[interview with Kevin Driscoll]
#interview, April 29, 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. 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 second and final one.
For our second conversation we met Kevin Driscoll ― a historian of the internet, now an Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Kevin is an author of two exceptional books, The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media (2022) and Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (co-authored with Julien Mailland, 2017), and a whole library of articles on the history of hobbyist networking, Bulletin Board Systems and collective memory of internet’s past.
We met Kevin after the long three conference days, our heads still a bit buzzing from all the information on undersea cables, first Web branding strategies, Dutch, Polnish, Danish and other web histories, and many more topics we were happy to dive into during this time. We found a cozy spot in the Big Bang Cafe (yes, from the TV series), to take a break over a cup of coffee, and ask Kevin about his way into the history of networks, the role of imaginaries in his work, and his critical and gentle approach to the narratives of whether the internet was better before.
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NATHALIE: How did you end up working with network history; was there something in particular that drew you to it, or was it more of a gradual shift from other interests?
KEVIN: I didn’t originally plan to do historical research—my PhD was in communication, and I was focused more on protocols and the kinds of claims people made about how network structures could produce broader social effects. At one point, as part of a class project, I started looking into UUCP, the early protocol used by Usenet, and FidoNet, which was used for exchanging mail. It was quite exploratory—I assumed I’d be able to find a book at the library on BBSs, but that book didn’t seem to exist. That absence made me think there might be a research project there.
What really pulled me further into historical work was the influence of media historians, especially those working in film and television. There are clear parallels—particularly with broadcasting—where so much of what you're trying to study is ephemeral. You're constantly circling around traces, trying to find evidence of something that often isn’t neatly archived.
NATHALIE: On your website you distinguish between an interest in political discourse and popular computing. I'm curious—do these areas overlap at all, or do they somehow inform one another?
KEVIN: Yes, there’s definitely some overlap between the two. My interest in the historical side of things actually grew out of noticing how political discussions around the internet often rely on a very narrow understanding of its histories. So while I’m not currently very active on the ‘political talk’ side, there’s certainly crossover between the two areas.
NATHALIE: I think you also said yesterday (during the conference dinner) that Internet History is not really a demarcated field in the US. Do you think this will come, will it become a discipline eventually? At the end, you have the Internet Archive, which is such a significant institution for what we do. For me, as a European early career scholar, you have these clear, established fields there. But you say that it is still pretty dispersed?
KEVIN: That really gets at a bigger question—how do you define a field? Is it by shared methods, theories, archives, or something else? At some point during my research, I became more aware of the history of technology as an established field, with its own journals, conferences, mailing lists—all the infrastructure that signals a recognized discipline.
But when it came to internet history specifically, it felt much more scattered. I remember as a graduate student, I was constantly trying to figure out where my work might belong. I’d submit to various conferences, often getting rejections, and I wasn’t always sure whether that was down to the proposals themselves or simply a mismatch with the audience. It felt a bit like auditioning—trying out different spaces to see what would stick.
There are definitely communities of scholars working on internet histories, but they’re spread across disciplines. It’s not something that exists as a standalone department, at least not in the US. So there’s a range—it’s happening, but not in a clearly demarcated way.
There are a few key hubs—for example, the Charles Babbage Institute is quite central when it comes to the history of computing. If you look at their site, you can see how many scholars have come through on fellowships. But with the Internet Archive, it’s a bit different. It’s incredibly valuable for academic research, but it isn’t really embedded in academic structures in the same way.
Some of the most important work that draws on or contributes to the Internet Archive actually comes from outside academia. My own research has relied heavily on the efforts of people who aren't working within universities—whether it’s individual collectors, enthusiasts running personal archiving projects, or even people selling old tech or documents on eBay.
So with anything that has a strong grassroots or cultural dimension, there's always this tension between where the work is happening and where the institutional support sits. It’s not very tightly organised, even if the resources and networks are there.
NATHALIE: That connects to something I’ve been meaning to ask—since so much of your work depends on archives that others have built and put significant effort into, especially for more recent history, how do you usually approach a project? Do you begin with a specific research question and then look for sources, or do you start with what's available in the archive and shape your questions around that? I'm thinking particularly of your work with text files.
