In this space, I:
wanted to know why people spent so much time online. I wondered what cyberspace meant to them, how it affected or changed their lives. I wanted to know how they were making sense of their experiences as they shifted between being in the physical world and being in these textual worlds created by the exchange of messages, where they could re-create their bodies, or leave them behind. (1998, p. 17)
The book that emerged from this ethnography, Life Online: Researching Real Experiences in Virtual Space, is a document of its era. The early Internet. This was a time in history when some people would spend 2 hours online and call that “heavy use” while others would spend 18. The visual web didn’t exist on any large scale yet. The people I observed and interviewed for the book used it for many different reasons, with different degrees of attachment and commitment. Most considered it a playful space, a way to constitute the self … “to try on different forms and identities, engage in meaningful activities with other people, and evolve as members of various communities” (Markham, 1998, pp. 157–158).
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In popular discourse, however, the rhetoric was often anxious. A creepy photo of a child threatened by cyberporn haunted the cover of the July 3, 1995 Time magazine. This was one of many panic-inducing headlines in these early years depicting the wild, alluring, and dangerous internet frontier. In 1996, “internet addiction disorder” entered the medical lexicon. My participants, like many people in the public sphere at the time, avidly talked about this addictive feature of the internet, but in stark contrast to the moral panics in the news, their discourse described a strong sensibility about the fact that their bodies were the center of their existence and there were limits of the internet, whether it was a tool, place, or a way of being.
As Kevin Driscoll notes in his chapter (this volume), many of us remain nostalgic about those days of the early internet. In the 1990s, there was a certain giddiness in the Western world about the potentiality of the internet. From my perspective in the thick of it, our1 beliefs in the transformative potential of the internet were driven by the imaginaries built through common stories floating through fiction, film, news, and the internet itself.
metaphors of the internet of the 1990s
In the nineties, we paid attention to the internet as a place precisely because we could be there but our bodies were both absent from the scene and still viscerally feeling so very much. After all, vast communities and intimate relationships were accomplished through the exchange of white or green ASCII text on dark desktop screen backgrounds (see Figure 1.1). If you were lucky, your interface might have different colors (Figure 1.2).
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While people would use artistic renderings of text to create maps (Figure 1.3) or convey facial expressions:-) or gestures ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, in general, the visual plainness of the interfaces belied the intensity of what was happening.
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
