[interview with Paolo Bory]
#interview, March 27, 2025
In February, Anya and Nathalie had the chance to visit CERN—the birthplace of the web—for ECREA’s Communication History Section workshop, Communication Networks Before and After the Web: Historical and Long-term Perspectives. Given that Matter of Imagination explores the imaginaries within the history of computer networks, we found ourselves in exactly the right place for two and a half days of engaging presentations, conversations, tours, and encounters. We used this opportunity to speak with some of the scholars shaping the field of Communication History, capturing their insights in a mini-series we—admittedly a bit cornily—call CERN Convos. This blog post is the first in that series.
Our first CERN conversation was with Paolo Bory, researcher whose work critically examines the processes of semiotisation (narratives, myths, metaphors) within internet histories and beyond. In his book “The Internet Myth: From the Internet Imaginary to Network Ideologies” (2020), Bory challenges the popular narrative of the internet as a utopian force for connection and empowerment. Currently, Bory is an Assistant Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano where he is leading a project funded by the Italian Research Fund that focuses on augmented reality, continuing his exploration of how narratives shape our understanding of emerging technologies.
Our conversation with Paolo took place on the first day of the workshop—Anya had just arrived and we were seated at the ‘not very colorful’ (straight out of the Big Bang theory set) CERN canteen. Still, we managed to have an inspiring talk about Bory’s work on the narratives surrounding AI, his book The Internet Myth, and how he frames networks as a form that hope for societal change can have. We also explored the Italian tradition within Communication History and Science and Technology Studies (STS), with its strong interpretive and historical traditions and emphasis on local histories.
~ ~ ~
ANYA: Your work has explored the historical construction of metaphors and narratives around technology. In 2020 you have published a book “The Internet Myth: From the Internet Imaginary to Network Ideologies”, exploring a particular narrative surrounding two Italian internet projects, Socrate and Iperbole. After the book you have shifted to the research on imaginaries of what is called AI. Do you see your current focus on AI imaginaries as a continuation of your earlier research on internet history, or are you approaching it as a distinct topic with different dynamics?
PAOLO: I think they are quite different in how their metaphors and narratives have been constructed. I’m also trying to understand the big narratives promoted by CEOs like Sam Altman—how he describes the future of AI and the imaginaries surrounding it. For example, in his interviews, Altman compares the AI revolution more to the industrial revolution than to the internet revolution. So, there are two parallel things happening: the network myth, which in my opinion is slowing down, and AI, which is framed more in relation to industry and mass production. I don’t see continuity between them. They are quite different in terms of subject matter, and AI is presented as something natural rather than as a connective medium.
ANYA: Could you explain what you mean by "natural" here?
PAOLO: AI is depicted as an alter ego or even a new species rather than as infrastructure. In some cases, it is framed as an independent entity rather than as a system that connects social groups. There is also a convergence of two narratives. For example, when we talk about the Internet of Things, it’s about non-humans connecting with each other.
"The major players in the tech industry study history and use it strategically to promote themselves, but they apply different historical narratives for different purposes. AI is increasingly being distanced from the imaginaries of the internet as we know them."
ANYA: How does methodology come into play here? You developed a compelling framework and set of concepts in your work on internet history—have you carried that over to your research on AI, or did you need to adjust or even reinvent it to account for the differences in materials and categories?
PAOLO: For me, it feels like a game—I have to say. I’m always searching for the best frameworks and theories from different disciplines that can be applied to the studied material. For example, in one of my papers on AlphaGo, I drew on theories from the sociology of play and games. Now, we can also think about the domestication of technology as a kind of game—something we engage with to understand and test new technologies. I didn’t use this framework when studying the history of the internet, but I think it could apply, for example, to early virtual communities and how they interacted with technology in a playful way. Some key thinkers I’ve always relied on—like Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur, the classics in the sociology of imaginaries—are still central to my analysis of AI. But I adapt my approach depending on the specific technology I’m studying.
ANYA: In your book, you combine historical methods with rhetorical approaches that feel rooted in critical media studies, particularly towards the end of the book, where you argue for the need to criticize the “network ideology” and to search for alternative ways of thinking about societal change. How do you see this combination? Do you view history as a way to critically engage with present-day processes?
PAOLO: I’ve always felt that when discussing the boundary between history and what one can call critical social studies, collaboration is essential. We need historians who focus on history without feeling pressured to also be critical scholars of contemporary technological developments. At the same time, we need critical scholars who at least acknowledge the historical paths that have shaped technology’s current state. I see myself as the latter. I like being a historian, but I don’t want to stay within the historian’s ivory tower. I also focus on imaginaries because, for me, the concept provides the ideal framework for navigating this dual role—studying narratives to understand where we are now while also examining how past narratives shape the construction of future ones.
