Book Review: The Internet Myth: From The Internet Imaginary to Network Ideologies by Paolo Bory

Abstract

Jamie Ranger reviews Paolo Bory’s The Internet Myth: From The Internet Imaginary to Network Ideologies. Bory contends that there is a dominant narrative within Internet studies that networks, by virtue of their being networks, are the main agents of social, economic and political change. He argues that this myth is embedded in the foundational imaginaries that were constructed around the Internet in the 1990s and that such an understanding forecloses and provincializes human-centred collective action towards alternative possibilities.

Keywords

• network ideology
• internet imaginaries
• internet history
• internet myth
• network imaginary
• the web