Of Viruses and Victims:
Framing the Internet, 1988-1990
Introduction
In November of 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student from Cornell
University, released one of the first computer viruses (technically a worm) on the
Internet, crippling some 6,000 computers that were connected to the network at the time.
In doing so, he helped introduce the largely unknown computer network into the public
consciousness. As far as the major media were concerned, until the Morris incident, the
Internet did not exist -- at least as a news subject. Over the next 16 months, through
Morris’ trial and eventual conviction on computer tampering charges, the media would
contribute to an ever-spiraling amount of information about the Internet. In the next few
years, the network would go from little-known communication backchannel for
academics and defense department workers to the subject of newspaper and television
news stories, magazine cartoons, and everyday public discussion. In time, it would be
dubbed the “information superhighway,” a lofty metaphor that belied a more complicated
infancy.
The earliest moments in the life of a new communication technology -- the point
at which it broadly registers in the public consciousness -- are critical in defining that
technology. During these early moments the new technology is socially constructed.
Social construction implies that a new technology (or a new idea, for that matter) does
not have a fixed meaning, despite the efforts of scientists, experts, bureaucrats and other
groups to create one. Rather, the public and the mass media, along with other groups,
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Convention