ANYA: I’m curious whether you see yourself as part of a particular tradition in how you analyse imaginaries. When compiling a bibliography on internet imaginaries, metaphors, and myths for MoI, we noticed a strong influence on the field from Sheila Jasanoff and related STS tradition. But there are also many other perspectives, including significant contributions from Italy—like works of Gabriele Balbi, Simone Natale, and your own work. Do you see yourself aligned with a specific tradition that emerged in Italian scholarship? I am thinking of how, for example, in Germany studies of ideas are inevitably shaped by ideology critique (Ideologiekritik) or Begriffsgeschichte, just because those approaches were formulated there.
PAOLO: I see a kind of polarisation in how different research traditions study and interpret imaginaries. In my opinion, Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim’s framework has really pushed the idea that imaginaries are mainly about the future—about expectations and projections of what’s to come. They do mention the cultural landscape in which these imaginaries are formed, and how that shapes certain visions of the future, but only briefly. The problem with this approach is that history isn’t treated as a key element of analysis.
PAOLO: On the other hand, historical perspectives tend to focus on past imaginaries but sometimes forget all the thinkers who were already discussing imaginaries in the early 20th century. So, you end up with a kind of self-referential loop where certain frameworks are built without fully engaging with earlier theoretical work. Personally, I like to pull from different disciplines, and I think historians should make more of an effort to do this too.
PAOLO: Another issue, for me, is the question of power in academia. Sheila Jasanoff, for example, is a big name, and that kind of influence can dominate how imaginaries are discussed—especially as STS keeps growing globally as a discipline. I’m not against STS at all; I’m part of that world, especially in Italy, where it’s a really strong and welcoming community. But sometimes, the way academic power works forces people to reference certain frameworks just because they’re dominant. I’d rather see the field remain more open, with multiple perspectives coexisting rather than one approach taking over.
NATHALIE: That’s an interesting distinction, and it’s something we’ve discussed a lot as well. Socio-technical imaginaries can be a useful starting point, but as you said—and as I also wrote in a blog post—they are very future-focused. That’s why I drew on your work, as well as Balbi’s, to bring in a stronger sense of periodisation. It’s great to hear that you’ve also recognised this distinction.
PAOLO: There are some alternative approaches, like techno-scientific imaginaries, media imaginaries, and network imaginaries. One of the challenges with using the socio-technical imaginaries framework—since it comes from STS—is that STS tends to focus heavily on the materiality of technology, on non-human actors and their pragmatic role in everyday life. As a result, it often sidelines other aspects of imaginary construction, particularly those linked to fantasy, fiction, and narrative-building.
ANYA: I feel is that Kim and Jasanoff tried to write a theory that should be operational, transferable between all kinds of cases that one can then compare. And what I really enjoy in reading your works but also works of for example, Gabriele Balbi and Simone Natale, is how much your works are based in the interpretative tradition where every case requires its own vocabulary, its own collage of approaches that come together.
PAOLO: Thank you, that sounds about right. I know Gabrielle and Simone—we work together, and it’s great to combine our different approaches. We also have a “maestro” in common, Peppino Ortoleva, an influential historian who has always combined different sources and frameworks teaching us to “open all the windows” of our cultural landscape to see new landscapes, but also to ask new questions. Gabriele is the strongest historian in the group; he always encourages us to focus on finding the right sources and understanding how they can speak to us. Simone, on the other hand, is more focused on drawing inspiration from other perspectives, often introducing theoretical frameworks from disciplines I hadn’t considered before—like corporate communication for instance. In that case we collaborated on a piece about corporate determinism and we borrowed concepts from corporate communication strategies that I wasn’t even aware of before.
PAOLO: That interpretative flexibility (if we want to use an STS term) is essential when studying the relationship between media and imaginaries, as well as different communities and cultures. The challenge isn’t just studying technology itself, but technology as it is situated in specific contexts. How do we read a particular technology within its own cultural and historical setting? This is why I find the focus on national and local histories so important. For me, studying Italy was a great example. When I interviewed people, I realised that their mindset, metaphors, and way of interpreting networks were completely different from the dominant narratives we often see in books about the history of the internet, particularly those focused on the US.
ANYA: We are really interested in this approach to local histories, which is something we see more and more in internet history research. Still, in your book The Internet Myth, I wasn’t entirely sure what you see as a local history and what is bigger than that. Do you see network ideologies as inherently multiple and nation-specific, or if you’re arguing that internet myths vary across national histories while network ideology itself remains more or less the same. Could you clarify how you distinguish between these layers?
PAOLO: I would say the second. The narratives and imaginaries of specific networks differ from the broader network ideology as I define it in the book—meaning the idea that the network is a means to achieve something. Pierre Musso, whose framework I draw on, links the network ideology to the figure of the engineer in the 19th and 20th century. Engineering has shaped our imaginaries in a way that standardized this belief in the network as the ultimate solution for everything—that’s the ideology.
PAOLO: However, the content of the network imaginaries can be quite different in different cases. In the book, I discuss an Italian case where the ideal network wasn’t the distributed model we often associate with the web. Instead, the network was seen as a vertical means to support the infrastructural development of the country. This contrasts with how the web was conceptualised at CERN, where the focus was on a distributed model of networking. However, while the imaginaries of the network structures differed, the underlying ideology remained the same.
