Editing History of the Internet (section)

==Historiography==
{{Further|Protocol Wars#Historiography}}
There are nearly insurmountable problems in supplying a [[historiography]] of the Internet's development. The process of digitization represents a twofold challenge both for historiography in general and, in particular, for historical communication research.<ref>{{cite journal | last1=Classen | first1=Christoph | last2=Kinnebrock | first2=Susanne | last3=Löblich | first3=Maria | title=Towards Web History: Sources, Methods, and Challenges in the Digital Age. An Introduction | journal=Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung | publisher=GESIS - Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Center for Historical Social Research | volume=37 | issue=4 (142) | year=2012 | jstor=41756476 | pages=97–101 }}</ref> A sense of the difficulty in documenting early developments that led to the internet can be gathered from the quote:

{{Blockquote|"The Arpanet period is somewhat well documented because the corporation in charge – [[BBN Technologies|BBN]] – left a physical record. Moving into the [[NSFNET]] era, it became an extraordinarily decentralized process. The record exists in people's basements, in closets. ... So much of what happened was done verbally and on the basis of individual trust."|[[Doug Gale]] (2007)<ref>{{cite news |last=Barras |first=Colin |date=August 23, 2007 |title=An Internet Pioneer Ponders the Next Revolution |work=Illuminating the net's Dark Ages |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6959034.stm |access-date=February 26, 2008}}</ref>}}

Notable works on the subject were published by [[Katie Hafner]] and Matthew Lyon, ''Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet'' (1996), [[Roy Rosenzweig]], ''Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet'' (1998), and [[Janet Abbate]], ''Inventing the Internet'' (2000).<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Rosenzweig |first=Roy |date=1998 |title=Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2649970 |journal=The American Historical Review |volume=103 |issue=5 |pages=1530–1552 |doi=10.2307/2649970 |jstor=2649970 |issn=0002-8762}}</ref>

Most scholarship and literature on the Internet lists ARPANET as the prior network that was iterated on and studied to create it,<ref>{{Cite book |title=The Desk Encyclopedia of World History |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |year=2006 |isbn=978-0-7394-7809-7 |editor-last=Wright |editor-first=Edmund |location=New York |page=311}}</ref> although other early computer networks and experiments existed alongside or before ARPANET.<ref name=":42">{{Cite news |date=30 May 2015 |title=A Flaw in the Design |newspaper=The Washington Post |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/05/30/net-of-insecurity-part-1/ |url-status=live |access-date=20 February 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201108111512/https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/05/30/net-of-insecurity-part-1/ |archive-date=8 November 2020 |quote=The Internet was born of a big idea: Messages could be chopped into chunks, sent through a network in a series of transmissions, then reassembled by destination computers quickly and efficiently... The most important institutional force ... was the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) ... as ARPA began work on a groundbreaking computer network, the agency recruited scientists affiliated with the nation's top universities.}}</ref>

These histories of the Internet have since been criticized as [[Teleology|teleologies]] or [[Whig history]]; that is, they take the present to be the end point toward which history has been unfolding based on a single cause:

{{Blockquote|text=In the case of Internet history, the epoch-making event is usually said to be the demonstration of the 4-node ARPANET network in 1969. From that single happening the global Internet developed.|author=[[Martin Campbell-Kelly]], Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Campbell-Kelly |first1=Martin |last2=Garcia-Swartz |first2=Daniel D |date=2013 |title=The History of the Internet: The Missing Narratives |journal=Journal of Information Technology |volume=28 |issue=1 |pages=18–33 |doi=10.1057/jit.2013.4 |s2cid=41013 |ssrn=867087 }}</ref>}}

In addition to these characteristics, historians have cited methodological problems arising in their work:
{{Blockquote|text="Internet history" ... tends to be too close to its sources. Many Internet pioneers are alive, active, and eager to shape the histories that describe their accomplishments. Many museums and historians are equally eager to interview the pioneers and to publicize their stories.|author=Andrew L. Russell (2012)<ref>{{Cite conference |last=Russell |first=Andrew |date=2012 |title=Histories of Networking vs. the History of the Internet |url=https://arussell.org/papers/russell-SIGCIS-2012.pdf |conference=2012 SIGCIS Workshop |page=6}}</ref>}}