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In the formative years of the Internet, researchers collaboratively connected computing systems with a goal of sharing research and computing resources. The model process with which they created the Internet and its forefather, the ARPANET, was echoed in early social media platforms, where creative computer scientists, artists, writers, musicians educators explored the promise of computer-based platforms to bring together communities of interest in what would be called “cyberspace.” With a focus on the arts and humanities, this introduction traces the development of social media affordances in applications such as email, mailing lists, BBSs, the Community Memory, PLATO, Usenet, mail art, telematic art, and video communication. The author outlines the early social media platforms documented in each chapter in this book and summarizes how the book's epilogues both explore differences between early and contemporary social media and look to the future of the arts in social media.

Beginning in 1992, Arts Wire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, was a social media platform and Internet presence provider, that provided access to news, information, and dialogue on the social, economic, philosophical, intellectual, and political conditions affecting the arts and artists. Initially led by Anne Focke and then by poet, Joe Matuzak, Arts Wire participants included individual artists, arts administrators, arts organizations and funders. This chapter focuses on Arts Wire's social media aspects, such as discussion and projects, including among others: AIDSwire, an online AIDS information resource; the online component of the Fourth National Black Writers Conference; the Native Arts Network Association; ProjectArtNet that brought children from immigrant neighborhoods online to create a community history; NewMusNet, a virtual place for experimental music; and Interactive, an online laboratory for interactive art. It also documents the history of the e-newsletter, Arts Wire Current (later NYFA Current).

In the early Internet, art history crossed the path of media history and both disciplines conveyed characteristics of each other. Net (based) art did not regain the utopian potential of art, but its social, aesthetic and conceptual approach referenced the future role of digital communication. This chapter documents and examines the role of the art network THE THING in early digital communication and art practice and how it anticipated the future potential to communicate, distribute, and produce. Including the theory and practice that informed the founding of THE THING, as well as an interview with THE THING founder, Wolfgang Staehle, and a concluding timeline of THE THING's history, this chapter also emphasizes how THE THING was both playful and far ahead of its time.

Chapter Three investigates the turn of the twenty-first century global expansion of Shanghai’s contemporary art vis-à-vis the first international iteration of China’s premier contemporary art event, the Chinese Communist Party-sponsored 2000 Shanghai. The chapter theorizes biennialization-as-banalization vis-à-vis contemporary exhibition practices and the promotion of contemporary Chinese art. The chapter argues that Shanghai Biennial’s curators’ hopes of harnessing the spirit of Shanghai were ultimately supplanted by a generic brand of global contemporary art that neglected the city’s unique historical features and current concerns. This chapter then examines critical responses to the 2000 Shanghai Biennial and critiques of the global positioning of Shanghai’s contemporary art as seen in Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi’s counter-exhibition “Fuck Off,” and in two related works by artists Zhou Tiehai and Yang Fudong.

The Minitel (French videotex system) is often considered as a “pre-Internet” platform and the art that was created with it as belonging to “network art” and/or “collaborative” practices on a “social media” avant la lettre. In which respect is this true? This article provides an initial map and a typology of minitel-based creative practice by identifying works and documenting its context as it happened in France, compared to other countries. With detailed descriptions of selected works and of the ART ACCES online magazine-gallery project, it proposes an analysis that will be compared to and confront net art, new media art, and current trends in e-publishing.

In 1995, Geert Lovink started <nettime> with Pit Schultz. It expanded into many lists and languages and in the process demonstrated that English language and American-centric platforms do not have to be the lingua franca of the Internet. Lovink's contemporary work with the Institute of Network Cultures and its research networks, such as Unlike Us, has shaped a coalition that explores network architectures, the role of collective production, aesthetic tactics, and diverse, open information exchange. This introduction to the Epilogues focuses on his 2012 essay in e-flux -- “What Is the Social in Social Media?” -- asking three questions: Can you expand on what roles you envision for artists and writers in contemporary social media? How can we teach students to create in a difficult medium that so beautifully (and relentlessly) combines text, image, design, interactivity and collaboration? And how do you envision a social media of the future?

Since meeting in 1975, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz focused their collaborative art work on developing new and alternative structures for video as an interactive communication form and on interactive new media and community-centered social media. With participation by media art and politics theorist Gene Youngblood, this historic conversation follows the work of Galloway and Rabinowitz, beginning with their meeting in Paris and including Satellite Arts Project (1977), Hole-In-Space (1980), and the birth of the Electronic Café during the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.

Twentieth century European philosophy has seen many influential critiques of the technological dehumanisation process, often accompanied by appeals to the humanising powers of art as a potential response. And yet, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in The Cubist Painters in 1913 that “Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.” What would it mean for art to be “inhuman,” and what relation might inhuman arts have to the dehumanising effects of technology? This chapter traces the idea of the inhuman in art from cubism to new media art, focusing on the reflections on these topics by Lyotard, through his activities both as a philosopher of art and as an exhibition director. It traces the meaning that “the inhuman” has in relation to art in his work from the exhibition Les Immatériaux to his later writings on Malraux, aiming to show how, for Lyotard, a “positive” aesthetic conception of the inhuman can act as an antidote to the “negative” inhuman of contemporary cultural conditions.

This chapter examines Lyotard’s consideration of the way that technologies, and in particular information technologies, reconfigure the nature of aesthetic experience. When art uses communication technologies themselves as its matter or medium, the “traditional” model of aesthetic experience becomes problematised. Lyotard argues that this is the case because information technologies determine or “program” a conceptual meaning in advance of an aesthetic experience. Therefore, we no longer have a situation of the “free play” between sensible forms and concepts that constitutes the aesthetics of the beautiful for Kant. Lyotard argues, however, that this decline in aesthetic experience as traditionally conceived need not be understood negatively: rather, it may be seen positively in so far as it furthers experimentation with materials, and activates an aesthetic of the sublime.