Where did people build community and outreach before social media? This video offers strategies for researching Usenet, a social network that is older than the World Wide Web.

About the expert

Suzanne van Geuns is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion. Her research interests are in American religion and computation, with a focus on sexual ethics and artificial intelligence. Her forthcoming book, Seductive Methods: Sexual Success in the Computational Imagination, is a genealogy of misogynist frustration and an inquiry into our shared computational condition. It is also a history of seduction forums, which are online domains that begin from the assumption that sex with women, or indeed success more broadly, is an achievement born of men’s methodological expertise.

Annotated Bibliography

Brunton, Finn. Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

This is a cultural history of spam, from pranks on early computer networks to contemporary criminal infrastructures. Brunton offers an account of Eternal September and explains the social norms on early Usenet in the second chapter (especially pages 34-48), which contrast the neatly circumscribed rules of military-academic ARPANET with the “Wild West” that was 1990s Usenet.

Dame-Griff, Avery. “Herding the ‘Performing Elephants:’ Using Computational Methods to Study Usenet.” Internet Histories 3, no. 3–4 (2019): 223–44.

This article reflects on the author’s experience archiving Usenet posts and preparing them for computational analysis. It offers a cogent “what was Usenet?” section and highlights three challenges for the historian: accounting for the different platforms and interfaces through which users could access Usenet, contextualizing newsgroups within their contemporaneous topic-specific discursive sphere, and accounting for the ethical concerns of working with message metadata.

Dame-Griff, Avery. The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet. New York: NYU Press, 2023.

This book examines the transgender internet from its 1980s origins to the present. The third chapter, entitled “Politics and ‘Petty Useless Bickering’: Transgender Usenet and the Emergence of ‘Cisgender,’” reflects on Usenet in particular. It draws on an extensive archive of Usenet posts, which the author has made available for others via the Queer Digital History Project, to trace the emergence of a particular vocabulary to express transness as a personal and political identity.

Dibbell, Julian. “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society.” The Village Voice, December 23, 1993. http:/web.archive.org/web/20030203120248/http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html

This journalistic account of a 1993 dispute in a small networked community – how to respond to one user’s online rape of another? – has become a germinal text. It laid out how users on a MUD, short for multi-user-dungeon, considered this online domain as a place that stood apart from real-life concerns. The appearance of gendered violence in this domain necessitated the elaboration of norms, expectations, and methods of punishment or censorship. The article made a powerful point against “cyberspace” as a wholly new world and its account of this particular incident foreshadows the rise of moderation as a key question for online communities.

Fidler, Bradley. “Eternal October and the End of Cyberspace.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 39, no. 1 (2017): 6–7.

This short piece grapples with the internet of October 2016 – the Trump election, buoyed in part by the interests of large social media corporations – through September 1992, or “Eternal September” in 1990s Usenet parlance. If Eternal September marked the end of a “cyberspace” where all norms could be set anew, so does October 2016, which the author takes as a definitive sign that online life is subject to the same problems, challenges, and social norms as real-world “civilization.”

Fisher, Danyel, and Christopher Lueg. “Appendix: Studying Online Newsgroups.” In From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces, edited by Christopher Lueg and Danyel Fisher, 253–60. London: Springer, 2003.

This appendix to an edited volume about Usenet and collaborate web spaces offers readers an overview of Usenet’s basic structure and workings. It explains how posts move across the network, what posts looked like in a Usenet client (i.e. before Deja or Google Groups), and how a 2003 researcher might go about gathering data. The short length makes this a particularly accessible explainer.

Grosse, Meghan. “Laying the Foundation for a Commercialized Internet: International Internet Governance in the 1990s.” Internet Histories 4, no. 3 (2020): 271–86.

This article argues that the Clinton Administration projected a concern for an open, global internet while in actuality, the Administration pursued a U.S.-centric approach to governance that prioritized commercial interests. By the mid to late 1990s, the internet was global and American corporations got to set the agenda. The priorities that won out in this era are ones that continue to shape the contours of internet governance to this day, especially in the treatment of the internet as a technologically neutral tool that could be carried around the world and across national borders without concerns for cultural, social, or political differences.

Grossman, Wendy. Net.Wars. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

This is a journalist’s account of the different controversies that roiled Usenet, the emerging World Wide Web, and Internet Relay Chat (a decentralized distributed messaging network) in the 1990s. The book works to disprove the early 1990s assumption that cyberspace presented a chance to invent politics anew. Many of its chapters foreground problems that are still problems in present-day online life, from the troubles caused by the commercialization of social life to the question of where to host porn and sex work. The chapters on Eternal September (1) and Usenet organizing against the “copyright terrorism” of the Church of Scientology (6) are especially strong.

Hauben, Michael, and Ronda Hauben. Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society, 1997.

This book aimed to tackle the social aspects of 1990s computer networking. It offers a history of internetworking that goes back to the 1960s, but its accounts of Usenet and the Web as they were at the time of writing are more relevant for reader’s today. The authors style themselves as chroniclers of an emerging society with its own norms and expectations and shared their optimistic descriptions of this society and its proper inhabitant – the netizen – on “the Net” before gathering them in this book. Especially notable is the fact that Usenet warrants its own treatment here; in 1997, it was not yet clear that the World Wide Web would overtake and incorporate Usenet.

Hauben, Ronda. “Commodifying Usenet and the Usenet Archive or Continuing the Online Cooperative Usenet Culture?” Science Studies 15, no. 1 (2002): 61–68.

