while some stated that you needed to develop the product while solving technical issues.1 Links to an external site. Even if these employees did not explicitly argue for Friendster’s persistence through the lessons that were learned from it, as those that related it to Facebook did, they did structure death narratives around overarching lessons, and described how these lessons were able to be mobilized in future work.

As he noted, in order to re-envision the network as one that primarily served Southeast Asian users, Friendster leadership had to go through the typical stages of grief–denial, then anger, acceptance, and action. For the group that he described, Friendster’s initial death was when it stopped serving, pursuing and being associated with US audiences, and when it started serving, pursuing and finally being associated with users in its long-dominant Southeast Asian markets.

With social networking features removed, he argued, the site had lost its network effect and therefore its potential for growth.

I thought [Friendster] was a failure, not because of the technical challenges, but because of the business decisions. Deciding that Friendster was going to be a media company, like NBC, to me, that was the beginning of the end for them.

rom the beginning, Friendster employees were under the directive to focus on US users and attempt to reduce the impact of the Southeast Asian users, lest these communities curb the platform’s growth in the United States, and therefore, its potential for monetization and its trajectory as a runaway success.

Lee, another early architect, felt similarly. He pointed out that these scaling issues were common for social networks at the time:

They had had their big moment and then they couldn’t scale. They had insurmountable technical issues, which they weren’t focused on. Instead, they were planning for the golden future that they were going to have. […] Because of their technical issues, MySpace was able to take the lead.

A popularly cited reason for why Friendster died was that it had insurmountable technical issues related to scale.

Searching those who had previously worked at Friendster, I messaged individuals with an interview request and description of the project, phrased as one that examines the lifecycles of social networks. Interviewees were recruited from throughout Friendster’s tenure.

A near synonym of death within Silicon Valley techno-cultures is failure. Indeed, when interviewees spoke of Friendster’s decline, they used failure and death metaphors interchangeably, and the open parameters of technological death that are used in this article allow for these terms to have significant overlap.

Following this, we might ask: does technological death have an afterlife?

Employees used moments of technical breakage to discursively acknowledge the aging of a system, and therefore reorient their shared goals around the end-of-life phase of the mission. In framing death this way, these studies establish a precedent for interpreting Friendster’s end as one that is socially negotiated, and for interpreting death as a term with expansive potential.

a lens which proposes that “breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design as conventionally practiced and thought about are the key themes and problems facing new media and technology scholarship today” (p. 222).

Therefore, before I discuss the death of Friendster as a platform, it is useful to discuss what technological end-of-life has looked like in previous studies, the rationale for avoiding death as a term, and why it might be time to reconsider including it, especially for research on platforms.

ndeed, Friendster’s apparent death was far from agreed upon in both circumstances and timing.

From this vantage point, Friendster was dead, a literal textbook case of Silicon Valley failure. In the years that followed, the platform would be sold to Malaysian payments company Money Online (MOL) in 2011, turned into a gaming site, and ultimately dissolved in 2018.

Friendster is remembered within Silicon Valley circles as a progenitor of social networking and as a cautionary tale of remarkable failure. Founded in 2002 by entrepreneur Jonathan Abrams, the site enjoyed skyrocketing users in its early years–three million users by early 2003

The word Internet functions as a non-neutral metonymy for an historically embedded set of institutions and practices; in a sense it has more in common with the term “Hollywood” than, say, “moving image” (Streeter, 2016 Links to an external site.).

As a result, while the Internet did not emerge overnight from nowhere, in the American white collar imagination, it seemed to.

And the direct experience of rapid development of new spaces online lent itself to a narrative in which the Internet had a telos.7 Links to an external site. It seemed to grow with a force of its own, beyond reach even of, say, Bill Gates.

the recurring question about the future became “what will happen on the internet next?” instead of, say, “what will we as a society choose to do with computer communication?”

