Remembering Netizens An Interview with Ronda Hauben co-author of Netizens On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet 1997

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This is a preprint of the following publication:

Tristan Miller, Camille Paloque-Bergès, and Avery Dame-Griﬀ. Remembering Netizens: An interview with Ronda

Hauben, co-author of Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (1997). Internet Histories:

Digital Technology, Culture and Society, 2022. ISSN 2470-1483. DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2123120

Remembering Netizens:

An Interview with Ronda Hauben, co-author of

Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet

and the Internet (1997)

Tristan Miller

Austrian Research Institute for Artiﬁcial Intelligence

Vienna, Austria

Camille Paloque-Bergès

HT2S, Conservatoire national des arts et métiers

Paris, France

Avery Dame-Griﬀ

Women’s and Gender Studies, Gonzaga University

Spokane, WA, USA

Abstract

Netizens, Michael and Ronda Hauben’s foundational treatise on Usenet

and the Internet, was ﬁrst published in print 25 years ago. In this piece, we

trace the history and impact of the book and of Usenet itself, contextual-

ising them within the contemporary and modern-day scholarship on virtual

communities, online culture, and Internet history. We discuss the Net as a

tool of empowerment, and touch on the social, technical, and economic

issues related to the maintenance of shared network infrastructures and to

the preservation and commodiﬁcation of Usenet archives. Our interview

with Ronda Hauben oﬀers a retrospective look at the development of

online communities, their impact, and how they are studied. She recounts

her own introduction to the online world, as well as the impetus and

writing process for Netizens. She presents Michael Hauben’s conception of

“netizens” as contributory citizens of the Net (rather than mere users of it)

and the “electronic commons” they built up, and argues that this collabor-

ative and collectivist model has been overwhelmed and endangered by the

privatisation and commercialisation of the Internet and its communities.

Keywords:

Ronda Hauben, Netizens, Usenet, online communities, Mi-

chael Hauben, Internet history

In the preface to Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet,

Michael Hauben deﬁnes the netizen as something more than just the average

Net user: “people who decide to devote time and eﬀort into making the Net, this

new part of our world, a better place”. His choice to combine “Net” and “citizen”

reﬂected the sense of community and collaboration he found in his interactions

arXiv:2210.02978v1 [cs.CY] 6 Oct 2022

on Usenet, the worldwide, decentralised discussion network that predated the

Web and was eventually eclipsed by it. The Haubens’ convictions underlie the

rest of Netizens, one of the earliest popular histories of Usenet and its impact.

The life of the book

Co-written by Michael and his mother Ronda Hauben, Netizens is broken into

four sections, beginning with deﬁning and describing Usenet in the mid-1990s

(Part I – “The Present: What Has Been Created and How?”), analysing its early

origins (Part II – “The Past: Where Has It All Come From?”), and considering

the Net’s future in an increasingly connected world (Part III – “And the Future?”).

The ﬁnal section shifts focus to technology’s role within modern democracy (Part

IV – “Contributions Towards Developing a Theoretical Framework”). Throughout

the book, the authors emphasise how these new global participatory networks

allowed many more individuals access to the public sphere. Through the Net,

they argue, netizens gain access to a vast array of information and resources to

help them not only be more aware of current events around the globe, but also

contribute to materially improving the world. The Haubens’ writing process

reﬂected this commitment to resource sharing: the book was published ﬁrst

online in 1994, then in print in 1997 by the IEEE Computer Society Press and

later by IEEE-Wiley. Several chapters were also serialised in the First Monday

journal, founded in 1996 and featuring academic analysis and think pieces about

the Internet.

The book’s tone and focus were shaped by the authors’ own experiences. Ronda

Hauben had been active online since 1988 and was a Usenet regular. Michael

Hauben frequently participated in the Detroit/Ann Arbor BBS scene prior to

attending Columbia University, where he began researching digital networks’

impact. Since the book’s publication, Ronda has continued to study how the

Internet has empowered citizen journalists, including as a resident correspondent

covering the United Nations and UN-related issues. While Michael remained

actively involved in discussions both online and oﬄine about the Net’s role in

participatory democracy, he passed in 2001 by suicide. He had been struck by

a taxi cab in 1999, receiving a head injury, and had long struggled with the

ensuing complications.

Netizens is a much-quoted book – alongside the myriad other texts the Haubens

produced on the topic of netizens and adjacent issues. The 1997 IEEE edition,

according to Google Scholar, has been referenced almost 900 times. Most

notable of these citing works is Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Communities (2000,

revised edition) – itself fundamental to the rise of think pieces and ethnographic

essays about the Internet and electronic networked media upon its original

1993 publication. Though not an academic analysis per se,Netizens is widely

acknowledged in academic literature in domains such as anthropology, sociology,

history, political economy, communication science, cultural and media studies,

and journalism studies.

