Minitel: Welcome to the Internet by Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017

Publisher’s website: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/minitel

Reviewed by Sophie Toupin

In Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, Mailland and Driscoll (2017) tell a technical and cultural story of the little beige box in Metropolitan France[1]. This story started in the early 1980s thanks to a massive government investment in information and communication technologies – what in French is known as télématique (computer + telephone) – and ended in 2012. Through home, office or public terminals, the Minitel provided access to a range of online services and virtual communities. Its use became widespread across the European French territory, including Corsica, since being first deployed in the northwestern part of Metropolitan France. While online access was often the privilege of a few geeks in the 1980s, in European France access was widespread. The Minitel quickly became a cultural symbol being portrayed in films, on posters throughout French cities, in adverts, and more. When the Minitel came to an end, it was the subject of art exhibitions, newspaper articles and radio and TV broadcasts showing how important this technology had been for millions of people.

Up to now, the Minitel has been well researched, particularly in French (Schafer and Thierry, 2012) but also in academic articles written in English. The originality of Mailland and Driscoll can be located in three areas. First, by analyzing the Minitel through a platform studies framework, the authors show the significance of this télématique system to the history of digital media in addition to current Internet and platform research. They demonstrate the extent to which the Minitel has similarities and dissimilarities with the current digital economy – an early platform capitalism they refer to as à la française. Second, their research is rooted in a comparative history of technological networks, which compares the development of the Minitel in European France to the Internet in the USA. Taking a comparative historical approach is an exciting area of research that has yet to be fully developed in this area. Their book makes a great contribution towards that end. Third, their work can be situated in the turn towards the history of technological systems – other than the Internet – that was experimented with in the second half of the 20^th century, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s and written in English. Examples include Chile, that attempted to create a cybernetic system under the socialist government of Salvador Allende for reshaping the national economy (Medina, 2011), and Soviet Russia where scientists attempted to network their nation through computers, though unsuccessfully (Peters, 2016).

The first chapter, entitled A Tale of Two Parties, introduces the notion of platform. While the term platform did not exist in the 1980s, the authors argue that situating the Minitel within a larger discussion of platform (Gillespie, 2010) or platformization (Helmond, 2015) allows for reframing the Minitel network not as a joke, as it was referred to by Silicon Valley, but rather as a complex technical system that became a cultural phenomenon in European France. Using the notion of platform also helps to further contextualize current discussions on free speech, surveillance, centralization and resistance through a European French cultural, economic and historical lens.

The second chapter, entitled Disaggregating the Minitel Platform, is a rich and accessible technical description of how the Minitel and all of its components worked. The Minitel could be described as an ‘assemblage of networks, servers, and terminals’ (Mailland & Driscoll, 2017: 24) or even more simply as keyboard + screen + modem.  From the start, the Minitel was conceived as an ambitious interactive technological project which involved a combination of old and new media. It was based on the interconnection between an analog network – the telephone network – and a digital network – France Télécom created the packet switching Transpac network in the late 70s – that together constituted a télématique environment where people and businesses could search for information, interact online and, under certain conditions, produce content and services.

Chapter three, Embedding Culture in Architecture, echoes current discussions on states’ technological sovereignty, which were reignited following the Edward Snowden scandal of mass surveillance. With an understanding that European France had a crumbling telephone infrastructure and needed to compete with the United States’ computer industry, the French government created the conditions for the development of the Minitel. The Minitel was a governmental sponsored project under the wing of the Direction Générale des Télécommunications (DGT) (later to become France Télécom) but designed and manufactured by privates firms. It used a pay-as-you-go billing system, meaning no subscription fees or up-front amount were necessary to use the Minitel. According to Mailland and Driscoll (2017), it was the billing system which made the Minitel a success in Metropolitan France. Moreover, the payment system named Kiosk implied that the DGT was monitoring all the traffic for accurate billing, in turn, bringing to the fore questions of state surveillance.

In the chapter, Not End to End, but Open, the authors argue that the Minitel was not a walled garden like many American platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, are now referred to. Rather it was a hybrid public-private system that was not completely closed since many of its services were not directed by the French government. One such service is well exemplified in The Booming Minitel Private Enterprise, a chapter which focuses on Minitel Rose, and the media representation of such adult-oriented services. Chapter six, On the Fringe, highlights yet other ways the Minitel was used, including by entrepreneurs to make money, by activists as a protest tool and by hackers to exploit loopholes in the network. The Conclusion speaks directly to an American audience to show that the Minitel is an example that a government intervention online does not necessarily equal a loss of freedom.

A topic that is left out of research on the Minitel is its presence in and relationship to France’s overseas territories and departments. As a case in point, when Mailland and Driscoll (2017) quote the DGT in saying that it ‘subsidized the cost of a simple terminal to every citizen in France’ (2017: 58), which citizens are we referring to? Are we referring to the citizens of Metropolitan France, including Corsica only, or are we also including the overseas departments and territories? The map of the implementation of the Minitel at the beginning of the book seems to gesture towards European France. Having said that, historical documents seem to suggest that the Minitel might have been available in France’s overseas territories and departments[2], but it remains to be seen whether its access was the same as in Metropolitan France.[3]  Investigating the Minitel through a postcolonial lens might open up new and interesting research insights.

References

Gillespie, T. (2010) ‘The Politics of ‘Platforms’’, New Media & Society, 12 (3), pp. 347–64.

Helmond, A. (2015) ‘The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready’, Social Media + Society, 1 (2), pp.1-11.

Medina, E. (2011) Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Peters, B. (2016) How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Schafer, A. and Thierry, B. (2012) Le Minitel. L’enfance numérique de la France, Paris : Nuvis, Cigref.

Notes

[1] In this review, I specifically use the term Metropolitan France or European France rather than simply “France” as the authors do. By using this terminology, I highlight the fact that the French Fifth Republic is composed of France’s overseas territories and departments (such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion, among others) and European France. Since Mailland and Driscoll’s book only focuses on Metropolitan France, including Corsica it seems more adequate to use this geographical terminology.

[2] Senat.fr. “Services téléphoniques : tarifications inégales entre la métropole et les départements d’outre-mer.” Accessed March 5, 2018 http://www.senat.fr/questions/base/1995/qSEQ951112588.html

[3] Senat.fr. “Absence de Minitel dans les agences postales de la Réunion” Accessed March 5, 2018   https://www.senat.fr/questions/base/1995/qSEQ950611104.html

Sophie Toupin is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship award recipient. Her doctoral research examines the relationship between technology and anti-colonialism. She can be reached at sophie.toupin (at) mcgill (.) ca