This is the project site for the Cultural History of the Internet course at Johns Hopkins University.
A collective project, it takes a critical approach to internet history, considering a wide spectrum of cultural practices involved in web services and apps, while exploring questions of access and algorithmic bias. It takes an interest in not only the common narratives of innovation, extending from the military infrastructure of ARPANET to the nineties dot-com boom to the emerging internet of things, but also the host of dead ends and lost sites, net ephemera, and once thriving web cultures that risk being forgotten.
The course’s guiding framework is the circuit of culture approach developed by du Gay et al. (1997), which emphasizes the role of meaning in the creation of cultural commodities and outlines five interconnected areas for analyzing any cultural object: “how it is represented, what social identities are associated with it, how it is produced and consumed, and what mechanisms regulate its distribution and use” (3). Significantly, it is an approach that developed in the same cultural moment as the internet was coming into everyday life and might itself be seen as an artifact of that moment.
Taught by Kyle Stine.
Production: Ludist’s Home on the Web
Production: Ludist’s Home on the Web In 1994, David Bohnett and John Rezner created a web hosting service that was intended to allow its users to create their websites and categorize them into their choosing, users could also browse websites created by others based on their interests. By 1999 it began to pick up steam
Production: Lord Zarak’s Transformer Collection
Koleton Marquis 7 November 2022 Kyle Stine Cultural History Of The Internet GeoCity The circuit of culture is a tool that evaluates if something is an object of culture. The circuit of culture consists of five huge components that include representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation. How objects are identified and represented is what the
Production: Steve’s Disney Collection
Geocities was once a popular web-hosting service that allowed anyone to create their website without any cost. Thus, this service made it possible for people, even those without much coding knowledge, to create and publish websites on anything they were interested in. Unfortunately, this service was eventually shut down. However many archive sites exist today
