logo infoclio
Table of contents






Valérie Schafer & Alexandre Serres

Histories of the Internet and The Web


ISBN: 978-3-906817-10-1
DOI: 10.13098/infoclio.ch-lb-0006

Abstract


Who « invented » the Internet? Who holds the keys to the Internet? What sources, what actors should be given prominence in a history of the Internet and the Web able to fully take into account its origins, trajectories, turns, evolutions, continuities?

The emergence of Arpanet in the 1960s, then, ten years later, of the Internet, is the product of a long-term innovation process that is yet to find its closure today, a process marked by the intertwining of socio-technical paths and heterogeneous networks of actors.

Fifty years after the Arpanet project was launched, twenty-five years after the inception of the Web, twenty years since the beginning of the Internet Archive -- by means of a selection of sources and research essays -- this anthology seeks to provide an extended panorama of the variety of actors, trajectories, perspectives, methods and writings of Internet and Web history. The anthology is organized in three parts, according to a chronological progression: from Arpanet to the Internet, then the early-adopters Internet, its appropriation by political arenas and the first steps of an "at-large" governance, then the early-2000s democratisation of the Web vis-à-vis the general public. This work ties together the technical, economic, social, cultural, political and legal approaches to the Internet and offers a broader vision of a history that is not only written by and from the United States, but lives and thrives today at the international level.