Social Media at the Margins: Crafting Community Media Before the Web

Abstract

“Social Media at the Margins: Crafting Community Media Before the Web” traces the emergence of four community media projects that provide a history of social media before social media. Queer and subcultural communities at the margins embraced new mediated means of being social in the shadows of the privatizing sphere of domestic technological, social, and aesthetic norms in the latter half of the twentieth century. This dissertation maintains that understanding the prehistory of the “social” of contemporary “social media” demands an attention to the marginalized archives of subcultural and queer media production from the period before the launch of the World Wide Web. I excavate this multi-sited history through methods of cultural history including original archival analysis and oral history interviews with subcultural media producers. I argue that “community information formats” are an important precursor to modes of sociality that later flourished online on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. A community information format refers to the development of social and technical standards for building community and for fostering access to community media production during the period right before the World Wide Web. This analysis of community information formats captures the segmentation of subcultures that was occurring just as the cultural influences guiding the principles of openness and accessibility of the Web were being developed. The concept of the community information format demonstrates how media technologies were made public and contributed to emergent ideas of a media commons despite privatizing forces in media production from the 1970s to the 1990s.

My case studies center marginalized social actors whose work anticipated and informed practices now associated with the rise of a social internet and social media platforms. The second chapter analyzes the infrastructural discourse behind the Community Memory public computing terminal system of Berkeley, California, an overlooked attempt to make computing as public and banal as a payphone. The third chapter contends with the queer temporalities of the home video archive of Nelson Sullivan, whose videos captured the 1980s-nightlife scene of New York City and now live on within YouTube’s streaming economy. The fourth chapter explores how the Atlanta public access television program The American Music Show built a participatory space of community media production through a satirical orientation to televisual conventions. The fifth chapter reveals how queer punk zine producers and readers constructed a network imaginary through zine distribution across North America. This dissertation draws from a wide range of archival research performed at institutions across North America: the GLBT Historical Society’s Dr. John P. De Cecco Archives and Special Collections in San Francisco, California; the Computer History Museum’s Shustek Research Archive in Fremont, California; Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library in Atlanta, Georgia; Michigan State University’s Special Collections Library; University of Michigan’s Special Collections Library; and New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections. This dissertation investigates community information formats such as self-printed zines, videotapes of public access television programs, and ephemera from queer media conventions to perform a cultural history of social media that surfaces understudied voices, lives, and media technological visions.