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MODELING OF DIGITAL FUTURES 297

beyond the reach of public deliberation. social actors took the lead and according to an
One-sided economistic approaches fall into analysis of the type of interplay among actors.
the same trap (see discussion in Elster, 1983).
On the other hand, voluntaristic approaches
underestimate the power of structures. The Phase I (1970s–1980s)
stories about genius inventors make for a
popular genre but exaggerate the role of indi- The Internet’s predecessor, the ARPAnet,
viduals (Hong, 2001; Weightman, 2003). was funded by the US Department of
These shortcomings can be overcome Defense in an effort to bolster the American
through a more holistic approach that bal- lead in research and technology after the
ances structure and agency, and through stud- Soviet Union’s successful launching of
ies of how social shaping processes are Sputnik had indicated that the Cold War
accomplished in the more or less conflictual, opponent was catching up. The concepts of a
competitive, or cooperative interplay of social redundancy of links and the transmission of
actors who are understood as being embed- messages in smaller, flexibly switched pack-
ded in institutional and structural contexts, ets had been developed in the 1960s at
which in turn provide both limits and RAND, a think-tank close to the Pentagon, as
resources for creative action. This approach part of a plan to set up a decentralized com-
draws on technology studies by Latour munications infrastructure that could survive
(1987), Bijker (1995), MacKenzie and the breakdown of some of its nodes in the
Wajcman (1999), and more generally, the scenario of a nuclear attack (Baran, 1964).
agency and structure balancing work of Although initially hesitant about the possibil-
Giddens (1984). How NICTs are shaped is ity of relinquishing control over their com-
thus seen as the outcome of a complex inter- puters by linking them to others, computer
play of social forces. These forces include scientists recognized the benefits of such a
socio-economic structures, legal frameworks, network rapidly and developed a thriving
political systems, cultural patterns, the culture of cooperation among colleagues at
options and constraints set by previous tech- distant campuses (Abbate, 1999). ARPAnet
nologies, and the agency locatable in a range was eventually transformed into the NSFnet,
of social actors with differential means of with funding provided by the National
influence (cf. Kubicek et al., 1997 and Wilson Science Foundation. The conflict of the Cold
and Kahin, 1997 for the USA and Europe; War can thus be seen as having given impe-
Herzog et al., 2002 and Schulz, 2001a for tus to the development of the Internet in its
Latin America). The contextually embedded early phase. Yet, within the conflict the prin-
social actors involved in these more or less ciple of publicly funded cooperation among
contentious shaping processes include, inter research scientists was crucial. Moreover, the
alia, transnational corporations with interests state-led development of ARPAnet and
in software, hardware, and e-commerce, inter- NSFnet must also be seen in connection with
governmental organizations and international developments centered in the counter-culture
treaty frameworks, political-administrative of the Californian Silicon Valley.
elites, domestic legal frameworks and courts
of jurisdiction, domestic corporations and
lobby groups, NGOs, users, consumers, and Phase II (1970s–early 1990s)
civil society initiatives, all with differential
interests, resources, imaginary capacities, and Silicon Valley computer scientists envisioned
strategies acting in changing contexts and decentralized personal computers as alterna-
constellations. Several partly overlapping phases tives to the big mainframes that only resource-
can be analytically distinguished in the devel- rich institutions could afford. Linking their
opment of the Internet according to which computers via conventional phone-lines and