Web historiography and archiving in
perspective: a reflection on the
development, current status and
historiographical challenges related to
the archived web.
Daan Beers
Thesis MA Digital Humanities 28042 words
University of Groningen June 2019
2
Table of Content
Introduction – World Wide Web: history in the making ... 3
Chapter I – Web historiography: history of the web ... 17
Chapter II – The Internet Archive: single website preservation ... 28
Chapter III – Institutional web archives: object oriented preservation ... 44
Chapter IV – Preserving the web: modes of web archiving in perspective ... 53
3
World Wide Web: history in the making.
Almost 30 years ago engineer Tim Berners-Lee proposed to manage general information based on distributed hypertext systems. By doing so Berners-Lee and his peers at CERN brought the idea of the World Wide Web, commonly referred to as ‘the web’ into life. The web allowed him and his peers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research known as CERN to share their stored research findings in a common digital information space (Berners-Lee, 1996). Web technology emerged as a state-of-the-art product of a ‘big science’ project that required large scale and computationally demanding internet and communications technology (ICT) resources (Dutton, 2010). Two years after its first emanation at CERN, Berners-Lee publically published the first web page and again two years later in the year 1993 the National Centre for Super Applications released the ‘user-friendly’ web browser Mosaic. Mosiac was widely adapted and popularized the web. Nowadays, the web has been around for nearly 30 years and during this time span the web has grown immensely in both size and reach. The web started merely as a common digital information space, exclusively used by the most advanced scientists of CERN to share their research findings. Nowadays, it has turned into a global information space connecting billions of people all over the world (Aghaei, 2012). This 30 year transformative process created impact on every possible facet of human society (Dutton, 2010). The world wide web connects billions of people and has long left its nascent use practices. Along with the growth of its user base the web has ever expanding functionality for its connected entities. Our current conception of the web exceeds Tim Berners-Lee vision of the web as distributed hypertext systems. The web’s functions are all-encompassing and deeply engrained within global society. Rough estimates by search engine giant Google indicate that the web currently consists off at least 47 billion indexed pages.1 Given its sheer size and massive expansion, web technology createsthe hard to refute impression that for the time being the web is here to stay and will only further expand as a dynamic information construct and global daily source of information. However, the defining societal impact of evolving web technologies remains for a large part unquestioned. This opens up a tension: the societal impact of the web is so all-encompassing and
unquestioned that it is by design hard to decipher, describe, and weigh its precise historical impact and more specific its concrete meaning for (future) historical research. Though, it is clearly important to unravel the impact of the web for historical research, because the rapid growth and expansion of
1 Size of the web at the 2nd of November 2018. The size of the web is based on estimations of the numbers of
pages indexed by search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo, see www.worldwidewebsize.com for a daily update of the estimated size of the web and an explanation of the formula and method used to measure the size of the (indexed) web.
4 the web’s size and functionality indicates that it is the defining technology of our time, the
information age. For young adults and the millennial generation the web is already a ‘given’ technology: a life without the functionalities of the web can’t be envisaged. By being part of this generation the ‘given’ nature of the web sparked my interest in developing a more refined historical understanding of the impact of this transformative technology and specific medium. The first obvious observation is how the web medium is one of the leading modes of interaction and presents itself accordingly as a vital and critical source for future historians to decipher and interpret the recent past. Digital historian Roy Rosenzweig already foresaw historiographical challenges in 1998, when the size, scale and reach of the web was still in its infancy compared to today. Rosenzweig wrote in a summary article that historicized the Internet, the web’s facilitator and larger technological framework, called Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet how “historians will feel compelled to reckon with the emergence of the Internet as a standard feature of everyday life”, while exploring the various approaches historians undertook and difficulties they faced to write the histories of the Internet (Rosenzweig, 1998). In the last twenty years since Rosenzweig wrote down his observations the web indeed increasingly expanded into everyday life, becoming a standard feature of it.
It’s not just the fact that the web increasingly plays an integral part in our life that makes it an interesting area of inquiry for historians. Besides this development the web medium is
simultaneously becoming a historicized entity with a past subject to an interpretation of historical development. Simultaneously the web inhabits both a history of his own and is at the same time part of all other histories. The accumulation of web functions served it’s societal adaptation.
Understanding the history of the development is able to shed light on the societal adaption of the web. As noted earlier on, the web developed from a classified and underground solution for scientific problems into a global and daily feature of life, continuously integrating and expanding functions to use the web. The web constituted itself as a historical object over time. More and more it became a place with a rich source of human action, activity and cultural phenomena, hence increasingly serving as a rich source full of defining explanatory potential for historians about the last thirty years
(Brügger & Finneman, 2013). In that sense the web inhabits the defining explanatory potential that characterizes and sets our time apart: web expressions make up an integral or even defining part of our culture and society.
Alike to the pioneering observation of Rosenzweig in 1998 historian Ian Milligan noted roughly 15 years later how it is becoming essential for historians to incorporate the web and its derived materials in their histories (Milligan, 2012). We can see Milligan’s argument as a
augmentation of Rosenzweig’s observations. Milligan provides a very fitting hypothetical example of the historian interested in political campaigning at the end of the 90’s and early 00’s. With the
5 massive amount of sources available it is easy for the historian to rely for his research solely on traditional media sources: newspapers, posters and television debates. Furthermore, the
contemporary historian is all too familiar with the pitfalls and limitations of these sources: he knows
how to handle them and how to write a history accordingly. Despite their accessibility and availability the great explanatory potential of political campaigning during this era is more likely to be found in web presence. The emergence of the web is what made political campaigning stand out from
previous times. Research is potentially or even on a fundamental level methodologically flawed when it downplays or overlooks the distinctive impact of the web on political campaigning in the late 90’s and early 00’s (see Milligan et al, 2016). Regardless whether the historian concisely conducted his traditional research by reading hundreds of representative news pages, examining a diverse corpora of posters, interviewing relevant stakeholders in the field of political campaigning and watching political television programmes.
This thesis proposes to explore the web from its medium specificity and create a detailed historical overview on the historical development, status and challenges of web historiography and archiving. The idea is to start with a firm theoretical understanding of web (archival) development and the challenges of the web for historians. After presenting this framework the theoretical understanding is supplemented with practical case studies that strengthen our historical understanding of the web and web archiving. All four case studies are (minor) web archival investigations into the domain of Dutch politics that highlight different possibilities and challenges for historical inquiry while using the archived web as a source to conduct historical research. Before that this thesis starts with further unravelling the history and development of the web over time. Overall I argue that historicizing the ‘unique’ web medium starts with synthesizing all problematic remarks and challenges posed by the web into one starting and in my eyes overarching or rather more fitting underlying historical question to guide this investigation of the web: how did the web medium develop over time? Historians are first and foremost in dire need of a more refined historical understanding of web development. In this case this refers to the complete web environment. As noted earlier on observing and understanding the development of the web is a critical precondition to a more integral understanding of the potential and limits of web produced and derived materials. This inquiry into the web produces a representative developmental phase model how to understand the web as historical phenomenon based on insights of evolutionary systems theory. This web development model serves as both the precondition and common ground for historians to understand the web historically. The primary function of this investigation is to sort out historical web development and explain accessory and derived web characteristics from a theoretical perspective.
