The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories

Gerard Goggin, Mark McLelland, Gerard Goggin, Mark McLelland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317607649
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories brings together research on the diverse Internet histories that have evolved in different regions, language cultures and social contexts across the globe. While the Internet is now in its fifth decade, the understanding and formulation of its histories outside of an anglophone framework is still very much in its infancy. From Tunisia to Taiwan, this volume emphasizes the importance of understanding and formulating Internet histories outside of the anglophone case studies and theoretical paradigms that have thus far dominated academic scholarship on Internet history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the collection offers a variety of historical lenses on the development of the Internet: as a new communication technology seen in the context of older technologies; as a new form of sociality read alongside previous technologically mediated means of relating; and as a new media "vehicle" for the communication of content.

Part 1

FRAMING CONCEPTS
AND APPROACHES

1

IMAGINARIES, VALUES,
AND TRAJECTORIES

A Critical Reflection
on the Internet

Robin Mansell

The history of the Internet is in urgent need of critical reflection. Most historical accounts suggest that there has been, and will continue to be, a relatively homogeneous trajectory of innovation. Examples are the widely cited accounts provided by Abbate 2000; Flichy 2007; Katz et al. 2001; Leiner et al. 1997; Leiner et al. 1998; and Murphy 2002. These neglect the heterogeneity of choices taken by decision makers around the world. It is these choices which have shaped what the Internet is, notwithstanding a common set of technical protocols. Some scholars have examined the “localization” of the Internet (Figueroa and Hugo 2007; Miller and Slater 2000; Postill 2011), but their accounts tend to focus on user appropriation of the Internet, and less so on its development. John Postill notes that many analysts regard the “rest of the world”, beyond the United States, simply as being impacted by “the Internet”.

A South Korean doctoral thesis by a student in the United Kingdom brought the importance of diverse trajectories of Internet innovation to my attention in the early 2000s. He had worked in the telecommunications industry in a senior capacity and participated in discussions about how the Internet should be deployed in his country. His research drew attention to the way the Internet was implemented in South Korea and his account departed from those originating in the United States (Kim 2005). He argued that those accounts persistently focused on a relatively small number of actors, assuming that their remarkably homogeneous cultural values would extend unproblematically to other regions of the world. He further suggested that these accounts favored a particular vision of the Internet, making implicit claims to universal accuracy. These accounts should not be generalized, he said, because the way the Internet (and other digital technologies) actually came to be embedded beyond the United States was substantially different.

Over time, the word “Internet” has come to be treated as a proper noun—that is, as a term designating something unique and singular. This usage limits inquiry into the variety of possible trajectories of technological innovation. The designation of “the Internet” as unique, timeless, and placeless is especially effective in deflecting attention away from contests over the socio-technical relationships that are fostered through its development. This notion of a unique configuration of technical and social relations, propagated through a largely US-centric historical record, is very effective in diminishing the visibility of the variegated character of the innovation process.

I reflect in this chapter on how the scholarly community might contribute to a much more variegated history of the Internet. I start in the next section by considering the prevailing social imaginaries that have been in contention from the earliest days of the Internet. The following section turns to additional narratives that are indicative of a broader range of social imaginaries that underpin studies of technological innovation generally. These perspectives are taken as a starting point for considering an approach to developing alternative histories of the Internet that are more likely to acknowledge the diverse, or variegated, nature of the innovation process in different parts of the world. In the final section, I conclude that critical reflection on the Internet’s history may encourage new social imaginaries to emerge. This might encompass a more variegated set of guiding principles that is consistent with governance arrangements that are not indifferent to people’s rights to access information, to experience some semblance of individual privacy, and to be relatively safe from intrusive surveillance.

Contending Social Imaginaries

One alternative to conventional individually oriented accounts of the Internet’s history is to start with reflections on the configuration of the social imaginaries that influence technological innovation and its governance. Taylor’s (2004) notion of social imaginaries can be applied to problematize widely cited Internet histories, so that the variety that characterizes its development trajectory in different geographical places is acknowledged.

