The Early Part of Internet History That People Don’t Talk About¶

URL: https://issues.org/prehistory-social-media-modem-world-driscoll/

Important to note as, nowadays the term 'internet' cannot be placed on one specific thing. The current day internet sprung from 'the internet', which is the original beginning grounds.

Yet the internet of today is not a stable object with a single, coherent history. It is a dynamic socio-technical phenomenon that came into being during the 1990s, at the intersection of hundreds of regional, national, commercial, and cooperative networks—only one of which was previously known as “the internet.”¹

"The standard account of internet history took shape in the early 1990s, as a mixture of commercial online services, university networks, and local community networks mutated into something bigger, more commercial, and more accessible to the general public."¹

This history of the internet is focused on what the government did and how the government paved the way for todays internet. It leaves out all input from people, all the hard work and countless trails and errors that aided the government's systems.

What this origin story leaves out are the thousands of people running highly local networks of personal computers who created early online communities at a grassroots level.¹

What the author is saying here is that the artificial history of the internet doesn't take into account the personal computers people used and community networks that helped shaped the internet.

To understand how the internet became a medium for everyday life, we need a history that accounts for the creation of personal computer networks and their convergence with the internet.¹

“modem” referred to a device for converting a stream of digital pulses from a computer into an audible signal for transmission over a standard telephone line, allowing computers to relay information via telephone.¹

What the author is hinting at here is that in order for the internet to become what it has become, the modem was a key component in its history. It is what allowed people to communicate with each other and connect to one another. It's what the internet needed to go from being a mainly governmental devices to an average Joe device.

Modem owners knew themselves as a separate class of computer users, capable of traversing the emerging byways of cyberspace. The networks that they frequented came to be known, collectively, as the “modem world.”¹

the modem world was driven by community-oriented amateurs and entrepreneurs—hobby radio groups, computer clubs, software pirates, and activist organizations.¹

Very early form of a social media platform.

bulletin boards systems provided a low-cost infrastructure for people interested in exploring the possibilities of online community.¹

Soon, modem-equipped teens were hosting bulletin boards of their own, adapting the technology to meet their interests and needs.¹

Trolling and flame wars took on a different character when the person on the other side could be your neighbor, classmate, coworker, or friend.¹

A separate internet from the heavily secured government internet.

the international FidoNet had become a people’s internet, unmatched for its low barriers to entry and global reach.¹