Thereafter two historically dominant modes of web (medium) preservation in other words web archiving are analysed and evaluated from a historical perspective. This starts with examining
6 the historical roots of the Internet Archive and institutional web archives. Both chapters are
supplemented with two case studies that serve as empirical explorations, to supplement the historians understanding of the web. Both chapters include one case study that highlights historical content analysis: web sources are here deployed in a traditional sense serving as contextual sources to explain society. The difference between both case studies is that one case study takes a single abandoned site (wouterwindvaan.nl) as starting point for historical inquiry, which can only be retrieved using the Internet Archive. The other case studies starts with a defined (historical) question: how did Dutch political parties respond to the tensions around the Iraq war? The latter case study utilizes and combines different web sources found within a web archive (Archipol) which sole purpose is to preserve institutional web expressions related to Dutch politics. The other two case studies are related to web development. The first one is applying a kludgy variance of the screencast approach as introduced by Richard Rogers to explore our understanding of web development over time by taking a look at the design history of political parties websites in the Netherlands. This case study is also used to test the outlined development of the web from chapter I. The last case study delves deeper into the concept of object oriented web archives by exploring a subcollection of archived Voting Advice Applications (VAA) and how this collection developed over time. The transformation of this collection is one of the only options to develop a historical understanding of digital-born technologies as VAA’s. Thenceforth the development, status and challenges of historical web (archival) are discussed in the fourth chapter to create a clear overview of the status and methodological challenges and solutions concerning web historiography and web archiving.
History and the web: a return to method?
First let us return to Ian Milligan’s observation how contemporary histories excluding the web are problematic. Milligan’s reasoning and presented example are in my eyes convincing and perhaps even a bit obvious, but the question remains why historians write such methodologically flawed histories? Is there perhaps a reason or at least an explanation why some historians hesitate up until today to incorporate the web medium in the historical profession? Until recently historians were able to neglect the web, hiding behind one of the fundamental principles of the historical profession: historical distance. The web concerned only the recent past and provided not enough historical distance to be part of the historians playing field. However, the days of this traditional argument against historical examination and incorporation of the web and its sources are increasingly
numbered. The consensus concerning historical distance to historical objects is approximately twenty years, which brings us to the late 90’s. Around that time Rosenzweig already made his remarks about
7 the potential impact and increasing relevance of the web for historians (of the future). Furthermore, the web was in 1999 already a publically available mainstream technology. More recently historian Jane Winters argued about the historical distance concerning the web how "for contemporary historians at least, this is beginning to look like a reasonable chronological span" (Winters, 2017). With the web being relevant for over twenty years historians should at least start to have an inclusive attitude towards the web. Furthermore, the web has developed so dramatically during its thirty year existence that historical evolutionary versions of the web are easily distinguishable and detectable. The web of the past is effortlessly recognizable for anyone slightly familiar with the design of the web (Tsatsou, 2016). Concluding, the web presents itself increasingly as a historically relevant object and source with enough historical distance.
Yet, there seems to be no mass adoption of the web by historians to narrate and explain the recent past, despite the fading relevancy of historical distance and the obvious observation how the web is defining our time. The question is where this element of hesitance comes from. Why are web sources not at the centre of all historical investigations? These questions are in dire need of an answer, because as noted earlier on historians have long foreseen and are conscious that the era where they will have to engage and draw heavily on the web to write future critical histories is upon us (Rosenzweig, 1998; Milligan, 2012). The main challenge to be faced by historians is the radical different nature of the web medium and the digital compared to older more analogue forms of media. Familiarity with the web medium is absence: historians are used to work with completely different forms of media. This radically alters the relation between the historian and its (familiar analogue) sources. To recall the example of Milligan one is familiar how to write histories using sources as newspapers, television and interviews, but just not yet used to incorporate the web as historical source. This absence of familiarity leads from a historians perspective to an unsettling lack of knowledge concerning guidelines and rules how to engage with the web and its produced sources. Above all, much needed experience and examples with writing inclusive web histories are missing. It remains therefore unclear how to exploit and unleash the web’s enormous potential for historical research, even though the increasing relevancy of the web for historians (of the future) becomes clearer and clearer.
Paradigmatic crisis of the digital medium
The stalemate between historical research and the web is therefore best perceived as a crisis
concerning the treatment of the new digital web medium. The digital, mainly expressed with Internet and the web replaced and transformed traditional media as newspapers and television as the centre of our communication infrastructure (Foot and Schneider, 2004). Historians are still unclear about how to engage with this radically different medium. The radical different nature of the digital
8 medium combined with the absence of consensus concerning scientific methods hints towards what we understand as a paradigmatic crisis. According to Thomas Kuhn radical changes and rapid
development in general communication infrastructure and information technology automatically creates instances of crisis regarding scholarship and knowledge production (Kuhn, 1962). What is experienced here is a crisis of ‘normal science’, in this case everyday historical practice, caused by the rapid disruption and emergence of the new and ever increasingly hegemonic digital medium.
The established mechanisms of the historical profession and humanities in general are disrupted and unable to directly and coherently respond to the radical challenges posed by the rapid development of the digital medium. It seems that we are right now still experiencing the unforeseen and unprecedented consequences of this disruptive shift towards the web medium (Brügger & Finnemann 2013; Milligan 2012). Following the societal impact of the digital medium and the web, the Humanities, concerned with critically reflecting on social expressions, are likely expected to shift from analogue to born-digital materials. Web historian Niels Brügger argues how this shift towards digitized and (re)digital-born material is likely to affect Humanities research as a whole (Brügger, 2016).
