Searching for missing “net histories”

Driscoll, Kevin; Paloque-Berges, Camille

doi:10.1080/24701475.2017.1307541

Cited by 22 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…At the same time, the field of computing was changing in significant ways. Personal computers and local Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) were proliferating (Campbell-Kelly & Garcia-Swartz, 2013), national telecommunications networks such as France's Minitel were growing rapidly (Driscoll & Paloque-Berges, 2017;Mailland & Driscoll, 2017), and the US ARPANET was transitioning from an experimental DARPA network to the NSFNET, and soon, to the commercial Internet of today (Abbate, 2000;Fidler & Russell, 2018).…”

Section: Programs Crisis: Changing World Changing Cpsrmentioning

confidence: 99%

From closed world discourse to digital utopianism: the changing face of responsible computing at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (1981–1992)

Finn

DuPont

2020

Internet Histories

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Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) began in 1981 as a group of computer scientists concerned about nuclear destruction. Early CPSR members analysed military planning documents and levelled technical critiques at how computers were to be used in battle, highlighting the limits of computing technologies. Although early CPSR arguments were primarily technical, as responsible professionals their practices were based on a collective morality and a willingness to question their profession's economic self-interest. As the Cold War thawed in 1989, CPSR met a series of challenges, including financial issues, leadership turnover, and a changing and expanding role for information technology. CPSR emerged from this crisis with a renewed focus on "civil liberties" that was largely underwritten by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Although CPSR's civil liberties advocacy sometimes retained its early arguments and practices by addressing the limitations of information technologies, they also adopted the emerging views of Silicon Valley's "digital utopianism," advocating for the growth of information technology. We describe this seemingly contradictory shift in responsibility along three axes: the use of standpoint epistemology for responsible computing, a transition from professional choice to lobbying, and a transition from substantivism to instrumentalism. In this paper, we characterize an important instance of collective responsibility for computing by tracing the evolution of CPSR's first decade of practices, techniques, and arguments with an eye towards the challenges of responsible computing today.

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Section: Programs Crisis: Changing World Changing Cpsrmentioning

confidence: 99%

From closed world discourse to digital utopianism: the changing face of responsible computing at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (1981–1992)

Finn

DuPont

2020

Internet Histories

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“…Recent interest in more thoroughly historicizing the internet beyond its ARPANET creation myth and subsequent "hacker" cyberculture has generated a wealth of research on different, plural "net histories" (Driscoll and Paloque-Berges 2017) working 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 (Mailland and Driscoll 2017;. This growing body of work which investigates temporally situated, geographically disparate, and marginalized peoples' internet histories raises questions about how we understand the contemporary internet's composition through offering insights into how it has operated under prior, less centralized constructions.…”

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confidence: 99%

Dispatches From the Early Internet: Histories, Imaginaries, and Archaeologies

Rudenshiold,

Dame-Griff,

MacLean

et al. 2023

SPIR

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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.”

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Run Runet Runaway: The Transformation of the Russian Internet as a Cultural-Historical Object

Asmolov

Kolozaridi

2020

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

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The history of Runet is not just a chronological account of the major events in the Russian Internet space. We take a historical approach in order to identify the boundaries of Runet as an object of investigation. This chapter offers a framework for the examination of Runet as a constantly changing socio-technical object. Due to the participatory nature of its continuous construction, Runet has been addressed as a “runaway object” (Engeström, 2008). In order to follow the development of this “runaway Runet,” we identify and follow five interrelated vectors: the technological vector, the cultural vector, the media vector, the user vector and the political vector. This allows us not only to describe the history of Runet but also to contribute to an understanding of what it is and whether there is an “end to Runet.”

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Searching for missing “net histories”

Cited by 22 publications

References 23 publications

From closed world discourse to digital utopianism: the changing face of responsible computing at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (1981–1992)

From closed world discourse to digital utopianism: the changing face of responsible computing at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (1981–1992)

Dispatches From the Early Internet: Histories, Imaginaries, and Archaeologies

Run Runet Runaway: The Transformation of the Russian Internet as a Cultural-Historical Object

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