S2E2: “Back to the Future? The Vernacular Web”
2025-10-02 28 min
Description & Show Notes
In the second episode of the series Luisa Conti and Fergal Lenehan, from the Centre for Digital Interculturality Studies, talk to Nathalie Fridzema from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and Anya Shchetvina from the Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany. Nathalie and Anya are PhD scholars and historians of the Internet, who presented a paper at the ReDICo-Conference in June 2025 called “Nostalgia, DIY and Internet Critique: The Emergence of the Vernacular Web as an Imaginary of Alternative Digital Futures.” The conversation touches on the vernacular web and what exactly this is, platforms dealing with the past of the Internet such as the Yesterweb, and the nostalgia-tinged imagining of Internet futures.
So, is the vernacular web simply a nostalgic-conservative imaginary of the past or is it, actually, a suitable imaginary for re-thinking the future of digitality, beyond the stranglehold of corporate platforms?
Listen to find out!
For more information on ReDICo and the ReDICo Centre for Digital Interculturality Studies, see: www.redico.eu
To join the ReDICo Hub, go to: https://hub.redico.eu
Visit the ReDICo YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DigInterculture
For more on the work of Nathalie and Anya, see their joint blog: https://matterofimagination.neocities.org
Transcript
The science podcast is brought to you by the Centre for Digital Interculturality Studies, which is presently based at the University of Jena in Germany. Our interest is the intersection between intercultural communications and Internet studies. This episode is part of the second series of our podcast dedicated to the topic of “Internet Futures”. The first series looked at “Freedom and the Internet”, and is still available from podcast platforms.
So, I'm joined today by my colleague from the Centre for Digital Interculturalities, Fergal Lenehan.
Hi, everybody.
And our guests today are Nathalie Fridzema from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and Anya Shchetvina from the Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany. So, Nathalie and Anya are PhD scholars and historians of the Internet. They presented a paper at our conference in June called “Nostalgia, DIY and Internet Critique: The Emergence of the Vernacular Web as an Imaginary of Alternative Digital Futures”. So, really, in the topic of our series. Their work looks at the Internet history in relation, therefore, to the imagining of Internet futures. Chapter 2: The Vernacular Web? So, I suppose my first question for you is what exactly is the vernacular web, Nathalie, as you were talking about that in the presentation, but today we want to dig further?
Yeah, thank you. I think it's a great starting question, because it actually is the question that Anya and me kind of struggled with, hence the inspiration to really dive into this topic. So just as a first definition, if I was going to use the vernacular web as a concept, I would describe it as amateur-driven, non-commercial web cultures, typically of the 1990s. But what we notice in our research is that the concept is kind of loosely defined. It is occasionally used in a scholarly environment.
We do see it used more now in like conferences calls and other spaces in academia, but it has a lot to do with vernacular and vernacular creativity that found its ways in media studies and cultural studies. But the vernacular web as a concept
is not very well defined, but it's definitely a phenomenon that is used more often. But what was kind of interesting for us is that we also saw that the term was used in different kinds of spaces, mainly in artistic and activist spaces. So we thought about it and we dived into this and we would actually say that the vernacular web is on the one side a scholarly notion or a concept and on the other side also an imaginary of a better web for a certain future.
Chapter 3: How is the Vernacular Web Researched? Okay, thank you. So the question is now how and why have you researched the vernacular web?
And what have you looked at exactly? I think Anya and I separately look into different versions of the vernacular web in our respective PhDs. So I look into archived homepages and I know Anya is looking into Internet manifestos. And here again I think you can see the two different interpretations emerge. So, for this research and the thing that we presented at ReDICo, we wanted to dive into the concept and see how it emerged differently.
So what we actually did, we took a lot of inspiration from Ruth Levy's Utopia as a Method. I won't go into it too much, but what we took away from her is that utopian thinking is part of academia and that it also has an archaeological mode.
So the utopian imaginary of the vernacular web, we think or we thought, is based on different elements and fragments from the past. And we digged into these, we wanted to see how they emerged, what they mean, how they relate to notions of the vernacular and vernacular creativity, and how those in turn relate to how we define the imaginary.
And Anya, do you want to add anything? Just to quickly add, I think another big source of inspiration for our perspective was just a coincidence that some colleagues of ours are working on a special issue of Convergence Journal right now. And their focus is utopian media studies.
The issue is dedicated to the utopian element through media studies history and I think it's a great way of positioning kind of this direction of thinking and for us it was very inspiring to look at vernacular web as an imaginary that contains this utopian element and how we can identify this utopian element both in scholarship but also in artistic and activistic works and how they mutually inspire each other.