For Charles Taylor, social imaginaries are “deeper normative notions and images”, referring to the expectations, or common understandings, that people have about how collective practice in a given society is, or should be, organized and governed. He suggests that social imaginaries are what enable people to make sense of practices at the individual and institutional levels. Social imaginaries include people’s expectations about governance arrangements, the locus of authority, and how it is, or should be, constituted institutionally. Taylor emphasizes that there are always multiple conflicting social imaginaries in play. These are articulated in the form of narratives or stories that people can tell about any feature of human endeavor. Thus, for example, if the prevailing narrative about the Internet insists that the technology’s design favors individual rights and freedoms, then this is likely to become a taken-for-granted assumption that is very widely held.

Although Taylor’s construct of social imaginaries is concerned with how people imagine that authority operates, or should operate, in a given context, he makes no a priori claims about the specific arrangements for governance that constitute a just or moral order (Mansell 2012). Applying the construct of social imaginaries as a basis for reflecting on narratives about the Internet’s history, it becomes clear that multiple narratives have been in play, notwithstanding the fact that only a very few of these are reflected in the most frequently cited accounts. This approach can sensitize researchers and other stakeholders to the existence of diverse narratives. This is essential when investigation of the Internet’s history is extended beyond the individuals and institutions that played a formative role in the United States.

Approaching a critical reflection on the Internet’s history in this way immediately yields insight into a prevailing narrative account (Mansell 2012). This account is underpinned by a social imaginary that informs many received histories of the Internet. It privileges technological innovation and the diffusion of digital technologies on a world scale. The imaginary is of exogenous impacts of technological innovation, guided by key individuals who value progressively more intense connectivity via networks, specifically supported by the Internet’s technical protocols. This social imaginary is consistent with a notion of autonomous technology and it privileges increasing quantities of information over the messy world of situated meaning construction. This narrative is principally concerned with the impacts of technological innovation and massive increases in capacities to produce, process, distribute, and store digital information. The main focus is on how society adjusts to the shock of rapid technological innovation. The narrative emphasizes outcome assessment to calibrate the effects of shocks such as measures of the rate of investment in Internet-related infrastructure. Scholarship is preoccupied with tracking transformations in computational capacity or with indicators of the intensity of use of the Internet (Katz et al. 2014).

In this narrative, the historical account focuses on individual behaviors in response to technological change with little attention to their distinctive features in different societies. As mathematician/philosopher Norbert Wiener argued, any activity involving digital information involves a complex interactive process: “information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it” (Wiener 1950: 17). This narrative acknowledges that technological and human systems interact, but it is presumed that there is some “higher authority” that controls the outcomes. It is an easy step from here to a universal account of the trajectory of the Internet’s development. This social imaginary arguably underpins programmatic visions of scientific research, engineering, and mathematics that focus on feedback systems and automation as control systems for military and non-military applications. The prevailing narrative is derived from a social imaginary that discounts the socio-cultural and political character of technology. It comes in two principal favors, consistent with Taylor’s view that there are always multiple narratives in play.

One variant of this social imaginary privileges a “higher authority” in the form of the market. In this account, efficient markets and individual choice are said to have guided change in the Internet system. This imaginary invokes a market-led diffusion of technology model. In the case of the Internet, the distinctive expectation is that all countries and people eventually will benefit from a “single global digital economy” (Aspen Institute 2012). The narrative underpinning this imaginary envisages a “catching up” process whereby decisions are taken to “leapfrog” generations of technology to reap economic benefit. Innovation is seen as being responsive to market demand, which is assumed to maximize individual choice, leading to evermore intelligent machines that are increasingly responsive to human needs, most recently for instance, through the development of the Internet of Things. The expectation is that investment in the digital technology system (including the Internet) has uniform positive impacts, unless “residual” factors skew the development trajectory in unexpected ways. The factor deemed most likely to detract from widespread economic benefit is interference in the marketplace through intrusive governance or regulation. The social imaginary of the digital world is one in which “thing-like” information products enlighten people’s lives. The idea that technological progress could be benign or harmful becomes simply “too obvious to mention” (Taylor 2007: 176).

The second variant of the prevailing social imaginary is very similar to the first. It also privileges technological innovation and the diffusion of digital technologies on a world scale. It differs mainly in its expectations with regard to where any “higher authority” is, or should be, located. In this case, there is an expectation that horizontal or collaborative models of authority, enabled by decentralized networks, are the optimal means for organizing and governing society (Mansell 2012). In this social imaginary, authority may reside with the commercial market, or it may be located in a host of non-market arrangements. In either case, however, the narrative focuses on how Internet technology-supported, non-hierarchical models of authority, most notably, peer-to-peer online interaction, favor the exchange or sharing of digital information.

