This article looks back on the period that preceded the launch of Internet Histories, the new academic journal, conceived as a platform for the many histories of the internet yet to be told. It addresses the following question: When did the initial ideas emerge, and how did they develop to form the basis of an editorial collective, a publishing partnership, and, ultimately, a tangible artefact in the form of journal issues? The article presents "memories" rather than a "history", and it is based on email correspondence, internal documents, and the author's own recollections of key moments and meetings from the period during which Internet Histories was established.
Following the 6(th) RESAW conference held at the University of Siegen in June 2025, we extended the conversation through follow-up discussions with selected participants, including both keynote speakers, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup and Jonathan W. Y. Gray. This round-doc discussion brings them into dialogue with Migl & edot; Bareikyt & edot;, Carolin Gerlitz, Sebastian Giessmann, Anne Helmond, and Ian Milligan, creating a space for interdisciplinary exchange. It re-examines the notion of the datafied web by situating it historically and methodologically. By mobilizing insights from a range of fields, the discussion broadens the conceptual and methodological approaches and tools available for studying the datafied web.
In this interview with Taras Nazaruk, researchers Olexa Baliura and Maryna Malchenyuk examine the formation of the Ukrainian internet (1990-2005), arguing that its decentralised structure emerged from institutional absence, grassroots initiatives, and strong social capital within the engineering community. Drawing on oral history interviews, archival materials, and quantitative network analysis, the researchers challenge narratives treating post-Soviet internet development as a uniform trajectory. Instead, they demonstrate that Ukraine's socio-technical model aligns more closely with decentralised Central European markets than with centralised systems in Russia and Belarus. The conversation outlines an alternative periodisation: the engineer-led foundation of social capital (1990-1995), marketisation (1995-2000), and institutionalisation (2000-2005). Ultimately, the researchers show how this infrastructural diversity and embedded trust networks created a resilient system capable of adapting under extreme conditions, as evidenced during Russia's full-scale invasion.
This article analyses the material arrangements and institutional contexts through which data practices became workable in concrete settings before and alongside the rise of the web. It explores how media formats, infrastructures, costs configured the ways data could be stored, circulated, stabilised and authorised. It examines the Publications Office of the European Union, the official publisher of the Official Journal, legal texts and information, as a site where issues of storage, authority, durability and access were negotiated across multiple media. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, paper, CD-ROMs and emerging web-based systems coexisted. Before turning to this case study, the article first revisits the discursive and practical relationship between CD-ROMs and online systems in the years preceding and surrounding the early web. Combined with our case study it highlights how media friction structured early data practices and shaped the conditions under which the datafied web could emerge and develop.
This article analyses how Brazil's early Internet was represented in two distinct sectors of its cultural field: television drama and print journalism. Focusing on Gl & oacute;ria Perez's Explode Cora & ccedil;& atilde;o (Rede Globo, 1995-96) and Maria Erc & iacute;lia's Netvox column in Folha de S & atilde;o Paulo, it applies Pierre Bourdieu's field theory to explain how media institutions with different forms of autonomy and capital framed the same technological event. The comparison is not empirical excess but a theoretical strategy to reveal how field positions may condition representations of technology. While Globo presented the Internet as a space of emotional release and consumer aspiration, Folha approached it as a question of market forces versus the State and national dependency. Both cases show how long-standing beliefs in modernisation as redemption persisted under different guises. By identifying this continuity as a national doxa of modernisation, the article demonstrates how imported technologies become locally meaningful within Brazil's field of cultural production. The study contributes to the global history of the Internet by showing how peripheral contexts rework technoscientific imaginaries according to their own symbolic hierarchies and historical aspirations.