This article explores the conflict between the cooperative online culture of users who have created Usenet and the corporate commodification of Usenet posts by companies archiving the posts. Focused on the transition between Deja News and Google, the essay tracks users’ efforts to petition the company to protect the archives and asks whether corporatization imperils the cooperative culture that characterized 1990s Usenet.

Horbinski, Andrea. “Talking By Letter: The Hidden History of Female Media Fans on the 1990s Internet.” Internet Histories 2, no. 3–4 (2018): 247–63.

This article draws on oral interviews with female fans to reveal how this group used computer networks to gather and organize. Predominantly female fans initially sought to self-segregate by means of locked communities, secret mailing lists and hidden newsgroups on Usenet, ceding a crucial portion of the visible internet discourse to other kinds of fans and fan practices that were more palatable to established cultural gatekeepers offline. The article traces the transition from these more intimate settings, each with their own challenges and archiving efforts, to the “fan internet” of the 2000s, which was dominated by for-profit platform websites.

O’Sullivan, Patrick, and Andrew Flanagin. “Reconceptualizing ‘Flaming’ and Other Problematic Messages.” New Media & Society 5, no. 1 (2003): 69–94.

This article theorizes “flaming,” a purposely aggressive and incendiary verbal style that was characteristic of Usenet debates, as a context-dependent phenomenon. While other analyses of flaming emphasize the content of messages, this article points out that flaming emerges in specific interactional contexts with their own norms. Flaming is a precursor to what became known as “trolling” in the early 2000s and foreshadows abusive posting in the 2010s. It is a communicative style that any researcher examining exchanges in 1990s Usenet newsgroups will come across with some regularity, and this article gives an overview of how scholars grappled with its pervasiveness at the time.

Paloque-Bergès, Camille. “Usenet as a Web Archive: Multi-Layered Archives of Computer-Mediated-Communication.” In Web 25: Histories from the First 25 Years of the World Wide Web, edited by Niels Brügger, 229–52. New York: Peter Lang, 2017.

This chapter offers a history of Usenet archives and helps contextualize the Usenet messages that remain accessible to us today. Because Usenet architecture ensured that content on the network was dispersed both temporally (message files deleted on some servers remained longer on others) and spatially (message files moved slowly “outwards” from their server of origin), archiving is unavoidably partial. The chapter traces how the archive that is available today is shaped by the transition from Usenet’s own architecture to the software and infrastructure of the World Wide Web, relied upon first by Deja News and later Google Group. Usenet as it is accessible to contemporary researchers, via Google Groups and through the Internet Archive’s repository of Usenet messages, is a layered archive that reveals the constraints of the web as a hosting information system.

Pfaffenberger, Bryan. “‘A Standing Wave in the Web of Our Communications’: Usenet and the Socio-Technical Construction of Cyberspace Values.” In From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces, edited by Christopher Lueg and Danyel Fisher, 20–44. London: Springer, 2003.

This chapter aims to capture Usenet’s politics. This is from a time in internet research where scholars sought to theorize “cyberspace” as a place possessed of new political norms and commitments particular to this domain. For Usenet, the chapter draws out how “Usenet veterans” believe the network cannot be regulated by governmental power (it is too decentralized), is capable of being regulated through user consensus, and is always in a state of perilous decline. Through an intuitive description of Usenet’s technical functioning, the chapter explains how a “backbone cabal” in control of the decentralized servers that make up the network end up shaping its contents and priorities.

Rai, Amit. “India On-Line: Electronic Bulletin Boards and the Construction of a Diasporic Hindu Identity.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 4, no. 1 (1995): 31–57.

This 1995 article applies theories of subaltern identity and postcolonial theory to Usenet newsgroups that revolve around Indian identity, most notably alt.hindu. In the early 1990s, when Usenet was not yet accessible through online services or through the Web, these newsgroups hosted a “counterpublic” composed of Third World professionals in the United States. Through close readings of newsgroup discussions about the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque and other Hindu nationalist projects of the early 1990s, the article excavates a diasporic identity marked by contradictions that have the potential to destabilize images of Hindu identity as capable of becoming purified and whole.

Siles, Ignacio. “The Internet as a Transnational Project: Connecting Central America through Computer Networks (1990–1996).” Internet Histories 2, no. 3–4 (2018): 230–46.

This article discusses how six countries in Central America – Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama – connected to and through computer networks and technologies such as UUCP, BITNET, and the World Wide Web in the first half of the 1990s. Drawing on archival research and interviews with protagonists of networking initiatives, this article argues that the establishment of these projects in Central America required forging a transnational network of collaborations, enabled by international organizations with presence in countries of the region. The example of Central America demonstrates that transnational collaboration is a key component in the Internet’s rise to dominance.

Whittaker, Steve, Loren Terveen, Will Hill, and Lynn Cherny. “The Dynamics of Mass Interaction.” In From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces, edited by Christopher Lueg and Danyel Fisher. London: Springer, 2003.

This chapter, part of an edited volume about Usenet and other collaborative web spaces, uses data-analytical tools to capture Usenet interaction. While the data analysis tools it employs are less relevant to contemporary research, the chapter contains detailed descriptions of how users participated, from the length of the average message to the demographic composition of Usenet newsgroups. While FAQs frequently forbid cross-posting to multiple newsgroups, for example, this chapter shows that this was in fact common and served as a way for content to spread beyond a given the relatively small group of active participants that usually set the tone in a given newsgroup.