Camille Paloque-Berges

Searching for missing “net histories”

ABSTRACT Across time, space and language, the meaning of “the Internet” is taken to be self-evident; appearing to both the scholar and the everyday user as a singular, homogeneous sociotechnical phenomenon. But the Internet, as it is generally known, is as much mythology as technology, a shared set of narratives that frame our expectations of the future. As we begin to write comparative, critical histories of the Internet, this seemingly stable object breaks apart, revealing a diversity of experiences, technologies, norms and motivations. The epistemological problem at the heart of Internet history requires us to borrow creatively from other fields and develop new historical methods. To arrive at new operational definitions of the Internet, we advocate the pursuit of hidden histories, obscure sources and less visible networks, stoking new life into vernacular terms such as “the Net.”

Behind the scenes: an interview with Pierre Beyssac

ABSTRACT Pierre Beyssac, who launched EU.org around 1995 and was the co-founder of Gandi, a French company which profoundly disrupted that countrys growing market of domain names, reflects on his path from the 1980s to the beginning of the 2000s. He was one of these discreet but central players of the French Web scene of the 1990s and 2000s, who experienced these tremendous times as a user, then as a “pro-am” and finally as a web professional.