Internet history

Literature on (social) history of the Internet

A reading list compiled by Polina Kolozaridi from recommendations from members of the Association of Internet Researchers

• Abbate, J. (2000). Inventing the internet. MIT press.

• Abbate, J. (2001). Government, Business, and the Making of the Internet.*Business History Review*, *75*(01), 147-176.

• Anderson, J. Q. (2005). Imagining the Internet: Personalities, predictions, perspectives. Rowman & Littlefield.

• Barbrook R, Cameron A (1997) The Californian Ideology. Hypermedia Research Centre, University of Westminster.

• Berners-Lee, T., Fischetti, M., & Foreword By-Dertouzos, M. L. (2000). Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web by its inventor. HarperInformation.

• Briggs, A., & Burke, P. (2010). Social history of the media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Polity.

• Brunton, F. (2013). *Spam: a shadow history of the Internet*. Mit Press.

• Chu, B. (2014). Stephanie Ricker Schulte, Cached Decoding the Internet in Global Popular Culture

• Driscoll, K. (2012).From Punched Cards to “Big Data”: A Social History of Database Populism. communication +1,

• Driscoll, Kevin. Hobbyist Inter-Networking and the Popular Internet Imaginary: Forgotten Histories of Networked Personal Computing, 1978-1998.Dissertation, University of Southern California, 2014.

• Flichy, P. (2004). The imaginary internet: how Utopian fantasy shaped the making of a new information infrastructure. *Business and Economic History*, *2*, 1-1.

• Flichy, P. (2007). The internet imaginaire. Mit Press.

• Guice, J. (1998). Looking backward and forward at the Internet. *The Information Society*, *14*(3), 201-211.

• Hafner, K., & Lyon, M. (1998). Where wizards stay up late: The origins of the Internet*. Simon and Schuster.

• Hauben, M., & Hauben, R. (1997). Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. Los Alamitos, Calif.

• Horner, J. R. (2010). Book Review: Patrice Flichy The Internet Imaginaire, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2007; 255 pp.: 109780262062619, US $29.95 (hbk). *New Media & Society*, *12*(2), 331-334.

• Levy, S. (2001). *Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution* (Vol. 4). New York: Penguin Books.

• Lewis, M. (1999). *The new new thing: a Silicon Valley story*. WW Norton & Company.

• Mansell, R. (2012). *Imagining the Internet: Communication, innovation, and governance*. Oxford University Press.

• Mosco V (2004) The Digital Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Shahin, J. (2006). A European history of the Internet. *Science and Public Policy*,*33*(9), 681-693.

• Sterling, B. (2014). *The Hacker Crackdown, law and disorder on the electronic frontier*. Bookpubber.

• Thomas, G., & Wyatt, S. (1999). Shaping cyberspace—Interpreting and transforming the Internet. *Research Policy*, *28*(7), 681-698.

• Turner, F. (2010). *From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism*. University Of Chicago Press.

• Woolgar S (2002) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality. New York: Oxford University Press

Added by Scott MacLeod:

• Manuel Castells, "The Rise of the Network Society,” 2 nd edition, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, chapter 1: "The Information Technology Revolution,” pp.28-76

• Janet Abbate "Inventing the Internet,” Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, pages 1-6, 44-81, and 181-220.

• Eric S. Raymond "The cathedral & the bazaar. Musings on Linux and opensource by an accidental revolutionary," Sebastopol, Ca: O'Reilly, 1999, pages 7 - 78.

• Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia "Net-Surfers don't ride alone: virtual communities as communities," on Barry Wellman (editor) "Networks in the global village,” Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, pp. 331-366

Repositories and other media

• SIGCIS Syllabus Repository,
• SIGCIS History Resources,
• BBS documentary by Jason Scott (proprietor of textfiles.com) that focuses on early dial-up systems, mainly in North America:
• Appropriating the Internet: Alternative & Comparative Histories R14, Denver, CO, USA, 2013
• Internet Histories Current edition of scholarly journal (Taylor & Francis Online)

Articles

• The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol Tim Gihring - Aug 16 2016
• Web of war 'How the hair-trigger nuclear age and fears of Armageddon inspired visionary cold warriors to invent the internet' Sharon Weinberger, AEON 09 March, 2017
• In the 1960s, Telegraph Poles Were Equipped With Nuclear Bomb Alarms ...and how that led Paul Baran at RAND to "to propose a network of distributed communication—an idea that evolved into the military’s revolutionary ARPANET and matured to become the internet." Sarah Laskow, Atlas Obscura, Jan 11, 2017

Videos

• The History of Internet Governance By Wolfgang Kleinwächter. EuroSSIG briefing 2015.

• A History of the Internet – Dave Farber ISOC-NY Chapterthon keynote - Nov 25 2017