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Paper: Media anthropology & the archives

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Budka, P. (2023). Media anthropology and the archives: On exploring and reconstructing sociotechnical life, histories, and biographies. Paper at EASA Media Anthropology Network Workshop: “Theorising Media and Time”, Copenhagen, Denmark: University of Copenhagen, November 9-10.

Screenshot of MyKnet.org records in the Internet Archive.

Abstract

This paper looks into digital archives and how they not only serve as facilities to collect, store, and categorize media content and artifacts, but how they mediate between the past and the present. How archives potentially contribute to the future projecting and envisioning of media as well as related technologies and practices. For that the paper explores the role of archival work in media anthropological research. It builds on material from my project on the Kuh-ke-nah Network (KO-KNET), an organization established by the tribal council Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO) to connect remote First Nation communities in Canada’s Northwestern Ontario to the internet (e.g., Budka, 2019). I was particularly interested in exploring and reconstructing the sociotechnical life of the platform MyKnet.org (1998-2019), which was set up exclusively for First Nations people to create personal homepages within a cost- and commercial-free space on the web. By tracing the rise and fall of MyKnet.org, this paper adds to the steadily growing body of research into missing and marginalized internet histories (Driscoll & Paloque-Berges, 2017).

Besides considering historical and sociocultural contexts of First Nations’ life, it critically reviews theoretical accounts and conceptualizations of change and continuity that have been developed in an anthropology of media and technology (e.g., Pfaffenberger, 1992; Postill, 2017) as well as in postcolonial technoscience (e.g., Anderson, 2002). During fieldwork many people told me stories about their first MyKnet.org websites in the early 2000s, how they evolved, and what they meant to them. People vividly described how their homepages were designed, structured, and linked to other pages. To deepen my interpretation and understanding of these narratives, I used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to recover archived versions of these websites whenever possible. Thus, the Wayback Machine became an archaeological tool for my anthropological research into the sociotechnical life and history of MyKnet.org and the digital biographies of its users.

References

Anderson, W. (2002). Introduction: Postcolonial technoscience. Social Studies of Science, 32(5–6), 643–658.

Budka, P. (2019). Indigenous media technologies in “the digital age”: Cultural articulation, digital practices, and sociopolitical concepts. In S. S. Yu & M. D. Matsaganis (Eds.), Ethnic media in the digital age (pp. 162-172). New York: Routledge.

Driscoll, K., & Paloque-Berges, C. (2017). Searching for missing “net histories”. Internet Histories, 1(1–2), 47–59.

Pfaffenberger, B. (1992). Social anthropology of technology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, 491–516.

Postill, J. (2017). The diachronic ethnography of media: From social changing to actual social changes. Moment. Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(1), 19–43.

Paper: The rise & fall of an indigenous web-based platform

Paper: The rise & fall of an indigenous web-based platform published on No Comments on Paper: The rise & fall of an indigenous web-based platform

Budka, P. (2021). The rise and fall of an indigenous web-based platform in Northwestern Ontario, Canada. Paper at Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials (RESAW21) Conference: “Mainstream vs Marginal Content in Web History and Web Archives”, Online (hosted by University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg), 17-18 June.

Abstract

In 1998, the Kuh-ke-nah Network (KO-KNET), an internet organization established by the tribal council Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO) to connect remote First Nation communities in Canada’s Northwestern Ontario to the internet, developed the web-based platform MyKnet.org. This platform was set up exclusively for First Nations people to create personal homepages within a cost- and commercial-free space on the web.

By the early 2000s, a wide set of actors across Northwestern Ontario, a region with an overall indigenous population of about 45,000, had found a new home on this digital platform. During its heyday between 2004 and 2008, MyKnet.org had more than 30,000 registered user accounts and about 25,000 active homepages. With the advent and rise of commercial social media platforms user numbers began to drop. To reduce administrative and technical costs, KO-KNET decided to switch to WordPress as hosting platform in 2014. Since this required users to set up new websites, numbers continued to fall. In early 2019, there were only 2,900 homepages left and MyKnet.org was shut down a couple of months later.

MyKnet.org used to be extremely popular among First Nations people. As I found out during my ethnographic fieldwork in Northwestern Ontario (six months between 2006 and 2008, including participant observation and 96 interviews) and in MyKnet.org (between 2006 and 2014) this was mainly because of two reasons.

RESAW 2021
  1. People utilized MyKnet.org to establish and maintain social relations across spatial distance in an infrastructurally disadvantaged region. They regularly visited the homepages of friends and family members to see what they were up to, they communicated via message boxes, and they interlinked their homepages.
  2. MyKnet.org contributed to different forms of cultural representation and identity construction. Homepage producers used the platform to represent themselves, their families, and their communities by displaying and sharing pictures, music, texts, website layouts, and artwork. Such practices not only required people to learn digital skills, they also contributed to the creation of a web-based indigenous territory on the web (Budka, 2019).

