Introduction: Histories, Narratives, Networks and the Internet

The introduction outlines the goals, and the theoretical and empirical perspectives adopted in the book. Beside a summary of the following chapters, three main interrelated theoretical perspectives are presented: historical research, the social and cultural analysis of the imaginary and the role of old media in the construction of networking projects and ideologies. Following and interweaving these three axes this chapter emphasizes how the institutionalization of the Internet myth has contributed to lay the foundations of the conceptual shift from a technical object, the network as infrastructure, to an ideological reference – the network as the elective model for the organization of societies. To question, to retrace and to analyze the imaginaries of networking of the past means to interrogate both the origins of networking technologies and the way in which their collective life path has been narrated over time.