KEVIN: I actually got a full mirror of textfiles.com early on in my project—Jason Scott, who created it and now works at the Internet Archive, is a friend. So in that sense, I had direct access and could work quite systematically with certain parts of the collection. For instance, I read through the FidoNews newsletter chronologically. But then there were also large batches of other materials—zines, chat logs, various dumps—that I’d browse or search more casually. That part of the process felt closer to traditional archival research, where you stumble across things serendipitously.
But overall, I haven’t really had the kind of experience where you define your question first, then identify the archive, travel there, and work through it within a set timeframe. It’s been more about living with the material—having it close at hand, spending time with it over a longer stretch. That has its benefits, like not feeling rushed to grab everything at once, but it also means there’s no clear boundary to the work.
You can easily slip into a collector’s mindset, wanting to gather every last document or magazine issue. What’s helped is treating the archive more as a collaborator, rather than trying to build or own it myself. That way, you don’t take on the burden of preservation as part of the research process.
NATHALIE: My supervisor often refers to it as an exploratory media-archival method—you don’t really know what’s out there until you start digging. And coming from more structured traditions in media studies, I found that really difficult at first. There’s just so much material, and I kept wondering: when do I stop? When is it enough?
How did you handle that while writing the Modem World? Was there a point where you felt, “Okay, now I can write a book,” or was it more of a simultaneous process, where the writing and the research unfolded together?
KEVIN: Part of writing the book, to be honest, was quite practical—I had a job and needed to publish a book to keep it. That’s a strong motivator. But yes, I definitely recognise that urge, especially coming out of grad school, to want a clearly defined project: a neat research question, a clear scope, and a straightforward path from start to finish.
Sometimes that works on a smaller scale. There were parts of the Modem World project that felt more contained, where I could pursue a question systematically. One example was wanting to understand how bulletin boards were distributed across area codes in North America. That led to a whole series of practical sub-questions—like when did different area codes come into use, who administered them, could I speak to anyone involved, could I match that with historical lists of BBS numbers? That became its own kind of mini-project within the larger book.
But more broadly, I’d say that writing itself became part of the methodology. I often found that I had to write in order to figure out what I actually thought. So it wasn’t a clean before-and-after, with all the research done up front. It was much more iterative—writing to think, and then returning to the archival material with new questions.
NATHALIE: In your final chapter, you include this very nice section about your students encountering the early web and BBSs for the first time. You mention how they often come away with a somewhat idealised view—that it was all very utopian or welcoming. We (as in MoI) have been thinking about how the amateur or vernacular web is increasingly becoming a kind of imaginary in itself, one that’s often used to critique the present-day internet. Do you recognise that dynamic? And if those nostalgic interpretations aren’t always historically accurate, does that matter?
KEVIN: I teach a course called Comparative Histories of the Internet, and it ran alongside the period I was writing the book—so the two really informed each other. Often, I’d be thinking through ideas with my students in mind: how they might respond, what they’d find surprising or confusing, and that would shape how I ended up framing them in the book.
The course was meant to explore alternative histories of the internet, on the assumption that students had at least some sense of the dominant ARPANET-centred narrative. But in practice, they often didn’t. So we’d start with that, briefly, and then move on to lesser-known or marginal stories. That in itself reflects a broader trend in writing about online history:
The things we have access to are often exceptional—radical communities, activist groups, subcultures that documented themselves unusually well. What’s missing is often the mundane, everyday experience of the early internet—the boring parts, like checking email at work. That’s much harder to write about, but it’s actually the majority of what was going on.
One semester, I tried to focus more on ‘walled garden’ platforms like AOL and CompuServe. But most of the readings available centred on queer communities in those spaces, and understandably so—those were socially rich, politically charged contexts. Still, because there's so little documented about those platforms overall, students came away with the impression that these platforms were mostly radical, artsy, queer spaces. That’s not entirely wrong, but it’s far from the whole picture.
