Metaphors of Internet. Группа авторов
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worlds as a male because for her, it felt safer. On many occasions she would also say it felt like she could be more authentic as her avatar, to interact and develop relationships as a male. This gave her the experience and confidence to eventually transition in real life into a gender that was a better fit.
Life in semi-anonymous text-based spaces could also be horrific and devastating for communities, as Julian Dibbell’s chronicle of A Rape in Cyberspace so vividly demonstrated. These brief examples and so many more reminded us that the internet was also a way of being with consequence. The experiences people had in anonymous spaces were every bit as real as they would be anywhere else, if what we mean by ‘real’ is that they are meaningful, consequential, and actual. Lived. Even as the internet has disappeared, our actual social realities are constructed not just through how we use the internet but also how we rely on it, and what we expect, which in large part emerges from the imaginaries we’re using to frame the situation in the first place.
How swiftly different metaphorical frames come and go. Looking back, I believe we were experiencing something that accompanies any historical technological advancement; shocked out of our typical frames for understanding human interaction, we were compelled to confront existential questions of what it means to be, and be with. Goffman’s work in Frame Analysis (1974) usefully articulates how anomalous events in a situation can create frame breaks, whereby the invisible structuring processes of our lives are disrupted. At these moments, the boundaries we use to encapsulate and delimit these situations are revealed. The internet did this in many ways.
The metaphors we use to frame our experiences of the internet (then and now) matter; in that they can construct both the enabling and limiting features of our technologies. These frames spread through everyday terminologies and visual imageries. What we called surfing, we now call sharing. What was once cyberspace and The Net are now platforms. What we once called online or networked is now IOT and smart. All of these are metaphors, but we might be less likely to notice them as such, because this is how dominant metaphors work - as infrastructures of.
Beyond language, the technologies or materialities themselves function metaphorically, as Carmel Vaisman discusses later in this book. What shifts in our ←9 | 10→thinking when we move from a mode of clicking or pushing buttons, to swiping across screens with our fingertips, and then to positioning screens in front of our faces, aligning our physicality with an invisible grid that confirms a matching digital and physical identity or conversely, enables us to morph our image into something different? Perhaps as many of the works in this book will emphasize, the internet is simultaneously a tool and a way of being. It is materiality and digitality combined, but more, an extension or prosthesis of one or more of our senses, as McLuhan would say of any medium. We are creatures that adapt to our tools, but also vice versa—and in the words of my colleagues writing the future history of machine vision (Rettberg et al., 2019),
a clear argument is to be made that technologies have predetermined human thought ever since the first stone axe shaped a human hand, or symbolic articulations shaped the human face.
We live now in the age of ubiquity, where the internet is by many experienced as a way of being, a point driven home by the central role of digital media in life, work, exercise, virus tracing, obtaining essentials during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.
If we depict this ubiquity visually, we often see digital information superimposed over materiality, which conveys a sense of invisible, always-on presence of the internet in our everyday lives (Figure 1.7). Far from being separate from us, it encompasses us, like the water encompassing the fish on Mark Deuze’s book cover for Media Life (Figure 1.8).
The phrase used by Sarah Pink, Debora Lanzeni, and Elisenda Ardevol in their 2016 book Digital Materialities is that the digital and material are “entwined.” For many years, the STS community has carried forward Donna Haraway’s image of ←10 | 11→the cat’s cradle to emphasize this “entanglement” of human, nonhuman, more than human. For me, the Arab Spring events and Japanese earthquake in 2011 highlighted how most of the world had become “digitally-saturated,” and I still use this adjective phrase as a way to try to articulate how the internet is interwoven in our everyday lives.
metaphors of the internet
For me, this book you read now and perhaps even hold in your hands (not likely) will also be a document of its time. It is written at a time when the internet has disappeared. Who knows when this happened? Maybe it was the moment when Facebook became so prominent as a form of networked sociality globally that many users would claim they didn’t use the internet, only Facebook (Samarajiva, 2012). Maybe it was the moment when Samsung advertised its Galaxy SII in 2011, proclaiming that everything we need to be the master of our universe lives in their revolutionary new phone. Maybe it was much earlier, when Google presented us with the epitome of the transparent portal to (all) information: a vanilla screen with nothing but the google logo and a search box.
What new metaphors are suitable in these times? Wherever and whenever the internet as a frame of reference disappeared, the resulting Gestalt (or feeling, or way of being) is just life. The internet is just there, like electricity fifty years after it became common. For those who are very privileged, it’s like oxygen. Even if a person doesn’t have ready or easy access to the internet, it is not absent from their worldview, it’s merely not accessible enough to fulfill their present needs. Within this way of being, metaphors such as tool and place still have relevance. And other metaphors emerge. The collaborators in this book find they are much more situated, nuanced, and understated, since the frame itself is no longer the topic of interest. Rather, what is available or possible takes center stage. This book, then, is about how we experience life because of the unique confluence of digital communication, a globally networked internet, within the continuous development of social media platforms, machine learning, automation, recommendation systems, and other technologically mediating forces (or agents or actants) in our daily lives that we live in different local conditions. For many of the collaborators of this project, the internet is not something to focus on, but it is something we all see through, live through. Whatever else these experiences are, they are tacit enactments of the internet in a time when it has become a taken for granted as a global way of being.
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1 By ‘our’ or ‘we’, I mean to generalize across academics, pop culture authors, filmmakers, developers, and enthusiastic users situated in the midst of the internet revolution of the early 1990s. And primarily in the English-speaking West.
A Wormhole, a Home, an Unavoidable Place. Introduction to “Metaphors of the Internet”
katrin tiidenberg
Late in December of 2016, Annette Markham and I invited scholars, artists and activists to work with us on a project that would generate a set of stories about how the internet is experienced by people as we near 2020. This was driven by three shared impulses. The first was personal—I had joined Annette at Aarhus University for a postdoc and we wanted to produce something big and meaningful together to celebrate our collaboration. The second impulse is probably best called ethnographic. We felt the need to push back against, or rather complicate with lived experience, the growing bundle of academic narratives of the internet becoming domesticated (Haddon, 2006),