Networks of Change

Leopoldina Fortunati, long involved in feminism and feminist studies, is Senior Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication in the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics at the University of Udine, Italy.Autumn Edwards is Professor of Communication at Western Michigan University and Co-directs the Communication & Social Robotics Labs. Her research explores gender, human-machine communication, and human-technology relations. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Human-Machine Communication and a recognized leader in understanding digital interlocutors and social robots in communication.Janet Abbate is a Professor at Virginia Tech who researches the history, culture, and politics of computing and the Internet.

• Introduction: (Re)writing gender in Internet histories 1.“She does a good job for a woman” – the challenges for women enablers in the era of internet histories 2. Becoming Wikipedian women: A sociotechnical history of the Gender Gap Task Force (2013–2023) 3. Gendering of the “ideal user” in 1990s-era internet magazines 4. The politics of the digital transition: Lessons from slash fan fiction communities at the turn of the millennium 5. Digital pioneers: Mormon mommy bloggers and building the “Bloggernacle” 6. Streaming out of the spiral of silence. Women’s visibility in gaming community and on twitch 7. Network breakdown: the queer anarchist politics at the heart of the ‘net from FidoNet to HOMOCORE 8. (Un)scaffolding gender: Social media and the evolution of nonbinary identity 9. How have you modelled my gender? Reconstructing the history of gender representation in Wikidata 10. Doing LGBTQ internet histories justice: A queer web archive manifesto 11. Dwelling with feminist media archives in the age of big data 12. Researching gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. A roundtable at the SHOT 2023 conference

This volume of Internet Histories brings to light multiple fascinating and understudied facets of the history of the Internet. Through uncovering these hidden histories that center gender and sexuality, the authors have re-oriented common perceptions of the Internet, and who has historically used and built it. The communities detailed in these essays— from queer online anarchists to Mormon mommy bloggers—teach us key lessons for the present, as well as showing us that being online has always been weirder and wilder than most people know.” --Mar Hicks, Author of Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017)