- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Series Foreword
- Acknowledgments
-
1 The Origins of Social Media -
2 The Personal Computer and Social Media -
3 Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place -
4 Community Memory: The First Public-Access Social Media System -
5 PLATO: The Emergence of Online Community -
6 alt.hypertext: An Early Social Medium -
7 Dictation: A Canadian Perspective on the History of Telematic Art -
8 Art and Minitel in France in the 1980s -
9 Rescension and Precedential Media -
10 Defining the Image as Place: A Conversation with Kit Galloway, Sherrie Rabinowitz, and Gene Youngblood -
11 IN.S.OMNIA, 1983–1993 -
12 Art Com Electronic Network: A Conversation with Fred Truck and Anna Couey -
13 System X: Interview with Founding Sysop Scot McPhee -
14 In Search of Identities in the Digital Humanities: The Early History of Humanist -
15 Echo -
16 MOOs and Participatory Media -
17 Hacking the Voice of the Shuttle: The Growth and Death of a Boundary Object -
18 Community Networking: The Native American Telecommunications Continuum -
19 The Art of Tele-Community Development: The Telluride Infozone -
20 Community Networking, an Evolution -
21 Cultures in Cyberspace: Communications System Design as Social Sculpture -
22 Crossing-Over of Art History and Media History in the Times of the Early Internet—with Special Regard to THE THING NYC -
23 Arts Wire: The Nonprofit Arts Online -
24 Electronic Literature Organization Chats on LinguaMOO -
25 trAce Online Writing Centre, Nottingham Trent University, UK -
26 Pseudo Space: Experiments with Avatarism and Telematic Performance in Social Media - A Conversation and Two Epilogues
-
27 Expanding on “What Is the Social in Social Media?”: A Conversation with Geert Lovink -
28 Epilogue: Slow Machines and Utopian Dreams -
29 From Archaeology to Architecture: Building a Place for Noncommercial Culture Online - About the Authors
- Index
Epilogue: Slow Machines and Utopian Dreams
Epilogue: Slow Machines and Utopian Dreams
- Chapter:
- (p.399) 28 Epilogue: Slow Machines and Utopian Dreams
- Source:
- Social Media Archeology and Poetics
- Author(s):
Judith Donath
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
The early days of social media saw tremendous optimism about the transformations that connecting people via networked computers would bring. This chapter, the book’s epilogue, analyses the nostalgia that permeates the preceding chapters, in which the pioneers of the field write with nostalgia for creative freedom, the pre-commercial internet and the hopeful time when people believed that computing would change humanity for the better. The world of dial-up modems and floppy disks and ASCII bulletin board systems seems very long ago. But the ideals of that time, in spite of their naiveté, indeed because of it, are very valuable. Untainted by cynicism or corrupted by practicalities, they remind us of what the social net ought to be; they remind of the direction to head in, even if we will not quite get there. By inculcating ideals into mythic origin stories, nostalgia weaves them into a culture: we create the past that we want to live up to.
Keywords: Social Media-History, Social Media - Pioneers, Social Media - Ideals, Early Social Media - Nostalgia, Creative Freedom, Computing - Ideals
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Series Foreword
- Acknowledgments
-
1 The Origins of Social Media -
2 The Personal Computer and Social Media -
3 Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place -
4 Community Memory: The First Public-Access Social Media System -
5 PLATO: The Emergence of Online Community -
6 alt.hypertext: An Early Social Medium -
7 Dictation: A Canadian Perspective on the History of Telematic Art -
8 Art and Minitel in France in the 1980s -
9 Rescension and Precedential Media -
10 Defining the Image as Place: A Conversation with Kit Galloway, Sherrie Rabinowitz, and Gene Youngblood -
11 IN.S.OMNIA, 1983–1993 -
12 Art Com Electronic Network: A Conversation with Fred Truck and Anna Couey -
13 System X: Interview with Founding Sysop Scot McPhee -
14 In Search of Identities in the Digital Humanities: The Early History of Humanist -
15 Echo -
16 MOOs and Participatory Media -
17 Hacking the Voice of the Shuttle: The Growth and Death of a Boundary Object -
18 Community Networking: The Native American Telecommunications Continuum -
19 The Art of Tele-Community Development: The Telluride Infozone -
20 Community Networking, an Evolution -
21 Cultures in Cyberspace: Communications System Design as Social Sculpture -
22 Crossing-Over of Art History and Media History in the Times of the Early Internet—with Special Regard to THE THING NYC -
23 Arts Wire: The Nonprofit Arts Online -
24 Electronic Literature Organization Chats on LinguaMOO -
25 trAce Online Writing Centre, Nottingham Trent University, UK -
26 Pseudo Space: Experiments with Avatarism and Telematic Performance in Social Media - A Conversation and Two Epilogues
-
27 Expanding on “What Is the Social in Social Media?”: A Conversation with Geert Lovink -
28 Epilogue: Slow Machines and Utopian Dreams -
29 From Archaeology to Architecture: Building a Place for Noncommercial Culture Online - About the Authors
- Index