A wave of Usenet studies

In the early to mid-1990s, Michael Hauben was studying both computer science

and communication, and had professional experience in documentation and

information handling. He is representative of a series of technophilic writers,

probably best exempliﬁed by Howard Rheingold, who took it upon themselves to

write extensively about the new medium they spent so much of their time using,

and whose work played a major role in spreading the word about networked

social services like Usenet within intellectual spaces.

On the academic side, researchers within the social sciences and humanities

were starting to take notice too: in the early 1990s, they started to experiment

with the Internet and Usenet as a ground for conducting a new kind of media

and cultural studies analysis. Starting with labels such as cyber-anthropology

or cyber-sociology, their discussions led to a new multi-disciplinary domain now

known, since the 2000s, as “Internet studies” (Wellman, 2011; Lueg & Fisher,

2003). For instance, Nancy Baym (who later helped found the ﬁeld of Internet

studies and is now a principal researcher at Microsoft) ﬁrst began analysing

Usenet in 1993 while conducting her Ph.D. thesis (see inter alia Baym, 1994).

There were also student papers, like Bruce Jones’s “An Ethnography of the

Usenet Computer Network” (1991) and Tim North’s “The Internet and Usenet

Global Computer Networks: An Investigation of their Culture and its Eﬀects on

New Users” (1994).

These very early works were the genesis of research analysing “cyberculture” – as

computer-mediated communication and sociality was commonly described during

that period. Moreover, much of this work legitimating the Internet and Usenet

as worthy ﬁelds of study was done by early-career scholars, even undergraduate

students. Despite the often-positive tone of the ﬁrst wave of cyber studies, these

early analysts worked at debunking some of the myths about what were then

known as “virtual communities”.

Usenet between popularity and marginality

Netizens makes a point of featuring Usenet as a burgeoning locus of Internet

culture, to the point where it became a metonym for “the Net” of the 1990s itself.

For a generation of young college students, Usenet served as their ﬁrst experience

with the Internet, and it received substantial attention in English-language

mass-market Internet “how-to” texts released during this period. Indeed, this

period marked Usenet’s peak use, followed by a gradual decline at the start of

the new millennium. Its remnants and memories have become synonymous with

an online “golden age”, before newbies and spam, and before the Internet had to

embrace the “politics of civilization” (Fidler, 2017).

Thus, Usenet’s place in Internet culture is somewhat ambivalent: shifting from

an initial position of relative popularity amongst early computer networks users,

according to Quarterman’s (1990) user demographics in the 1980s, to a gradual

decline in use at the turn of the new millennium as its underlying communications

protocols were superseded by the Internet’s TCP/IP (Russell, 2014). Usenet

was used not just for discussion, but also for producing and circulating a huge

volume of informational, educational, humorous, and folkloric material, including

technical standards, tutorials, jokes, and anecdotes. Much of this output was, at

least originally, quite speciﬁc to Usenet in terms of content (such as netiquette

guides) or form (such as FAQs). In a way, Usenet taught the Internet at large

how to communicate and how to behave online.

In a considerable number of countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the Usenet

“social” service (as Quarterman qualiﬁed it) and its underlying protocol, UUCP,

provided the ﬁrst digital routes, pathﬁnders, and map onto which the Internet

would graft itself. Surprisingly, early Unix network administrators have been

praised less for their actual ﬁrst steps in international connectivity (namely,

UUCP and Usenet) than for their subsequent role in bridging the gap between

their local networking infrastructure and the Internet, which didn’t happen

until much later in the 1980s, when NSFNET became eager to open trans-

international oﬃcial liaisons (on TCP/IP links). However, this praise sometimes

mischaracterises these UUCP/Usenet link-ups as the ﬁrst “Internet connections” –

e.g., in France, the Netherlands, or South Korea (see Paloque-Bergès, 2017a,

2021). This discrepancy can be explained by the strong incentive and will of

the Unix community to actually contribute to and use the TCP/IP networks,

thanks to a shared computer culture centring on cooperation and friendly

rivalry – highlighted by the Haubens in Netizens. Eﬀectively, UUCP/Usenet’s

international pioneers happened to become, after a few years of experimentation,

oﬃcial “Internet ﬁrst-timers” in their own countries or regions.

But we also have to consider this as a shifting heritage, mostly due to the

massive popularity of the Internet beyond the TCP/IP world and the American

soft power inscribed and used in the ARPANET/Internet ﬁliation – as shown,

for instance, by ICANN’s governance role in software standards (Nye, 2010;

Kalinauskas & Barčys, 2013) and the rise of political issues related to data

networks in non-US countries (Carr, 2012; Badouard & Schafer, 2014).

