650 research outputs found
The Internet Myth
No full text‘The Internet is broken and Paolo Bory knows how we got here. In a powerful book based on original research, Bory carefully documents the myths, imaginaries, and ideologies that shaped the material and cultural history of the Internet. As important as this book is to understand our shattered digital world, it is essential for those who would fix it.’ — Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World The Internet Myth retraces and challenges the myth laying at the foundations of the network ideologies – the idea that networks, by themselves, are the main agents of social, economic, political and cultural change. By comparing and integrating different sources related to network histories, this book emphasizes 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. The book decodes, analyzes and challenges the foundations of the network ideologies looking at how networks have been imagined, designed and promoted during the crucial phase of the 1990s. Three case studies are scrutinized so as to reveal the complexity of network imaginaries in this decade: the birth of the Web and the mythopoesis of its inventor; and the histories of two Italian networking projects, the infrastructural plan Socrate and the civic network Iperbole, the first to give free Internet access to citizens. The Internet Myth thereby provides a compelling and hidden sociohistorical narrative in order to challenge one of the most powerful myths of our time. This title has been published with the financial assistance of the Fondazione Hilda e Felice Vitali, Lugano, Switzerland
The Italian network hopes: Rise and fall of the Socrate and Iperbole projects in the mid-1990s
No full textThe article retraces the histories of two Italian networking projects of the mid-19990s: the national infrastructural plan named Socrate, launched by the monopolist Telecom Italia in 1994 and the civic network Iperbole, launched by the municipality of Bologna in 1995. Relying upon a corpus of primary sources and in-depth interviews with key-informants, the article stresses the complex relationship between infrastructures, networks and media imaginaries in Italy at a time when the large-scale diffusion of the Internet and the World Wide Web were still in fieri. The same years of the WWW's first diffusion were in fact a period of negotiation at local, national, and international level between various actors and different ways of envisioning the upcoming digital age. The article shows how the history of Socrate challenges the idea of the centrality of the Web and the Internet in company discourses of the mid-1990s juxtaposing a different narrative and an imaginary of networking infrastructures linked to broadcasting media. Conversely the case of Iperbole is a particular example of public service use of the Internet on the wave of a political and cultural tradition that looked at media as strategic tools, rather than theoretical models, for democratisation
Deep new: The shifting narratives of artificial intelligence from Deep Blue to AlphaGo
No full textThe article compares two key events that marked the narratives around the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in two different time frames: the game series between the Russian world champion Garry Kasparov and the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue held in New York in 1997, and the Go game series between the South Korean champion Lee Sedol and DeepMind’s AI AlphaGo held in Seoul in 2016. Relying on a corpus of primary and secondary sources such as newspapers and specialized magazines, biographic books, the live broadcasts and the main documentaries reporting the challenges, the article investigates the way in which IBM and Google DeepMind used the human–machine competition to narrate the emergence of a new, deeper, form of AI. On the one hand, the Kasparov–Deep Blue match was presented by broadcasting media and IBM itself as a conflictual and competitive form of struggle between human kind and a hardware-based, obscure and humanlike player. While on the other hand, the social and symbolic message promoted by DeepMind and the media conveyed a cooperative and fruitful interaction with a new software-based, transparent and un-humanlike form of AI. The analysis of the case studies reveals how AI companies mix narrative tropes, gaming and spectacle in order to promote the newness and the main features of their products. In particular, recent narratives of AI based on human feelings and values such as beauty and trust can shape the way in which the presence of intelligent systems is accepted and integrated in everyday life
The broken network: The history and resiliency of infrastructure of the Telecom Italia (1994-1997)
No full textThe article deals with the history and the resiliency of the Socrate data network infrastructure launched, and never completed, by the Telecom Italia company in the 1990s. Through an historical analysis based on sources and in-depth interviews with key witnesses, this paper underlines the relevance of technical infrastructures, which are often underestimated in network histories. Relying on these sources, the article highlights the "resiliency" of past projects, their impact on digitization, and the lessons that can be learned from the histories of networking
Weak systems. Unveiling the vulnerabilities of digitization
