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593: Dispatches from the early internet: histories, imaginaries, and archaeologies
Time:
Thursday, 19/Oct/2023:
1:30pm - 3:00pm
Session Chair: Kevin Driscoll
Location:Wyeth C
Sonesta Hotel
Presentations
Dispatches from the early internet: histories, imaginaries, and archaeologies
Alexander Rudenshiold1, Avery Dame-Griff2, Liam MacLean3, Katie MacKinnon4
1University of California – Irvine; 2Gonzaga University; 3Northeastern University; 4University of Toronto
This panel charts disparate histories of early internet formations: building from and contributing to the growing body of work which operates across technical interfaces, infrastructures, and cultures of use to paint a more complete picture of how internet and computing cultures, as we now know them, came to be. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, these accounts work against hegemonic, top-down, “revolutionary” narratives of historical internet cultural and infrastructural development. Rather than revolutionary, this collection of papers views the development of new media as a sort of continual updating of technological norms through existing neoliberal logics. In case studies ranging from transgender identity to furry infrastructure, from German leftism to Canadian youth culture – this research offers new interventions, drawing from across geographies and temporalities and further problematizing the popular framing of any singular “internet.”