It remains to be seen whether the Digital Humanities offers the solution to guard the Humanities as a whole through this paradigmatic shift. The Digital Humanities is an emerging field and discipline that tries to actively negotiate with the transformative impact of digital culture, materials and methods on behalf of the Humanities. Historically the Digital Humanities were rooted within a framework defined by digitization of analogue sources rather than born-digital material (Brügger & Finnemann, 2013). This framework used to be known as humanities computing, which is now submerged into what we conceive as the Digital Humanities. The historical roots of Digital Humanities in digitization strikes similarities to the development of the early web in the 90’s which used to be rooted within a framework that merely facilitated processes of cognition and presence (see Raffl et al, 2009). Web development over the last fifteen years unfolded to us how this early framework was essential in setting up the next phase of the web that is commonly referred to as the social web 2.0. This more refined web 2.0 submerged and replaced the early web into its new version. Similarly the urge and rush towards digitization with Humanities Computing was a first necessary, perhaps slightly reactionary and kludgy but more importantly a collective step of action from the Humanities to engage with the crisis of the digital. Its first step was translating itself including known methods and knowledge into the unknown emerging digital medium, which serves both as a ‘adventurous expedition’ and necessary precondition to further guide, integrate and develop the Humanities more successfully into the new medium.
Perhaps this suggestion of Digital Humanities as a field still in early development also offers the start to an answer for why historians still hesitate to incorporate the web medium: the complete
9 field of Humanities struggles with adaption to the digital. Digital Humanities also received critiques from the traditional Humanities concerning the lack of cultural criticism and reflexive abilities about the field (see for a diverse amount of examples replicating this critique Liu, 2012; Gold, 2012 and Presner, 2012). Cultural criticism is traditionally seen as the backbone and sacred duty of the Humanities. In general the critique comes down to the notion that a lack or not enough ties to cultural criticism will hinder the Digital Humanities from reaching its fullest potential. Moreover, Brügger hints towards an overreliance on the digital in the Digital Humanities while other scholars point with a diverse amount of arguments regarding lack of diversity (McPherson, 2012) and pedagogy (Alexander and Frost-Davis, 2012). Therefore, the Digital Humanities should be seen as a potential answer in the making: an extension and next phase of critical knowledge, skills and methods concerning the societal treatment of the digital. Moreover, they do not replace the complete Humanities: as the digital condition is not immanent, but rather creates a post-digital condition. Florian Cramer argues how the post-digital condition happened when our disenchantment with digital technologies became historical, opening up new potentialities for cultural criticism (Cramer, 2015). More important traditional knowledge and insights do not disappear but are mostly submerged and weighted carefully within the new frameworks of knowledge production that is facilitated by developments in the Digital Humanities. This development radically alters the playing field of historians.
The practice of web historiography
The reluctance of historians to engage with the web medium is for a great part contributed to challenges related to the unprecedented characteristics inherent to this emerging and increasingly dominant web medium. The required confrontation and accessory upcoming struggle to involve and incorporate the digital medium into an ancient craft and established practice as history leads
automatically to questioning its epistemological and methodological foundations (Rosenzweig, 2011). Logically incorporating medium specific struggles into normal historical investigations doesn’t
happen overnight as Karpf notes methodological change moves at a glacial pace (Karpf, 2012). Simultaneously neglecting the web or incorporating sources without considering the medium specific characteristics produces methodologically flawed histories. If the humanities and history in specific wants to regain its historical position in academia it will have to be capable of examining and critically interpreting social and cultural expressions of the web and born-digital materials (Brügger &
Finnemann, 2013). In order to do this both medium specific source criticism and a return to questioning and verifying certain tenets of historical method is demanded.
10 all contained in what is understood as historiography. The concept of historiography is like a double edged sword: its meaning does not only entail what is just described above but also involves any body of historical work on a given subject. Leading web historian Niels Brügger argued how a better understanding of the web of the past is a prerequisite to understand the current condition and possible future development of the web (see for example Brügger, 2009; Brügger, 2013 and more recently Brügger & Schroeder, 2017). Suitably, he coined the term Web Historiography in order to further theorize and develop historical methods refining the historians understanding of the web’s past, current condition and possible future course and meaning in academia. Web historiography is currently in its nascent stage (Ankerson, 2015) and didn’t play a substantial role in the first
establishing years of Internet and Web Studies (Brügger, 2009). Nevertheless, web historiography is of great importance as the digital seems to magnify historiographical challenges. Moreover, web historiography is a useful perspective for historians to combine further theorizing about the uniqueness of the web medium while practicing history with sources provided by the web. Hence, web historiography intertwines both historical- and web research to further develop historical methods and launch the Humanities into the digital 21st century.
The referred model of web development should take both the socio-technical function of the web and its defining ontology into account. Therefore, the web is presented as a dynamic integrative socio-technical environment that enabled different processes related to information sharing and knowledge productionthrough time. In the beginning the web enabled merely knowledge sharing processes in terms of cognition, followed up by more refined processes communication and collaboration (see Raffl et al, 2009 and Fuchs, 2010). The shifts towards these submerging web processes are inspired by economic incentives (Floridi, 2009). All materials spawned or placed within the environment inhabit in a general sense the same defining distinctive characteristics as the complete environment (Brügger and Finnemann, 2013).
A historical account of the web environment assists in describing and analysing historical web development. Still the model is not enough to solely explain the overall web medium for historians. The nowadays established historical understanding of the web in so called web versions is hard to neglect as web versions permeate all public and academic discourse surrounding the historicity of the web. Yet, explaining the historical development of the web using versions works somewhat limiting. The limitation with explaining the development of the web just through versions will be explained in greater detail in the next chapter. In short, explaining the development of the web through versions is useful, but at the same time it should be noted how these versions are merely social constructs and should therefore not be taken at absolute face value by historians to define, explain and understand the societal development of the web. More specific the critique is how the emergence of web versions is directly tied and more importantly limited to characteristics of
11 particular web business models, disregarding for example alternative user practices (see Barassi and Treré, 2012). Furthermore, these web business models had a direct stake in ‘creating’ a discourse of web versions to sell their business models, capitalizing on being the ‘next big thing’ on the market of ideas (Floridi, 2009). A closer look at the rise and fall of business models accompanying particular web versions underlines this observation. Regarding web versions it is interesting to point out how the ‘social’ web 2.0 of communication, which emerged following the crash of business models tied to web 1.0 in the dotcom bubble (and web 1.0) is considered the starting point of the web’s historicity. The reason for coining web 2.0 was that this ‘version’ of the web inhabited distinctive developmental characteristics, expressions and functions compared to the earlier web. Indeed, it is hard to refute how this was the same web as before the crash, hence the creation and application by both business and academics of a web versions discourse. Additionally given this perspective, it is hard for the historian to argue against the historical demarcation of the web in different version. However, it becomes rather problematic when the social web is established as the present web and web 1.0 as the web of the past, while web 3.0 refers to the possible web of the future. Moreover, clearly different conceptions of web 3.0 compete to champion themselves as ‘web 3.0’ namely the semantic web promoted by Tim Berners-Lee and what is now publicly known as the Internet of Things (Floridi, 2009). Besides, a conception of web development exclusively in terms of versions suggests an absolute linear path where the web replaced itself by an update to the next version. Rather, old versions of the web submerged in non-linear fashion into the new version of the web, hence the underlining of both dynamic and integration in the modelled definition.