Community and networks

This heritage discrepancy aside, Usenet is also notable for how it bridged the

world of computer science with other professional and scientiﬁc ﬁelds, includ-

ing early lay users of computer networks, both on- and oﬄine. For example,

many early Usenet connections were launched or strengthened at Unix con-

ferences. Usenet can hereby be understood in the long history of community

networks (Schuler, 1994), ﬁrst established in the 1960s to the 1980s as centralised

systems but then later decentralised, including PLATO at the University of

Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Woolley, 2016; Rankin, 2018), the public-access

Community Memory network in Berkeley (Felsenstein, 2016; Farrington & Pine,

1997) and its homologue in the Netherlands, De Digitale Stadt (van den Besselaar

& Beckers, 2005). Such networks must also be located within the broader context

of an emerging home computer culture and the associated BBS scene (Driscoll,

2022). Within the context of industrialised countries at least, the home computer

underwent a seismic transformation throughout the mid-1990s and into the 2000s,

shifting from a technical tool and hobbyist passion to something more akin to a

middle-class home appliance.

This sense of a digital rights uprising lies at the heart of Netizens. Within popular

discourse, the Net is presented as an empowering tool for people from marginalised

or politically under-represented groups, and many of these users were not only

present on Usenet, but also inﬂuenced its development, at times inheriting

tactics from a longer lineage of oﬄine activism (Washick, 2020; McIlwain, 2019;

Kennedy et al., 2003; Spender, 1995). For instance, a ﬁercely debated proposal

for a comp.women newsgroup in 1988 contributed to profound changes in how

Usenet functioned and was structured. The discussions and clashes helped raise

questions such as, “What is a newsgroup supposed to be?”, “What is a newsgroup

supposed to want?”, and “What are community standards?”

The online social networks that have largely supplanted Usenet are nowadays

referred to as “platforms”, but many of their socio-technical features have seen

little change since Usenet’s heyday (Weller, 2016) and there remain many

barriers to access and use (in terms of economic cost, technological know-how,

cultural habits, social structures, etc.). Today’s view of social media tends

to be disenchanted. For while most social media platforms have become for-

proﬁt, regimental services, their owners are (whether corporate or collective)

still grappling with some of the same problems that arose on Usenet, such as

acute issues about governance (DeNardis & Hackl, 2015), for instance through

the prism of “infrastructure” (Plantin et al., 2018). The complicated politics of

netizenship have never been more relevant to broader social and political issues,

constrained as they are by structures that are often out of the hands of typical

Internet users.

In retrospect, we might hypothesise that access to networked social services, and

the capacity to use digital machines and networks easily, if not wisely, was the

privilege of a few “Net elites”: those who knew how the tools (and the workbench,

and the whole workshop) actually worked. But another aspect of invisibility is

all that has to do with hands-on development and administration of essential

network infrastructures and services. Eric S. Raymond (2020) writes that “[t]he

Internet has a sustainability problem” because “[m]any of its critical services

depend on the dedication of unpaid volunteers, because they can’t be monetized

and thus don’t have any revenue stream for the maintainers to live on.” Usenet

aﬁcionados, especially those who involved themselves in the daily administration

and maintenance of its technical infrastructure, largely behind the scenes, can be

seen as (having been) relatively invisible. This issue of invisible labour remains a

critical concern, as maintenance of the world’s digital infrastructure increasingly

falls to un- or underpaid gig and crowdworkers (see for instance Muntaner, 2018).

Cultural and epistemic issues

The story of Usenet archives is complex, full of bugs and holes, and deﬁnitely

unﬁnished – it has been documented and criticised by many, Ronda Hauben

(2002) being one of the ﬁrst. Usenet archives have made their way to the Web

through many layers of so-called “software as a service”, each layer appropriating

the original content and making it more or less accessible – though nowadays

most such archives are no longer reachable or, at best, in ruins (Paloque-Bergès,

2017b). The argument can be made that “history will keep in memory what’s

important”, and while we have seen some Usenet archiving initiatives “in the

wild” by individuals and companies, it is not altogether clear whether preserving

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RememberingNetizens:AnInterviewwithRondaHauben,co-authorofNetizens:OntheHistoryandImpactofUsenetandtheInternet(1997)TristanMillerAustrianResearchInstituteforArticialIntelligenceVienna,AustriaCamillePaloque-BergèsHT2S,ConservatoirenationaldesartsetmétiersParis,FranceAveryDame-GriWomen'sandGenderStu...

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