How can we make sense of cultures of peer production, which exist in diverse national, cultural and language contexts, span several industries and domains, and comprise a range of different organizational structures? Peer production is commonly defined as a mode of production – that is, a social and material structure in which labor takes place.…[Read more]

Death on the internet is not limited to human death. The business model of planned obsolescence, the technical work of preserving old websites, systems, and applications, as well as a cultural emphasis on the new and immediate all combine to make the internet a place where many software technologies have gone to die. Networked modes of living…[Read more]

What image defines the 1990s web? Perhaps it is an “under construction” gif, a “starry night” background or some other fragment of what net artist and scholar Olia Lialina dubbed “a vernacular web” (2005). If not a vernacular, perhaps a sign of an increas- ingly commercial and professional web – the first banner ad, announcing that this par- tic…[Read more]

“In this essay, my interest is in how imagined media futures are implicated in the work of producing novel web publishing technology. I explore the issue through an account of the emergence of Slashdot, the tech news and discussion site that by 1999 had implemented a number of recommendation features now associated with social media and web 2.0…[Read more]

Preprint of chapter from the SAGE Handbook of Social Media (Burgess, Marwick and Poell, eds., 2018).

“How should we think of the relationship between social media and the early web, and what can we learn from this history?”

This article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to understand the regenerative “belief in the new” in new media culture and web history. I begin by noting that discursive constructions of the web as disruptive, open, and participatory have emerged at various points in the medium’s history, and that these discourses are not as neatly tied to…[Read more]

This article critically interrogates key assumptions in popular web discourse by revisiting an early example of web ‘participation.’ Against the claim that Web 2.0 technologies ushered in a new paradigm of participatory media, I turn to the history of HotWired, Wired magazine’s ambitious web-only publication launched in 1994. The case shows how d…[Read more]