HIST1900A: The History of the Internet

HIST1900A: The History of the Internet
Fall 2025

Instructor: Professor Shawn Graham

The ‘history of the internet’ is more than the history of a particular package of technologies. It certainly didn’t start in 1993 with the invention of the world wide web. It didn’t start in the 1970s with the ARPAnet. In fact, if the ‘internet’ is what happens when communication technologies are linked together, then the story goes back much further indeed. And it’s a story about power, people, culture, and materials. We will begin with the present enshittified internet and its allied technologies. Then we’ll move backwards to see how we got to that. Then we’ll take another step backwards. And so on… until what we have ended up with is a history of human communications. My goal in this course is also to help you develop and exercise your own connection-making abilities, because that is the essence of human communication. There will be many in-class handwritten activities to that end. The internet is a process as much as anything else, and assessment will be geared towards your thinking processes accordingly.