When institutions meet the Web: advocating for a ‘critical Internet user’ figure in the 1990s

What is an “Internet user” in the late 1990s? How is this important in the 1990s transition between the confidential and the mainstream Internet? The Web as a “missing link” between information systems technologies and market is a common answer to explain the success of the Internet in the end of the twentieth century. However, we lack insight on how the Internet entered the public sphere, from a genealogical and historical point of view. Our hypothesis is that in the context of an Internet crisis in the mid to late-1990’s, institutional appropriation of the topic on the Web 1.0 helped define a general Internet user; and thus, allowed the emergence of a “Internet critical user” as an alternative to the “commercial user” beging fashioned in the new digital economy. One of the first institutional appropriations of network technologies can be analyzed through the creation of non-profit organizations dedicated to the defense and promotion of the Internet, and more specifically dedicated to the “Internet user”. We studied how they appropriate Internet and Web technologies to showcase their mission. Our corpus comprises websites of two of these groups in France: AFUU, the French Unix User Organization that pioneered open system networks in France since 1982, falling within the tradition of professional computer users; and AUI (Internet Users Organization), created in 1996 in reaction to the first governmental attempts in France to regulate Web usage, and fitting into the model of the citizen defense group