Presenter: Gerard Goggin
Abstract: ‘Internet Histories’
The Internet is now at least four decades old, and its histories are only now being formulated. In this presentation, I offer a critical examination of Internet history writing, and examine innovative approaches, concepts, methods, and tools in the field.
What are the available histories, and what are their conceptual bases, orientations, and shortcomings? What questions are posed in considering Internet histories? Is Internet history a different undertaking from writing other media or general histories? What are the specific challenges it poses? What are its archives? What methods and tools are being used, or suggested, by it? What are the historiographic and theoretical implications of Internet histories? What is entailed in thinking about social or cultural histories of the Internet? What new perspectives on the Internet are afforded by specific national, regional, subcultural, post-colonial, and other, histories? What place do Internet histories occupy in Internet studies generally?
Bio
Dr Gerard Goggin is an Australian Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. Gerard is writing a cultural history of Australian Internet, and is editor of Virtual Nation: The Internet in Australia (University of NSW Press, 2004). He is researching an Australian Research Council-funded study of mobile phone culture, policy and regulation. Gerard has published widely on the Internet, telecommunications, new media, and disability, including Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media (with Christopher Newell; Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid (University of NSW Press, 2004).