give and give off of themselves as music listeners, they create experiences for their future selves. In the next piece, Maria Schreiber and Patricia Prieto-Blanco offer a deceptively straightforward case study of their own experiences of collaboration in various virtual co-working spaces. Their story offers intriguing conceptual thinking by showing how through everyday co-presence, they are actually co-becoming a new hybrid being—Maria+Patricia+internet. The process of becoming through and with socially-mediated photography of the self is poignantly discussed by artist Cristina Nuñez. In an interview with Kat and Annette, Cristina shares her path ←20 | 21→through physical, material, and digital experiences, raising important questions about the possibilities and challenges of becoming with technology. Finally, Katie Warfield uses the conceptual lenses of transgeography and feminist phenomenology to look at how young people regard their use of social media for self-presentation. She offers a series of what she calls “slippery” metaphors that help reorient our analytical gaze from people or individuals doing things, to the processes of becoming through, with, and in digital and material entanglements across and through geographies that are less about place and more about deeply contextual processes and meanings.
Section 5, Ways of Being With, is titled in homage to the notion that being is always relational and dialogic. R.D. Laing would explain that our identity cannot be abstracted from our identity-for-others, our identity-for ourselves, the identities we attribute to others, the identities we think they attribute to us, what we think they think we think, and so on (Markham, 1998, p. 215, citing Laing, 1969, p. 86). Distinct from the focus of section 3 on ways of relating with other people, this section focuses on how we make sense of ourselves, others, and the world through/by being with machines, the digital, and information, as facilitated by the internet. You could also say the pieces we’ve collected here explore how technologies mediate self, other, and relationality. We open with Tobias Raun’s study of how Facebook is experienced as a wormhole between life and death. Based on his conversations with Camilla, a woman whose mother and sister recently passed away, the chapter follows how a deceased person’s Facebook page is a portal, enabling a sense of closeness and presence that the gravesite does not. This emotional and eerie chapter is followed by a series of photos by xtine burrough entitled Vigil for Some Bodies. Each All Hallow’s Eve since 2015, xtine has paid Mechanical Turk workers 25 cents, not to conduct digital piece work as is typical, but to light a candle in remembrance of loved ones. The topic of presence, being with, and the digital/physicality of commemoration is entangled and juxtaposed in xtine’s images in ways that raise important questions about the centrality of the internet for everyday sensemaking. Sarah Schorr and Winnie Soon take up related questions, focusing on temporality, being with, and the reappearance of the unerasable in their artworks, Saving Screens and Unerasable Images, respectively. Building from and reframing the violent metaphorical associations involved in screenshooting, they discuss how the act of cut/copy/paste of the screenshot transitions from a tool of the internet era to a generative sensemaking practice where meanings and memories linger. Daisy Pignetti continues this contemplation of the internet’s capacities to revive and re-present information in the next chapter. Daisy relates the story of how her New Orleans childhood home, devastated in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina and subsequently razed to the ground, reappeared in 2010 on Google Maps’ Street View. This strange familiarity is one of being—not out of time, but in different layers of time, a consequence of the interconnections ←21 | 22→between physical referents, mapping technologies, social media activity, and episodes of nostalgia. Annette Markham offers a final brief essay for this section. She offers the metaphor of echolocation as a way of making sense of digital sociality. Comparing the various pings of our social media use to the practices of bats, whales, and dolphins to navigate through space, Annette suggests that through an always-on, always-available internet, people locate their social selves when they are responded to, relational processes that are only visible when the lack of response casts the self into existential doubt.
Our sixth and final section, Whose Internet? Whose Metaphors? collects pieces that address the rules, power hierarchies and boundaries in who gets to perceive the internet as theirs, who gets to make the dominant metaphors and what that may mean for imaginaries of the future internet. Carmel Vaisman’s chapter tells the history of a blogging platform where teenage girls lived, resisted, appropriated and finally submitted to platform owner’s and community manager’s tropes of what Israel’s blogging platform Israblog is—and more importantly, is not—for. Based on her analysis of the battles of meaning, Carmel suggests that as systems become more complex and bureaucratic, people naturalize certain technical constraints, accepting them as given. Jessa Lingel’s chapter offers a thought experiment to explore how some of the practices of anarchist groups online demonstrate a stronger democratic or collaborative mode than the automated, ill-functioning content moderation processes adopted by many social media giants. Inspired by anarchist communities she knows via her research and activist work, she offers a generative set of practices for managing online communities. In the following chapter, Polina Kolozaridi, Anna Shchetvina, and I offer a rare insight into Soviet and Post-Soviet understandings of the functionality, meaning and uses of the internet. By analyzing the metaphors used by Russia’s internet-pioneers, and contextualizing those within historical Soviet conceptualizations of the interconnections of technology and humans, we propose that different cultures create marked distinctions in what meaning is conveyed within the same root metaphor. Nuancing the metaphors of tool, place and way of being with historical Russian/Soviet connotations emphasizes not how technology is used by individuals, but rather how it participates in relations with collectives. This opens up new avenues to think about the future of the internet. We wrap up this section and the book as a whole with Ryan Milner’s chapter. In a sensitive, critical and self-aware analysis of his own early internet use, Ryan opens up the implications, blind spots and exclusions imbricated with the tone, practices and self-perceptions of the young, white, American men, who arrogantly called themselves “The Internet” in the early 2000s. Ryan analyzes that Internet through the metaphor of a “Remix Machine” that runs on a particular form of repurposing, creativity and irony. These practices of remix have become more accessible todiverse groups of internet users, but as Ryan says, the ghosts linger in the machine. As Ryan writes in his chapter, “If ‘just a joke’ ever requires, even ←22 | 23→‘ironically,’ trotting out the same dehumanizing stereotypes and characterizations that have been sampled time and again to write songs of oppression, then maybe the joke’s not funny,” (p. 253). He concludes with a call to use our tools to create a place premised on more diverse, more empowering voices.
Together, these chapters weave new and old metaphors into our understanding of what the internet means in an era when it has all but disappeared as an obvious frame for experience. This is what we mean by the subtitle of our book, Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity. The term “ubiquitous computing” is attributed to Mark Weiser (1991), who believed the best sort of computers were those that receded into the background and simply functioned without our noticing. Without getting into whether or not we agree with this valuation, we take the concept of ubiquity in the way our colleagues in the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) did when titling our 2004 annual conference “Ubiquity?” This conference challenged as well as explored the visibility and prevalence of the Internet as everywhere, all at once. The call for papers raised questions such as:
is the internet everywhere? How and where does the internet appear and act in technical, social, political, or cultural contexts? What does it mean to have access and who does and doesn’t have it? How does the presence of the internet affect individuals, communities, families, governments, societies and nation-states? What are the implications of ‘internet everywhere’? (excerpt from AoIR mailing list call for papers)
We believe Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity illustrates how these sorts of questions often get answered in ways that highlight one particular metaphorical frame over others. The pieces in this book can also help us understand that debates over meaning are not only longstanding, they are rarely recognized as debates in the first place. This is precisely because metaphors move from active or “live” where they startle us into making new sense of something, to dead, where they are still active but function at the deep structure of discourse to simply frame understanding and guide definitions. And of course, things change.
