Dr Kevin Driscoll

Digital Scholarship Visiting Research Fellow
Dr Kevin Driscoll

June - July 2021

University of Virginia

Kevin Driscoll is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia where he specializes in technology, culture, and communication. His recent research concerns alternative histories of the internet, the politics of amateur telecommunications, and the moral economy of consumer software. In collaboration with Julien Mailland from Indiana University, he published Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, a cultural and technological history of the French videotex network (MIT Press, 2017). His next book, The Modem World, traces a pre-history of social media through the dial-up bulletin board systems of the 1980s and 1990s (Yale University Press, 2022).

Project Title: The Moral Economy of Shareware

This project examines creativity, copyright, and commercialization in early consumer software using platform emulation to carry out a systematic analysis of “shareware” programs of the 1980s and 1990s. The rhetoric of shareware authors reveals an alternative economic imaginary rooted in trust, accountability, and mutual identification among computer enthusiasts.

ORCID ID: 0000-0003-1864-101X