An Internet for the People: The Politics and Promise of craigslist: 2 (Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology) - Hardcover

Lingel, Jessa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691188904 ISBN 13: 9780691188904

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2020

Synopsis

How craigslist champions openness, democracy, and other vanishing principles of the early web

Begun by Craig Newmark as an e-mail to some friends about cool events happening around San Francisco, craigslist is now the leading classifieds service on the planet. It is also a throwback to the early internet. The website has barely seen an upgrade since it launched in 1996. There are no banner ads. The company doesn't profit off your data. An Internet for the People explores how people use craigslist to buy and sell, find work, and find love―and reveals why craigslist is becoming a lonely outpost in an increasingly corporatized web.

Drawing on interviews with craigslist insiders and ordinary users, Jessa Lingel looks at the site's history and values, showing how it has mostly stayed the same while the web around it has become more commercial and far less open. She examines craigslist's legal history, describing the company's courtroom battles over issues of freedom of expression and data privacy, and explains the importance of locality in the social relationships fostered by the site. More than an online garage sale, job board, or dating site, craigslist holds vital lessons for the rest of the web. It is a website that values user privacy over profits, ease of use over slick design, and an ethos of the early web that might just hold the key to a more open, transparent, and democratic internet.

About this title

About the Author

Jessa Lingel is assistant professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Digital Countercultures and the Struggle for Community. She lives in Philadelphia.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691188904
• ISBN 13: 9780691188904
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208