ANYA: Could you elaborate on what you mean by the content of a network? I really like that phrasing—it made me think of Susan Leigh Star’s concept of infrastructure. She briefly mentions that infrastructures can be analysed as narratives but never fully develops the idea. Your point reminded me of that. So, what exactly constitutes the content of a network? Is it its design, the ideas surrounding it, or a combination of both?
PAOLO: No, I think we should separate them. I see two kinds of network hopes.
"On the one hand, there are networks that are created as a means to achieve a specific goal—whether that goal is tied to values, politics, community organisation, or globalisation. There can be multiple ambitions behind a network hope. On the other hand, there are cases where the network itself is the hope."
ANYA: Network for the sake of the network?
PAOLO: Yes, in this case, the realisation of the network is the hope itself, without the complex layers of cultural structures, values, or goals behind it. This is especially evident when analysing Zuckerberg’s interviews and how he describes the metaverse and the future of networks. Here, the ultimate goal is to turn us all into nodes—where nodes are not devices, but our own bodies. I recently read an interview where he compares bodies, nodes, and atoms, suggesting that we will become the atoms of this new network. But from a sociological perspective, atomisation is generally seen as negative—it’s actually the opposite of most past network hopes.
ANYA: It raises a methodological problem. When researching how ideas about digital technologies spread, we have to consider how the industry itself is structured. Tech companies—especially giants—have large marketing teams,engineers, programmers, and CEOs who all can have different narratives. And marketing narratives can differ from those actually used internally by people developing the technology. So, when we study imaginaries, aren’t we at risk of just analysing marketing rhetoric rather than the broader picture?
PAOLO: Yes, we do end up studying marketing, and that is a problem. For example, I’m applying for a grant to research AI imaginaries among computer engineers in higher education institutions. That part of the narrative is often missing. We should focus more on how the people who actually make these technologies imagine them—both in terms of their potential and their risks—not just from a historical perspective, but by actively engaging with their perspectives today.
PAOLO: We pay a lot of attention to the media and big CEOs, but we overlook the workforce behind them. Studying this retrospectively is challenging—you can interview older professionals or find textual sources. But when studying emerging technologies, it’s also about creating historical sources for the future. I think that’s crucial, and I completely agree that we’re missing a significant part of the picture.
ANYA: That was a deliberately provocative question. I’ve mainly studied marketing ideas myself, so it’s also a form of self-critique. Together with Gabriele de Seta, I co-wrote an article on stock images and how Chinese companies use them to represent machine vision technologies. I have to say, many of them are incredibly simplistic, and we struggled with how to analyse these quite silly imaginaries. How do we take them seriously, and why? How do we justify studying silly things? I don’t have a good answer beyond the fact that they are fascinatigly weird.
PAOLO: As Susan Leigh Star said, we should study the boring things, but also simple that looks, only at a first glance, “simple”.
NATHALIE: You mentioned that when we study imaginaries, we focus on the media, big CEOs, and the workforce. But what about everyday users? Should the vernacular be part of that analysis?
PAOLO: Another distinction that is important to me is the difference between collective and individual imaginaries. This is becoming a growing area of interpretation, especially after Tania Bucher’s work on the algorithmic imaginary, which explores how individuals develop their own imaginaries of technology through everyday use and interaction.
PAOLO: But I see this as something different. It’s difficult to trace a collective imaginary by studying every individual’s perception of technology. Of course, we can identify shared views, and that’s important, but we also can’t study everything. Any approach will inevitably capture only part of how an imaginary is constructed in a specific context.
PAOLO: What matters, then, is building connections between scholars who focus on different areas and contexts—not just coming together at conferences like this, but also finding ways to extend that collaboration beyond these spaces.
ANYA: You mean to the practitioners?
PAOLO: *laughs* To the world in general! I have the feeling that sometimes we talk with ourselves and that is the part of the action that we should take to be useful.
ANYA: But to whom do you think we should talk?
PAOLO: The big area of stakeholders. The media. We also need to convince the media and journalists that history can be used in a catchy way. Practitioners too, like performative arts or fiction. But it's a huge effort.
ANYA: It reminds me of your last chapter, where you suggest looking to countercultural movements and underground groups for alternative imaginaries or challenges to network ideology. Why do you think these spaces are key?
PAOLO: To find new ways of imagining things, to avoid getting stuck in a single mindset or workflow—to imagine something else. I really believe that diversity is the only way to create new imaginaries. Looking at the current situation, I think small groups, including marginal ones, could be a source of new imaginaries in the future. And honestly, by the end of the book, I was so tired of talking about networks that I didn’t want to anymore laughs. This network ideology thing became a kind of obsession, we need new ideas rather than new ideologies.
~ ~ ~
To cite this interview: Bory, P., Fridzema, N., & Shchetvina, A. (2025, March 27). How do we read a particular technology within its own cultural and historical setting? [Interview with Paolo Bory]. Matter of Imagination. https://matterofimagination.neocities.org/blog8
Do you have any critique, response essay pitches, general comments, or (literature) suggestions after reading of this interview? Do not hesitate to get in touch with us!