EVENT DETAILS

"National Utility or Global Inevitability? Competing Visions of the Internet and Why They Matter" with Stephanie Ricker Schulte

Why do we think what we think about the internet? How is the American vision of the technology a culturally peculiar one? Dr. Stephanie Schulte has investigated the political and cultural narratives—the various “common senses”—that circulated about the internet in the United States and Europe. In the United States, the internet seemed self-evidently American, democratic, and capitalist. But European cultural and political agents questioned these assumptions. By recovering the assumptions about the internet that have been erased or diminished by our present uses and the accepted memories of it, Schulte’s talk recovers the origins of today’s prevailing understanding of the internet from among the forgotten false starts and competing models that helped shape the technology. By showing the ways technology is embedded in history and culture (and not outside of either), Schulte investigates the discourses and complicated, intertwined national powers that produced the internet culturally, politically, socially, and historically. Often imagined as a “global space,” the ultimate example of transnationalism and globalization, the internet is constituted through transnational engagement, national policies, and even popular culture—not just through technological development. Through her comparative research, Schulte dismantles both the technologically determinist and unflaggingly American nationalist common senses that the internet’s expansion is “inevitable” and that corporate forces are the natural rulers of online spaces.

Stephanie Ricker Schulte is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Arkansas, where she researches communication technologies, media history, media policy, popular culture, and transnational cultural exchanges. She is the author of Cached: Decoding the Internet in Global Popular Culture (NYU Press, 2013). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Television and New Media, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Mass Communication and Society, Feminist Studies, and the Journal of New Media and Culture.

For more information, please contact Allison Perlman at aperlman@uci.edu.