I am honoured to be invited to speak at this event to help celebrate the foundation of Internet Studies, now 20 years old here at Curtin University. As evident from the other papers presented during the conference, we are now able to explore futures more open and playful than ever seemed possible when first I started to think about the Internet back in 1994, and on a much more profound and secure basis than in the early days of the Internet Studies program which I started in 1999. It is a privilege for me to speak alongside colleagues such as Henry Jenkins and John Hartley, whose wit and important insights have for decades helped us understand humans’ complex interactions with computers and networks, media and culture, and the possibilities for communication, play and self-expression which stem therefrom (two examples are Jenkins 2004 and Hartley 2012). My heartfelt thanks to the organizers for their kind invitation to give this keynote address and for the acknowledgment it gives to my role in the initial formation of
I had the great pleasure of working at Curtin University from the mid-1990s through until the start of 2013, becoming during that time Australia’s first Professor of Internet Studies in 2011. I remember well that Curtin was a place where, more or less, innovation and invention were regarded favourably: it was, as I will explain below, the kind of ‘young university’ in the 1990s where new ideas could flourish, and risks could be taken, but also where such approaches were economically necessary (see M. White 1996 for discussion of how Curtin’s transformation in 1987 from an institute of technology to a university). It is, therefore, great to return, and share with you the history of the formation of Internet Studies and what it might say about disciplinarity, higher education, and the affordances of network communication. But, of course, my appearance today is only possible because of the continued vitality of the Internet Studies program, some seven years since I left. This vitality may owe something to what came before, but it is also due to the insights, hard work, and dedication of the many academics who continue to make Curtin an intellectual hotspot for internet studies.
At appropriately significant times, such as a 20-year anniversary, it is wise to turn our eyes to the past and observe some of the ways in which things like internet studies come to be. I will take us today on a journey into that history, while noting that the ghosts of professors past are by no means a trustworthy source. Along the way, I want to explore how history – not the past itself, but the discipline, which is a practice of thinking about the relations of past and present – was a useful disciplinary foundation on which to establish a project to make sense of the internet and bring it within the academy (evident in my much later work such as Allen 2012). The internet was, for many years (and perhaps is still), a socio-technological intervention into human development over time which suffuses the world with
I also want to use the history of Internet Studies (perhaps in more traditional Marxian sense of ‘history’, Hirst 2009) to suggest that, whatever the internet’s irresistible impact on society that might legitimate and fund academic attention, and whatever the inevitability that scholars would necessarily be motivated to discern truths about this new technology, these necessities are not
When did Internet Studies at Curtin begin? There is, of course, no comprehensive reply despite the beguiling simplicity of this question. But let me venture three approximate answers to help create the conditions for telling the history of Internet Studies.
First, we should acknowledge the formal institutional commencement of Internet Studies which means 2019 is a year of anniversary: we act today to ‘make’ a certain kind of past, retrospectively. Casting my mind back 20 years, I recall that Internet Studies was, in 1999, perched uncomfortably within the then–School of Social Sciences and Asian Languages. It was a new program enrolling its first students in a graduate course in Internet Studies, with a staff of one (me) and a postgraduate student, an energetic and cheery person called Mike Kent (who, after a brief sojourn at Murdoch and Brighton has successfully found his way home to Curtin and is thus the only remaining original Internet Studies person). I will discuss how this institutional commencement came to be in more detail in a moment.
But perhaps we might also point to the day in late 1994 when the faculty systems administrator came into my office, distracting me from the mundanity of teaching critical thinking to accounting students (the reason for my initial employment at Curtin) with news of an exciting development: the availability of Mosaic and the coming of the World Wide Web (Andreessen and Bina 1994). We installed the software, “surfed” to the NASA homepage (one of the very few then in existence) and waited, and waited, until it loaded. As someone then in the process of becoming a media studies scholar (history having proven a highly insecure field of professional employment since my first job as a tutor in 1991), I can still remember my amazement, even though not very much was there on the screen. As a budding researcher of television (having recognized the career limits of remaining an historian), I was already alert to the transformation of our understanding of media use through the concept of the ‘active audience’ (Hartley 2009). As an emerging internet scholar, I had spent much of 1994 investigating telnet, FTP and so on and had come to see the potential of the internet for information distribution, but in ways that did not seem coherent with television, not least because of the frustrating limitations of command-line networking and overreliance on text. As I gazed at the Web and understood how it worked for co-created, interactive, visual content, I thought: ‘this is going to change everything’.
