Metaphors of Internet. Группа авторов
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of movement or motion (going on, getting off, and surfing the internet). The most recent Wikipedia entry on internet metaphors divides them into social metaphors (i.e. ones that emphasize community and togetherness), functional metaphors (indicative of how the internet should be used), and visual metaphors (how the internet is visualized, mostly through a partial network of connected nodes) (Wikipedia, 2019). The effort to identify and critically analyze the metaphors we use to encapsulate the experience and use of digital media is important because, as Annette noted in 2003, the more concrete the preferred metaphors for the internet are, the more they construct walls of meaning around us: “reifying a box that we will be asking ourselves to think outside of in the future” (Markham, 2003, p. 1). We see these boxes everywhere: metaphors like virus, backdoor, and cloud have encouraged particular imaginaries about what parts of the internet look like or how they work. “Piracy,” a common metaphor for file sharing outside sanctioned networks invokes images ←16 | 17→of deliberate nonconformity and a culture of violence and thievery, which hardly encapsulates the everyday activity of file sharing between friends. What do we imagine, when we are told that data is the “new oil?” Such discourse matters. Each term we use invites different moral assessment and regulation. The use of particular frames has significant impact and implications, far beyond simply using a metaphor to explain how the internet works in a general conversation (cf. Katzenbach & Larsson, 2017; Wyatt, 2004).
a wormhole, a home, an unavoidable place?
This book contributes to ongoing conversations about metaphors by focusing on how and whether Annette’s original framework of “tool, place and way of being” still captures the essence of how people make sense of the internet in their everyday lives and work. Through short vignettes, longer essays, artworks, interviews and academic studies, the collaborators share granular details of lived experiences in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Spain, Israel, Russia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Denmark and Austria. The pieces describe all manner of activities, including blogging, forum posting, image sharing, history telling, music and live video streaming, meme remixing, searching, status updating, mapping, filesharing, video chatting and cloud syncing. Some authors tell their own stories, while others share their informants’ stories of mourning, migration, childbirth, trauma, transition, family, vulnerability and activism on, in and with the internet. These are stories about life, but they are also stories about the internet. About how the internet is part of life, how it makes life better, easier, or is described as an intrusion. For our collaborators and their informants the internet is inescapable and boring, necessary and magical, grand and mundane.
“Metaphors of internet” is packed with lived experience and varied modes of finding and expressing meaning about an internet that is viscerally relevant. The pieces, despite being written for an academic book, evoke both the mundanity and shocking transformative potential of the internet in the age of ubiquity. Through images, vignettes, poetry, and dialogues, the chapters bring life to theories so often used to analyze the internet. This vitality was nurtured through a long and arduous process of collectively composing and curating the book. Making a monumental effort towards our vision to build a book collaboratively, our authors wrote their chapters in a shared space online. From the very first drafts, they opened themselves up for comment and critique from the other authors. Because our goal was to create readable, evocative, and creative pieces that were also analytically rigorous, we relentlessly banged that drum every time we interacted with the drafts or engaged in conversation with our collaborators. We were somewhat amazed that they accepted this unconventional, radically open style of writing and engaging in ←17 | 18→peer review and further, embraced the level of intensity it involved. We are equally grateful for being allowed the great freedom to hands-on edit and remix the texts as they entered the final draft stages. Because of this dual process of multiple rounds of collective reviewing and dialogue on the one hand, and the close editing by Annette and I on the other, the book accomplishes two often incompatible aims: It offers a kaleidoscopic diversity of everyday experiences and articulations of the internet, and maintains a coherence and consistently high quality. This is a book, not a collection of disjointed chapters.
We’ve organized the book into six sections, titling them to emphasize how much the internet has become a way of being, the third metaphor in Annette’s original conceptual continuum. The introductory section lays out some core ideas. In addition to introducing the overall framework of the book and the authors (the piece you’re reading now), we include two chapters that highlight historical shifts in how we communicate about the internet, from astounding, marvelous and revolutionary to mundane, routine, and unremarkable. We opened the book with a short piece by Annette Markham, discussing some of the ways internet metaphors have changed over the years, both linguistically and in our everyday visual representations of the internet and our relationship with or in it. That piece helps situate the present book within a larger conversation that began in the mid-1990s about what the internet is, an ongoing definitional debate that frames how people will make sense of and interact with this core element (some would say backbone) of digital life. Annette raises a future-oriented question about which metaphors we want to use to reflect, and more importantly shape, our future experiences with digital technologies. Kevin Driscoll’s chapter analyzes how the small and privileged group of long-term internet users—those who’ve had steady access since 1997—make sense of and articulate how the internet has transformed. In his historical treatment, Kevin discusses how nostalgia and narratives of decline have the rhetorical power to “shape debates about Internet policy, technology and culture” (this volume, p. 28). His piece raises the question of how today’s mundane and ubiquitous internet could “inspire new senses of wonder, feelings of possibility, and sparkling visions of better tomorrows?” (this volume, p. 34).
Section 2, Ways of Doing, presents stories about the everyday performances and practices in and with the help of the internet. Despite the general argument that the internet has disappeared, at least as an obvious frame for experience and interaction, it—and its capacities and affordances—remain central to almost every aspect of contemporary living. The authors in this section highlight some of these capacities of the internet as a tool for getting things done. The two pieces by Nadia Hakim-Fernández and Jeff Thompson illustrate vividly how the capacities of networking enable geographic dispersion, and at the same time, create a reliance on the material means of production—there are machines with cables that require power and network connections. Nadia analyzes how becoming a mobile worker ←18 | 19→shifts how the internet is lived by mobile freelancers. Her stories surface the invisible luxury of both being connected (to a workplace) and disconnecting (from work), as mobile freelancers face challenges of making one’s own workplace at the intersections of wifi-connected cafes, computer configurations, devices that wear out or break, and networks of other gig workers. Jeff’s images of the physical workspaces of various Mechanical Turk workers around the world highlights the routine materiality of platform work. The images are even more striking when we compare the materiality of a microworker’s desktop to the shiny, hipster-coffee-shop vibe presented in advertisements or stock images of the gig economy. In the following two pieces, Tijana Hirsch and Whitney Phillips depict two very different ideas about what it means to create and connect information on social media networks. On the one hand, the availability of information and tips from new friends stabilize and ease Tijana’s participant’s efforts to migrate to a different country and try to be a good parent through challenging transitions. For her the internet, or specifically Facebook, is a tool for making migration and parenthood work. On the other hand, Whitney’s essay lays bare the chaotic ways that information ricochets through the internet as it is created, remixed, and taken up by stakeholders with radically different ambitions. We conclude this section with my own conceptual work on the micro processes of interactivity involved in looking and showing (through visual image sharing), to clarify how the capacities and affordances of the internet shape our performances of our selves. When we look beyond the fact of visual images, we can explore how the interactive performativity with and in the internet adds up to much more than the sum of its parts. In all, this section offers a nuanced exploration of why the intersection of the activities of the people and the capacities of the internet matter.
Section 3, Ways of Relating, focuses attention on being with others, and the relations that emerge as we interact with others through digital technologies, whether we call this “online” or not. Crystal Abidin’s analysis introduces us to the ways that people