It was all very high-minded. What was then officially called the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) would be used by scientists for sophisticated research and perhaps as a kind of electronic library where thoughtful patrons would quietly and studiously gather useful information.

n 1990, what existed of the Internet was understood as a research-oriented prototype that, according to legislation, would “be phased out when commercial networks can meet the networking needs of American researchers”

the U.S. Congress was revising the structure of its communications law for the first time in more than half a century, major corporations from the phone companies to Microsoft to the television networks were radically revamping core strategies, television ads for consumer products routinely displayed URLs and the Internet stock bubble was starting to inflate.

Changes in style, shades of meaning and unstated assumptions are an indicator of the presence of structures of feeling.

in an important early overview article. Rosenzweig noted the many competing narratives and visions in writing about Internet history,

So, for example, myth and symbol school scholars looked at literary and popular texts in American history and identified recurrent themes such as “the machine in the garden” and the “city on the hill” which could then be shown to be operating in contemporary talk about new technology (

Structures of feeling, he wrote, concern “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt … characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought”

Novelty in the digital does not surprise us; over the last 30 years, it has become an expectation.

Yet, here he was cheerfully ceding any role for government. At that moment, he knew that this gesture of turning power over to the private sector would be so automatically accepted by this audience that it would need no defending.

legal control existed for the Internet technically laid with the US government

hey are not, it is true, learning any trade which they may follow thorough life; but those messengers who choose to study telegraphy are said to make especially good operators.

every boy is expected to serve ten hours a day.

But there are grades of promotion, and a boy who becomes a sergeant, and then has general charge of an office, giving out the uniforms, etc., is paid five dollars a week.

t is of course necessary for the boys to know the situation of every street in the city. A large map of the city is therefore placed before them, with the streets marked on it, but without their names.

Every boy, therefore, who is employed by the American District Telegraph Company is put into a training-school, and this school is a very interesting one. 

But there are times in the year when a great many message come in for delivery between 1 and 7 A.M. At such times, ambitious boys are given an opportunity to do extra work.

This record shows that the average time required is, with a surprisingly small variation from week to week, eight minutes and fifteen seconds.

A boy who is a slow walker or inclined to be lazy will not deliver so many while a very active boy will deliver more.

work by a set of strict rules, so that if a boy is slow or careless, he may be known at once among all his comrades. Long experience has shown how this can be done, and all the regulations of the office are made so as to get from each boy the best service possible.

So rapidly are they expected to do their work, that even the very short time lost in opening and shutting umbrellas is held to be worth considering.

These are the telegraph-boys or messengers. It will be found that they are not all dressed alike, and a little inquiry will show that this is because they are in the employ of different companies.

if the business boys all over the land were to have justice done to them in the way of description, it would require the writing of a whole book; and a very interesting book it might be made, too

But it is very easy to overlook the fact that working side by side with these men, is an army of business boys, to whom all branches of trade are indebted for assistance, and without whose aid more than one industry would suffer at least serious inconvenience

Everybody living in a city sees the telegraph messenger hurrying along the street; hears the news-boy shouting out the names of his papers; is offered on every hand the services of the boot-black, or comes in contact with the cash-boy or office-boy.

The reasons are not hard to identify: students of history acquire, by studying different phases of the past and different societies in the past, a broad perspective that gives them the range and flexibility required in many work situations.

The Ability to Assess Evidence

People who have weathered adversity not just in some work of fiction, but in real, historical circumstances can provide inspiration

Only through studying history can we grasp how things change; only through history can we begin to comprehend the factors that cause change; and only through history can we understand what elements of an institution or a society persist despite change.

How can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace—unless we use historical materials? How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation, or the role that beliefs play in shaping family life, if we don't use what we know about experiences in the past?

Unfortunately, this use can encourage mindless memorization—a real but not very appealing aspect of the discipline

History is in fact very useful, actually indispensable, but the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem from some other disciplines.

Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist—as most American educational programs do—on a good bit of history? And why urge many students to study even more history than they are required to?