In writing the book, I was trying to think carefully about how and why we focus on the more utopian or imaginative parts of internet history. There’s value in highlighting them—they challenge the assumption that the internet we have now was somehow inevitable. It wasn’t. Things have been organised in vastly different ways before. It’s easy to slip into a kind of nostalgia, especially for the “small web”—imagining an internet of today’s scale, but with the infrastructure and intimacy of the past. That’s not really how it was. In the early days, being online was often a solitary or fringe activity. Many people were the only ones in their social circles using bulletin boards or dial-up systems, and that shaped how they experienced it—often as something separate from everyday life.
One of the challenges, both in research and in teaching, is addressing the sheer change in scale. The number of people online now is incomparable to 10 or 30 years ago. Most internet users today have no memory of a pre-smartphone internet, and that fundamentally shifts the terms of engagement. So part of the task is not just documenting the past, but finding ways to communicate how different it really was—without collapsing into idealisation.
NATHALIE: I agree—it’s great when students feel inspired by internet histories to question or critique the current state of things. That kind of historical perspective can be really powerful. But yes, I also share that unease. The early internet wasn’t perfect, and there’s a risk of flattening it into something purely utopian. It’s important to hold on to the complexity.
KEVIN: Absolutely. Trolling and abuse were present from the very beginning—none of that is new. And a lot of early online spaces were quite unprepared to handle it. Moderation was often unsophisticated, if it existed at all. Some people were genuinely thinking about how to build inclusive communities, but many simply weren’t engaging with those questions, or were experimenting with models based on the idea that everyone should be free to speak their mind equally. The issue, of course, is that those “everyone”s were operating in far more homogenous spaces than what we see online today.
So when nostalgia points towards a return to that earlier moment, I think we have to be clear about what’s actually being longed for. If “going back” means returning to a more homogeneous, less inclusive internet, that’s not something I want to romanticise.
Spaces like Black Twitter or the richness of different TikTok networks represent something incredibly valuable, regardless of the issues with platform economies. I’d rather think about how they could flourish under better conditions, not roll things back. The past can be a useful reminder that the internet has taken different forms—that doesn’t mean we should try to recreate it wholesale.
NATHALIE: Do you think internet historians have a responsibility to resist mythologising the early web—to be clear that the goal isn’t to go back, but to use those histories to imagine better ways forward?
KEVIN: Yes, I do think there’s a responsibility there—but it’s complicated. The myth of the early web is powerful, and stories about the past are often told with the aim of motivating people in the present. So if you’re a historian who cares about having some kind of social impact, I think you need to do both: aim for detailed, accurate history, while also being aware of how narrative works—how certain stories can carry weight and inspire.
That doesn’t mean inventing things, but it does mean starting with an open narrative and then being deliberate about which anecdotes you choose to highlight. I remember a mentor once telling me that if you're writing about an online community of 10,000 people, it really matters which few make it into the final text. Those choices help shape the narrative, whether you mean them to or not.
So I wouldn't say it's a fixed obligation for every internet historian, but we can’t ignore the fact that myth-making is happening all around us. If we step back from it entirely, others will shape those myths for us—and often in ways that flatten or distort the past. Better, I think, to engage critically and consciously, and offer alternatives that are both compelling and grounded.
ANYA: I really like the notion of an open narrative—so we don’t end up treating the development of technologies as something natural or inevitable. But could you reiterate again about why you would say that this approach matters?
KEVIN: In the early 2010s, if I was giving a talk on social media or teaching about it, the starting assumption was generally positive. The prevailing idea was that connecting people online was inherently good or desirable. But over the course of the decade, that assumption more or less reversed. Now, when I walk into a classroom or public talk, the baseline expectation is that social media is harmful—whether it’s making people lonely, fuelling misinformation, or contributing to surveillance.
What’s interesting is that both positions—utopian and dystopian—are rooted in broader cultural beliefs, and they shape how research is received. At a certain point, I realised that documenting those earlier utopian visions was actually really important. Not to romanticise them, but because they still offer something worth considering. Some of those ideals—like open, participatory spaces with flatter hierarchies—might not be achievable everywhere, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth aspiring to in certain contexts.
