Paolo Bory

This article discusses digitization weaknesses, biases, and malfunctions to challenge popular, almost hegemonic visions of contemporary technologies. By focusing on examples provided by recent mediated cases, controversies, and critical research about biases, we aim to propose an analysis of anything digital starting from its vulnerabilities, to look beyond polarized deterministic views, both optimistic and pessimistic. The article generates from the thematic track: "Weak Systems. Exploring bias, bugs and the vulnerability of digitization" that took place at the VIII STS Italia Conference. The panel brought together scholars from different backgrounds, including STS, history of technology, sociology of communication and critical data and media studies to discuss instances of technological weaknesses in various contexts. The article sums up some of the panel takeaways and pleas for a cooperative and interdisciplinary effort focusing on "weak systems".

The essay investigates the evolution of the " narratives of invention " used by the founding fathers of the World Wide Web in a selected corpus of papers written by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues from 1989 up to 1993 and later in the books of James Gillies and Robert Cailliau and of Berners-Lee himself in 2000. Thanks to a textual analysis that cross these sources, we identify three main sets of common keywords that did not change and three couples of conflicting keywords that depict the evolution of the narratives over time. Change and continuity, intertwined with conservation and innovation, emerge as the key-strategies of the Web's founding fathers in narrating their idea.

Employing a theoretical approach called “biographies of media” (Natale, 2016), which looks at how the histories of particular media are built up through recurring narrative patterns, this chapter uncovers the particular imaginary hidden behind the story of the emergence and development of the World Wide Web. It argues that the history of the Web has become a key context in which cultural, political, and ideological representations of the medium are constructed and negotiated within the public sphere. More broadly, the chapter aims to show that the stories we tell about technological systems such as the Web are essentially similar to the stories we tell about people – in other words, to biographies in the strictest sense of the word. Drawing on literature exploring the archetypal structure of narratives and myths, we demonstrate that both biographical writings about the Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, as well as the “biographies” of the Web follow quite closely the trajectory of the hero’s journey, as sketched by Joseph Campbell (2004). Ultimately, this narrative pattern provides a familiar framework through which the story of the emergence of the Web has come to make sense to us, contributing to the formation of particular claims and views about this medium’s role in our societies and everyday life.

We will refer to an updated version of the 5 step model of Internet history proposed by James Curran (2012)* thanks to the contribution of Balbi and Magaudda (2014). Under a geographical perspective the U.S. are the main country in which all these steps of Internet history can be recognized in different time lapses of its technological and cultural history.
Nevertheless, European countries are usually considered as the key actors of the public service stage mainly thanks to their role in the creation and dissemination of the Web. Although during the last years the field of Asian Internet has been growing (Kluver, 2003) there are still some methodological and theoretical open issues.
The experiences of some European countries as well as the history of the Internet in China provide aninteresting contribution not only for the e-westernization of Internet Studies. Indeed, they also provide an interesting contribution in the field of the rising global histography of the Internet (Consalvo & Ess, 2011).The proposed research questions for this AIOR section are: Can we apply Curran’s model to the history of the Internet in China? Under a theoretical perspective, is it possible to use this model to compare the different paths of the Internet in China, U.S. and Europe? The missing phases in national histories of the Internet are relevant? Should these missing phases be taken into account in the study of these countries?
* Curran’s model includes the following phases: military sponsorship, academic values, countercultural vision, European public service and commercialization of the Internet. Balbi and Magaudda proposed a sixth step, the social era, as a result of the Web 2.0

Before the rise of the Web and our contemporary digital cultures, computer networks had already been imagined, tested, and used worldwide. This special issue retraces some of the technological, cultural and social paths that shaped the development of networks in six different areas of the world. All papers result from the two-day conference held at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano on December 2017.

I media digitali sono spesso descritti come il futuro obbligato, il cui successo è dato per scontato. Ma c’è un altro lato della digitalizzazione che viene poco considerato e che una puntuale analisi storica aiuta a mostrare: anche le tecnologie digitali a volte non funzionano o vengono abbandonate dagli utenti, i processi d’innovazione che sembrano inevitabili s’interrompono, alcuni mezzi che saranno nelle case di tutti domani diventano presto obsoleti. In poche parole i media digitali possono fallire. Questo è il tema di Fallimenti digitali, un libro che raccoglie contributi originali dedicati a differenti settori mediali (dalla fotografia alle reti, dalla TV alla radio, dalla stampa alla realtà virtuale, dal cinema ai videogiochi) al fine di esplorare e decostruire la categoria di fallimento nell’universo digitale. Il risultato è un lavoro “archeologico” di riscoperta e scavo nella storia recente di quelli che (spesso in maniera impropria) vengono definiti nuovi media. Un lavoro che favorisce la riemersione di varie storie d’insuccesso poco conosciute, interrotte e sacrificate sull’altare delle retoriche “vincenti” proprie del
tecno-capitalismo digitale, in cui anche il fallimento è propedeutico al successo futuro in piena logica da start up. Adatto a un lettore curioso così come agli studiosi di media e comunicazione, il libro vuole sottolineare come la digitalizzazione non costituisca un percorso scontato e lineare, ma si presenti piuttosto come un processo incerto, molto più traballante e insicuro di quanto siamo comunemente spinti a immaginare.

Pandemia e assembramenti. Se un secolo fa le folle erano pericolose e delinquevano perché mettevano a repentaglio l'ordine e lo status quo sociale, le folle di oggi sono condannate in quanto folle e quindi non per i loro obiettivi espliciti, ma per il loro effetto epidemiologico La movida sui navigli, lo shopping in via del Corso, i balli nelle discoteche sarde, le feste in casa dei calciatori, i tifosi radunati in piazza Duomo. Nei mesi di pandemia queste scene, che si sono peraltro ripresentate in maniera simile in vari paesi, sono state viste, commentate, condannate o difese con grande frequenza sui giornali e in TV o sui profili social di tutti noi.