Metaphors of Internet. Группа авторов
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It’s no wonder that “cyberspace” was such a popular term, as it depicted an Other place, a developed place, where information and people lived, separate from physical—or what some at the time called IRL (In Real Life) or meat—space. This dis-placement gave the opportunity for re-configuring both body and reviving a meaning-centered form of relationality.
Cyberspace collapsed distance, so we could be at a meeting halfway around the world and still be in our pajamas in our home country. We could be inside the most prestigious libraries in the world, browsing through their archives, without actually being there, but with a verisimilitude of being there. Because it was an information space, we were told, it didn’t have any physical limits. Its seeming location in nowhere and everywhere facilitated the visual metaphor of an out of body experience. This idea was built and facilitated through various sci-fi books at the time: William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” in 1984, described it as “a consensual hallucination” one could jack into; Iain Banks called it a “cryptosphere” or a “data corpus,” where people’s minds could be uploaded and accessed after they died (1994); Neal Stephenson called it the “metaverse” (1992). We could use our body fat to power ←5 | 6→immersive experiences (Pat Cadigan), take a drug to wake us up from our lives in “The Matrix,” or otherwise enter and move through data-filled spaces, often occupying avatar bodies of ourselves, other people, or nonhuman entities.
In other words, there were strong visual metaphors of virtual reality, avatars, and disembodiment that dominated conversations about what the Internet was, what happened there, how one could get there, where to find entries and exits, and once there, where one could go. As the web grew into a more commercial enterprise with websites, actual and imagined designs grew even more fantastical for a while. Some of these imaginaries, collected later in the Atlas of Cyberspace (Dodge & Kitchin, 2000), depicted web browsers where our avatars would be transported through portals from one location to another (Figure 1.4) or illustrated real information in three-dimensioned cityspaces, like antarti.ca’s creative mapping in 2000 of the world’s websites (then two million) onto a map of the continent Antarctica (Figure 1.5), or MIT Media Lab’s architectural rendering of an individual’s computer (Figure 1 6).
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Of course, these weren’t the only imaginaries. At roughly the same time John Perry Barlow was writing his cyberspace manifesto to proclaim the idea that the internet is a wild frontier, ripe for exploration, a place where we (the privileged) could attain a genuine participatory democracy, others, later represented by then vice president Al Gore, were promoting the concept of the internet as an information superhighway. Both metaphoric imaginaries fueled speculation and development to build particular types of capacities, based on the idea that the internet was a conduit between places as well as the network of places.
The internet was many things at once, as most technologies are. The capacities of the internet enable or facilitate certain actions, movements, and structures. In the late 1990s, because the internet afforded anonymity, we could test out certain ways of being and try certain actions to witness the results. “What if” or “Why not?” became motifs for trying out new experiences of “being with.” The experimentation was often humorous. I offer this example from my own experience teaching an online course in 1999 (excerpt from Markham, 2004, p. 371):
We had met online for six weeks, never meeting face to face, as the participants were both local and distant. We had met in various online environments to assess the impact of each technology on our participation in class as well as the development of individual identity and overall sense of community. One night my students and I met in Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a synchronous anonymous chatting environment. At the request of the students leading class discussion, we adopted colors as our names. I thought I would be satisfied with ‘Forest Green’, but I got bored, and switched it. As I changed my ‘nick’, this message appeared on everyone’s screens:
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*** Forest green is now known as
“GhostlyGreen”
For me, GhostlyGreen was satisfactory for a while (it was very close to Halloween). But I was feeling playful—finally, I could experience a classroom environment in which I was not immediately identified and characterized as Dr Markham. For all they knew, I was just another student.
*** GhostlyGreen is now known as
“babypuke”
Much better. I acted out my ‘color identity’—made rude comments, interrupted other participants, and such. Still, I thought, it wasn’t really ‘me’. I continued my spectrum of development:
*** babypuke is now known as
“RottenJackOrange”
This still did not quite feel right, and I was in an obnoxious student-disrupting-the-class mood, so I shifted my nickname again:
*** RottenJackOrange is now known as
“oatmeal”
I oozed and squelched while the rest of the class attempted to carry on a scholarly conversation. Occasionally they would get into the playful mood with me and “walk around oatmeal,” or enact “gets their shoes stuck” in my porridge-ness. One student threatened to “throw oatmeal on you” to another student.
We all had a good laugh about that, which disrupted the class even more. Finally and wisely, the students running class discussion decided it was time to reveal the actual identities behind the colors. As I watched various students reveal themselves, I saw IndigoBlu turn to AnnetteMarkham:
*** IndigoBlu is now known as
“AnnetteMarkham”
Wait! I had never chosen IndigoBlu as my color identity. I thought to myself, “someone’s playing a good game.” So I went along with it and after all the other students had presumably revealed their actual names, I unmasked as the only unnamed student remaining:
*** oatmeal is now known as
“DennisL”
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For the remainder of the class, almost two hours, the rest of the students believed he was the professor and responded to him as if he were me. I played the role of student. They believed I was a student. Afterwards, when Dennis revealed what he had done, none of the other students believed him. But until that point, they had believed he was the professor. Which is a remarkable thing.
The experiences of being computer-mediated were transformative in more meaningful,