Remembering Netizens: an interview with Ronda Hauben, co-author of Netizens: on the history and impact of Usenet and the Internet (1997)

Abstract

Netizens, Michael and Ronda Hauben’s foundational treatise on Usenet and the Internet, was first published in print 25 years ago. In this piece, we trace the history and impact of the book and of Usenet itself, contextualising them within the contemporary and modern-day scholarship on virtual communities, online culture, and Internet history. We discuss the Net as a tool of empowerment, and touch on the social, technical, and economic issues related to the maintenance of shared network infrastructures and to the preservation and commodification of Usenet archives. Our interview with Ronda Hauben offers a retrospective look at the development of online communities, their impact, and how they are studied. She recounts her own introduction to the online world, as well as the impetus and writing process for Netizens. She presents Michael Hauben’s conception of “netizens” as contributory citizens of the Net (rather than mere users of it) and the “electronic commons” they built up, and argues that this collaborative and collectivist model has been overwhelmed and endangered by the privatisation and commercialisation of the Internet and its communities.

Keywords:

• Ronda Hauben
• Netizens
• Usenet
• online communities
• Michael Hauben
• Internet history

Disclosure statement

The authors report that there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 Explanatory comments in footnotes are those of the interviewers.

2 See McCabe (2018, pp. 3, 5).

3 Presley (1982).

4 Ross (1991).

5 For more information on this network, see Cleveland FreeNet (2022).

6 Licklider and Taylor (1968).

7 Hauben (1998b).

8 Hauben (2017). A talk based on this article was presented at the re:publica 2017 conference: https://youtu.be/KKFQQDWxNgU

9 A revised version was later published in Amateur Computerist as Woodbury (1994).

10 Hauben (1993; 1995).

11 Then Mark Horton.

12 Hauben (1998a).

13 Hauben (1994).

14 First introduced in 1991, gopher is a text-based, menu-driven communication protocol for distributing, searching, and retrieving files and documents via Internet Protocol networks. Though it did have many early adopters, it was eventually replaced by more graphical web browsers like Mosaic. See Frana (2004).

15 Eisenstein (1993).

16 At ohmynews.com, since 2000.

17 A full recording can be found at https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/audio/the-tragedy-of-the-digital-commons/

18 Advanced Network and Services, Inc. was a US-based non-profit organization formed in 1990 by a trio of NSFNET partner corporations (Merit Network, IBM, and MCI) to maintain the NSFNET Backbone Service’s infrastructure. A year later, they also opened a for-profit subsidiary ISP, ANS CO + RE. In 1995, America Online (AOL) acquired this for-profit branch following the decommissioning of the NSFNET Backbone Service.

19 Min (2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tristan Miller

Tristan Miller is a computational linguist specialising in lexical semantics, language resources and evaluation, and creative language. He is a senior research scientist at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Vienna and an associate faculty member at the Ontological Semantic Technology Lab at Texas A&M University-Commerce. Since 2020 he has co-chaired the Usenet Big-8 Management Board.

Camille Paloque-Bergès

Camille Paloque-Bergès, who wrote her PhD thesis on the cultural history of Internet folklore, researches the history of computer and communication at the History of Techno-Sciences lab (HT2S) at Conservatoire national des arts et métiers in Paris (Cnam). She is the author of several books about computer network culture, lately about the genealogy of Internet forums and born-digital archives (Open Editions, 2018 and 2019), and is currently completing a monograph about the role of Unix communities within the spreading of digital networks.

Avery Dame-Griff

Avery Dame-Griff is a lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies at Gonzaga University. He is the author of The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (forthcoming 2023), which tracks how the Internet transformed transgender political organising in the US from the 1980s to the contemporary moment. He also founded and serves as primary curator of the Queer Digital History Project (queerdigital.com), which documents pre-2010 LGBTQ digital spaces online.