Megan Ankerson

Beginning with narratives of empowerment through personal computing and the ostensibly borderless nature of cyberspace, the imagination of digital media has long held popular appeal. The 1990s fascination with the distinction between the virtual and the real may have subsided, but new imaginaries that seem to capture the character and promise of digital media continue to find their way into hyperbolic news headlines. The social graph, the quantified self and other abstract notions evoke a technological present that was previously impossible. Such widely-publicized imaginations have been routinely criticized: from the early 1990s, various scholars cautioned against the transcendentalism, political naivete and escapism that pervaded much of the utopian rhetoric around digital media. Like digital utopianism itself, such criticism has hardly slowed down, as evidenced for example by the success of reformed cyberutopians Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier. What goes missing during the back-a...

This chapter contains sections titled: The Great Opportunities and Serious Limitations of Web Archives, Triangulating Sources and Creating a Personal Archive, Software as Source: Going Behind the Digital Production Scenes, Conclusion, Notes, References

ABSTRACT As dating and hookup apps for gay men and hetero-identified users flourish, the slow growth of lesbian-identified apps is continually framed as a “problem” by developers, investors, and users. We observe this “problem” to be one of designing lesbian contact, a problem that materializes as a queer incommensurability at the intersection of app design, technology startup culture, and perceptions of lesbian sexuality. While locative media scholarship foregrounds the social dimensions of space, we consider temporal orienting devices that design contact among women seeking women using a case study of the lesbian dating app, Dattch (rebranded as Her in 2015). Dattch's development and eventual reconfiguration into Her exemplifies how lesbian contact is negotiated through an iterative design process that tries to manage the pressures of a rapidly moving, capital-driven “appified” market.

The web’s historical periodization as Web 1.0 (“read-only”) and Web 2.0 (“read/write”) eras continues to hold sway even as the umbrella term “social media” has become the preferred way to talk about today’s ecosystem of connective media. Yet, we have much to gain by not exclusively positing social media platforms as a 21st-century phenomenon. Through case studies of two commercially sponsored web projects from the mid-1990s—Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab’s Day in the Life of Cyberspace and Rick Smolan’s 24 Hours in Cyberspace—this article examines how notions of social and publics were imagined and designed into the web at the start of the dot-com boom. In lieu of a discourse of versions, I draw on Lucy Suchman’s trope of configuration as an analytic tool for rethinking web historiography. By tracing how cultural imaginaries of the Internet as a public space are conjoined with technological artifacts (content management systems, templates, session tracking, and e-co...

While acknowledging that the task of writing web histories introduces new problems and possibilities, this article urges web historians to consider broadcast historiography scholarship that grapples with questions of power, preservation, and the unique challenges of ephemeral media. Methodological concerns in web history and archiving are compared with examples from broadcast history that demonstrate strategies for coping with ephemeral media and the power relations that impact archiving. Recognizing the limitations of historical approaches that compare digital networked forms with old media, this article concludes by suggesting that the emerging field of software studies can help retain the focus on digital culture and digital artifacts. A short case study of Flash software is offered to demonstrate how attention to software, along with approaches informed by cultural histories of broadcast media, can provide a new perspective for exploring the ephemeral nature of web objects and t...

As dating and hookup apps for gay men and hetero-identified users
flourish, the slow growth of lesbian-identified apps is continually
framed as a “problem” by developers, investors, and users. We
observe this “problem” to be one of designing lesbian contact, a
problem that materializes as a queer incommensurability at the
intersection of app design, technology startup culture, and
perceptions of lesbian sexuality. While locative media scholarship
foregrounds the social dimensions of space, we consider temporal
orienting devices that design contact among women seeking
women using a case study of the lesbian dating app, Dattch
(rebranded as Her in 2015). Dattch’s development and eventual
reconfiguration into Her exemplifies how lesbian contact is
negotiated through an iterative design process that tries to
manage the pressures of a rapidly moving, capital-driven
“appified” market.

The web’s historical periodization as Web 1.0 (“read-only”) and Web 2.0 (“read/write”) eras continues to hold sway even as
the umbrella term “social media” has become the preferred way to talk about today’s ecosystem of connective media. Yet,
we have much to gain by not exclusively positing social media platforms as a 21st-century phenomenon. Through case studies
of two commercially sponsored web projects from the mid-1990s—Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab’s Day
in the Life of Cyberspace and Rick Smolan’s 24 Hours in Cyberspace—this article examines how notions of social and publics were imagined and designed into the web at the start of the dot-com boom. In lieu of a discourse of versions, I draw on Lucy Suchman’s trope of configuration as an analytic tool for rethinking web historiography. By tracing how cultural imaginaries of the Internet as a public space are conjoined with technological artifacts (content management systems, templates, session tracking, and e-commerce platforms) and reconfigured over time, the discourses of “read-only publishing” and the “social media revolution” can be reframed not as exclusively oppositional logics, but rather, as mutually informing the design and development of today’s social, commercial, web.

While acknowledging that the task of writing web histories introduces new problems and possibilities, this article urges web historians to consider broadcast historiography scholarship that grapples with questions of power, preservation, and the unique challenges of ephemeral media. Methodological concerns in web history and archiving are compared with examples from broadcast history that demonstrate strategies for coping with ephemeral media and the power relations that impact archiving.

Recognizing the limitations of historical approaches that compare digital networked forms with old media, this article concludes by suggesting that the emerging field of software studies can help retain the focus on digital culture and digital artifacts. A short case study of Flash software is offered to demonstrate how attention to software, along with approaches informed by cultural histories of broadcast media, can provide a new perspective for exploring the ephemeral nature of web objects and the discursive negotiations surrounding their production.

While television and film studies have benefited from historical investigations that account for the “look” of a text alongside the (re)-organization of cultural industries, studies of Web design and production have yet to develop mature and historically grounded methods for analyzing the cultural artifacts that emerged from the Web’s first decade. This essay contributes to such a project by investigating the economic and industrial organization of new media industries during the dot-com era (1994 – 2001) and relating shifts in the business of Web production to changes in Web style and design practices.

In order to situate the strategies of Web industries and the changing notions of “quality” Web design within the context of the dot-com boom, Hyman Minsky’s classic model of a speculative bubble is employed to provide a framework for periodization.  Tracking the business and design of the Web through the stages of displacement, boom, euphoria, and bust, this paper argues that we can better understand popular post-crash movements like “Web 2.0” by investigating websites as cultural forms that respond to particular socio-historical, economic, and industrial contexts.