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I started my media archeological dig in hopes of finding out when the icons of social media sites (tumblr, facebook, etc) started appearing on websites of official news sites. I chose Salon.com somewhat arbitrarily. Surprisingly, I discovered that salon.com was not always the property of today's news and entertainment magazine. As it turned out, the URL originally belonged to "Salon dot Com a Cyber Community," a hub of salon and beauty professionals, and was established as such in 1997. The oldness of this site is prominently paraded in the design --- brightly and variously colored text against a black background, words underlined to denote hyperlinks, lines of text centered to (presumably) maintain order-- while avoiding the headache of working with framesets and tables in web design of this era. No images. There is a broken link up top, a 'counter', based on surrounding information. The use of the term "cyber" to characterize this community is another bit of faded jargon linking the site to the 1990s. During that decade, the 'cyber' prefix was affixed to many people, places and things to signal 'new media' status. Some versions of this site also link to an "E-Zine," another trope of remediation, aimed at association with 'e-mail', most likely. It seems that some point in early 1999, salon.com shifted to the Salon Media Group, and the early versions of the web magazine that persists to this day appeared (tables and css in effect!)

"When I was learning how to write in grade school, I noticed that all my teachers wrote with near-identical handwriting on the chalkboard...I realized that we were being taught to write in a specific font." The statement here is from series by contemporary artist Jesse England. This is not net.art, but an interesting variant on "remediation," or a perverse post-digital gesture pointing to non-obvious connections between new and old modes of communication design. England, Jesse. "Learn to write in Different Fonts: Jesse England" Accessed February 14, 2014. http://jesseengland.net/index.php?/project/learn-to-write-in-different-fonts/

The Circle by David Eggers is an interesting take on social networks and the possibility of a future dystopia cyber landscape. It is about a young woman who starts working at a facebook/google like company called The Circle and looses her private life her job. This novel is similar to design fiction in presenting what could possibly happen in the future, but in this case it is a negative view. If you are interested in context collapse, social media, communication and interaction this book is really interesting. I have linked to a 45 minute audio recording in which David Eggers reads a excerpt from his book. Here is a better summary of the entire story if you like the exerpt: "When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company's modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can't believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world-even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge" E

Eggars, David. The Circle. Knopf, 2013.

This animated video by designer Melih Bilgil provides a concise, relatively easy to understand motion graphic animation about the Internet's infrastructure. Key technological inventions are detailed with a series of highly legible icons that Bilgil developed while studying Communication Design. Faced with inherently technical and sometimes challenging descriptions of various networking protocols and systems, this narrated visualization is an effective supplement to the histories relayed in the Cybernetic Counterculture texts. Melih Bilgil. "History of the Internet" Vimeo posted 2009. https://vimeo.com/2696386 Accessed February 11, 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2GRAVpbDds Somewhat related

Here's a collection of the NSA slides, revealed by Edward Snowden by way of the Guardian news. The slides detail the various pervasive and invasive methods of surveillance, tapping into phone and social media networks, as orchestrated by the National Security Agency. This is the internet-of-things-that-go-bump-in-the-night. Also, as discussed in class, the layout and design of these slides is often horrendous, complicating or obstructing clear communication of information. "NSA Prism program slides" The Guardian News. Published Friday 1 November 2013 http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/prism-slides-nsa-document. Accessed April 6, 2014