No full textThis article discusses digitization weaknesses, biases, and malfunctions to challenge popular, almost hegemonic visions of contemporary technologies. By focusing on examples provided by recent mediated cases, controversies, and critical research about biases, we aim to propose an analysis of anything digital starting from its vulnerabilities, to look beyond polarized deterministic views, both optimistic and pessimistic. The article generates from the thematic track: "Weak Systems. Exploring bias, bugs and the vulnerability of digitization" that took place at the VIII STS Italia Conference. The panel brought together scholars from different backgrounds, including STS, history of technology, sociology of communication and critical data and media studies to discuss instances of technological weaknesses in various contexts. The article sums up some of the panel takeaways and pleas for a cooperative and interdisciplinary effort focusing on "weak systems"
Digital Federalism: Information, Institutions, Infrastructures (1950–2000)
No full textThe history of federalism in the digital age unfurls against a complex backdrop of dreams and expectations, cooperation and conflict, and preservation and change. Throughout this history, a range of individual and institutional actors in pursuit of a common goal are forced to grapple with a constantly shifting balance of resources, technologies, and re-sponsibilities.Contributions deal with topics such as the relationship between and among states, in-formation, and computers; federal dealings with respect to migration and university policy; and the social and political coordination required both locally and nationally by high-performance computing. The editors’ introduction reflects on how different forms of autonomy and authority were negotiated to achieve the benefits of digital technologies within social and material space
How the Web was told: Continuity and change in the founding fathers’ narratives on the origins of the World Wide Web
No full textThe essay investigates the evolution of the “narratives of invention” used by the founding fathers of the World Wide Web in a selected corpus of papers written by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues from 1989 up to 1993 and later in the books of James Gillies and Robert Cailliau and of Berners-Lee himself in 2000. Thanks to a textual analysis that cross these sources, we identify three main sets of common keywords that did not change and three couples of conflicting keywords that depict the evolution of the narratives over time. Change and continuity, intertwined with conservation and innovation, emerge as the key strategies of the Web’s founding fathers in narrating their idea
Computer Network Histories: Emerging Streams from the Internet Past.
No full textBefore the rise of the Web and our contemporary digital cultures, computer networks had already been imagined, tested, and used worldwide. This special issue retraces some of the technological, cultural and social paths that shaped the development of networks in six different areas of the world. The papers and the final conversation between two leading scholars of this issue touch some crucial topics of network histories from a variety of cultural, geographical and disciplinary perspectives. The issue combines studies and researches based on theoretical and empirical analyses in the U.S., Europe, Brazil and South Africa. Among the most relevant case studies, the story of the Italian-American pioneer Robert Fano, the early data activism networks in France, the role of telephonic infrastructures in the German network, the digital activism in South Africa during the Apartheid, the communitarian and technical dimension of the first BBS in the U.S., as well as the origins of the Internet in Brazil. A final conversation among the two conference’ keynote speakers also contributes to compare the ways in which network histories are studied but also narrated in different areas of the world. All papers result from the two-day conference held at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano on December 2017, which saw the participation of 22 researchers from 13 parts of the globe. Based on new and unpublished researches, the special issue explores six uncharted territories part of the complex Internet realm, linking and adding unveiled nodes to the network of stories and experiences that shaped the internet not only at global level, but also in national and local contexts
The path to WeChat: How Tencent’s culture shaped the most popular Chinese app, 1998–2011
No full textThis article contributes to the literature on WeChat, providing a historical perspective on the long-lasting culture of its mother company, Tencent. Through a corpus of primary and secondary sources, the article retraces four constitutive choices which characterized Tencent’s culture from 1998, when the company was founded, to 2011, when the first version of WeChat was launched. We argue that Tencent’s market strategy has always been based on four principles: mobility, media convergence, gaming/youth culture and Sinicization. The article concludes by highlighting that these constitutive choices paved the way to the creation of WeChat, thus contributing to its current success
«A story of friendship and misunderstandings»: the origins of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 1985–1992
No full textThe history of federalism in the digital age unfurls against a complex backdrop of dreams and expectations, cooperation and conflict, and preservation and change. Throughout this history, a range of individual and institutional actors in pursuit of a common goal are forced to grapple with a constantly shifting balance of resources, technologies, and responsibilities
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