The Internet Myth: From the Internet Imaginary to Network Ideologies

Abstract

Biography of the Web as a Myth-Building Narrative 2.2 Questioning the Myth of the Web: Media Imaginaries and Web History 2.2.1 Hypertext: The Forgotten Hero Ted Nelson 2.2.2 Retracing Old Media in the World Wide Web 2.2.3 The Web and the Network 2.3 Rethinking Web History 3. Lost Networks: The Socrate and Iperbole Projects in Italy 3.1 The Web Was Not Alone 3.2 The Italian Networking Landscape in the 1990s 3.3 Rise and Fall of Socrate 3.3.1 The Uncertain Reasons for the Failure viii Contents 3.4 The Other Network: The Internet in Italy 3.4.1 Iperbole: The Pioneering Italian Civic Network Project 3.5 Conflicting Imaginaries: Socrate vs. Iperbole 3.6 The Ruins of Socrate 3.7 Legacy Systems 4. Challenging the Network Ideologies 4.1 Imaginary Networks 4.2 The Transitory Propriety of Network Imaginaries 4.3 The Power of Limits 4.4 Beyond Networks References List of Acronyms Index Preface xiii Internet. The 1990s was the decade when, to quote Umberto Eco, this integrated vision of the network emerged, while more recently a turn towards the apocalyptic vision occurred with key authors such as Morozov, Lyon, Zuboff, Fuchs and others. But, in the contemporary 'network imaginaries' , the two visions still co-exist. The one studied in this book is already in place and has limited the possibilities to imagine other forms of network. This is a relevant aspect, underlined by Paolo Bory in the final pages: the power of limits. Consequently, this book is also an inquiry in the limits of imagining the Internet and the technologies we live by in general. Internet imaginaries, ideologies, narratives, and myths (all terms used and explained by Paolo in his book) take time to be built, spread, accepted, and maybe then killed by society. They all have effects in the long term, they need long periods to be metabolized, and their effects are persistent even if often unnoticed. This book uses history, one of the few disciplines able to grasp longterm changes and continuities, in order to understand crucial issues in the relationships between contemporary societies and the Internet. It is an attempt to retrace how the digital culture today is based on forgotten ideas, to revitalize the powerful and persistent narratives behind failed projects, and to understand how the Internet was built with a mix of mythologies, human needs and limits. Every technology of communication is a by-product of the society that created it. And in every society, imaginaries, ideologies, narratives, and myths play a crucial role in establishing a taken-for-granted and yet powerful system of looking at the world. This book ultimately aims to study the habitus where the Internet was created and, in the end, to better understand the ways in which contemporary societies decide to imagine, show, and limit themselves.

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“…Por último, se han incluido en este bloque las transformaciones derivadas del análisis y de la comprensión social de la datificación: los mitos fundacionales (Bory, 2020) o existenciales de la sociedad datificada, las metáforas compartidas (Puschmann y Burgess, 2014) o sus representaciones visuales más comunes (Pentzold, Brantner y Foelsche, 2019), o las ideas provocadas por la visualización gráfica de grandes cantidades de datos que alteran nuestra comprensión de la realidad compleja (Kennedy y Hill, 2018) o que justifican sus previsiones (Diviani, 2018).…”

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“…In he published the book "The Internet Myth . From the Internet Imaginary to Network Ideologies" [Bory, 2020] where retraces and challenges the myth laying at the foundations of the network ideologies -the idea that networks, by themselves, are the primary agents of social, economic, political, and cultural change. By comparing and integrating different sources related to network histories, this book emphasises how a dominant narrative has extensively contributed to the construction of the internet myth while other visions of the networked society have been erased from the collective imaginary.…”

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“…Popular discursive formations often feature the idea of technology as important to human advancement and also being an important aspect of living within the context of Modernity as evidenced by the several ways in which technology use is represented in popular texts such as Hollywood films, novels, advertising, and related social practices (Bory, 2020;Foshay, 2016;Holmes, 2005). Like F. T. Marinetti and the Italian Futurists of the early 20th century, an affirmative sense of the utility, necessity, and to some degree excitement regarding technology is characteristic of Modern thinking (Rampley, 2005;Redhead, 2011).…”