Abstract
Since the 1990s, several historical studies have been published showing how institutions, government agencies, engineers, and programmers shaped the creation of the Internet. Recent years have seen a new angle on this topic, as critical media and technology scholars have begun to contrast earlier accounts by including a broader range of actors (e.g. Bory, 2020; McNeil, 2020; O’Mara, 2020). Interest in the history of network communities is growing, as is interest in power relations, in the origins of collective myths about self-made entrepreneurship, and how narratives emphasizing the role of “big tech” shape our understanding of information technology. The Modem World responds to this awakening interest by exploring the reasons why people went online in the first place and by answering how the Internet became a medium of everyday life. Conventional narratives about the Internet’s past cannot explain why so many people engage with social media today. The Modem World stresses the importance of Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) by arguing that the people who built, maintained, and used them between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s have anticipated the digital interaction of millions of others who brought their lives online. However, the role of BBSs in the creation of the Internet is largely forgotten. BBSs were operated from home by amateurs who kept their communications systems running by tinkering with dial-up modems. The Modem World’s central premise is that BBSs were an important social media before the dot-com boom, providing a bottom-up alternative to the networks installed and expanded by government agencies, research universities, and multinational corporations.
The Modem World offers an engagingly written historical study for a broad audience interested in media, technology, activism, and social change. The book contains good examples and well-prepared diagrams. Since there was not one but many BBSs, The Modem World draws on a wide range of source materials, including floppy disks, magazines, discarded library books, technical manuals, documentary films, software, and oral interviews. The most important source, however, was the digital archive textfiles.com. The combination of these materials brings to light the infrastructure and the perspective of developers and early adopters rather than end users and the content of their interactions, but this would require further analysis. However, since most users did not seek public exposure, The Modem World rightly points out that this is where research reaches ethical limits.
The monograph is divided into seven chronologically ordered chapters that introduce various actors and locations in the United States. It reveals that the early BBSs were run by a small group of microcomputer enthusiasts who shared technical information with each other and chatted about their hobby. The Modem World finds the roots of BBSs in the hobbyist movement and its beginning in 1978, when two Chicago citizens developed what they called their Computerized Bulletin Board System, which required a phone line and a modem, the technology to exchange data and make calls. The two approached members of their microcomputer club, but also announced their system in computer magazines, which drew immediate attention to online communication. One of the most interesting connections The Modem World makes is between the technical cultures of radio amateurs and computer hobbyists, while the former, the older, passed on norms and values, not all of which were positive. The book points out several times that early BBSs were neither cheap nor the user groups diverse, which changed only when BBSs grew in number and popularity. Yet they never became a mainstream medium in the emerging home computer culture. Thus, The Modem World is also a story of radical subcultural settings from left to right. Only later did BBSs connect more diverse communities and cover a broader spectrum of interests and identities. However, The Modem World notes that while it remains unclear how many people actually used BBSs, demographics are consistent with the introduction of the personal computer: Most users were white, male, and middle class.
In the middle of the book, the reader learns that BBSs became more common as computers became cheaper, and that by the 1980s it was no longer just hobbyists who were setting up online systems. There were now multiple forms of BBSs. Some became platforms for exchanging software and transferring data from computer to computer, while new forms of electronic literature emerged for downloading. Some entrepreneurs now sold online access for monthly fees. Unlike nationwide commercial services, BBSs usually served a local population, since few people could afford regular long-distance calls. Fido, a network to overcome the problem of long-distance dialing, tested in 1984, first used a host PC and nodes and was then expanded into a large network with different zones that even reached overseas.
This example brings me to my first critical comment. The Modem World briefly mentions that FidoNet had several sysops outside the United States. Further research would be desirable here, as the book does not highlight local initiatives that may have been taken in other countries. However, it would be important to know if independent BBSs were established elsewhere and how they were used. My second concern is the juxtaposition of BBSs as a product of enthusiastic amateurs and the World Wide Web as a corporate product in Chapter 6. Of course, the latter system became a capitalized mainstream mass medium during the dot-com boom, but the distinction between grassroots activism on the one hand and institutional developments on the other hand neglects the fact that criticism of commercialization also arose within institutions—the most prominent example being Tim Berners-Lee, co-founder of the World Wide Web, who began advocating that the standard web be open and nonproprietary (White, 1998). Future research may address the extent to which hobbyist movements and institutional frameworks overlapped and had commonalities, and will perhaps better integrate centralized forces and peripheral activities. The Modem World is a very instructive book, arguing that looking back at the history of BBSs can help envision a post-commercial online world. Whether and how knowledge of online communities and communication systems in the past raises awareness of the problems of today’s Internet remains to be seen.
