:MeetPi

I’ve just got back from Perth where Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland ran the second Internet Histories Workshop. I presented a paper on the role that AARNet played in the development of the internet in Australia. My main point: that internet history cannot and should not be represented by a single monolithic narrative, but that instead, we need to document and record what I call local histories. Local histories are the points at which people come into contact with the technology. Local histories can be individual’s recollections, or histories of the way groups of people used the internet (for example, Gerard’s work on the Pegasus ISP and the use of the Internet in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales). The role of AARNet here is to function as a local history, but also to link other local histories, which until 1995 had to be connected via AARNet since there was no other tier 1 ISP in Australia. I’ll publish a link to the paper once I check with Mark and Gerard about where we’re going with an edited collection.

There were a number of other papers presented, all great. The day went really fast given that it was filled with 30-minute papers and we never left the conference room in the WA State Library. The keynote, Professor Shin-Dong Kim from Hallym University in South Korea presented a fascinating paper about the uptake of the Internet in South Korea - a place renowned for its high penetration of high speed broadband. Kim linked the development of the Internet in South Korea to the importance of education in South Korean society, seeing this - more than just government policy - as a major social factor in the way South Koreans have embraced broadband.

One of the topics that came up was the need for some kind of national archive or place for the preservation and documentation of Australian internet history. The materials internet historians work with are quite ephemeral, worse than material stored on tape or disk - and much worse than even paper. FTP sites quoted in source documents often no longer exist, the data never backed up. Entire servers go missing, and a whole lot of stuff (like FTP sites) was never indexed by sites like the Wayback Machine (which only goes way back to 1996 anyway).
Harold Innis would no doubt have loved the way the Internet has so clearly demonstrated such a strong spatial bias, and such a weak temporal association. I think any archiving project will need to be aware of this, and do something about turning bits and bytes back into something more permanent and durable.