This short paper presents some ideas about the difficulties which have arised in ‘selling’ the National Broadband Network in Australia in recent years – the paper is delivered to the symposium “Convervging on an NBN future’, held at the University of Canberra and organised by Sora Park, Catherine Middleton and myself. Click to read more
A paper presented at the Australian Media Traditions conference exploring the historicity of the Internet through the use within discourse of Web 2.0. Click to read more
The first piece I wrote on Web 2.0 that started me off on a journey back into history as a mode of understanding contemporary Web 2.0 developments. In essence, I argue, O’Reilly profited from ‘control’ of the idea of Web 2.0 but that, to enjoy that control O’Reilly had also to allow differences in meaning. The paper concludes by suggesting that Web 2.0 therefore signifies a new kind of economics that brings together freedom and control in a new way. Click to read more
Stewart, Future of History History difficult subject to teach; digital history – various views about what digital history is – is it using computers to DO history? probably not; references H-net “perpetual annual conference”; makes a similar point about Wikipedia – it;s like a first draft of history being updated regularly and collaboratively. Digital history includes the idea of assignments for students that involve different approaches to previous research. “digital resources encourage students…to become historians themselves”; also emphasises “interactivity” to mean… (perhaps) interaction between community and classroom. Significant curricular and pedagogic materials to show/help teachers to do history effectively in classroom [am imagining this means school teachers]; Strong emphasis on making people into historians. [Question - how does the web and its less narrative form re-arrange the nature of history which is so often driven by narratives which spellbind the reader?] Kazmer, E-learners prepare to graduate Focus is on students at distance learning only online in LIS program (Masters); what happens when the come towards graduation? – 20 students, 677 posts over 1.5 years in an LMS. “Analytic frame” was ‘social world of disengaging’ with learning – various items (eg time, friendship, etc). Basically – something is going to change, … Click to read more
Blogging Keith Herndon’s paper on newspaper industries and the Internet (full disclosure; Keith is one of my graduate students) Keith’s research is important for providing the ‘long history’ of newspapers and electronic information technologies (note, print news was itself an information technology!). Notes the 1970s – emergence of commercial databases, and the electronic publishing paradigm. 1980s – attempts to establish videotext as viable business model – Knight-Ridder, Viewtron “primitive by today’s standards, but cutting edge at the time”. Fails – not adopted by “early technology adopters”. There were similar projects. These projects – both experience of them and failure – left newspapers wary about investing in electronic ventures and perhaps meant they were unprepared for Internet and, indeed, resistant of it. Resistant, in particular, of the telecommunications industry moving into this field which was seen as ‘belonging’ to the news; then also attempted to defend their interests by creating alliances with companies like Prodigy. This is why new media is not new; new media is a phrase that could easily describe events from 1970s onwards, not just the Internet. Moreover, the Internet disrupts what was already being done with ‘new media’. In the 1990s, as the INternet emerges as a … Click to read more
Recently gave a presentation to the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Program on Historicising the Internet; it involved both me talking, and a brief group activity – which would have been better, if longer – about personal histories of the Internet. Briefly, I argue that we need to use history so as to: Such awareness aids in contextualizing how things came to be the way they were, exploring the contingency of present action (thereby to discern more clearly what might be its causes and real effects), reviewing differences which emerge by temporal comparison, and always being conscious of the historical locatedness of the scholarship on which you are drawing. But there are dangers because of the mythic nature of ‘origin’ histories; and the arbitrary periodisation which appears to create discrete ‘times’ linked to causes and effects in the past. In the end, I advance some ideas about the novel uses of history around historicity; and history as discourse. Presentation available at http://www.netcrit.net/writing/
