<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">Hi Bruce,</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">I noticed you joined the webcultures listserv, and was wondering if you might help us get started with a post that puts the list’s mission - to help organize and promote web history and related research - into a larger perspective. </div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*Who, me? I lurk on discussion lists, I never discuss anything much.</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*On the other hand, I rarely lack for some "larger perspectives."</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; "> If you’re willing, here are some questions you could use (but also feel free to ignore them):</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">Is there a distinction between dead media that can be reanimated and those that can’t, and which category will the web go into?</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*It belongs in the category of the dead. The "web" isn't a single gizmo or a protocol. The web a host of small pieces loosely joined that continually flake off the imaginary central mass and irrevocably decay. </div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*Imagine that you miraculously had the entire World Wide Web from 2004, preserved on a single server. You could boot that "web" up, hook up some modern wireless broadband and tell the population to have at it. Would it "live" again, would it be "re-animated"? No. It would be just as dead as Olia Lialina's replica of GeoCities. </div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*One can build a kerosene-fired magic lantern that works identically to the old dead pre-cinematic devices, but the Web was already built on a compost of earlier dead stuff: ARPANET, gopher, Wais, Web 1.0 with its static web pages, etc etc. They won't come back even if the machinery functions -- the social ecosystem around the tech is gone, so it's like trying to revive the dead 8 track tape.</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">Wired once ran a “The Web is Dead” article and it was lampooned, but is there some truth to the idea that the open, collaborative, mildly subversive medium many believed we were dealing with from the early-90s to about 2008 (say, up to the launch of the App store) is pretty much gone, killed off by the neat separation of content providers (netflix, kindle, verified users, etc) and communication apps where public discussion is limited to one-liners?</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*Everybody likes to lampoon Wired, but somehow Wired is still an existent paper magazine when legions of its rivals are long dead. </div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*I agree that the 90s web of functional anarchy and go-along, get-along little websites is now a historical relic. I'd be inclined to blame Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Amazon for all their disruptive embracing-and-extending. However, there were plenty of other factors dooming the 90s web: wireless broadband, an explosion in mobiles, a militarization of the Net, the NSA, the Chinese, rampant online criminality, the popular love for television rather than boring discussion lists on desktop machines. You could see from a glance at the 90s web that the thing was changing with catastrophic speed. It was the picture of hectic instability.</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; "> Is the dream alive on Facebook and Facebook Messenger, or is the best we can hope for that contributing to Wikipedia and Reddit becomes as cool as collecting LPs?</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*The dream isn't alive. The best hope is some new social invention we haven't heard of yet. Facebook is quite boring. Facebook is more tedious than old-school broadcast network television, even. Big budget media with millions of captive viewers isn't "cool" by definition. </div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*One shouldn't cry in one's beer when formerly cool stuff becomes a pillar of society. That attitude smacks of bohemian naiveté. No social phenomenon embraced by a million people remains the same in the hands of a billion people. Complaining that the 90s web is gone is like complaining that the Mongols got too popular.</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">Another (grander and vaguer) way of putting this is: what will the last 20 years or so of web history ultimately look like? A blip? A transformation? A missed opportunity? </div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*A twenty-year blip. In retrospect, the early web will look like the silent film period. It'll look like the twenty-year frenzy around radio technology before television arrived. Of course there were plenty of missed opportunities, and radio itself was indeed a transformation. </div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*The next twenty years will also be a blip of sorts. The web's present regime won't last. It's uglier, greedier and more intrusive than the older web, but it's no more stable.</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*We're getting the "web culture" we deserve for this glum historic period. Our web today looks quite like other major aspects of our culture, our finance, our military situation, our religions, our law, our environment. That's because the web permeated all those things.</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">*This too shall pass. Web culture is a subset of culture, and culture for better or worse is profoundly ductile. I think web history is great, but history is full of surprises. The Web itself was a big surprise. When you can't imagine how things will change, it means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; ">Bruce Sterling</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; "><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-family: Menlo; "><br></div><div><div>On Sep 1, 2014, at 9:19 AM, Michael Stevenson <<a href="mailto:michael@webcultures.org">michael@webcultures.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;">Hi Bruce,</span><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;">I noticed you joined the webcultures listserv, and was wondering if you might help us get started with a post that puts the list’s mission - to help organize and promote web history and related research - into a larger perspective. If you’re willing, here are some questions you could use (but also feel free to ignore them):</span><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;">Is there a distinction between dead media that can be reanimated and those that can’t, and which category will the web go into?</span><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;">Wired once ran a “The Web is Dead” article and it was lampooned, but is there some truth to the idea that the open, collaborative, mildly subversive medium many believed we were dealing with from the early-90s to about 2008 (say, up to the launch of the App store) is pretty much gone, killed off by the neat separation of content providers (netflix, kindle, verified users, etc) and communication apps where public discussion is limited to one-liners? Is the dream alive on Facebook and Facebook Messenger, or is the best we can hope for that contributing to Wikipedia and Reddit becomes as cool as collecting LPs?</span><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;">Another (grander and vaguer) way of putting this is: what will the last 20 years or so of web history ultimately look like? A blip? A transformation? A missed opportunity?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;">Hope to hear from you!</span><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;">Kind regards,</span><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;">Michael Stevenson</span><br style="font-family: monospace; font-size: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>