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Because of the age of many documents up here and due to my increasingly limited time, much remains as it looked in the heady days of Mosaic. Forgive the mess, I am refurbishing slowly. The Hydra began with a number of "links" when the web was young. In countless hours of surfing, mooing, emailing and some naive hacking, I decided to put together myself what I could not find. It struck me as the academic web turned into a global shopping mall that there was a need for "theory" on the web, and that it would have to resist the dominant trends of the medium.
This site was established in December 1994 as part of a non-commercial "hydra" webring dedicated to media theory, which comprised sites in Britain (1995 - 96: www.cee.hw.ac.uk/johnm/ - now defunct), in Florida (1995 - 97: www.cas.usf.edu/fobo/ - now defunct), in Germany (1995 - 98: www.lake.de/home/lake/hydra/ and glas.lake.de - now defunct), in Minnesota (since 1996: www.hydra.umn.edu) and California (since 1998: humanitas.ucsb.edu/~hydra and, from of 9/1999 to 12/2000, at www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~hydra - both now defunct). This University of Minnesota site is the sole survivor. Readership of these pages has grown exponentially over the months and years, and currently they clock well over 300.000 visits per year, about 1.000 per day. However, since this is a non-profit site, I don't keep track of everything; there are scripts providing summaries of each 24-hour period and so forth, but watching you watching this, day in and day out is not as interesting as it sounds, even for a computer. I am as grateful to those who email me with updates, as I am tired of those asking for free books or movies, and I am not promising anything to those urging me to redesign the site to bring it into the 21st century. This site has been available for free since its inception. Because of its steady traffic from parts of the globe where bandwidth has a higher premium than in the new US economy, I have been slow to incorporate graphic complexity, thus much of the Hydra remains largely text-based. Still, it has received recognition from various search portals as well as multiple listings on other people's sites dedicated to theory, philosophy, and related issues. Thanks for visiting, I try to keep it up although I have little time to update things, and despite the increasing commercialization of the web. |
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