Does Not Compute / 2000s _
The 2000s web was the web of pages: personal homepages, forum websites, and blogs proliferated in the first half of the decade. It was the Web 2.0. era, when it seemed the Web would be social first and foremost, and filled with user-generated content second. After 2005, however, sociality and user-generated content increasingly became the business of (social media) platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. The story of the 2000s web is the story of this transition from pages to platforms.
This module focuses on the early 2000s web: its now-quaint aesthetics and its emergent corporate politics. The resources below combine archives of surviving web content with scholarship on its social and commercial life.
Watch
Annotated bibliography
2000s Annotated Bibliography ⇓ Download as PDF
■ Archives
While the Internet Archive preserves many different kinds of materials, the Wayback Machine’s enormous archive of web pages is perhaps its crown jewel. The archive contains crawled web pages from 1996 to the present, but it has extremely limited search capacity. To make use of its riches, you will need to find URLs first.
This is a hobbyist archive of Geocities, a platform service that allowed users to create their own web pages. It has almost no search capacity; the most efficient way to find pages is to search for “neighborhoods” dedicated to a particular theme, in a trial-and-error process.
The real task before researchers interested in the early 2000s web is to find URLs. Google prioritizes recent results; this search engine offers the option to not show the first 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000, or million results of a given query. This makes it possible to search more deeply and find older, less well-established web pages, including those that have not been updated since the early 2000s.
Another way to find URLs to feed to the Wayback Machine is to use this search engine, which only queries web pages that are formatted and designed the way web pages in the late 1990s and early 2000s were. Its aim is to counter the search-and-answer character of the contemporary internet and reconnect users with the “real joy” of finding web pages they did not know they wanted to find.
This service presents a more labor-intensive but potentially very effective way to find URLs. Set the crawler loose on a web page or web pages, and it produces a list (and a networked graph) of all the pages linked to by the starting page(s). This quickly generates large lists of URLs and works well with networked web pages, such as blogs, but be warned: if the web page contains too many built-in links (think: a “share to Twitter” button), the list the Issuecrawler produces will not be as meaningful.
■ Scholarship
Ankerson, Megan Sapnar. Dot-Com Design: The Rise of a Usable, Social, Commercial Web.
New York: NYU Press, 2018.
This is a book about the 1990s web that explains why the web of the early 2000s looked and felt the way it did. Drawing on design theory and media studies, it makes sense of the years after 1995, when the dotcom bubble gathered steam and the web became increasingly navigable and exploitable thanks to design innovations. The final chapter explicitly reflects on the 2000–2005 period as the time when these 1990s developments came to fruition.
Brügger, Niels. The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023.
This book reflects on the web as a site for historical scholarship. Its chapters present characteristics of the online web significant for scholars, investigate how and to what effect the online web became the archived web, and explore how the particular digitality of the archived web can affect a historian’s research process. Scholars looking to quickly find their way will find chapters 4 and 6, which lay out the different scales of analysis and where different kinds of materials can be located, especially helpful.
Dijck, José van. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013.
This history of social media traces the movement from amateur-driven community platforms to the large corporations of the 2010s. Focused on five major platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia — the book traces the rise of “sociality” as a primary characteristic of the World Wide Web in the post-2005 period. The introduction is particularly helpful in its overview of the historical shift from a decentralized and nonhierarchical web to the social media platform as a global information and data mining company.
Frank-Wilson, Marion. “The Preservation of African Websites as Historical Sources.”
In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.690
This article reflects on the archiving of African websites. Efforts to preserve and archive African web contents as historical resources have been relatively few and sporadic. This essay underlines that durable and effective archiving of African websites will depend on collaborative relationships between historians and librarians and strong partnerships with African stakeholders.
Helmond, Anne. “A Historiography of the Hyperlink: Periodizing the Web through the Changing Role of the Hyperlink.”
In The SAGE Handbook of Web History, edited by Niels Brügger and Ian Milligan, 227–41. London: SAGE Publications, 2019.
The hyperlink was crucial to the rise of the World Wide Web. This chapter uses the development of the hyperlink to periodize web history, defining three episodes: early hypertext systems, the World Wide Web as dependent on the hyperlink to become navigable, and the era of search engines that use hyperlinks as a measurement of relevance. The chapter ultimately theorizes the development of the hyperlink as a window onto the commercialization of the web in the first decade of the 2000s.
Hillis, Ken, Michael Petit, and Kylie Jarrett. Google and the Culture of Search.
New York: Routledge, 2013.
This is a media-theoretical exploration of the famous search engine’s cultural heft. Chapter 1, “Growing Up Google,” offers a fine-grained historical overview of Google’s rise to almost complete market control. The contemporary culture of search is inextricably bound up with a metaphysical longing to manage, order, and categorize all knowledge, and the chapters trace an increasingly networked culture in which search technology could become, by 2010, perhaps the site of knowledge and power.
Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture.
New York: New York University Press, 2013.
