Dot-Com Design

The book is chronologically organized and almost reads like a well-referenced storybook with many characters. - Choice What Walter Benjamin was to Paris, Megan Ankerson is to the web: she has resurrected an era attitudes and aesthetics, economics and practices, fantasies and futures to explain how the present came to be. Indispensable reading for everyone who wants to understand what the web meant, and what it means. - Finn Brunton, author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet Ankerson opens a wormhole into the history of the World Wide Web. Hers is an original and importantly critical account of how surfing and browsing have depended upon emergent design norms. She takes her readers from the early days of hotlists, cool sites, and cyber-whatnot to the design ethos of shopping carts and “user experience” as a premium, all of which helped broker the emergence of Web 2.0 as a thinkable, shared experience - Lisa Gitelman, New York University Dot-Com Design provides deep contextualization of the many instances of dispute and sites of struggle that shaped the aesthetic, software, and hardware design of what we now term the Internet. (Communication Booknotes Quarterly)

Megan Sapnar Ankerson is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. She is co-editor of the international journal Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society.