“We’ve been telling the same story about ARPANET and the web for 25 years, and it isn’t satisfying anymore.”
Instead of emphasizing the role of popular innovation and amateur invention, the dominant myths in internet history focus on the trajectory of a single military-funded experiment in computer networking: the ARPANET. Though fascinating, the ARPANET story excludes the everyday culture of personal computing and grassroots internetworking. In truth, the histories of ARPANET and BBS networks were interwoven—socially and materially—as ideas, technologies, and people flowed between them.
The standard history of the internet jumps from ARPANET to the web, skipping right past the mess of the modem world. A history that consists of mostly ARPANET and the web isn’t incorrect or not valuable. There is much to learn from these networks about informal collaboration, international cooperation, public-private partnerships, and bottom-up technical innovation.
Before the widespread adoption of internet email, people complained about having to print up business cards with half a dozen different addresses: inscrutable sequences of letters, numbers, and symbols representing them on CompuServe, GEnie, AOL, Delphi, MCI Mail, and so on. Today, we find ourselves in the same situation. From nail salons to cereal boxes, the visual environment is littered with the logos of incompatible social media brands.
Commercial social media platforms are of a more recent origin. Major services like Facebook formed around 2005, more than a quarter-century after the first BBSs came online. Their business was the enclosure of the social web, the extraction of personal data, and the promise of personalized advertising. Through clever interface design and the strategic application of venture capital, platform providers succeeded in expanding access to the online world.
The other key, and closely related, failure of the social media industry is in its disregard for the needs of the communities that rely on it. In public debate, commercial social media providers like Facebook portray themselves as “tech” firms rather than “media” publishers, merely “neutral platforms.” This allows them to disclaim liability for the things that people do on their platform and entitles them to regulate user behavior through capricious “Terms of Service” agreements.
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