Teaching really drove that home. My students are deeply familiar with dystopian tech narratives—from Black Mirror to constant news stories about the harms of digital life. But they often haven’t encountered the earlier optimistic visions at all. There’s no contrast for them to reflect against. So I don’t think our task is to offer some naive utopia, but rather to make sure those earlier narratives are visible again—to show that things could have turned out differently.
NATHALIE: Yes, I had quite an odd experience this past year when I had to present my work outside of internet studies. Like you mentioned earlier, you go in assuming people have a shared frame of reference—but that’s not always the case. I was speaking about the amateur web, and someone gave feedback that using the word amateur sounded like I was being judgemental—that I was saying it was less serious, or somehow not good. I was genuinely surprised by that, because within our field, the amateur web is a well-established theoretical concept.
Have you ever had a moment like that, where you presented your work to a different audience and the language or framing meant something completely different to them?
KEVIN: The issue with the word amateur comes up again and again. Within our field, we tend to treat it as a theoretical anchor—linked to concepts like amateur media, amateur technology, all part of a broader cultural and historical discussion. But in common usage, amateur often carries the sense of something second-rate or unpolished—amateurish.
There’s a moment in some of the 1980s FidoNet material where Tom Jennings refers back to amateur radio, and he actually includes a little aside—something like, “amateur, in a good way.” He clearly anticipated that not everyone would read it the way he intended.
ANYA: This word also has a lot of synonyms. Words like amateur, hobbyist, and vernacular. How do you see the difference here?
KEVIN: There is some interesting work in Leisure Studies and Sociology that tries to sort all that out. You get distinctions between amateurs, hobbyists, dabblers, connoisseurs… and in some contexts, those can be quite useful. For instance, a hobbyist often implies someone doing something in their free time, outside of paid work, whereas an amateur can be someone doing very skilled work that’s not necessarily recognised or paid—like amateur athletes, for example. They’re often expected to perform at professional levels, but still sit outside the formal work/leisure divide.
Then you’ve got other terms like tinkerer, which I really like—it suggests a hands-on, experimental approach. But hobbyist also shows up in the primary sources. Before BYTE magazine, Wayne Green compiled a collection of columns from his ham radio publication under the title Hobby Computing Is Here. So hobby computing was already a named thing, and not outside commercial logic either—plenty of people turned their hobbies into side businesses or small shops.
So these terms each bring a slightly different emphasis. But I don’t think the boundaries between them need to be rigid. We don’t have to settle the typology to make the concepts useful.
ANYA: Just thinking out loud, but it strikes me that hobbyist and vernacular tend to imply a creative engagement. Amateur, on the other hand, is more tied to questions of status—whether someone’s seen as equal to a professional or not. That’s interesting in the context of early network history, which we often associate with creativity and experimentation, especially in nostalgic narratives.
NATHALIE: Yes and it plays into the aesthetics as well right. You probably know the Digital Folklore publication; Olia Lialina, one of the authors, had this nice quote on the vernacular web, how it is ‘aesthetically, a very strong past’.
KEVIN: Yes! Olia Lialina’s essays on the vernacular web are so great. In 2019, I heard her give a fantastic talk about tracing the origins of popular animated GIFs that appeared on personal home pages. Despite a stereotype linking teen boys and the early online world, she uncovered a largely overlooked network of women and older people who were producing many of these images. They were a key part of that amateur, often highly creative, web scene, and it really shifts how we think about authorship and labour in those early online spaces.
It reminded me that, even though on a macro level the majority of internet users at the time may have been men, that wasn’t true in all contexts. In this particular creative, highly aesthetic community, women were clearly central. So those broad demographic assumptions don’t necessarily hold when you zoom in—they break down depending on the space, the practice, the context. And that’s exactly what makes these histories so rich to work with.
ANYA: That brings us back to the topic of mundane, everyday aspects of internet history, rather than just the flashier or more niche examples. When we look at things like users’ narratives around BBSs or early computer networks, how do you distinguish between myth-making and something more grounded in practice?
KEVIN: The everyday, mundane aspects are often the ones that don’t get preserved. It’s not something that can be easily solved through interviews either, because many people don’t see their own experiences as particularly significant. I find that folks often refer back to a broader, more common narrative, almost by default. The response is often something like, “Yeah, we used to use dial-up modems, and then we got faster internet,” as if it was just a natural progression. That reinforces the dominant story, but it’s also shaped by having heard that version of events for decades.
