Christopher Leslie

Flame Wars on Worldnet: Early Constructions of the International User

Some of the earliest users of the Internet described their activities as predicting a widespread communication medium that would cross national boundaries even before the technical capability was possible. An analysis of conversations on Human-Nets, an early ARPANet mailing list, shows how users were concerned about providing a forum for open discussion and hoped that the network would spread to provide communication throughout the world. Moving forward to CSNET, one can also see a strong insistence that the network provide connectivity beyond the United States. Contrary to those who might tell the history of the Internet as a story of a technology that was first perfected by the military, adapted by U.S. academics and then brought to the rest of the world in the 1990s, these users reveal a strong ideology of international communication.

Competing Histories of Technology: Recognizing the Vital Role of International Scientific Communities behind the Innovation of the Internet

One way to make the history of computing relevant is to explain how different histories are in competition with each other and how they support quite different technology policy. The prevalent history that the US military created the Internet hides the international spirit of goodwill and cooperation that made a particular implementation of Internet happen. This is not just an academic issue. The success of the Internet encourages us to ask how we can continue to innovate the technologies of the Internet or new technologies of a similar power. The myth that the military created the Internet also supports the idea that it was designed on purpose according to a plan. This could not be further from the truth. In fact, the most interesting thing about the Internet is that, in its history, it had a tendency to violate the plans set forth. The international community invigorated the kind of inquiry that would lead to the Internet, not the United States in isolation. In order to create something like the Internet, then, we need to provide an environment for international exchange and cooperation, not maintain proprietary secrets and work in a disciplined environment of practical research.

Decolonizing the internet

The 1990s were full of enthusiasm for the apparent power of new media to transcend local boundaries and bring the people of the world directly into contact with each other regardless of their separate governments. The rhetoric at the end of the 20th century about the power of information technology is reflected by a March 1994 speech by Al Gore. In order to preserve freedom and democracy, telecommunications development must be encouraged in every nation. In this way, citizens will think of themselves as members of the human family, instead of enemies. Interconnectedness, Gore said, will bring about ‘robust and sustainable economic progress, strong democracies, better solutions to global and local environmental challenges, improved health care, and – ultimately – a greater sense of shared stewardship of our small planet’ (Gore, 1994). Another cyberoptimist, Michael Hauben (1996), wrote about the way in which Netizens (as he called them) would be able to break through national boundaries and speak to each other in a free medium. While Netizens live physically in a particular country, everyone online is a ‘compatriot’; ‘geographical separation is replaced by existence in the same virtual space’. The image of togetherness, the idea that new media would be able to eliminate boundaries between people, seemed to suggest that the status of nationality and independent culture would be lessened in the electronic future. At the same time as this optimism was being expressed, it seemed as if there would be the unfortunate consequence that local languages would be lost in the process. The loss of local languages was decried at the start of the century, even if the globalization of English seemed like a necessary price to pay for the new camaraderie of Netizens. In one hundred years, some predicted, the number of the world’s languages would have been cut in half, to 3,000. Along with the language loss would come a homogenization of culture: ‘As the global drive to learn English eats up those remaining languages, it will also consume many 439806 GMC8110.1177/1742766512439806Review essayGlobal Media and Communication 2012

Ingenuity in Isolation: Poland in the International History of the Internet

The popular understanding of the invention of the Internet is that it was the work of researchers in the United States working in relative isolation. However, the Internet is about connection, and so its success required the independently developed networks of the international community. By analyzing early network development in politically isolated Poland toward the end of the Cold War, one sees development concurrent to the development of the Internet but separated technologically through CoCom trade embargoes. By analyzing information technology periodicals, FidoNet newsletters, and other sources, a number of projects have been identified: data distribution over radio and the use of computer networks to protest communist propaganda. In addition to these amateur efforts, we learned about commercial products and academic research. While these efforts were not successful in a conventional sense, they do demonstrate how the computer industry and network research in Poland played an important role despite the political restrictions.

Sequencing the Genome, Naturalising Race

Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, edited by Barbara A. Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee and Sarah S. Richardson, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2008, 368 pp.,

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires; In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives; The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

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Innovating with History: How an Archival Intervention Diminishes Snow’s “Dangerous” Divides

The Internet has become such an integral part of people’s daily lives that one can easily forget how young it is. After a two-decade gestation period, during which the network was primarily the plaything of university-based computer scientists, the Internet exploded onto the public’s consciousness during the mid-1990s. During this period, the Internet was widely regarded as unlike anything that had ever gone before. 1 Every month seemed to bear witness to a new innovation that made possible new forms of expression and communication. The Internet’s potential seemed limitless. 2