I also happened to read, some months later, Mark Poster’s thoughts from 1995 on the internet in which he said:
The internet is more like a social space than a thing so that its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers. The effects of Germany upon the people within it is to make them Germans (at least for the most part); the effects of hammers is not to make people hammers. (Poster 1997)
This distillation also had a profound effect on me, reminding me that, at the heart of this new web, was not technology but people and the social systems which make them who they are. I soon experienced something of what Poster meant in using the internet to teach distance-education students and saw well past the shallow screens to the deep possibilities of community thereby enabled.
Third, the answer to the question of when Internet Studies began also lies in one of those curious moments in an academic’s career, when circumstances allow or require a re-examination of one’s own interests and ways of working. As a new academic, still without tenure, I had to continue to justify my existence with colleagues, to evade what appeared then to be the inevitability of unemployment at a time of financial pressure on university budgets, and to be more than the person who was just here to teach that critical thinking program to accounting students which had brought me to Curtin. Later in 1995 I began to teach, with John McGuire and Peter Reeves, a new unit of study called “histories of the future”. This unit is where I discovered that history was as much about the
These three stories are, of course, origin myths: they serve as post-facto explanations which, in the time of telling, slyly suggest the higher purpose of decisions made earlier for many reasons, poorly understood and without clear intentions, and thus distinguish those few successful decisions we make from all the other unsuccessful ones that are soon forgotten. They are of their time of writing, not the time they claim to recover.
Indeed, one of the most fascinating topics of my early engagement with the internet was the internet’s
The origin myth also helped ‘explain’ for newcomers where the internet had come from. The internet arrived unheralded for most users, inexplicable and not at all what the telecommunications and media corporations, who desired to dominate ‘broadband interactive services’ (as they were termed in the pre-internet period – for example, in a comprehensive Australian government report: BSEG 1994; also in P. White 1996), had planned to deliver. The virtues of a packet-switched, free information and communication service became evident to many people, very quickly. Internet use in Australia rose from just under 3% of Australians in 1995 to 50% some 5 years later (Clarke 2004), despite the complete absence of the broadband infrastructure and ‘compelling content’ thought to be the essential pre-requisite for consumer uptake. Indeed this dramatic rise in use destroyed the easy expectations of media and telecommunications companies as to how they would profit from the future of broadband, while preventing them from using consumer payments to fund the infrastructure Australia needed. In this confusing space, where the predetermined expectations of broadband were rapidly replaced by the present success of the internet, there was a need to make sense of this unexpected irruption into the present of what seemed, in the early 1990s, to be a far-off future possibility. The origin myth of the internet as ‘stolen military technology’ served this purpose well: by concealing many other important and complex aspects of the historical development of this technology, it both explained disruption
Internet Studies, as I signaled before, commenced in 1999: named, identified, and thus existing in a different way to the ongoing everywhere study of the internet. Institutionalization, carried out within a system of rules and moves, created Internet Studies, with both limits and advantages, and with a character that reflected the games at play at that time.
Central to the history of Internet Studies are the economic conditions of Australian universities and the people within them (myself included). In the 1990s, universities were caught in a financial pincer, trapped between the demand for them to operate as market-driven businesses and yet restrained by government policy from fully embracing the market, in that the price charged to Australian undergraduate students was fixed as were the number of students who might be recruited (Meek & Wood 1997). Costs were rising; and government subsidies for students were shrinking in real terms. Furthermore, a tectonic shift was occurring within higher education: until 1991 a smaller number of traditional universities received disproportionately higher funding to pay for research activities, and a larger number of colleges received funding principally to educate students. After 1990, this binary system ended and all universities (new, old, and amalgams of both) were expected to conduct both research and teaching, with funds distributed more equitably but at levels which enforced new kinds of efficiencies (see among others Bessant 2002 and Pick 2006).
