[Air-L] AoIR 2023 Nancy Baym Annual Book Award Announcement

[Michelle, Association of Internet Researchers]

The committee for the Association of Internet Researchers 2023 Nancy Baym
Annual Book Award is delighted to announce this year’s winner. Many
excellent books were submitted for consideration by the committee and the
task of narrowing down the list to one clear winner was by no means an easy
one. Indeed, as the committee felt that the two books that made it to the
final stage of consideration were both eminently worthy of the award on
their own terms, we decided it would also be appropriate to give an
honorable mention. Accordingly, without any further ado, the winner of the
2023 Nancy Baym Annual Book Award is T*he Modem World: A Prehistory of
Social Media* by Kevin Driscoll (Yale University Press) and the distinction
of an honorable mention goes to *Redeem All: How Digital Life is Changing
Evangelical Culture* by Corrina Laughlin (University of California Press).

Driscoll’s *The Modem World* offers a compelling history of the sprawling
BBS culture from which much internet culture emerged. Driscoll’s meticulous
yet fast paced narrative of the rise and fall of the “modem world” of
dial-up BBSs is as engaging in a readerly way as it is rigorous in terms of
research and argument. Moreover, Driscoll’s analytical objective here is
not just to recover a forgotten historical moment in the development of the
internet and social media, but to present his account of the BBSs as a
genealogy of the present that has important implications for imagining and
enacting a future of the internet outside of the hegemonic rule of Big
Tech. Accordingly, *The Modem World* captures the unwritten, yet crucial
history of "alternative" social media as well as the historical dimension
of the technology, both of which are badly needed for existing research on
the internet and communication technologies more broadly. We note that this
is the first time the award has been given to a monograph focused primarily
on media history.

Laughlin’s *Redeem All: How Digital Life is Changing Evangelical Culture*
is a tour de force of research fieldwork on one of the most consequential
developments in organized religion of the past decades, namely, the
relationship between digital communication technologies and the quotidian
practices of evangelical Christianity in the United States. Laughlin
grounds her analysis in the ambivalent 20th century history of how American
evangelicals have alternatively embraced and resisted the integration of
new communication technologies into the missionary work of Christian
religious practice. This historical grounding sets the stage of Laughlin’s
ethnography of several different sites and spaces of contemporary
evangelical culture that embody and perform what she terms the “digital
habitus”, such as the suburban mega-churches and Silicon Valley start-ups
that specialize in “faith-tech.”  The book’s careful attention to the
cultural politics of digital technologies within evangelical communities
speaks to members of the AoIR community who do interpretive and qualitative
work from sociological, anthropological, and cultural studies perspectives.

For this year’s award, the committee was comprised by:

Andrew Herman, Chair, Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada)
Nick Bowman, Syracuse University (USA)
Marco Bastos, University College, Dublin (Ireland)
Niki Cheong, King’s College London (UK)
Jun Liu, University of Copenhagen (Denmark)

AoIR congratulates Kevin Driscoll on winning the 2023 Nancy Baym Annual
Book Award, and likewise congratulates Corrina Laughlin on receiving an
honorable mention. AoIR would also like to thank the members of the award
committee for their work adjudicating between the many quality books
received this year.