and along with these, the meaning of the internet shifts as well. And while these frames may disappear over time and familiarity, the power of the imaginary remains an influence in how we act, with others, with our technologies.
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Losing Your Internet: Narratives of Decline among Long-Time Users
kevin driscoll
Annette Markham’s Life Online (1998) documents an historical conjuncture in which the visibility of the Internet in popular culture outpaced hands-on access for most Americans. At the time that Markham was completing her fieldwork, approximately one-third of Americans reported using the Internet, most of whom were white, wealthy, highly educated, and male (Rainie, 2017). Yet, for half a decade, news and entertainment media had been saturated with stories of the Internet as a technical marvel, economic opportunity, social revolution, and moral threat (Schulte, 2013; Streeter, 2017). Every few months, the cover of Time magazine added a new dimension to the Internet story, from the “info highway” in 1993, to the “cyberporn” panic in 1995, dot-com “golden geeks” in 1996, and the “death of privacy” in 1997. Beyond these sensational headlines, friends and coworkers gossiped about relationships and romances forming online. Early users of the Internet were similarly enthusiastic and many shared a sense that computer-mediated communication might transform the social world. Even Markham described her initial observations of the internet and its growing user population as “astounding” and “extraordinary” (1998, pp. 16–17). At the turn of the century, the Internet seemed charged with unknown possibility.
Twenty years later, the structure of feeling that characterized early encounters with the Internet has changed. For millions of people, computer-mediated communication is now an unremarkable aspect of everyday life. In comparison to the fantastical multi-user environments that Markham described in 1998, typical uses of the internet in 2017 seem quite dull: reading the news, solving a crossword ←25 | 26→puzzle, shopping for household goods, or arranging meetings with coworkers. Furthermore, in popular media, the Internet seems to oscillate unpredictably from the mundane to the menacing. The same platform used to file income taxes is said to facilitate waves of terrorism, harassment, fraud, and propaganda. Returning to the Time archive, we find alarming cover stories about the “secret web where drugs, porn and murder hide online” in 2013 and a failed e-government initiative described as a “nightmare” in 2014. What is striking about these recent headlines, however, is how infrequently the Internet itself is an object of scrutiny. Unlike stories from the 1990s, the presence of the Internet in our homes is now taken-for-granted and the panic lies in its misuse or abuse.
Long-time users, the small group who have enjoyed continuous internet access since 1997, are in a unique position to reflect on the transformation of the Internet from ballyhoo to banality. While any American adult alive in the early 1990s would have been exposed to ideas and arguments about the Internet, only long-time users can compare these narratives with first-hand experience. Long-time users bore witness to several translations in the cultural position of the Internet: from voluntary to compulsory, peripheral to central, marvelous to mundane. For the long-time user, the interleaving of computer-mediated communication and human society is neither taken-for-granted nor natural. And while these transitions unfolded over the course of many years, long-time users are only occasionally prompted to reflect on the changes they have experienced. It is in these moments of self-reflection that we find clues regarding the changing meaning of metaphors over the past two decades.
This chapter focuses on discourses of nostalgia, loss, and decline among long-time users for whom the Internet of the 1990s became, in Markham’s analysis, “a way of being” (2003). Almost invariably, long-time users remember the early Internet as a kind of golden age, an electronic Eden in which anyone with a modem was free to play and experiment in relative safety. As one characteristic comment on an historical blog post reads, “[This] brings back some fond memories. [Back then,] the worst thing that would happen was that call waiting would knock me offline!” Undoubtedly, this nostalgia reflects an authentic longing for the excitement one felt standing on the threshold of cyberspace but it also obscures the substantial social barriers and material costs that prevented most people from sharing in that experience. To understand what is at stake in this tension between the nostalgia of long-time users and the on-going expansion and domestication of Internet access, this chapter examines both the contemporary accounts of Internet use captured by Markham in Life Online and the retrospective stories told by high-profile figures in the recent past. This comparison reveals the rhetorical power of narratives of decline to shape debates about Internet policy, technology, and culture. As we consider what it means to live online for another two decades, we must critically consider the stories that we tell about Internets of the past.
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lost ways of being on the internet
The Internet of today is cheaper, faster and more widely accessible than at any point in the past. But these developments have been achieved through a process of continuous change. The Internet is made and re-made as various components are adopted and abandoned, incorporated and disconnected. As the Internet evolves, long-time users mourn the loss of particular programs, practices, services, or interfaces. Favorite sites shut down, loose network connections fade away, daily habits are disrupted. As the technical systems that make up the Internet change, they unsettle the Internet as a way of being.
The consequences of technological change for long-time Internet users are clearest in the transition from desktop terminals to mobile devices. In the mid-1990s, a majority of online social activity unfolded in text-only environments. Even as faster modems, graphical operating systems, and the Web grew more common, the Net of the 1990s was composed of seemingly endless streams of text; row upon row of letters, numbers, and punctuation. In the decades since, text-only applications such as IRC were displaced by interactive video displays that interleave images and text, respond to taps, gestures, swipes, and voices rather than instructions typed out on a keyboard. Although these new interfaces contributed to the growing accessibility of the internet, the transition was not without costs for users accustomed to navigating by text. For several participants in Markham’s Life Online fieldwork, the text-only interfaces of the 1990s afforded ways of being not available elsewhere in their lives. In the words of one interlocutor, text-only environments like MUDs and MOOs gave rise to “a much more complex life of relationships … centered around being a part of a meaningful community” (p. 176). For some long-time users, the Internet was a way of being because the Internet was made of text.
Text-oriented interfaces also shaped the embodied experiences of users in the 1990s. Markham’s interlocutors reported sitting at desks, day and night, in computer labs, offices, and bedrooms. Their hands played across a keyboard or moved a mouse, and their gazes focused on a screen fixed in place. Likewise, the textual environments they inhabited—MOOs, chatrooms, listservs, and newsgroups—maintained a material distinction between being online and offline. To enter one of these spaces required being in a particular place, sitting in front of a machine, and entering the proper sequence of commands to open a network connection. Although the predominance of text seemed to offer an “escape” from the body for some users, Markham found that the bodies of her interviewees stubbornly resisted abandonment, a phenomenon that Megan Boler later described as a “new digital Cartesianism” (2007). Embodiment persists, reflected Markham, even when bodies were rendered, enacted, and performed through text alone (1998, p. 209).
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For those users who inhabited the Internet as a way of being in 1997, the Internet was, implicitly, a society of written texts. Though text-only interfaces and text-oriented applications may not have obliterated the flesh, they nevertheless privileged written communication over all other forms of social interaction.
