title: The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online
author: Whitney Phillips
description: "Memes, trolling and weird internet jokes are becoming part of the everyday language of contemporary societies, whether occupying centre stage in mainstream politics or scuttling around in the darkest corners of the web. In this book, two leading scholars of digital communication have joined forces, in turn bringing folklore together with rigorously forensic studies of internet culture to create a new theoretical vocabulary for understanding, researching and teaching the Internets multiple vernaculars."<br /><b>Jean Burgess, Queensland University of Technology<br /><br /></b>"From pranks and tasteless jokes to political propaganda, its never been more important to face how online media give rise to and amplify the longstanding communal practices that lie between play and hate, fun and cruelty. Like its subject, this book is both entertaining and disturbing. Its an honest, uneasy, and essential reckoning. Youll laugh, feel bad you did, and understand."<b><br />Nancy Baym, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research
  						    	
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zlib_text: A Brief History of the Internet The Bright Side: The Dark Side
  1
  A Brief History of the
  Internet
  The Bright Side: The Dark Side
  Michael Hart with Max Fuller
  (C)1995, Released on March 8th.
  
  A Brief History of the Internet The Bright Side: The Dark Side
  2
  CHAPTER 00
  Preface
  The Internet Conquers Space, Time, and Mass Production...
  Michael Hart called it NeoMass Production [TM] in 1971... and
  published the U.S. Declaration of Independence on the and no one was
  listening...or were they? ???careful!!!! If the governments, universities or
  colleges of the world wanted people to be educated, they certainly could
  have a copy of things like the Declaration of Independence where
  everyone could get an electronic copy.  After all, it has been over 25
  years since the Internet began as government funded projects among our
  universities, and only 24 years since the Declaration was posted, followed
  by the Bill of Rights, Constitution, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc.
  Why do more people get their electronic