Description
Book SynopsisFrom dial-up to wi-fi, an engaging cultural history of the commercial web industry
In the 1990s, the World Wide Web helped transform the Internet from the domain of computer scientists to a playground for mass audiences. As URLs leapt off computer screens and onto cereal boxes, billboards, and film trailers, the web changed the way many Americans experienced media, socialized, and interacted with brands. Businesses rushed online to set up corporate home pages and as a result, a new cultural industry was born: web design. For today's internet users who are more familiar sharing social media posts than collecting hotlists of cool sites, the early web may seem primitive, clunky, and graphically inferior. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, this pre-crash era was dubbed Web 1.0, a retronym meant to distinguish the early web from the social, user-centered, and participatory values that were embodied in the internet industry's resurgence as Web 2.0 in the 21st centur
Trade Review
The book is chronologically organized and almost reads like a well-referenced storybook with many characters. -- Choice
What Walter Benjamin was to Paris, Megan Ankerson is to the web: she has resurrected an era attitudes and aesthetics, economics and practices, fantasies and futures to explain how the present came to be. Indispensable reading for everyone who wants to understand what the web meant, and what it means. -- Finn Brunton, author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet
Ankerson opens a wormhole into the history of the World Wide Web. Hers is an original and importantly critical account of how surfing and browsing have depended upon emergent design norms. She takes her readers from the early days of hotlists, cool sites, and cyber-whatnot to the design ethos of shopping carts and "user experience" as a premium, all of which helped broker the emergence of Web 2.0 as a thinkable, shared experience -- Lisa Gitelman, New York University
Dot-Com Design provides deep contextualization of the many instances of dispute and sites of struggle that shaped the aesthetic, software, and hardware design of what we now term the Internet. * Communication Booknotes Quarterly *