The financial pressures of this system were more than evident by the mid-1990s when I began to conceive of Internet Studies as something bigger than just my personal scholarly response to socio-technical change. They were directly affecting my own employment circumstances and were driving institutional behaviours, leaving little space for innovation
While research grants appear often to be central to the processes of scholarly innovation, in fact much research (and most of it in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences) is funded from student enrolments, especially at newer universities like Curtin (more generally see Turner and Brass 2014 on where and how humanities research occurs). The surplus between the cost of teaching and the student income pays the time of staff to do research, noting that each student generates the same income per head but, if they learn
But where might such students come from? Within the steady-state of permitted student enrolments at undergraduate level, new bachelor degree courses would only redistribute income within the university. Such a move would undoubtedly be resisted by the academic areas already established, whose intellectual identities and successes required conservation not innovation. As a result of this conundrum, I learned to play the institutional bureaucratic game and to identify the way in which some moves are permitted, while others are not. Curtin University, in recognition of the problem of declining income relative to cost, had encouraged innovation in graduate coursework (not research) education by permitting faculties to retain a significantly higher proportion of revenue from such students than was normal rather than surrendering the income to the university’s central accounts. These courses also did not compete for existing students and did not make colleagues nervous as to the effect of innovation on current enrolments. Postgraduate course offerings did not require negotiation for the way they might fit as components within larger undergraduate programs, enabling them to be developed autonomously. I could retain control of the curriculum and the ideas behind it, preventing interference from those who did not understand the internet or saw it through an older, conservative lens.
Thus the ‘business case’, as universities have become comfortable in describing such ventures, for the innovation of Internet Studies was strong, as was the opportunity for a single academic alone to pursue it. The only danger was that, in my enthusiasm for innovation (and after reading too much European theorizing about the future of an information society and Rob Kling’s important work from the USA, for example Kling et al. 1998), I was considering calling the new program ‘social informatics’. This move, while probably justified now in our automated, algorithmically shaped networked society (Meyer et al. 2019), was fortunately deflected by some wise colleagues who convinced me that marketing a course of that name might prove challenging. So was born Internet Studies: a name deliberately vague to mobilize both the popularity of the internet among intending students and, also, to defer decisions as to the precise nature of the curriculum. In 1999, we enrolled our first students in the Graduate Diploma of Internet Studies. The future had arrived.
Of longer-term significance, however, was a much more substantial organizational change which was in the offing in 1999 and, without which, Internet Studies may well not have survived its early emergence. This change was the establishment, at the intersection of the older schools of Social Sciences, and Communication and Cultural Studies, of a new school, the School of Media and Information. The move involved complex bureaucratic political work and was the result of two motive forces. First, and evident in its name, the school was formed to anticipate and reflect the then-emerging discourse of convergence: the coming together of media and information in a new social and economic formation implicit in at least a decade’s prior work towards the so-called information society, and requiring or enabling transformation of media industries (see Jenkins 2004 for an astute critical analysis). The school was one of Curtin’s attempt to compete for students who might otherwise choose to study elsewhere and improve its standing in the narrow educational market in Perth. Yet this forward-thinking move concealed a deeper and more complex conservatism, largely borne of the frustrations of traditional film, television and journalism academics and educators in the School of Communication. Together, they mostly were the income-generating engine for that school, cross-subsidizing traditional humanities areas and, in their view, unrecognized and overworked. For them, the new school was a chance to achieve status, power and long-held desires for autonomy for their traditional approaches, focused largely on professional training rather than research.
