About this Event
Next Tuesday, 26 November at 16:25 (CET), Carmen Noguera gives an open lecture titled “Partying, Flirting and Building Collective Identity: the emergence of the first participative websites in Luxembourg (1996-2004)” as a part of the Oberseminar series.
Carmen Noguera is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Luxembourg and is working on a PhD thesis on the history of the Internet and the web in Luxembourg from the 1970s to 2010. Carmen has a degree in journalism from the University of Sevilla, Spain, followed by a DEA (post-graduate diploma of advanced studies) in EU and International Relations from the University Complutense Madrid. With over 15 years of experience in Digital Marketing and Communications in the private sector, Carmen Noguera has focused on developing marketing and communications strategies, corporate e-reputation, digital footprint, Social Media strategies, and digital mentorship.
The abstract of the talk is as follows:
This presentation aims to analyze the first participatory websites in Luxembourg and how they helped to shape the emerging digital cultures in Luxembourg. We focus on how they managed to create their own local communities based on digital interactions and local events, which became a reference for the young generation of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The first Luxembourg websites started to emerge in the early 1990s, after the Internet was brought to Luxembourg in 1992 by Restena, and it got the authorization to manage the .lu domain names. By 1997 almost 45% of the websites in Luxembourg were commercial, and 10% were personal pages, showcasing the citizens willingness to contribute to the WebSphere, according to our own construction of a corpus of websites elaborated by the cross-checking of two different sources using web archives and a printed directory of websites. In 2001 it was estimated that there were around 3,000-4,000 Luxembourg websites (Paperjam, 2001).
Following Parks, 2010, who analysed social networks sites as virtual communities (Wellman & Milena, 1999; Sohn, 20008; Jones, S. 1998; Baym, 1998; Jones, Q., 1997; Liu,1999), we argue that the first participatory websites were framed under the virtual communities’ culture described by Howard Rheingold in 1993 emerging from computer supported social networks, such as bulletin board systems, newsgroups, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), among others. In the second half of the 1990s, Luxembourg saw the emergence of two participatory websites: luxusbuerg and party.lu. These platforms became sources of collective identity building, with the increased use of Luxembourgish in a time where it was barely used in the written communication (Mousel and Lulling (2002,), and also a referent place to socialize, flirt, and meet merging traditional and virtual communities (Latzko-Toth 1998) through the multiple parties and offline meetings.
These case studies will allow to discover a work based on web archives, to historicize the history of the digital, identify the digital trends and first web-based business models that emerged in the late 1990s and beginning of 2000s, and to put into perspective questions of continuity and rupture specially referred to concepts such as web 2.0.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Karolinenplatz 5, Darmstadt, Germany
USD 0.00
