fragment again, learning the lessons outlined in this book - that the boards having care for their community can help us to understand how to build a better internet going forward. Many ‘internets’ have existed before social media, and we can build a new and better one again. For scholars and students of the internet, The Modem World is a timely and vital read.