In some ways, I think historical work can help people reconnect with earlier expectations or moments of excitement, before their experiences were folded into more routine uses like emailing at work.
NATHALIE: I’ve found it really interesting how you mentioned the everyday and the mundane often aren’t preserved—and that interviews don’t necessarily solve that. I’ve noticed something similar in web archiving, where a lot of the focus is on big events or moments of crisis. Have you ever thought about how we might go about preserving the more ordinary, the mundane or the boring parts of online life? What would it take to do that well?
KEVIN: Oh, that's a great question!
There’s definitely something about the affective, phenomenological experience of being online that’s really difficult to capture—especially things like the sense of time or speed. I was rereading Annette Markham’s Life Online recently, and she talks about that physical experience of sitting at her desk for so long that she felt achy, or noticing that the sun had gone down outside. It’s those small, embodied moments that are so familiar but rarely recorded.
Some early memoir-style accounts of being online do include that kind of detail—descriptions of daily routines, just being there regularly—but they’re few and far between. And the problem with trying to preserve that is that, when you’re living it, you don’t necessarily notice it. It’s just the texture of everyday life, something you take for granted.
Although certain spaces have become almost iconic—the living room with the video game console, or the garage workshop, which plays a huge role in Silicon Valley mythology. These settings get recreated again and again.
NATHALIE: Have metaphors or imaginaries been a prominent theme in your work on the BBSs’ so far? And when you look back at the BBS era, do you see metaphors already playing a significant role there?
KEVIN: The BBS world was so varied and also heavily text-based, so you do find a lot of writing where people are trying to make sense of it all—what it might become. There’s clear evidence of users engaging with broader narratives, like the "Information Society" or other terms circulating at the time. If you look at BYTE magazine, for example, there’s a lot of imagery tied to telecommuting and telework, which shaped how people imagined these technologies fitting into daily life.
In my own work, I’ve approached imaginaries a bit differently—less through metaphor directly, and more through how people's experiences of being online shaped their sense of what was possible or appropriate. If someone has only ever accessed the internet through smartphone apps and platform-driven services, then their sense of what the internet is—what it could be—may be quite limited. I tend to think of imaginaries as spaces of possibility.
If someone lived through different phases—dial-up, broadband, bulletin board systems—they have more varied first-hand experiences to draw on. That gives them a concrete way to say, “this aspect of today’s internet isn’t working for me,” because they’ve seen other ways it could be organised.
When I was writing about bulletin boards, it really struck me how much of the platform era is simply taken for granted—this idea that “scaling” must look a certain way, that internet businesses must be advertising-driven, that people won’t pay for things online. But people did pay, for years.
So I’ve been thinking about imaginaries as the shape of what people believe is possible—what might happen, or what could be different. Metaphors help us talk about that, of course, but for me, the imaginary is more about that underlying structure: what you expect when you go online, and how that’s formed by both personal experience and the stories that circulate around you.
ANYA: Do you think there’s a risk of following imaginaries too uncritically? Since there’s often a gap between what people say and what actually happens, especially in textual sources, how do you approach that tension?
KEVIN: One thing I find really interesting about earlier online systems is how different the scale was, and how scale affects our interpretation of what mattered. Today, we're used to platforms where visibility is measured in metrics—views, likes, shares—and it’s common to hear people say things like, “This video only got 100,000 views,” as if that’s insignificant. But 100,000 is a massive number—especially when you consider that, for a good stretch of time, there weren’t even that many people online with modems. If you had 100,000 people in one place physically, it would be overwhelming. So part of what interests me is how our sense of scale has shifted so dramatically.
That shift really affects how we interpret historical sources. Take something like The WELL—it’s often considered one of the most important early online communities. But even at its peak, it had around 10,000 users. That was seen as large. And if all 10,000 people were somehow active in one discussion thread, it would have been impossible to follow. So when people describe the experience of a flame war or an intense back-and-forth exchange, they might be recalling something that felt all-consuming—but if you could observe that interaction in an archive, it might amount to only a dozen messages exchanged over the course of a week.