Chapter 4: Olia Lialina, the ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Barbarian’ Web If I think of the presentation you were holding in June, I remember you were talking about a specific author, her name is Olia Lialinaif I pronounce it correctly.
And I think it would be interesting now to talk a bit about her idea of the vernacular web. And I was wondering, also looking again at your slides, I remember on that day, I was kind of irritated about something you chose to show. So you were saying that she describes the web of the past as the Internet of the Indigenous or the barbarians. So putting Indigenous and barbarians beside each other. So it's kind of an expression, which under a critical perspective is quite problematic.
So maybe you can tell us more why you chose this quote, how she used this association it’s like lacking of critical perspective or is maybe really wish to recreate a certain perspective. So I would love you share with us more.
Yeah, thank you. I also find this quote fascinating just because it's so provocative. And I guess I have to start with just mentioning that Olia Lialina is an amazing Internet artist and archivist. And beyond this problematic quote, there are quite interesting things she's doing. And the essays where the quote is from also have been very inspiring for Internet historians and beyond.
And the essays that she has written are free texts. They're also quite old by now, published during different years in the late 2000s, early 2010s. And in those essays, she reassesses the history of web aesthetics.
And suggests an unusual perspective that amateur visual experiments, web design experiments on early home pages and DIY websites, they have a certain value, and they might have even considered as a cultural heritage.
And she describes different aspects of those in a way that highlights not just aesthetical properties, but also describes a certain ethos of what she calls vernacular web, so she speaks of an ethos as a way to have control over technologies, to be able to change them, maybe a certain level of autonomy and control that people have later lost or delegated to professional web designers. And I totally agree with you that the metaphor of early Internet users as Indigenous is problematic in different ways.
And why I think we should be very cautious here is because it definitely somehow connects to a very long metaphorical tradition of describing users, certain users as digital natives, a metaphor that took off during the 90s when different liberal Internet activists like John Perry Barlow, for example, quite furiously argued that the Internet should not be regulated by the government because it's a region of its own and users like digital natives should do kind of self-government there, which is, of course, a very special metaphor that positions Internet as a virtual, ephemeral space beyond geographical and political borders and we know that it's not true.
But Lialina uses a metaphor in a bit different context here, so we should both see this connection with liberal discourse, but also see how she changes it. And in her essays...
She's not using it in the same way, but she creates this romanticized way to refer to early web practices as valuable. And this romanticization is interesting here because she describes them as kind of pure, as naive. She describes first users as barbarians in a way that we can look at the past as some sort of digital pastoral and idyllic space where people didn't know yet the troubles of commercialization, of professional web design and platforms and so on and so forth.
Okay, so if I understand correctly, it is very conscious, the decision of Indigenous on the one side playing with the idea of natives, digital natives and so on. And on the other side, barbarians to say these people without rules, but like in a very sympathetic way, like
there was a nice time and it was a freedom there and it's not about being ignorant of what should be, what it came after, which is not necessarily the way it should be. Is it right?
Yes, exactly. Exactly. She repeats the word independence a lot within her essays as a very important value here.
Chapter 5: The Yesterweb Imaginary Okay, thank you so much Anya. And I would like to ask you also about the Yesterweb. So it's a word play with yesterday and yesterweb, if I understand correctly. And it would be nice if you could explain in this context what it is, this Yesterweb, and what kind of an imaginary of the web of yesterday takes form there.
Yeah, thank you. This is one of the cases we analyze in our research about the vernacular web and the Yesterweb, which is, you're very right, it's a wordplay between the words yesterday and web.
It was an online social movement during the early 2020s, which stopped existing around 2023, if I'm not mistaken, so it's very fresh. And because of this, I guess it's important to mention that we were not Yesterweb participants, so we only researched it from the side, and we know there are many people out there who know the history of the movement better and for whom there is a lot at stake, so we always have to talk about it with a certain gentleness.
But we found this case very interesting to kind of look deeper into how this vernacular web imaginary is still very, very alive and mobilized in top and thinking of contemporary social movements. So the Yesterweb was a movement purely online-based. They had a website, they had a web ring, discord server, a zine, and many, many formats and some participants reported at the moments when it was at its peak, there were more than 5,000 users. So it was not that small. And in a nutshell, it was built around a certain nostalgia towards what people called an old web, a web roughly before platformization.
So, participants engaged in a lot of hands-on work and a lot of peer learning. They learned how to build their own websites and looked into different older practices and technologies that would help them to leave social networks for good. And it was all based around the idea that one can draw from the Internet's history and find ways to have more control over digital environment, over your data, over the organization of the online spaces.
And the idea was that it's easier to do if you look in the past and you look into something that worked before.
So, of course, there is a very strong nostalgic element there that's kind-of based on this belief that Internet was cosier, it was more safe, more predictable, controllable, which, yeah, as Internet historians, we know that it's not very close to reality and the early Internet had many, many problems.
