ABSTRACT
What would a cultural history of the Internet look like? The question almost makes no sense: the Internet spans the globe and traverses any number of completely distinct human groups. It simply cannot have a single culture. And yet, like the railroad, the telegraph and the highway system before it, the Internet has been an extraordinary agent for cultural change. How should we study that process? To begin to answer that question, this essay returns to four canonical studies of earlier technologies and cultures: Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New; Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden; Ruth Schwarz Cowan’s More Work for Mother and Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV. In each case, the essay mines the earlier works for research tactics and uses them as jumping-off points to explore the ways in which the Internet requires new and different approaches. It concludes by speculating on the ways that the American-centric nature of much earlier work will need to be replaced with a newly global focus and research tactics to match.
