Cultural History: Cultural Histories of the Internet

For the past 30 years, people have been growing up, existing, and producing data online, on platforms and through a series of communication networks around the world. These digital traces are distributed sporadically across the live and dead web, in corporately owned digital spaces, institutional holdings, and web archives. How these traces are theorized, studied, aggregated, deployed, or destroyed deserves increased public and academic attention.

This course on a cultural history of the internet builds from research in platform studies, archival theory, feminist ethics of care, digital youth culture, and critical data studies to deepen insight into engaging with the politics and ethics of studying the internet and data from a historical perspective. This course will introduce students to methods and frameworks to approach the internet as an object of study. Students will learn about historiography by exploring new and long-established methods for the study of cultural histories applied to internet histories, and politics of historical representations. They will have hands on exercises with internet and web archives, exploring theoretical and methodological approaches.

The purpose of this course is to give students the necessary skills to carry out an independent, in-depth contextual analysis of cultural histories related to the internet. The course is organized into four parts: the first explores topics in technology domestication, including media and memory, gender and labour, and habituation. The second section will discuss platforms as built social infrastructures that facilitate relationships between people, machines and industries. The third section introduces web archives, and the internet archive, as critical sites of preservation and contestation. The last section explores the afterlives of software and data and engages with critical temporalities of the internet.