The central task will be to make the connections that help to explain why radio, television, and newer technologies developed as they did. We can also begin to imagine the connections that failed: the technological potential that was suppressed, the programs that never made it to a wider audience, the possibilities for a different kind of interaction with broadcasting that were shunted off to one side or actively discouraged.

fought back by running a write-in campaign for governor of Kansas in 1930, using the slogan “Let’s Pasture the Goats on the Statehouse Lawn.” His campaign was a model of populist appeal;

In 1923, Brinkley was awarded one of the first radio station licenses in Kansas, based in the small town of Milford where the Brinkley Hospital was located.

For instance, we can understand one of the central events of the twentieth century, World War II, in two ways. The first is as a war of national borders: Germany’s attempt to take control of other countries and those countries’ defense of their national sovereignty. The other is as a war of interior borders, or identity: the attempt of a nation to assert a superior Aryan national identity and to wipe out its Jewish citizens and others who did not conform. Borders and identities—these are the stuff of nations. And so they are the stuff of history. Equally, they are the stuff of broadcasting.

One of the greatest utopian promises of the revolutionary new technology of radio in the 1920s was its ability to tie our vast and varied country together as a nation.

For the United States, in particular, this gateway to television from outside our own cultural universe has been a revolution.

We export our media products across the globe, and it is a rare country that has not had some experience with U.S. films, music, or television, not to mention similar products from other countries.

Thus the history of 1950s America becomes a pastoral vision of moms at home, even though by 1960, fully 40 percent of American women worked outside the home and made up over a third of the total workforce, and even though in television many women found powerful and influential careers.

Even though some events can be proved to have happened, if they are not repeated in the right places, or worse, if they are overlooked or omitted by powerful histories, they can be silenced out of existence.

But neither could history ever be written without careful use of clues to the past, or it would cross the border into fiction.

break apart the two terms to arrive at the equation given at the beginning of this section: History (our understanding of what happened in the past) consists inseparably of both the past and historiography (K. Jenkins 1991).

Depending on the context into which we put these television programs, and the explanations we write around them, their history changes, even though the facts of their existence do not.

As sociologist Stephanie Coontz wryly puts it, “Contrary to popular opinion, Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary”

Most families in the United States were in fact not nearly as affluent, “non-ethnic,” or “traditional” as their TV models.

These three trends were closely tied to the emergent business of the television broadcast networks, as they promoted TV set sales to suburban homeowners, aired shows sponsored by the manufacturers of home appliances and other consumer goods, and increasingly used market research to match up audiences, products, and appropriate programming.

These families lived for the most part in a substantial suburban single-family home, with a yard and trees and neighborhood schools that the kids could walk to. Their kitchens contained the most modern appliances; they dressed well, owned at least one car, and entertained regularly. They ate meals together, served by Mom (unless there was a maid, usually depicted as an African American woman, as in Beulah or Make Room for Daddy). Not only were all the families affluent and mysteriously non-ethnic, so was everyone else in their neighborhood and social circle.

“Strong families” meant heterosexual, nuclear units with a dad who worked, a mom who stayed home and looked after the house, and good clean kids who respected their parents. “Things were better” because the government stayed out of people’s private lives, and families were self-sufficient and right-thinking.

One has all the mighty machinery of the media industry on his/her side, the other can find it difficult to talk back or to find an entry point into the machine.

Our political process, and the political processes of other nations, have been and continue to be fundamentally influenced by the power of the media.

look at them as conduits for social and cultural power. This includes the power to create understandings about the world and the people who live in it, the power to direct our attention toward some things and away from others, the power to influence how we see ourselves and our potential in life, the power to ensure that certain kinds of things get said over and over, while others remain silent, on the margins, without a voice.

then you will no doubt see many holes in my perceptions

but as a creative process of interpretation and construction in which you can, at any moment, intervene.

Does history happen without you, or do you play a role in deciding what history is?

each book starts with a preconceived framework

Where could we possibly begin such a history?

came worry about the negative effects of the new connections

how a shift in one direction can cut off another, and how each “improvement” comes along with possibilities for ruin.

tragedies that occur when connections fail, or are mishandled

barriers lifted and contradictions at least temporarily resolved

You have had a mistress—I forgave you. My sister has a lover—you drive her from the house.

see that his behavior affects the lives of others

find their lives forever altered