"This is the most culturally sophisticated history of the Internet yet
written. We can't make sense of what the Internet means in our lives
without reading Schulte's elegant account of what the Internet has meant
at various points in the past 30 years."
--Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chair of the Department of Media Studies at The
University of Virginia
In the 1980s and 1990s, the internet became a major player in the global
economy and a revolutionary component of everyday life for much of the
United States and the world. It offered users new ways to relate to one
another, to share their lives, and to spend their time--shopping,
working, learning, and even taking political or social action.
Policymakers and news media attempted--and often struggled--to make
sense of the emergence and expansion of this new technology. They
imagined the internet in conflicting terms: as a toy for teenagers, a
national security threat, a new democratic frontier, an information
superhighway, a virtual reality, and a framework for promoting
globalization and revolution.
Schulte maintains that contested concepts had material consequences and
helped shape not just our sense of the internet, but the development of
the technology itself. Cached focuses on how people imagine and relate
to technology, delving into the political and cultural debates that
produced the internet as a core technology able to revise economics,
politics, and culture, as well as to alter lived experience. Schulte
illustrates the conflicting and indirect ways in which culture and
policy combined to produce this transformative technology.
