[Air-L] Out now: Internet Histories double special issue 6 (1-2), Dead and Dying Platforms

[Muira McCammon]

Hi, everyone:


On behalf of my co-editor, Jessa Lingel, I wanted to share the exciting
news that our double special issue on dead-and-dying platforms is now
completed and available online. Full details are below. We owe a debt to many
people on this listserv, who kindly offered their support in different ways
along the way. We began this effort in 2020
<https://twitter.com/muira_mccammon/status/1262510666533023744> and
benefited greatly as well from the editorial guidance of Niels Brügger, Ian
Milligan, and others belonging to the editorial board at *Internet
Histories*. We hope the contents inspire others, who are thinking and
writing about endings, technological failure, infrastructural frailty, and
the ethics of exhuming the web that was.


All my best,

Muira



*Muira McCammon*
*Ph.D. candidate, Annenberg School for Communication, University of
Pennsylvania *
*M.L., University of Pennsylvania Law School (2020)*

*Twitter: @muira_mccammon*


***


The journal Internet Histories Volume 6 Issue 1-2 has been completed and is
available online.


This is a special double issue "Dead and Dying Platforms" by guest editors
Muira McCammon & Jessa Lingel.

Two articles are Open Access, and one is Free Access for a limited time.


The double issue may be accessed here:

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rint20/6/1-2 <
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rint20/6/1-2>


Contents:


Editorial

Situating dead-and-dying platforms: technological failure, infrastructural
precarity, and digital decline

Muira McCammon & Jessa Lingel


Interview

Dead-and-dying platforms: a roundtable

Muira McCammon, Diami Virgilio, Cody Ogden, Kevin Ackermann,
Ethan Zuckerman, Robert Gehl, Saima Akhtar, Sultan Al-Azri, Catherine
Knight Steele, Amber M. Hamilton, Anat Ben-David, Sarah Wasserman,
Sara Namusoga-Kaale & Joy Lisi Rankin


Articles

Why does a platform die? Diagnosing platform death at Friendster’s end

Frances Corry


“Tom had us all doing front-end web development”: a nostalgic (re)imagining
of Myspace | Open Access

Kate M. Miltner & Ysabel Gerrard


The four deaths of Couchsurfing and the changing ecology of the web

Karolina Mikołajewska-Zając & Attila Márton


Porn bans, purges, and rebirths: the biopolitics of platform death in queer
fandoms

Diana Floegel


“Everything on the internet can be saved”: Archive Team, Tumblr and
the cultural significance of web archiving | Open Access

Jessica Ogden


Forgotten passwords and Long-Gone exes: the life and death of Renren

Lianrui Jia


“They’re describing Yelp in 1992!”: revisiting the Blacksburg
Electronic Village

Tamara Kneese


The rise and fall of MapQuest

Rowan Wilken


“Yakety yak: Don’t talk back”: An autopsy of anonymity gone awry

Kathryn Montalbano


r/WatchRedditDie and the politics of reddit’s bans and quarantines

Julia R. DeCook


A ‘lifetime of indentured servitude:’ rights, labor, and gender anxieties
in a dead men’s rights newsgroup

Alexis de Coning


The death of GeoCities: seeking destruction and platform eulogies in
Web archives

Katie Mackinnon | Free Access


Book Reviews

Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory:
Classification, Ranking, and Sorting of the Past by Ben Jacobsen and David
Beer, Bristol University Press, Bristol, 2021. Hardcover, pp. 116, ISBN:
978-1-5292-1815-2

Kira Allmann


Wikipedia @ 20, stories of an incomplete revolution, edited by
joseph reagle and jackie koerner, the MIT press (2020),
cambridge, Massachusetts; london, England, U.S. $27.95

Helen Hockx-Yu