Thus, the new school of which Internet Studies was to become a part, looked backwards as much as it looked forwards. This uncomfortable mingling of identities and knowledge formations created an at-times awkward mix, though also the potential for positive change, and took some years to stabilize. It reflected perfectly the vastly more profound games of power and money being played
The change was, nevertheless, a boon for Internet Studies. In a classic moment of organizational ‘unfreezing’, as Kurt Lewin would term it (Cummings et al. 2016), the field for academic staffing and programs was liberated from constraints. New staff were appointed and an
That said, the Internet Studies course did subtly promote a more traditional humanities agenda, which might be summed up as enabling students to learn critical thinking, creative expression, ethical and political behaviour and a wider grasp of
I could spend much more time on the complexities of the on-going struggles to sustain and grow Internet Studies. There were disputes with colleagues. For example, one older journalism academic thought the internet would soon die away and could not, for the life of him, see why it should take attention away from the journalism school he wished to build: my reply that I, too, did not see a future for Internet Studies amused him: but he failed to appreciate my implication: that, soon enough, all media would become ‘internet’ and thus proposed his own end and not mine. There were sneaky moves to generate revenue by making some internet units compulsory within other degrees. One key moment came when I persuaded colleagues that the Mass Communication degree really ought to require students to study web communication – for some, this was a radical move even as late as 2007. Not only did this boost our ‘metrics’ (student enrolments per staff member), thus providing security from financial micro-management, but it actually made this venerable Curtin degree more attractive and successful for everyone: indeed, recently, Internet Studies has taken responsibility for the course which, at first, it had to fight to be part of. There was the largely unobserved success of the offering of our course through Open Universities Australia, a unique program which allowed students to study online (see Cottingham 2008 for more detail), outside of the quota on university admissions, and which for many years was the primary income stream for Internet Studies. There was our emphasis on doctoral student recruitment – gaming the system since we all got higher research allocations for having such students because the university was “incentivizing” people to grow doctoral study enrolments. On a more negative note, I even recall a secretive hostile “review” of Internet Studies in 2010 by a former dean – a classic move of the internal political game – divorced entirely from the reality of the program’s success and the evidence all around as to why the internet mattered. It is no wonder that, at times, we in Internet Studies imagined ourselves to be engaged in a kind of insurgency, using ways and means outside of conventional institutional conflict, to build our strength until the revolution might occur.
In summary, Internet Studies required more than just a good idea, more than just insights into the coming technological transformation of networked computing, more than just an inevitable turning of academic eyes to new social technologies and cultural formations. Internet Studies’ formation was founded in a
Based on this experience, I would conclude that, for all the grand narratives which seek to describe and to know the subject of “knowledge work” in late modernity, we should refuse this turn to the overarching theoretical explanation. Evident in what happened in the formation of Internet Studies, knowledge work is grounded in the microeconomics of each location in which it occurs. At Curtin, in the last 20 years, that has meant Internet Studies has thrived in a distinctive manner, not an example for others so much as a case study in the influence of local conditions on research and teaching formations within the academy. And, I now realize, my PhD (which concerned strategy, organizational change, new technology, and the conservatism of bureaucracy) really was relevant after all: if not to the internet, then very much to founding and developing
Yet, as I come to the end of this keynote, I also remember that Internet Studies was not
First, Internet Studies was able to generate sustainable student enrolments because of the way the Internet aggregates the attention of an economically significant number of people, despite them being spread, in many small numbers, across dispersed geographic locations (see Gnecchi & Corniani 2003 for further discussion). Second, its teaching methods embraced the propensity of Internet technologies to favour user-generated content, thus making for engaging courses ahead of their time with active learning (for example, for a later study, see Lee & McLoughlin 2007). Third, the rhythms of asynchronous communication gave to Internet Studies the kind of virtual community which, as elsewhere online, sustains the individual’s successful participation despite the exigencies of competing demands on one’s time (something evident for decades prior to our current fascination with Zoom: Hiltz & Turoff 2002). Fourth, the internet was always technologically
While Internet Studies might, in part, be accounted for as another bureaucratic game, played within the largely self-referential ruleset of such games, it cannot fully be divorced from the way the Internet has itself changed the rules of how individuals and groups interact socially and economically. Internet theorists we were reading (and asking students to read) such as Michael Goldhaber, danah boyd, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Lisa Nakamura, Hal Varian and more gave us the ideas that helped Internet Studies be successful and sustainable as the academy of the 2010s and beyond reformatted itself to accommodate the network society we all knew was coming. There was, essentially, a coherence between the
In the 1990s, I knew so very little of what the internet itself might become and had modest ambitions for what Internet Studies might be. That these ambitions have been so comprehensively exceeded is due not to any particular myth of origin but to the continuing excellence of everyone who is part of Internet Studies then and now. And, into the future, Internet Studies will I think
For all its history, Internet Studies remains a place, in time as well as space, where we can together make a bit more sense about futures to come and futures past.