What I find compelling is that these small traces—the messages, the logs—don’t always match the intensity or emotional significance people attach to them. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. It just highlights the gap between the archival record and lived experience. So yes, when working with these materials, there’s always a tension between what was said, what was felt, and what actually happened. When relying on textual sources, it’s less about taking everything at face value, and more about understanding the context that made a small interaction feel significant at the time.
NATHALIE: Yes, you really have to be attentive to the design of the systems you're researching. I remember early on struggling to understand why people would post such personal information on their websites. But of course, at the time, those spaces were perceived as far more private—there weren’t search engines indexing everything in the same way. People really treated their homepage as their own, private directory. So to study these histories properly, we really do need to understand the imaginaries that shaped how people related to technology at the time.
ANYA: Do you know of any spatial metaphors like ‘home’ related to BBS?
KEVIN: Yes, absolutely—space comes up a lot when people talk about their experiences with bulletin boards, and in two quite distinct ways. First, there’s the physical space—the actual location of the computer. People often remember where it was in their home: in a bedroom, in the kitchen, sometimes even at the centre of a house party, with everyone gathering around to see the board. That physical presence was important—it was tangible, visible. In contrast to cloud computing today, where everything is remote and hidden away, BBSs felt very immediate. The messages and files were there, on that machine.
Then there’s the second layer: the spatial metaphors within the software itself.
Because BBS software was so customisable, people often described it in spatial terms—you’d “go into” a certain area of the board, and users could be restricted from other sections. Some systems were designed around movement through rooms or spaces—much like chat rooms, which were imagined as places you entered and exited. There were also “doors”—software plugins that let users leave the main board environment to access games or other applications.
NATHALIE: Yes, I’ve noticed that too—early home pages weren’t just single static pages; they were often imagined and designed as virtual homes. The term home page itself carries that association, but many users extended the metaphor through hyperlinks, creating entire environments you could move through. By clicking from page to page, you were effectively walking through someone’s personal space online.
I think for some people, especially at the time, it was difficult to conceive of the web as anything other than something they already knew—so thinking of it in terms of a house or a room helped make it more relatable.
KEVIN: Right—although making a home is not a document of course. That’s part of what makes it so fascinating. The web was technically structured around the idea of hypertext documents, yet people described their pages using architectural metaphors: this is the living room, that’s the kitchen, here’s the basement. They used those familiar spatial ideas to structure and communicate their online presence, even though the underlying technology didn’t require or even suggest that kind of layout.
NATHALIE: Especially now that we have seen here at CERN how the web was based on this idea of document stacking.
ANYA: Yes, I really appreciated François’s narrative (one of the panellists from the founding fathers of the web roundtable during the conference opening)—his description of the web as a collaborative effort among researchers, aimed at advancing human knowledge. It’s such a contrast to many of the later accounts that focus on the commercialisation of the web. His framing highlights an earlier, more idealistic vision of what the web was meant to be, before all the layers of market logic settled in.
I have one more question about nostalgia. I’m wondering whether we already saw nostalgic narratives emerging in the 1990s, for example around the time BBSs were being replaced by the internet. Thinking about how people miss the early web now, or early platforms, or Twitter before it became X, it looks like there are constantly reiterating waves of nostalgia simply because everything changes so quickly. Have you come across any material that reflects that for BBS?
KEVIN: There definitely were people expressing nostalgia for bulletin boards by the late 1990s—you can see it quite clearly in Jason Scott’s BBS Documentary. I think that sense of loss often came from a kind of social rupture. Many people had built close, sometimes very intimate communities on BBSs, and those connections didn’t necessarily carry over as things shifted to the broader internet. The nature of interaction changed, the spaces changed, and not everyone found a new equivalent. It’s easy to imagine people feeling that something meaningful was lost in the transition—especially given how quickly the pace of change accelerated.
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To cite this interview: Driscoll, K., Fridzema, N., & Shchetvina, A. (2025, April 29). Early internet history, archival research and imaginaries as "spaces of possibility" [interview with Kevin Driscoll]. Matter of Imagination. https://matterofimagination.neocities.org/blog8
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