Nevertheless, every historical account of the web environment is obliged to take established notions as web versions into account, despite their (outlined) shortcomings. A look at the discourse surrounding the history of the web shows how intimately the historicity of the web is tied to web versions. Web versions are therefore an useful social construct to explain characteristics of the web if supplemented by the described model which underlines the evolution of the web in terms of
information sharing and knowledge production. Over time with the emergence of the social web 2.0 the defining characteristics of the web: integration and fluidness are becoming more and more prevalent, which magnifies existing historiographical challenges concerning preservation and practicing historical research. Consequently, the attention of the web historian should not just be limited to tracing the history of the complete web environment and consideration should be payed to what can be described as distinguishable modes of web archiving.
Historians should trace the web archival impulse or preservation tendencies used over time to store the web for academic purposes. Milligan observes how these different modes of web archiving actively shape future historical research about the web (Milligan, 2012). An overview and insight into the (historical) methods and techniques used over time to preserve the web assists
12 historians in developing accessory methods to extract and determine historical value of archived web sources. Two ‘historicized’ web archiving tendencies are explored: institutional web archives and the ‘Internet archive’. This selection was made because these two are most likely to facilitate the web historians of the future, however both possess different value for historical research as they stress different tensions within the archival process.
Defining the web
So what are the complex challenges for historians involved with researching the web and its derivative materials? Web historiographical challenges are in the first place linked to the
characteristics of the web and the accustoming preservation of the live web as ‘stable’ historical source.2 The main problem is how historians have developed their methods while using sources with
contrasting defining properties as web sources. Traditional historical investigations are used to stable sources, which the web by definition lacks. Consequently, the web lacks the so called familiarity for historians which they were accustomed to by older forms of media, while there is no overarching solution in place to preserve the live web in its original state for historical research (Rosenzweig, 2003), hence we have to settle for web archived sources as the best shot to document the past and practice history.
The ambivalent ontology and unique ‘nature’ of the web compared to older media poses the largest challenge for historians (Falkner and Runde, 2010). The web is dynamic by nature and exists in a fluid state: a medium which is notorious for producing unstable objects and ephemeral materials (Foot and Schneider, 2004). Web materials have by design fluctuating lifespans instead of fixed or atleast predictable ones. Additionally, web material is defined by their programmability: the notion that they are open to edit in unique ways at any given time (Manovich, 2001). In contrast, historians are more keen to use stable fixed objects in order to write histories and verify the past. Likewise, the sheer amount, or rather the scale of ‘sources’ the web produces is challenging for historians. The historical roots of these arguments are found again in an article of Rosenzweig who wrote an article called ‘Scarcity or Abundance: Preserving the past in the Digital Era’ in 2003. Rosenzweig argued how there was a considerable risk that historians in the digital age would simultaneously experience both a dark age and overload of information. The overload of information was likely to be caused thanks to the amount of sources available to historians, while a possible dark age was foreseen due to the dynamic nature of the web and born-digital phenomena. Rosenzweig foresaw how critical sources for future historians were prone to completely vanish (Rosenzweig, 2003). It’s hard to refute this
impression if we take a look at the four month lifespan of the average webpage. In hindsight, both of
2 Stable refers here to representation and the option to sustainably retrieve and validate the characteristics
13 Rosenzweig’s foreseen future scenarios are looking likely. Yes we live in a dark age concerning
authentic sources of the live web, finding authentic old web sources untouched by the archiving process is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Besides even if one finds an apparently
untouched part of the web: how are you going to validate its authenticity? What criteria’s could you use to prove the authenticity of your source if your source is defined by its programmability? Overall the quest for the authentic historical web is very unproductive given the size and the scale of the current web. The web offers historians a sea of unstable information with both unprecedented opportunities and challenges (Brügger & Finnemann, 2013).
As a consequence of the web’s ambivalent ontology there is no overarching tool or
infrastructure in place to ensure preservation of this sea of unstable information (Rosenzweig, 2003). Masanes observes how it is by definition impossible to capture the web in its original state (Masanes, 2005). Preserving unstable objects is impossible without stabilizing them first, which alters the object and depletes it from authenticity as a traditional cultural record (Kallinikos et al, 2013). In short, the preservation rules are different with the web compared to analogue materials. Analogue materials remain ontologically the same even if removed from their original context. Yet, preserved web materials are the best shot at interpreting the past of and with the web for historians, because web objects won’t automatically preserve themselves in a sustainable manner for historians. Applying the live web as historical source brings up even more structural challenges concerning verification of sources. Indeed do the preserved materials differ from ‘the real deal’, but still they come as close as possible and possess potential cultural value. All in all, preservation of the past isonly possible when materials are archived in one way or another. The web archiving process entails here the way in which web materials are collected, documented and made accessible (Brügger & Schroeder, 2017) for the public and researchers. The archiving process, or mode of preservation, precepts the research possibilities and determines the possibilities of historical web research. Consequently, all web archived material are products from the archival process itself (Brügger, 2009), unconsciously integrating the process of web archiving within any practice of web historical studies.
Consequently, collections and concentrations of archived web materials, so called web archives, play an integral part in every form of historical web research. Web archives have remained up until today on the ‘ fringes’ of (digital) humanities and historical research (Winters, 2017). This undervaluation and neglect of web archives is one of the key factors why writing history with or about the web is still in its infancy. Despite its infancy scholars argue how web archives inhabit the potential to facilitate the critical historical research of the future. For example digital historians Guldi and Armitage argue how the digital medium with its accessory sea of information, captured in its essence by the public catchphrase of big data, allows for ‘realigning the archive to the intentions of history’ (Guldi and Armitage, 2014). Yet, Brügger and Schroeder noted in response to Guldi and
14 Armitage how the potential to unleash histories from below by using the power of big data is only possible when the big data stored in web archives accurately presents said forces from below (Brügger & Schroeder, 2017). Theoretically, web archives and the amount of big data produced by the web offer the potentialities to break free from the woven social fabric of archives and
institutional power structures. In order to further exploit this potential to unleash histories from below historians are required to establish themselves as a proactive force in the web archiving process along with other web stakeholders as archivists, information scientists and curators. Historians should join the conversation about the established parameters that dictate what we preserve of the web. An interdisciplinary approach is fundamental here given the overarching
influence of the web on various disciplines, especially archivists and historians should collaborate and practice prospective archiving of parts of the web to facilitate retrospective historical analysis. The initial break up between archivists and historians took place around the turn of the 20th century: the
future challenges concerning the web hopefully reconciles them.