This book outlines what marketing and advertising professionals thought the internet had become by the end of the 2000s. On what came to be called Web 2.0, every user participated: by sharing or by creating content themselves. This book makes sense of this development by contrasting “stickiness” — aggregating attention in centralized places — with “spreadability” — dispersing content widely through both formal and informal networks. In this age, the authors argue, participation is the greatest good.
John, Nicholas A. “Sharing.”
In Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture, edited by Benjamin Peters, 269–77. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
This article considers the great optimism about the internet’s effect on society that characterized the early 2000s. It analyzes the emergence and development of the word “sharing” in forty-four different social media network sites from 1999 to 2010, revealing a trend from the specific to the far more general. Sharing is the constitutive activity of Web 2.0, bearing the promise that today’s network and mobile technologies — because they make it easier for us and encourage us to share extensively — will bring about a better world.
Kim, Jin. “The Institutionalization of YouTube: From User-Generated Content to Professionally Generated Content.”
Media, Culture & Society 34, no. 1 (2012): 53–67.
This article examines the institutionalization of YouTube, i.e. its transformation from a user-generated content website into a professionally-generated content video site. This development of institutionalization is inseparable from Google’s purchase of the platform in 2005. The article considers whether the emancipatory promise attributed to user-generated media ought to be rethought in light of the technological and economic constraints at work in YouTube’s 2000s development.
Mackinnon, Katie. “The Death of GeoCities: Seeking Destruction and Platform Eulogies in Web Archives.”
Internet Histories 6, no. 1–2 (2022): 237–52.
This article attends to GeoCities, once one of the most popular platforms on the web. GeoCities blossomed in the second half of the 1990s and declined over the course of the 2000s after Yahoo’s 1999 purchase of the company. This article focuses on “platform eulogies” posted by users who mourned the platform and articulated the reasons for its decline, preserved in different web archives and offering insights into the corporate and social tensions that led GeoCities from paradigmatic example of creative self-expression to near total non-use.
Peters, John Durham. “God and Google.”
In The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, 315–76. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
This media-philosophical exploration of Google connects the company’s services to much older dreams of perfect maps, complete libraries, and absolute knowledge. The chapter makes a twofold argument: first, that Google provides an essentially logistical service — it does not contain all knowledge, it just connects subjects and objects efficiently; and second, building on the first, that omniscience is unavoidably patchy. Google, representative of our “storage-crazy moment,” would do well to remember that loss and forgetting, incompleteness and slippage, are essential.
Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
This book was one of the first to consider the downsides of Web 2.0’s participatory possibilities: trolling. In its first seven chapters, this book tracks how trolling went from a subcultural form of humor on 4chan in the first half of the 2000s to the purposeful destabilizing of mainstream news media by the second half. The book’s main argument is that trolling is not deviant — trolls’ actions are born and fueled by culturally sanctioned impulses and do not differ meaningfully from sensationalist corporate media.
Sreberny, Annabelle, and Gholam Khiabany. Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
This book about early 2000s blogging in Iran serves as a prelude to scholarship about the Arab Spring and social media organizing. Is the internet an agent of social change; a place where a culture of dissidence can blossom? This book contrasts the state’s exercise of control over the Iranian internet with the actual state of blogging, both within Iran and in the English-speaking diaspora, and considers how the 2009 protests underlined that the internet was changing things in ways neither the government nor the democracy movement anticipated.
Weber, Marc. “Browsers and Browser Wars.”
In The SAGE Handbook of Web History, edited by Niels Brügger and Ian Milligan, 270–96. London: SAGE Publications, 2019.
This chapter traces the history of the browser: software that made the internet as easy to use as online services had proven to be. It offers a detailed and accessible explanation of the World Wide Web’s beginnings, with the browser as a crucial final development. The so-called browser wars of the 1990s — between Netscape and Internet Explorer, or Internet Explorer and Firefox — were a struggle over the internet’s future. The outcome of these battles made the early 2000s web what it was.
Webster, Peter. “Existing Web Archives.”
In The SAGE Handbook of Web History, edited by Niels Brügger and Ian Milligan, 30–41. London: SAGE Publications, 2019.
This chapter presents an overview of web archiving as it stood in the late 2010s, distinguishing between the Internet Archive as a non-profit, national libraries subject to government priorities, and smaller issue-specific archiving initiatives. The chapter introduces different crawlers used for web archiving and connects these technical characteristics to the overall structures of the archives they make possible, underlining that search — now the primary mode of online engagement — is still not a possibility in working with these historical resources.
■ Miscellaneous
This 1997 “Moms on the Net” video special is not just funny in its corniness, but also offers a remarkably thorough explanation of what the internet is (compared to online services) and how it might be used in the years ahead.
This essay uses the rise and fall of America Online, the most popular online service provider in the era of “static” web pages, to ask whether the social media giants buoyed by Web 2.0 are not repetitions of these early “walled gardens.”
This article chronicles highs and lows in the career of Heather Armstrong, the most famous “mommy blogger” of the early 2000s, an era when blogs about the realities of motherhood seemed the pinnacle of the genre. Her trajectory reflects the transition from the static written web page to the interactive and commercial Web 2.0 “influencer.”