Below is my response to an email thread on a mailing list I’ve been on since 1995. I didn’t include any list discussion by others, as a matter of principle. I think one can make sense of it without that context, but let me know, if I’m wrong.

What’s sobering to me is all this utilitarian and ends justify the means thinking.  All unsolicited mail is spam, especially when it’s selling something,  and some regard it as an intrusion of market forces into spaces reserved for other kinds of communication. Others think it’s no big deal, or have no idea what a space outside the market might be.

That’s fine and fair enough. I understand people have different views. But, puh-lease don’t assume those whose views get in the way of your plans (however noble those plans) are simply cranks, or mere minorities in “modern American life”.

There’s a whole Net culture for whom spamming is socially unacceptable behavior. This culture has particularly strong pockets in academia (N.B.:university spam filters are some of the strongest out there). I was raised in that culture and though I’m happy for those who’ve succeeded in email campaigns, and even considered one myself, I just haven’t been able to get around ye olde-timey net.values.

It’s not a question of whether spam works. It’s a principle of how to use email as a channel, not unlike discussions of how to use the members list, and when to take discussions elsewhere, such as Ning, a privately held company which adds me to it’s data mine field as the price of admission to the channel.

Send unsolicited mail (i.e., spam), if you feel you have to to survive, but what going on in all this froth of communication isn’t just noise. Deeper issues are involved and my goal is writing this is to point them out.

Last weekend I spent some time working to restore part of the Cyborganic archive that went down when oz.cyborganic.org died in April 2008. Aimee Cardwell had been asking after the TND Dispatches, so I decided to get an idea of how much grepping and schlepping it would take to get images and main links working for just that part of the Cyborganic site.

Though these things are never the quick look-see one intends, it was pretty simple to correct/revise broken URL paths. However, I came away with a much thornier sense of all the decisions involved in doing a complete restoration of the site for real (including decisions about what for real means).

Do you work to restore all the serverside includes and scripts, including slideshows done with cgis? Do you re-implement same/similar functionality with current wares? Do you leave broken links to pages outside the Cyborganic site as they were because the original path, broken or not, is itself the data in the context of an archive? Just what I needed, a host of complex techno-philosophic decisions to get to before diving into the archive data that’s been sitting on my PC for almost a year!

I’m hoping some of you will read some of the dissertation. I realize that’s asking a lot. It’s a huge, academic document. You’re busy. It has many parts. You might be interested in some (but which?). So, I prepared a short chapter guide to show where the goodies are and a slideshow (it’s bigger in the guide) to entice you to read, baby, read!

Communities of Innovation: Cyborganic and the Birth of Networked Social Media is now available for download (PDF, 5.7 MB). I am especially eager to share my dissertation with the many Cyborganics who participated in the research, sharing their stories and insights. For those who prefer a quick synopsis to the 420-page version, I offer the following diagram and abstract.

Abstract
Communities of Innovation: Cyborganic and the Birth of Networked Social Media

Cyborganic, the subject of this study, was a community whose members brought Wired magazine online; launched Hotwired, the first ad-supported online magazine; set-up Web production for CNET; led the open source Apache project; and staffed and started dozens of other Internet firms and projects—from Craig’s List to Organic Online—during the first phase of the Web’s development as a popular platform (1993-1999).

As a conscious project to build a hybrid community both online and on-ground, Cyborganic’s central premise was that mediated and face-to-face interaction are mutually sustaining and can be used together to build uniquely robust communities. Yet, Cyborganic was also an Internet start-up and the business project provided both impetus and infrastructure for the community. The social forms and cultural practices developed in this milieu figured in the initial development of Web publishing, and prefigured Web 2.0 in online collaboration, collective knowledge creation, and social networking.

The objectives of this dissertation are several. The first is to demonstrate the role of Cyborganic in the innovation and adoption of networked social media through an ethnographic case study of the group, showing it as exemplary of the regional and cultural advantage of “technopoles,” and as precursor to contemporary phenomena of online social networking. The second objective is to interrogate the relation between entrepreneurial and utopian practices and social imaginaries in the Cyborganic project, identifying not only their synergies, but also their tensions. Finally, my third objective is to ground celebratory and utopian discourses of new media genealogically, showing that the social media heralded today as “revolutionary” grew from earlier media and practices, similarly hailed as revolutionary in their day. Rather than representing rupture with the past, the narrative of social revolution through technologies is a cultural legacy passed through generations already, and one that draws on quintessentially American attitudes and practice.

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