Summarizing, the web produces sources that are subject to completely different
conservation and preservation rules and traditional historical methodology does not adapt well to this altering of the historians playing field (Milligan, 2012). In a sense the web and digital medium creates a post-history condition. Authentic primary sources, the good old backbones for historical inquiry and understanding, are increasingly eroding and losing relevancy in the digital age, while the fresh produced digital sources inhabit contrasting properties. This absence of traditional primary sources is no valid reason to abstain from writing histories. One should wonder what will happen if we continue with the massive production of histories that exclude the web. As Milligan pointed out histories excluding the web are fundamentally flawed. If the relationship between the web and history is hard to establish this still doesn’t justify abandoning either the web or history. The discipline of history would increasingly lose its relevancy as contemporary social memory of society when it refuses to engage and interpret digital materials. Moreover, such an abandonment of its proclaimed aim or even duty is likely to cause severe cases of digital dementia in society. What is therefore needed is an exploration and reorientation of historical methods to adapt to the kludgy reality of the 21st century posed by the web medium.
According to Megan Ankerson, web historians should take notice of the practices by other media historians. Especially those who took up the challenging task to document the history of early television and radio inhabit fruitful experiences about how to deal with notoriously unstable and ephemeral materials. Similarly, these sources also emerged as products of the earlier paradigm shift in communication infrastructure towards the television medium. Ankerson argues how the seeds for answering the outlined historiographical obstacles related to the web are likely to be found by partial adoption of the proposed methodological solutions and careful examination of the source treatment
15 by other media historians (Ankerson, 2013). Ankerson delivers here a valid argument: it makes a lot of sense for historians to highlight the continuity of struggle between historical methods and emerging forms of media. Although, web materials are defined by their ambivalence and unique contrasting ontology which creates a unprecedented situation. Despite these differences there is relevant historical continuity found. For that reason historians should be wary of statements that claim absolute and irreversible problems regarding the challenges faced with the web and digital medium. It is most likely that structural long term solutions, conventions and rules can and will be developed by (web) historians for the challenges posed by the new medium. Even though, it is currently hard to decipher their exact moment of arrival, modus operandi and or ultimate form. Moreover, medium specific complaints are part of the historical process. In the 16th century Martin
Luther proclaimed with great certainty how the production and multitude of book materials spawned by the invention of the printing press were causing a great everlasting evil for scholarship. In more recent fashion, during the 1970s, the overproduction of books was seen by many as causing a state of irreversible intellectual depletion (Milligan, 2012). These examples are presented merely to show how, even though there are obstacles related to a medium crisis of the web, partial and effective solutions are in the end likely to be found, if we want to write our own histories in the near future. Confrontation of the web medium remains fundamental. Historians should actively argue about the promises and especially about the pitfalls posed by the web for writing histories, figuring out approaches to unleash the histories of the digital age. The web is not completely different as a medium, but it just magnifies age old historiographical challenge of source incompleteness by making this more visible. Ankerson points out how source incompleteness has always been an issue for historians, although the issue is now more visible due to the nature of the digital medium (Ankerson, 2013).
Historians are still obliged to practice history in the age of the web medium, however practicing history following the traditional standards and source treatment guidelines is increasingly difficult with messy web material. Furthermore, the material develops more and more into the social and interactive domain far away from the reach of web archiving .3 Web development points towards
a medium which is becoming increasingly dynamic and embedded. Accordingly the process of stabilizing and harvesting web content is harder or even impossible. The older web fits more within the approach of ‘just’ stabilizing the unstable object. Moreover harvesting social media content is impossible with the current web archival methods in place by both the Internet Archive and
Institutional web archives. This is a concern for the future as more and more histories are tied to the currently impossible to harvest social web. The historian is faced with the incomplete reality of the
3 Chapter II and III discuss the limited reach of web archives and its inability to harvest social and interactive
16 web: an inherent dynamic and messy information environment. Nonetheless this condition does not hinder the practice of history completely given the subjective core of the historical profession and the ability settle for what in cyber culture is described as a kludge. A kludge refers to a software or hardware configuration that, while inelegant, inefficient, clumsy, or patched together, succeeds in temporarily solving a specific problem or performing a particular task. In this case its perfectly applicable to the historians post history condition in the age of the post-digital and the prevailing web medium. It’s better to develop ways to work with the available archived web material as to ponder about the possibly structural problems inherent to the web.
At first hand stressing the subjective core of the profession feels counterintuitive in an age of ever increasing rationalisation. Highly relevant here is Walter Benjamin’s (complete) sixth thesis in Theses on the Philosophy of History where he proclaims that it is the basic duty of the historian to continue “fanning the spark of hope in the past” (as cited in Beiner, 1984, 426). Benjamin continues in the same thesis how articulating the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ In other words to rationalize it and relive it, but it just means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Thanks to the workings of the web, preservation and social memory, reconstructing the way the past really was is discarded as impossible. Keeping Benjamin’s remarks in mind this is not even such a big deal as it was in the first place impossible for the historian to do this. It is a complete waste of time and resources to ponder about ways of reconstructing an eternal absolute picture of history as depicted by historicism, arguing how history moves following laws towards a certain predefined goal. What rests for the historian is a possible reconstruction or examination of culturally deemed relevant web objects, which should a priori be recognized by the historian as incomplete and his own. The reconstruction of a beforehand recognized incomplete puzzle is the best shot the historian has at creating an understanding of the past or interpreting the web.
17
Chapter I – Web historiography: history of
the web
This chapter’s web historiography focusses on building and narrating a historical understanding of the web medium, which both underlines and challenges established historical narratives and
understandings of web development. Web historiography, a term popularized by Niels Brügger, came to the surface as an antidote to better understand the web as a phenomenon (Brügger, 2009). Yet, historical web studies are still in its nascent stage (Ankerson 2015), hence practicing web
historiography is a prerequisite to interpret or grasp the web. An explanation of the evolution of the web brings us automatically to a history of the web environment. The question on the table is therefore: what is the web exactly and how did it develop over time? In short, the web is an
integrated and dynamic socio-technical environment that produces materials with the same defining characteristics namely that they are both ‘unique’ and integrative (Raffl et al, 2009). For the historian the materials the web produces are shaped and derived by the web environment. As a consequence historians who engage with web materials should pay attention to the historical development of the web as a whole. This conception of the web follows insights from evolutionary dynamic systems theory (see Raffl et al, 2009 and Fuchs, 2008) and applies a phase model. Within this phase model web functions develop cumulative and are submerged over time.