This social imaginary underpins the notion that an open, emergent, and collaborative culture is favorable to collective decision making (Benkler 2009; Jenkins 2006; Lessig 2006). Like its counterpart, it insists that the Internet should not be regulated so as to give free rein to innovators, often, but not exclusively, in an open information commons. Inspired by a commitment to open access to information, and to minimal restraints on freedom of expression and the preservation of privacy, the historical narrative is about the benefits of horizontal institutions of governance, the empowering characteristics of user-generated content and mass-self communication (Castells 2009). Scholars whose work is informed by this variant of the prevailing social imaginary may criticize intrusive corporations and state exploitation of Internet users and highlight power asymmetries (Mosco 2014), but their accounts treat digital information primarily as a “thing” to be circulated and diffused. This second variant of the prevailing technologically deterministic social imaginary fits with the notion that the Internet should not be formally regulated.

In both variants of the prevailing social imaginary, the resulting accounts of the innovation process eschew a consideration of the variability of meaning construction. The accounts are therefore apparently universally applicable. In both cases, the appropriate locus of authority is assumed to be diffuse, consistent with the end-to-end architecture of the Internet. Over time, this architecture comes to be seen as a technological given, no longer one with multiple possibilities and potential trajectories. Proponents of the two variants of the prevailing social imaginary of the Internet are pitted against each other in policy debates. One group advocates reliance on the emergent properties of a complex market system as the means to achieve universally positive outcomes. The other advocates reliance on the generative activities of decentralized technology designers and a growing mass of online participants to achieve these outcomes. In both, the overall narrative about the history of the Internet is remarkably similar. Claims to universal applicability invoke a “higher authority”, whether market or dispersed members of civil society. This means that detailed attention to differences in the values and commitments of stakeholders to market-, government-, or civil society-led innovation go largely unexamined.

If this prevailing social imaginary of a technologically undifferentiated Internet was simply a narrative account with no bearing on the future, we might conclude that scholarship on the distinctive ways in which the Internet has been “localized” is all that is needed to correct the historical record. It is this prevailing social imaginary, however, that gives rise to expectations that predominate in contemporary debates about the future of the Internet. Today, computing experts are referring to “social machines”. A world of Web 3.0 technologies is expected to diffuse throughout the world. The contemporary imaginary is one of “metaverses” embracing social media and information, drawing in data from virtual (physical) spaces. Social computing, Web science, and social computation focus on combining citizen participation with machine-based computation. Higher authority here rests with key individuals who are responsible for ensuring that security and privacy are designed into these machines (Smart and Shadbolt 2014).

The prevailing social imaginary is of machines that can “think” and make “choices” on behalf of human beings. Manuel DeLanda’s (2011) work on simulation, for example, is illustrative of attempts to employ computerization to explain the emergent properties of systems, including the social. Self-organizing “meshworks” are depicted as alternatives to hierarchy in a socio-technical system that increasingly privileges the potentialities of “intelligent” computing. This is seen either as enhancing the prospects for economic growth through information markets, now designated as “big data”, or as facilitating increasingly decentralized societal governance (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013). These expectations are being inscribed into algorithms (boyd and Crawford 2012). With companies storing terabytes of data for scrutiny, the emphasis is on machine learning to harness the power of the social Web, resting on an open Internet.

This diffusion of technology narrative differs remarkably little from that which informed the work of earlier generations of scientists and engineers. Vannevar Bush (1945), for example, hoped that social machines would be better able to review their “shady past” and to analyze social problems. As Philip Mirowski (2002: 19) asserts: “If there was one tenet of that era’s particular fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Global Coordinates of Internet Histories
• PART 1 Framing Concepts and Approaches
• PART 2 Rethinking Internet Evolution
• PART 3 Early Computer Networks, Technology, and Culture
• PART 4 Imagining Community via the Internet
• PART 5 Histories of Social Internets
• PART 6 Internets and New Media Forms
• PART 7 Publics, Politics, and Digital Societies
• Index