Yeah, it's very hard to separate, also very strictly the old Internet from the contemporary Internet there was no one turning point. But it's also important to mention that nostalgia was a contested topic there.
So it was not purely nostalgia driven eventually. And it closed partially because some members started talking about how nostalgia is not a very productive approach. And to really change something, to really make a difference in the modern Internet, you need to be progressive in a way, you need to be future-oriented. You can't just get lost in this huge nostalgic sentiment. And there were some tensions around these different views.
But what is interesting for us is to see how the idea of old vernacular web is again here a very, very strong mobilizing idea, very strong belief that web of the past was better and that history can inspire us to imagine a better way to be online.
Chapter 6: The Vernacular Web, Interculturality and Nationalism I suppose, okay, we were looking here now at the micro level, looking at sort of specific examples and you've sort of analyzed how the sort of a past imaginary here sort of feeding into a quasi future imaginary. One of our questions is, of course, okay, that the Podcast is about Digital Interculturality. Then how does this research, how does it relate to intercultural research and interculturality? And another question, okay, there is nostalgia here and we all know that nostalgia is linked to certain types of discourses, not least sort of nationalist discourses. Is there an implicit nationalism here actually behind the idea of the vernacular web imaginary? Could you say something a small bit about that, Nathalie, maybe if that's okay?
Yeah, thank you. I think the web as a space, as a technology, can maybe inherently be understood as intercultural, because it's always been a space where locally grounded practices and culture kind of intersects on a more global level, where transnational cultural flows intersect.
And you can see this in the different types of imaginaries and aesthetics that then travel. So a big part of Olia Lialina or her essays is that these vernacular elements like guest books or certain GIFs, they become part of this vernacular web culture and they travel in that sense. But I think that the intercultural lens, and kind of to relate to your second question on nationalism, can work very well here because it shows that even though you have this...
what we can say is perhaps one web culture, it is very context and culturally grounded. And in our research, it became clear pretty soon that it is of course very much grounded in Western ideals of individuality and autonomy.
When we looked into utopian thinking in historical accounts of the web, the virtual community is a concept that pops up pretty soon, it's a well-known concept brought forward by Howard Rheingold, and that is very much honed into the culture of the United States at the time, so the kind of foreign ideology kind of creating this community away from the state. But what then is very interesting, as soon as that idea travels to, for example, the Netherlands which is a case I work with a lot.
You see that the idea of the virtual community becomes something that is not so much separate from the state, but in the Netherlands they very much wanted to work together with the state and with local politics. So it changes depending on where it goes. And I think the intercultural lens, and also, or in that sense, helps to see how nationalist tendencies go about there. There's also a great article by one of our colleagues, Gabriele de Seta, who's worked on vernacular creativity on the Chinese web, which is of course an all other ball game in that sense.
Okay, so it works sort of on a comparative level, is what you're saying, rather than anything else.
Yeah, at least that's what we think.
Okay, it's very interesting. So as I understand it, then there's an imaginary of a virtual community, which is developed and developed
in the United States, is transported then as an imaginary and then is locally sort of reinterpreted according to the different contexts.
Yes, yeah. At least in the cases that I looked into and like I said, it's mainly based on Western ideals, but of course it means different things in different parts of the world.
Chapter 7: The Vernacular Web as a Conservative Imaginary and Future Visions OK, very, very interesting. OK, so a lot of what you've been talking about is has been sort of nostalgia and nostalgia is sort of is a feeling of hurt about a lost past and nostalgia. I suppose has traditionally be seen as intertwined with with actually conservative set of discourses. Would you would you characterize the vernacular imaginary actually as a conservative imaginary? On the other hand, OK, can or indeed does the utopian imaginary of the vernacular web then also feed into positive future visions of the Internet? How would you sort of situate
the vernacular imaginary in relation to that. Maybe Anya first, if that's okay.
In early media studies, the entrance to vernacular web is definitely progressive and not conservative, just because the notion is, firstly, being used while the Internet is quite young. So this focus on vernacular is connected to hopes for the future and to anthropologists and media scholars seeing something online that they think is valuable and valuable because it's vernacular. So that's what we're looking at.
And generally, it's grounded in this interest of the time that we can see in philosophy and cultural studies in general towards participation, participatory culture, amateur creativity, self-organization and things like this. But vernacular web is also an interest of later researchers and later artists and activists, in works that are published after 2010, 2020, we see that quite often this notion is used as a reference to the past. And the vernacular web becomes a historical phenomenon.
So here we see that a certain nostalgic element is being added. And now to this part of your question where you ask if it's conservative imaginary, because nostalgia can be conservative. I would say that nostalgia can be conservative, but it doesn't have to.
