DISPATCHES FROM THE EARLY INTERNET: HISTORIES, IMAGINARIES, AND ARCHAEOLOGIES

Abstract

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.”