This article presents a case study of the Flash software platform, used for the development of internet applications. I will situate Flash within a media history of databases by examining its initial deployment at developer Macromedia and by situating it within broader discursive and technological/practical developments. The concept of media frictions will guide my construction of a media history of the dissemination of computational objects. The paradigm of object-orientation as well as the development of database technology for web applications will be introduced. These broad strands of recent technological development converge in a programming model for web application development, Flash's so-called SharedObject. By reconstructing the development of proprietary structures on the internet from the perspective of software development, I focus on the historical agency of material constraints and highlight possible approaches to a critical media history of the web.
Web-based data dashboards provide critical points of access for users hoping to gain knowledge concerning environmental phenomena, yet their historical development has not been explicitly tracked in existing literature. This paper historicises environmental data on the web by examining preserved copies of the US-based non-profit organisation Surfrider Foundation's coastal water quality monitoring data dating back to its earliest crawl via Wayback Machine in October, 1997. Building on literature concerning cultural techniques and the value of processual metadata, the study situates Surfrider's data curation practices within broader shifts in web development during the identified historical period. Methodologically, it combines media archaeology and digital forensics to analyse changes in data formats, web design, and documentation practices. Findings show the site shifting from static HTML with rich sensory descriptions in 1997 to a dynamic web-based dashboard in 2025, which also correlates with increased reliance on specialised external libraries and standardised forms of representation. Considering these changes within the framework of changing cultural techniques for both scientific knowledge production and web development, the paper shows how the changing social impacts of data curation on the web exemplify broader social issues concerning knowledge production in digital environments.
Most research on Incels begins with violent outcomes, not their Internet history since 1997. I studied Incel Internet history, tracing it back to when the subculture was first created in 1997 through to the first known Incel-motivated 2014 Isla Vista killings, analysing 232 archival records of Incel websites and forums, contextualised by conversations with a self-identified former Incel who lived through this history. I used thematic narrative analysis of content (i.e. user interests) in the context of evolving Internet affordances (i.e. means of interactions) and found that, despite the shared topic interest of celibacy, Involuntary Celibacy Project (1997), IncelSite (2004) and IncelSupport (2006) cultivated gender-inclusive, introspective and problem-solving cultures, while Love-shy (2003) and PUAHate (2009) encouraged misogyny and violence. Findings suggest that online affordances do not unidirectionally cause radicalisation. Focusing on misogynist Incel communities risks treating misogynistic violence as inevitable, overlooking the agency involved in repurposing celibacy in divergent ways: cultivating misogynist communities, despite the non-misogynist, non-violent ones that existed and were available alongside them.
Recent research in game studies has been inspired by postcolonial critical thinking to denounce the inequalities prevalent in many video games. While such critical analyses are conducted by academic researchers, a vernacular decolonial critique can also emerge from the experiences of ordinary players who, through gameplay, develop a reflexive awareness of the political dimensions embedded in video games. In the context of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine, Ukrainian gamers have become particularly attuned to the dynamics of domination reproduced through gameplay. Discussions on dedicated forums reveal how these players highlight invisible infrastructure-related problems, such as server issues managed by international game developers-which tend to reinforce Russian centrality. In doing so, they critique a form of trans-imperialism by design that persists in the architecture and geopolitics of video game infrastructures across Eastern Europe.
In their first 10 years (2015-2025), augmented reality (AR) filters have transformed from a nascent social media novelty to a ubiquitous affordance across most social media platforms. The ascendance of AR filters as a beautifying technology has implications for how women present themselves whilst reflecting (and contributing to) developing beauty ideals that are increasingly unrealistic, homogenous and Eurocentric. Using a critical feminist lens this paper maps a historiography of this important image-altering technology across Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok during its first decade. The timeline is shaped by what I term a 'digital beauty template': a visual framework that is used to locate and bound eras of filter use through the identification of distinct aesthetic and beautification trends, which is in itself both reactive to and influential of cultural tides, policy/governance changes, and platform-specific technological advances. This paper identifies seven digital beauty templates: beginning with Snapchat's playful filters I then trace beautifying filters on Instagram through five templates, following the increasing sophistication and proliferation of this technology under the shadow of continual governance challenges. Finally, I discuss TikTok's innovative (and controversial) AI-AR filter 'Bold Glamour' and its gender essentialist and colourist problematics. In their first decade, filters can be seen drifting further towards a singular, imperceptible, uncanny beauty ideal that has only been accelerated by the introduction of AI. Following Meta's dissolution of their AR filter development technology Spark AR in 2025, this paper offers a timely examination of an ephemeral - yet ubiquitous - technology in flux.
