The Italian network hopes: Rise and fall of the Socrate and Iperbole projects in the mid-1990s

The article retraces the histories of two Italian networking projects of the mid-19990s: the national infrastructural plan named Socrate, launched by the monopolist Telecom Italia in 1994 and the civic network Iperbole, launched by the municipality of Bologna in 1995. Relying upon a corpus of primary sources and in-depth interviews with key-informants, the article stresses the complex relationship between infrastructures, networks and media imaginaries in Italy at a time when the large-scale diffusion of the Internet and the World Wide Web were still in fieri. The same years of the WWW's first diffusion were in fact a period of negotiation at local, national, and international level between various actors and different ways of envisioning the upcoming digital age. The article shows how the history of Socrate challenges the idea of the centrality of the Web and the Internet in company discourses of the mid-1990s juxtaposing a different narrative and an imaginary of networking infrastructures linked to broadcasting media. Conversely the case of Iperbole is a particular example of public service use of the Internet on the wave of a political and cultural tradition that looked at media as strategic tools, rather than theoretical models, for democratisation.