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Schulte, Stephanie Ricker. "State Technology to State of Being: The Making of the Internet in Global Popular Culture (1980-2000)," George Washington University, August 2008. Advisor: Melani McAlister
My dissertation details the ways Americans and Europeans made sense of the internet as it became a major player in the global economy in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Tracking representations in news media, popular culture, and policymaking documents, I argue that the internet - as a technology and set of cultural meanings - transformed in accordance with larger changes in culture and policy as much as with the intrinsic capabilities of technology itself. By bringing cultural studies perspectives and discursive analysis to the history of media and technology, I problematize technologically-determinist histories by arguing that cultural representation and policy-making practices had material consequences that shaped the internet’s development. I chart the often contradictory discursive constructions of the internet: as simultaneously a toy for teenagers and a cold war weapon, as both embodying the future and emblematizing the past, and as at once a distinctly American and a global space. Examining these contradictions, I explore how the internet’s emergence and growth participated in larger debates about mass media, the nation, the state, globalization, democracy, public space, consumption, and capitalism. In this interdisciplinary dissertation, I analyze visions of the internet in popular culture, news media, academic debates, advertising, and policy legislation and debate in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. Ultimately, I argue that while these understandings helped shape the internet’s development, regulation, and character, thereby creating the internet as a capitalist tool rather than a common good. This development was far from inevitable. Thus, the final chapter in particular - through its analysis of European efforts to construct the internet as a public good regulated by state forces instead of a private commodity regulated by the forces of capital - illustrates that the internet could have been both understood and regulated differently.
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