[Note: This is a slightly edited version of a talk presented on May 1, 2012 at a small celebration in honor of the 15th Anniversary of the publication of the print edition of the book Netizens]

I – Looking Back

Fifteen years ago on May 1, 1997, the print edition of Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet was published in English. Later that year, in October, a Japanese translation of the book was published. Today we are celebrating the occasion of the 15th Anniversary of this event.

In honor of this occasion I want to both look back and look forward toward trying to assess the significance of the book and of Michael Hauben’s discovery of the emergence of the netizen. I want to briefly look at what has happened in the interim of these 15 years toward trying to understand what new advance this… weiter lesen

[This is a slightly edited version of a talk given in Copenhagen on 10-17-08 at the 9th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (The tag for the conference is IR9.0)]

This year, 2008 is the 15th anniversary of the publication of the “Net and Netizens” by Michael Hauben on the Internet in the summer of 1993. Michael posted this paper in parts because it was fairly long. It was based on research he had done about the Internet by asking people questions about how they were using the Net in that period of the early 1990s. Also at the time there was some use of the term net.citizen on the net. Michael contracted the term net.citizen into the term netizen. Based on the responses and his analysis of them Michael put together a paper defining what he called the netizen.

His paper was spread around the Net by… weiter lesen