And here we draw a lot from work of Svetlana Boym and her book, which is called The Future of Nostalgia, where she distinguishes quite interestingly a difference between two types of nostalgia.
First of them is restorative nostalgia and second one is reflective. So restorative nostalgia tends to be more conservative, and here you're very, very right. And she analyzes how this type of nostalgia also drives conservative movements, for example, in politics. And this type of feeling is grounded in the belief that the past can be rebuilt in its original form. So it existed somewhere back then and maybe it was better and you can return to this better state of the world.
So, this is one type of nostalgia, nostalgic sentiment, and the second...
Sorry, the sort of the MAGA nostalgia, sort of the idea of make America great again, and with an implicit nostalgia from the 1950s, I suppose, or something like that.
Yes, or as a modern USSR nostalgia of Putin's Russia, very good examples. And on the other hand, you have a reflective nostalgia, which doesn't have this feeling of being hurt, what you mentioned, and your reflective nostalgia is kind of savouring of the fact that something happened. And you know it happened. It will never return, but you can appreciate this distance and you can enjoy it. You can get inspired by it. So you know that it can't be resurrected anymore, and that's fine. So, applying it to our cases, thanks to your question,
we see quite clearly that the Yesterweb had both types of nostalgia there, and these conservative aspects were probably one of the reasons the movement stopped existing, because they were contradictory towards the idea that you can use this imaginary to build a better future. People some people just really wanted to return to the past and were closed to other alternatives, which is not very helpful.
Very, very interesting.
Yeah, so I would say that just in a nutshell, to summarize all this, when we talk about vernacular web as an imaginary, it can be conservative, it can be progressive, it can be many different things, and how we try to define it is that it's an utopian imaginary that is mostly...
built around a certain set of values about what is better for our relationship with the Internet. So this idea that vernacular web is not necessarily a historical phenomenon, but an idea that self-organization, amateur driven ethos, a certain playfulness, a certain autonomy to design your media, is very, very important to have a good life online. So this is the core of this imaginary, so to say.
Okay, then Nathalie, do you want to add to what Anya said?
Yeah, I think when we had conversations with other people about our research, we get often very nostalgic reactions also, but also reactions that say, well, it's not like these people blindly want to restart GeoCities again and just have the old web again. And I think that's precisely the core of what Anya just said. People don't just want to...
go back in time and that be it, but indeed take certain values from the past and use them to inspire the present. And I think it's important that we emphasize that they are not, so to say, blindly romanticizing the past. And yeah, that's it.
Okay.
Can I add one more thing?
Of course, Anya, of course.
I just remembered we were talking to a very great Internet historian, Kevin Driscoll, taking an interview with him. And he mentioned that he thinks that studying Internet history is helping you to have a more broad scope of what you imagine as
as possible, as normal. So when you look in history, you have more ideas about how life can be, how Internet can be. So in this way, vernacular web can definitely have a lot of potential to look into web's history, to get inspiration, to build something that is better than what we have now. We just need to be really, really cautious with this conservative nostalgia, kind of.
But then the last question for me would be, so you are historians, you have been dealing with this topic, with this issue, you have been reading and analyzing and so on. So what do you think are the values of the Internet in the future? What should be the values leading farther
a different internet?
I think, Anya and I, we summarized it, and I think I would say these are also the things that I stand behind around the concept of autonomy. So autonomy of the medium, so being able to design your own platforms, autonomy of playful participation, so building community online, and we also had autonomy from the commercial web ecology. And I think if we look into most contemporary Internet critique, the latter one resonates with people the most, kind of the feeling that you are not able to be online outside this commercial web logics. And I think that one also resonates most with me. I would love to go back to a more non-institutionalized web in that sense.
So a bit of an anarchic Internet.
Yeah, maybe. anarcho-cosmopolitan imaginary, in essence.
That's a great term.
So thank you, thank you very much, Nathalie, and thank you very much, Anya. Yeah, thank you for having us.
Thank you for having us, that's great questions. Yeah, and thank you very much from me too.
And for everyone now, if you would like to learn more about ReDICo, then please go to redicoeu. You can also go to our YouTube channel where you will find, for example, the presentation held by Anya and Nathalie, and also many more educasts and further presentations. You can also join the ReDICo- Hub. It's a platform for all of those people who are interested in the topics from our podcasts and also related ones.
This platform is absolutely for scholars, but not just for scholars, for students, but also for those people involved more practically, such as trainers, policymakers, and also teachers, for example. So you also can follow us on Bluesky, on LinkedIn, and Mastodon. Thank you very much to everyone for listening to us and have a nice day. See you soon.
See you soon, everybody.