When defining or engaging with the web there is a need for historians to highlight the web as an integrated socio-technical system. Socio-technical implies here that web development is marked by human agency, regardless of the perceived degree of this agency, as produser of web technology and content. Narrating the development of the web solely in technical terms of design and function without addressing the contextual social realm ignores how the development of web technologies is always a product of complex social interaction, a product of the fundamental Internet infrastructure and therefore part of the general technological infrastructure of human society (Fuchs, 2010). Accordingly, the web is best conceived as a dynamic techno-social system where humans interact and actively negotiate with technological power structures at hand. (See Fuchs, 2008; Raffl et al, 2009; Barassi, Treré, 2012).
18
The Internet versus the Web
Frequently the web and Internet are used interchangeably by the public, despite the fact that both mean different things and should be disentangled from each other to prevent further confusion. Especially given the intent to refine our understanding of the web. First things first, the web does not equate the Internet. The web is the smaller and public part of the Internet network. Contrasted to the Internet the web consists of all the web pages visible while using a hardware device connected to the Internet. The Internet thus serves as a necessary precondition of the web. The connected device to the Internet was in most cases a personal computer, until the recent rise of the Smartphone as an alternative to the pc, which indicates that surfing the web is not bound to one predetermined technological infrastructure. Thus the web more or less equates the public information space while the Internet is a larger unit which more or less equates the complete infrastructure including all web entities. The internet serves as a necessary precondition for this information space making the web by definition an integrated, dynamic and responsive socio-technical environment. The web excludes closed interconnected networks as email, instant messages, news groups and file transfers as part of the web because these technologies are not part of the public environment. Nonetheless, describing the historical development of the web is incomplete when excluding the environment and
infrastructure that spawned its emergence. Internet is in short the enormous network of billions of connected computers and other hardware devices with connection possibilities, set up originally in the 1960s under the name ARPAnet as a way by western powers, in specific the United States, to maintain military communication in the case of a possible nuclear strike (Rosenzweig, 1998).
Internet Historiography
Roy Rosenzweig distinguished four narrative techniques or approaches deployed by historians to describe the origins and development of the Internet since the 60s: biographic, bureaucratic, ideological and social (see Rosenzweig, 1998). Rosenzweig provides here a short but useful insight into the diverse ways historians have approached the rise of the Internet. The biographic approach prioritizes the agency of individuals deploying a rather old fashioned great man theory of history while looking at the origins of the Internet. According to Rosenzweig this is exemplified by Hafner and Lyon’s Where Wizards Stay up Late: the Origins of the Internet who argue how the Internet came to life thanks to the genius determination of specific individuals. The bureaucratic approach
employed by Norberg and O’Neill in Transforming Computer Technology: Information processing for
the Pentagon, 1962-1986 diminishes or at least downplays this so called individual agency by
reconstructing the roots of the Internet through looking at less exciting bureaucratic processes that brought the Internet into existence. Others as Paul Edward place the emergence and early
19 development of the Internet into the ideological framework of the Cold War, stressing how
ideological differences and tensions gave rise to the Internet, pushing the context outside
laboratories, bureaucrats and the genius sparks of individuals. Edwards sketches an account of the Internet that fits less as an overarching narrative but more as a collage of the past. Last but definitely not least is the social approach that prioritizes an account of the popularization and adaption of the Internet by mainstream users outside of the military and academia. The social approach creates a bottom up historical account of the Internet by looking at reasons for ordinary people to use this technology from the 80s onward.
Recently, it has been argued how the history of the development of the Internet has focused too much on technical breakthroughs, the consequences of policy initiatives, and court decisions. This is a persevering perspective when dealing with technology, susceptible to overlooking the role of bottom-up activities in shaping the Internet (Lee, 2016). Over the years along with the adaption of personal computers in the 80s and normalization of personal computer use in the 90s the Internet increasingly expanded into the social sphere as more people were able to connect their devices to each other through the Internet. Consequently the Internet became more and more a technology in need of a historical account that incorporates the social everyday use of the technology. The history of the Internet and web shows how they came into being as complex interplays between
technological and social forces. The web evolved into an integrated socio-technical system and information space where documents and other web resources and materials are identified by a
Uniform Resource Locator (URL), interlinked by hypertext links, accessible through a web browser all
facilitated by the technological infrastructure of the Internet (Barassi & Treré, 2012; Fuchs, 2010 and Raffl et al 2009).
The history of the web
Ideally we’re modelling the evolution, development and progression of this integrated socio-technical system without operating within a time frame that limits our historical understanding of the web to temporal periods with related and associated manifestations of the web. Despite, its dynamic nature the web fits in a phase and layer model: historically certain preconditions were deemed necessary for the web to develop into a new socio-technical stage, making the web
increasingly an accumulation of functions. Following notions from evolutionary systems theory about the dynamics of knowledge production and information sharing the web presents itself as a
technological system that enabled three consecutive and mediated social processes over time: cognition, communication and co-operation (Raffl et al, 2009; Fuchs, 2010). According to this phase model the web started out as a ‘read-only’ medium that supported merely cognitive processes. The
20 web’s original design was aimed essentially at finding and sharing electronic documents and
information (Dutton, 2010) in the way Tim Berners-Lee envisaged (Berners-Lee, 1996). The ‘read-only’ web of cognition where web elements were mainly marked and defined by hypertextuality facilitated the creation of a web of communication characterized by both reading and writing processes. Raffl describes this as the web of communication, while Dutton interprets it as a web of contributing, while Aghaei coined this stage as people connections (Aghaei, 2012). Without
marginalizing the differences between these approaches completely all descriptions identify a stage with a common ‘social’ ground or element. Moreover, the social web sowed the seeds for a web of co-operation (Raffl et at, 2009) or web of co-creating (Dutton, 2010) with complete networked and integrated digital technologies and collaborations . Over time the reader or user of the web
developed from consumer into a producer and produser of web materials. Previous stages of the web submerge within the next stage just as, following Raffl’s model, cognitive processes in general exist as a part of communicative processes. Communication is regarded as a necessary precondition and essential part of co-operation (Raffl et al, 2009). Another leading interpretation of web development, as in most cited in the field of information and computer science , follows in general the same line of reasoning. Web development is here similarly perceived as an accumulation of functions, which are mediated by the social and technological, despite stressing different forms of connections as the main fundamental and evolving force of web development, while singling out four stages of development instead of three (Aghaei et al, 2012). Connections have been central to the
development of the web identifying information connections to people connections to knowledge connections to intelligence connections.
