Nettime Survey:

Introduction

This project aims to trace the evolution of debates with the field of critical Internet studies over the course of time through studying the Nettime mailing list.

Summary

While contemporary social media have been critiqued for their ephemeral effects on activist politics, the mailing list has proven an enduring venue for geographically dispersed communities to participate remain in dialogue over the course of decades. Founded in Amsterdam in 1995, the Nettime mailing list has played host to a community of activists and media artists and help to launch or establish the careers of a number of prominent new media theorists and Internet critics (including Geert Lovink, Lev Manovich, Matthew Fuller, Brian Holmes, Bruce Sterling, amongst others). Established in an era prior to the corporatization of the Web, over the course of its twenty years, Nettime has continued to discuss the Web in terms of the radical political possibilities with which it was imagined in its ‘salad days’.

Research Questions

• List activity: As a mailing list, Nettime is popularly associated with mid-90’s media activism, yet it continues to be active to this day.
  • When was Nettime most active?
• List vigour: A list’s health may, perhaps, be seen as a function of the extent to which it is also a space for dialogue.
  • When was Nettime at its most dialogical?
• Outspokenness: Mailing lists like Nettime appear to be dominated by strong personalities.
  • Who have been Nettime’s most prolific contributors?
  • and how might one begin to periodize the list in relation to those personalities?

Methodology

The object of study is an archived mailing list, a web interface to which is available online nettime.org/archive.php. The objective is to scrape all the data in order to query the database in relation to the research questions.

Data Gathering

• Tools are written in Python and can be found at https://github.com/gauthiier/nettime
• We devised scripts to crawl and aggregate Nettime's email content using custom MHonArc scrappers.
• We have build an archive of all Mettime's emails in both custom json and legacy mbox format.

Visualization

• Consistent with the ‘90’s-era origins of the Nettime list, time series data analytics were graphed in a series of simple bar graph using Python's numpy, pandas and matplotlib.

Findings

In consultation with Geert Lovink, one of the list’s founders -- and the most prolific poster, by far -- we discussed our data and identified a few unexpected patterns, namely:

• that, when assessed in terms of the number of posts over time (list activity), that:
  • the list paradoxically grew in 2000 subsequent to its having become a moderated list -- a major controversy, famously chronicled by Lovink (‘03)
  • that, as expected, the list activity diminished in 2004 -- which coincided with the birth of social media, and blogs
  • that there was a spike in activity in 2011, that could be explained as corresponded with the global surge in activism in that same year
• that, when assessed in terms of relative number of replies over time (list vigour), that:
  • Nettime has steadily become a more ‘dialogical space’
• that, when assessed in terms of the most prolific contributors over time (outspokenness), that:
  • different figures can be seen to be dominated the years and that, presumably this might offer an entry-way into periodizing the ‘times of Nettime’

Further Research

• To our mind the content of the posts and conversations in Nettime is, in fact, what makes this list of particular interest from the perspective of new media studies. To this end, future work could analyse the content of the list, filtering twenty years of posts, in order, for example, to identify the most ‘controversial’. Another interesting question has to do with periodizing the ‘eras’ or ‘times of Nettime’, in terms of who were the dominant figures in different periods and how might they have clustered into cohorts.

Keywords

media art history, mailing list analysis, media activism, mapping debate

Team Members

David Gauthier, Marc Tuters

References

Geert Lovink Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture. MIT Press: Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.