Network Frontier: Reframing Exploration and Exploitation in Internet Rhetoric
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Date
2015-08-18
Authors
Hess, Michael
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
The Internet is a product of the organizational structure of the Office of Science and Research Development, scientific corporate liberalism of Vannevar Bush's post-WWII policies, the process-oriented rhetoric in Science: The Endless Frontier, and Kennedy's commitment to the New Frontier. This thesis first examines the network infrastructure and then the Web in succession, following the common use of the metaphor, which moved from the rhetoric of science in the 1940s to a metaphor that financially and ideologically supported the Pentagon's Advanced Research Project Agency infrastructure in the 1960s and then finally created the value-laden features of the Internet, cyberspace, and its culture in the 1990s. This thesis connects the stages of development of the Internet to uses of the frontier in political rhetoric.
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Keywords
American frontier, ARPANET, Corporate liberalism, Cyberspace, Internet, Manhattan Project