[WebCultures] excellent article, Michael!

[Megan Ankerson]

Hi WebCultures history folks,

I just wanted to introduce myself and give a should out to Michael for his excellent piece in New Media & Society that was recently published (available through Online First):

Michael Stevenson, "Rethinking the participatory web: A history of HotWired’s “new publishing paradigm,” 1994–1997,” New Media & Society 1461444814555950, first published on October 21, 2014 doi:10.1177/1461444814555950 
http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/10/20/1461444814555950.abstract?rss=1

It is so great to see quality research that can finally start to undo the teleological “progress” narrative that the Web 1.0/Web 2.0 divide has put in place! Nice work, Michael.

About me: My name is Megan Ankerson and I study web history, interaction design, and digital visual culture. I had the good fortune to meet Michael, Anne Helmond and Rudolf Ammann at the Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space conference in Amsterdam in June.

I’ve just finished a book (still seeking a publisher!) called Dot-com Design: The Rise of the Commercial Web. I’ve pasted a blurb below to give anyone interested a short overview of the project. I look forward to learning more about the work that all of you are up to!

Dot-com Design tells the story of the web’s first decade, too often reduced to the retronym “Web 1.0,” through a lens that takes “dot-com” and “design” as useful keywords to frame the social, economic, aesthetic, technological, and industrial contexts from which a thriving commercial web industry developed alongside a growing speculative bubble in internet and technology stocks in the 1990s. This book examines precisely how we got from a physicist’s dream of global hyperspace to the walled gardens of proprietary algorithms that structure search engines, useable apps, friend requests, followers, and the quest for quantifiable social influence. It does this by explaining how the commercial web became useable and social, and why these terms formed such an important, if contentious, vocabulary for interaction designers, marketers, and the internet industry at large by the 21st century. By historicizing the web’s first decade, Dot-com Design considers all of the ways that it could have unfolded differently: at times it was designed to resemble print magazines, to work like chat rooms, or to unfold like cinema. But by the first decade of the 21st century, “using” (described in terms of usability, user-generated content, user experience or UX design) “social” media became the dominant way to understand engagement and resurrect the internet’s commercial potential after the crash of the internet economy in 2000-2001. 

As an emergent cultural industry, interaction design involved parsing the very meaning of the web: what it was and who it was for, how it should look, feel, and work, who was best qualified to design it, and what principles should guide these decisions and practices. By ignoring how the web was imagined, visualized, and designed, and how web production was organized, evaluated, and reconfigured, today’s web is often framed as a gradual realization that users and social platforms matter. 
Indeed, Dot-com Design shows how these concerns have long mattered but manifest in different ways in response to shifting industrial logics, cultural concerns, technological developments, and the ongoing jockeying by diverse players to stake a claim in a fast-paced industry that was said to run on “internet time.” Although in popular memory, this era may register as a more-or-less cohesive moment (“Web 1.0” or “the halcyon days of the dot-com boom”), Dot-com Design takes special care to historicize the web’s commercial and conceptual development by carefully mapping shifts in the cultural and economic imagination to dominant web design practices, modes of production, aesthetic and stylistic changes, and discourses surrounding web users/usability/utility/use. The book frames the “birth” of the web we know today as a long, uncertain, and passionate conception that took place between 1989 and 2003. Designing the web, Dot-com Design argues, is an ongoing project that involves legitimating certain visions of what the web could be, while disciplining those practices that are seen as out of the step with the future.

cheers,

Megan Sapnar Ankerson
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Studies
University of Michigan
5431 North Quad
105 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285

ankerson at umich.edu


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