Semantics of the internet: a political history

The history of the Internet has been narrated many times. However, political histories of the Internet with a non-US-centric focus are still an uncharted research area. This paper contributes to closing that research gap. It reconstructs the Internet’s history in Germany through the lens of semantic changes in press coverage on politics. In our investigation, we sought to analyse semantic change as a political history by drawing on insights concerning the relationship between semantic change and political conflict from the perspective of discourse theory and theoretical reflections on politicisation. The study follows our intuition that semantic struggles of the past leave traces in word contexts. Conversely, it uncovers semantic change by following the traces of semantic struggles in these contexts. In line with this rationale, we conducted a ‘blended reading’ of word contexts that relied on a quantitatively assisted qualitative text analysis. The study finds that the Internet has long been understood predominantly as a tool for politics in the political public. In the late 2000s, its perception as a highly politicised object of governance also became dominant. While the Internet was always associated with a medium and a public sphere, its characterisation changed from ‘web 1.0’ to a ‘web of corporations’.

互联网的历史已被多次梳理与叙写。然而，以非美国为中心视角的互联网政治史研究，仍属于未被充分探索的研究领域。本研究旨在填补这一研究空白，通过政治新闻报道中的语义变化视角，重构德国的互联网发展历史。本研究尝试将语义变化作为政治史的分析对象，依托话语理论（discourse theory）视角下关于语义变化与政治冲突的关联洞见，以及有关政治化（politicisation）的理论反思展开研究。本研究秉持如下核心直觉：过往的语义斗争会在词语语境中留下痕迹；反之，本研究通过追踪这些语境中的语义斗争痕迹，得以揭示语义变化的具体脉络。基于这一研究逻辑，我们采用定量辅助的质性文本分析方法，对词语语境展开‘融合式解读’（blended reading）。研究结果显示，长期以来，政治公共领域对互联网的主流认知均将其视为服务于政治的工具。至2000年代末，将互联网视作高度政治化治理对象的认知也逐渐占据主导地位。尽管互联网始终被关联为一种媒介与公共领域，但其定性描述已从‘Web 1.0’转变为‘企业网络’。