This paper explores the rise and fall of MyKnet.org, aiming thus to contribute to the analysis of missing and marginalized internet and web histories (Driscoll & Paloque-Berges, 2017). By considering the historical and cultural contexts of First Nations’ everyday life and by drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, it critically reviews theoretical accounts and conceptualizations of change and continuity that have been developed in an anthropology of media and technology (e.g., Pfaffenberger, 1992; Postill, 2017) and in postcolonial technoscience (e.g., Anderson, 2002). In doing so, it examines how sociotechnical change and cultural continuity can be conceptualized in relation to each other and in the context of (historical) processes of digital decoloniality.

During fieldwork many people told me stories about their first MyKnet.org websites in the early 2000s, how they evolved and what they meant to them. People vividly described how their homepages were designed, structured, and to which other websites they were linked. To deepen my interpretation and understanding of these narratives, I used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to recover archived versions of these websites whenever possible. Thus, the Wayback Machine became an additional methodological tool for my ethnographic research into the history and social life of MyKnet.org.

References

  • Anderson, W. (2002). Introduction: Postcolonial technoscience. Social Studies of Science, 32(5–6), 643–658.
  • Budka, P. (2019). Indigenous media technologies in “the digital age”: Cultural articulation, digital practices, and sociopolitical concepts. In S. S. Yu & M. D. Matsaganis (Eds.), Ethnic media in the digital age (pp. 162-172). New York: Routledge.
  • Driscoll, K., & Paloque-Berges, C. (2017). Searching for missing “net histories”. Internet Histories, 1(1–2), 47–59.
  • Pfaffenberger, B. (1992). Social anthropology of technology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, 491–516.
  • Postill, J. (2017). The diachronic ethnography of media: From social changing to actual social changes. Moment. Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(1), 19–43.

MyKnet.org: Traces of digital decoloniality in an indigenous web-based environment

MyKnet.org: Traces of digital decoloniality in an indigenous web-based environment published on No Comments on MyKnet.org: Traces of digital decoloniality in an indigenous web-based environment

This blog post is a shorter version of a paper presented at the Engaging with Web Archives (EWA20) conference in September 2020 (Book of Abstracts).
Budka, P. (2020). MyKnet.org: Traces of digital decoloniality in an indigenous web-based environment. Paper at Engaging with Web Archives (EWA20): “Opportunities, Challenges and Potentialities”, Online (hosted by Maynooth University), 21-22 September.

This blog post builds on selected results of an anthropological project that explored various indigenous engagements with digital media, technologies and infrastructures in Northwestern Ontario, Canada (e.g., Budka, 2015, 2019; Budka et al. 2009). The project was conducted in cooperation with the First Nations internet organization Keewaytinook Okimakanak Kuh-ke-nah Network (KO-KNET).

In this post I briefly reflect upon traces of “digital decoloniality”, a concept borrowed from Alexandra Deem (2019), by exploring selected aspects of the sociotechnical history of KO-KNET’s web-based environment MyKnet.org and by discussing facets of a MyKnet.org user’s digital biography.

KO-KNET & MyKnet.org

KO-KNET Network, 2010, courtesy of KO-KNET

In 1994, the tribal council Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO) established the Kuh-ke-nah Network (KO-KNET) to connect Canada’s indigenous people in Northwestern Ontario’s remote communities through and to the internet. At that time, a local telecommunication infrastructure was almost non-existent. KO-KNET started with a simple bulletin board system that developed into a community-controlled ICT infrastructure, which today includes landline and satellite broadband internet as well as internet-based mobile phone communication (e.g. Fiser & Clement, 2012).

Together with local, regional and national partners, KO-KNET developed different services: from e-health and an internet high school to different remote training programs. The most mundane of those services was the digital environment MyKnet.org, which enabled First Nations people to create personal homepages within a cost- and commercial-free space on the web.

MyKnet.org was set up in 1998 exclusively for the First Nations people of Northwestern Ontario. By the early 2000s, a wide set of actors across Northwestern Ontario, a region with an overall indigenous population of about 45,000, had found a new home on this web-based platform. During its heyday, MyKnet.org had more than 30,000 registered user accounts and about 25,000 active homepages.

With the advent and rise of commercial social media platforms, such as Facebook, user numbers began to drop. To reduce administrative and technical costs, KO-KNET decided to switch to WordPress as hosting platform in 2014. Since this required users to set up new websites, numbers continued to fall. In early 2019, there were only 2,900 homepages left and MyKnet.org was shut down a couple of months later.

Continue reading MyKnet.org: Traces of digital decoloniality in an indigenous web-based environment

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