Web versions: constructed historicity of the web
At this moment we modelled the web as an integrated dynamic socio-technical system. Its
progression over time is marked by an accumulation of functionality. This working definition of the web allows us to flesh out the historical account of the web as object by describing its temporal characteristics over time. Every historical account and understanding of the web is marked by different versions (1.0, 2.0 and 3.0), which not surprisingly coincide with the web development stages pointed out in the three stage models of Raffl, Dutton or in a robust sense with Aghaei’s understanding of the web as four evolving forms of connections. Web versions are easily understood in terms of versions that completely replace one another. Therefore narrating the development of the web solely in versions serves a problematic form of essentialism what the web exactly entails. It creates tensions between how the web is conceived and how it potentially functions in practice, limiting the historical understanding of the web if taken for granted. Nevertheless, web versions remain valuable social constructs deployed by academics and businesses to interpret the web, but do
21 not tell the complete story of web development.
Interestingly, the established historicity of web versions did not start with the emergence of ‘read-only’ web 1.0 technologies but rather with the coinage and adaptation of web 2.0 by scholars and businesses. Web 2.0 materialized from what is described as a “noisy market of ideas” (Floridi, 2009 and Tsatsou, 2016). Panayiota Tsatsou describes how the historicity of the web emerged as a response to describe the differing appearance of the social web of communication. Web 2.0
originated as a label or concept between 2003 and 2005 to classify certain drastic changes compared to the old condition of the web (Tsatsou, 2016). Version 2.0 described thus the contemporary characteristics of web technologies. The classification of the current web as 2.0 became quickly adopted by both academia and business. At the end of 2005 the search term ‘Web 2.0’ counted already roughly 9.5 million citations on Google (O’Reilly, 2007). More important ‘2.0’ marked a cultural moment in the development of the web and was embraced to address its development. As the starting point for historicizing of the web ‘2.0’ popularized a historical discourse marked by versions. From 2005 onwards it spawned debates about the importance of analysing the Internet and web as a technologies in constant transformation defined by different phases of development (Barassi & Treré, 2012). This observation is further substantiated by the fact that web 1.0, as a distinguished version of the web, only came to live after web 2.0 was broadly accepted as the way to describe characteristics of the web’s current state. Summarily, referring to web 1.0 meant referring to expressions and the past’s web, while referring to web 3.0 meant referring to the possible state of the future’s web (Tsatsou, 2016).
Therefore, web versions are best conceived as social constructs adapted by scholars and businesses to classify a phase of web development and restrain the dynamic technological and societal forces which shape the evolution of the Web (Floridi, 2009). Yet, these social constructs allow us to describe the different communication and information processes and social dynamics over time (Fuchs, 2010; Tsatsou, 2016). Nonetheless, one has to keep in mind how classifying the web with different distinguishable versions that inhabit certain characteristics assumes user practices of people a priori and potentially marginalizes web users that negotiate with the web in radical ways for political and social reasons. All in all this potentially limits a more practice driven historical description of the impact, development and lived experience of the web (see Barassi & Treré, 2012). Floridi argues how different versions of the web to classify and describe characteristics have
gradually emerged as distinct answers, driven mostly by economic incentives from the ‘noisy market of ideas’. According to Floridi scholars have followed the question ‘what is the next stage or version in the development of the web’ with great attention since the so called dotcom mess, which refers to the economic crash of business models based on web 1.0 technologies. Overall this crash was
22 attributed to the technical limitations posed by the web (Floridi, 2009).
The crash of web 1.0 and emergence of web 2.0
The development of our historical understanding of the web in versions is notoriously linked to the “dotcom” bubble: a period of excessive economic speculation in information technologies that occurred from 1997 to 2001. Wide scale use of the web rose significantly in the 90’s when possessing a personal computer globally became a normalized practice: the first wave of introducing the web as daily feature of life. Surfing the web was made much easier with the release of user friendly browsers as Mosiac. Consequently, a shift towards an economy based on information technology developed. The adaption of the web resulted tried with low interest in waves of excessive speculation by companies. Businesses tried to profit from the rise in web technologies by spending heavily to harness the new network effects of the web to build market and mind shares as fast as possible, despite most of the time only offering an online presence. Around the year 2000 the investment climate went sour and companies were in general forced to revisit their advertising campaigns and hardly sustainable shells of business models. Through a number of crisis events stocks plummeted, the dotcom bubble bursted and around 75% of all collected value over the year was lost. In general, the investing climate was further tarnished by the attacks of 9/11 and the large ‘Enron’ & ‘Worldcom’ scandals of 2002, which accelerated the droppings even further.
Summarizing, these crashing web technologies only offered connection of static information or consumption of information as a cognitive process. The web offered ‘sharing’ opportunities to society by providing an universal information space with documents, connected by hyperlinks that allowed surfing between documents and so called hypertextuality (Halpin, Wheeler, Clark; 2013 and Dutton, 2010). However the web didn’t offer interaction and was mainly used to establish an online presence, present static information, distribute content and sell services (See Raffl et al; 2009 and Aghaei, 2012). Business models reflected the limitations of the information sharing technologies of the web. Despite, the ‘crashing´ economy of the early web, which in the end didn’t offer enough services to keep its value afloat, both web pioneers and scholars argued in the early 2000’s that far from having crashed the web was more important and alive than ever before (O’Reilly, 2007). Exciting new applications and sites were still created. In hindsight, the burst of the dotcom bubble was a major turning point for the web. Some even argue how the web was taken from the
stranglehold of business companies and given back to the people (Raffl et al, 2009). The new ‘generation’ of the web came to life and the term web 2.0 was coined around 2004. Web 2.0 was widely adapted a year later to describe the set of technological web applications that facilitated a significant increase in (user) interaction, while at the same time setting up a new architecture of
23 participation and contribution (Fuchs, 2010 and Dutton, 2010). Digital Media theorist Lev Manovich argued how this architecture of participation functioned as a veil: web 2.0 business strategies incorporated people’s tactics by applying business models that strategically exploited the
technologies that allowed the users to customize and produce web content (Manovich, 2009). Bill O’Reilly, widely regarded as the inventor of the term web 2.0, characterized the new web
technologies as ‘links between people’ or the social web (Newman, Chang et al, 2016). However, Web 2.0 did not only allow connections between people but also connections with other entities as events, brands, interest groups, companies (Rainiem and Wellmann, 2012). The network effects came no longer solely from the company but also from the user themselves, who became an active co-developer of the web (Aghaei, 2005; O’Reilly, 2007) or a produser by allowing processes of both reading and writing on the web (Raffl et al; 2009). The hypertextuality of the early web was still in place but supplemented with more intense modes of interactivity.