The client that is used to connect to a server serves a function that is almost as important as the server itself. The client governs how a user is able to interact with a digital system, the actions they are able to take, what information they can view, and what information is being shared. This paper presents a vision of a Loyal Client, a client that is aligned with the preferences of the end user rather than those of the platform. This is an old idea from the early days of the internet which we feel should be modernised for social media. We argue that a loyal client is a key piece of a generative internet and introduce four principles by which to evaluate whether a client is loyal, arguing that a loyal client should be: protective, interoperable, customisable, and usable. We explore this concept using three historical case studies: Usenet, instant messaging, and web browsers, connecting each case back to these principles.
Today, a variety of actors, including traditional journalists, activists, and NGO workers, are using digital media and data to investigate emerging injustices, especially in the context of crises and wars. The Baltic States find themselves under hybrid forms of attack and other forms of injustice that emerge as a consequence of Russia's war in Ukraine. Using 17 semi-structured interviews and short-term fieldwork with investigative practitioners from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, we analyse how investigative practitioners perceive the changes and implications in their practices since Russia's full-scale invasion. We argue that the full-scale invasion has significantly changed the work of investigative practitioners. We identify the emergence of pervasive threat perceptions, new investigative themes and data practices, and the reconfiguration of collaborative practices among investigative practitioners. They show how investigative practices in the Baltics today not only analyse and counter injustices, but also need to adapt to changing perceptions of security and foreign influence to become, we argue, "resilient investigative practices". Paradoxically, investigative practitioners also engage in what we conceptualise as "tactical avoidance", i.e. a conscious trade-off and a form of resilience through the suppression of painful, uncomfortable knowledge to carry out their work. With our research, we contribute to the dynamic digital war and media studies by bringing an empirical study of situated investigative practices from a geopolitically charged region into transnational discussions, furthering research on the subjects of securitisation, cooperation, and tactical avoidance in times of war.
In this paper, we examine the commercial development of packet based data networks in the UK, primarily through the lens of the largest player BT. We describe how network portfolios evolved to address market needs; the role of skills, closeness to the customer and the market, and the influence from developments in local area networks (LANs) and IT, coupled with the diffusion of Internet and other nascent technologies. The period between 1982 and 2000 is examined; this saw the public data networking proposition migrate from an X.25 based service to a succession of high speed services in the core, supporting IP based LAN services at the edge. We believe that BT and other providers adopted TCP/IP and Internet product strategies at a time when it became commercially advantageous, building on expertise accumulated in the field of corporate networking and a willingness to engage with new technologies such as Local Area Networks, Bridge Routers and Frame Relay.
In Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), the Supreme Court encountered the internet and defined it as a speech system protected by the First Amendment. Nearly 30 years later, this view is ubiquitous. Where did this vision of the internet come from? This article tells that story. Contrary to an academic consensus that this idea resulted from the Californian Ideology, this article shows the origin of the ideological and legal recipe for how the US internet should work was written in the 1940s by a network of liberal, cybernetic Cold Warriors who believed democracy could be safeguarded from authoritarianism through participation, which provided for individual liberty and democratic stability. These themes culminated in Ithiel de Sola Pool's book Technologies of Freedom, which articulated a symbolic framework for understanding networked computers, the forerunner of the internet, as a speech system. He sought to protect their participatory affordances through absolute First Amendment coverage, which influenced key legal internet architects at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who would successfully bring his ideas to the Reno Court. This story explains where one of the core American ideas of what the internet is for comes from and teaches where US internet law comes from.