The possibility offered by web 2.0 to simultaneously consume and produce content made the web itself become even more dynamic and increasingly woven into the fabric of everyday social life, blurring the threshold between the online and offline world, while also announcing the permanent end of the virtual. In the early years of its existence, at the end of the 80’s and in the 90’s, the web used to be seen as a virtual realm existing on its own. With the more prominent place of the social on the web the thought that cyberspace was a placeless space ceased to exist (Rogers, 2009). Instead, the web became grounded, contextualised and shaped by geo-specific rules and conditions. Furthermore the web became a baseline against which one may judge societal conditions (Rogers, 2009). Web users, content and design became flexible, reinterpreted, updated frequently and collaborative content creation and modification were facilitated much easier with web 2.0. Common expressions of web 2.0 applications were blogs, RSS feeds, Wikis and Mashups: pages combining information and services from multiple sources on the web. The adoption of web 2.0 was made easier, quicker and cheaper by development tools as JavaScript and XML (Aghaei, 2012 and O’Reilly, 2007). Most of all, web 2.0 became known for social networking and the social interaction within the blogosphere (Dutton, 2010). Weblogs (blogs in short) used to be around as web filters since the beginning of the web. Over the years they were redefined by social practices that expanded their content, use and software that redefined its characters into a stable web format. Their development from filter into an integrative social web format is a prime example that shows the fluid nature of web technologies and their accessory development. Blogs were appropriated by integrative social processes and used to express an assemblage of social processes. According to web practitioners weblogs merged with sites such as diaries and journals only after 1999 as a result of the emergence of automated blogging software, particularly Blogger (Siles, 2011).
24 users (O’Reilly, 2007; Halpin, Wheeler, Clark; 2013). The prevalence of interaction and both read/ write processes were mainly captured in what we know refer to as social media. The web developed into the meeting place that facilitated processes of communication, interactivity and the exchange of expressions as social goods, creating thus something reminiscent of the public sphere. The web created potentialities for both micro and macro networking of individuals, organizations, institutions and complete societies at a global level, unleashing the potential to provide global cohesion (Raffl et al, 2009).
In O’Reilly’s vision blogging and social media supported the web as a hive mind of collective intelligence offering exciting possibilities for change. Social media and the blogosphere reflected in this view people’s conscious thought and attention: the wisdom of the interconnected crowd and the realisation of a new public sphere (O’Reilly, 2007). Later on this techno-deterministic view was adjusted, criticized and for a large part discarded as naïve or motivated by business incentives. The idea of ‘linear progress’ through digital technology was rejected in the new post-digital condition of cultural criticism where our disenchantment with digital technologies has become historical (Cramer, 2015). Various new media scholars argued that the Internet can revive or extend the public sphere, as it is, contrary to the traditional mass media, in essence an interactive medium. Still, it is argued how the concept of the public sphere, both as a normative and a descriptive concept, does not really assist us to weigh the contributions social media to public debate. In general the deliberations on Internet forums cannot be easily considered a digital extension of the Habermasian public sphere. Overall, there is only limited value found when we examine particular forms of online
communication in the context of actual societal conflict (Poell, 2012).
Another main line of critique argued how the produser’s social content facilitated by web 2.0 technologies was superficial by nature (Fuchs, 2010; Manovich, 2012). Blogging and online diary writings were best characterized as web technologies of the self, allowing the creation of identity and representation of the self by web users (Siles, 2012). Social content was not a transparent window into people’s thoughts, imaginations, intentions or motifs, but served rather as an interface for people to present themselves to the world (Manovich, 2012). Even more radically Geert Lovink conceived content production as an instrument for one’s self in terms of marketing, managing and developing public relations. Blogs and their interconnections were just competing for a maximum of attention with the only thing that counts being linked and shared, maximizing the network effects of the technology in place (Lovink, 2007). With the web being increasingly important for the economy, greater significance was placed on informational materiality where value is shaped and determined by informational significance around productive economic forces. Informational materialism implies that in order to gain value information must be shared and linked (Hardt & Negri, 2004). Thus, the more social content users generate while maximizing network effects of the web, the more economic
25 significance it produces for business models capitalizing on exploiting this user interactivity and production. Simultaneously, with users contributing more and more content to the web, the collective content of web pages becomes increasingly difficult to track down to individuals and collectives. This development makes it progressively harder to digest or trace where the ‘social’ content originated from. Karpf also brings up an integral criticism of the established concept of the blogosphere: “Speaking of the blogosphere as though it is a single, overarching component of the
world wide web only encourages faulty generalizations – leading researchers and public observers alike toward inaccurate claims about the quality of “citizen journalism,” the trustworthiness of “bloggers,” and the goals and effectiveness of “bloggers.” All of these generalizations misinform rather than enlighten. They create fractured dialogues and regrettable cul de sacs in the research literature” (Karpf, 2012).Still, the superficial nature of the ‘social’ content does not hinder a
description of Web 2.0 as a social version of the web. The produsers are part of society regardless of the superficial identity produsers construct, the behaviour they display and the content they
produce. Different users, with different motivations and interests, apply the technology of social media and the blogosphere to different ends. This holds true for the all ICTs including the web in general (Karpf, 2012). A historian can still see worth in social web and media content as artefacts of the past. These artefacts still reflect social conditions and possess historical value although extracting this value is harder thanks to the dynamic , integrative and superficial nature of such artefacts.
A historical account of web 3.0?
Presenting a historical account of Web 3.0 is more challenging as its previous versions, because 3.0 was and is still mainly used to refer to the potential web of the future (Tsatsou, 2016). The rise of Web 2.0 technologies took place around 2004 and 2005, but there are not yet years specifically linked to web version 3.0, because it is still highly contested and debated among scholars what web 3.0 technologies in specific entail. Different competitive ideas are around for web 3.0 (Floridi, 2009). This was also the case for 2.0, but as history unfolded the characterization set out by O’Reilly diminished in a short time other competing ‘2.0’ definitions. Because it’s still not exactly sure where web 3.0 will lead us giving a historical account of web 3.0 is therefore above all a concern for future historians possessing the sufficient amount of historical distance to disentangle competing
conceptions of web development. One of the leading interpretations is how web 3.0 includes the next generation of devices that integrate the web’s infrastructure as cloud computing, big data, the Internet of things and security technology into the established socio-technical system of the web (Newman, Chang et al, 2016). This conception is partly challenged by those that argue how the transition from web 2.0 to 3.0 already happened with the adaption of smart phone technology,
