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:
←7 | 8→
*** 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”
←8 | 9→
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, poignant ways. One of my then-female friends spent a lot of time in virtual worlds as a male because for her, it felt safer. On many occasions she would also say it felt like she could be more authentic as her avatar, to interact and develop relationships as a male. This gave her the experience and confidence to eventually transition in real life into a gender that was a better fit.
Life in semi-anonymous text-based spaces could also be horrific and devastating for communities, as Julian Dibbell’s chronicle of A Rape in Cyberspace so vividly demonstrated. These brief examples and so many more reminded us that the internet was also a way of being with consequence. The experiences people had in anonymous spaces were every bit as real as they would be anywhere else, if what we mean by ‘real’ is that they are meaningful, consequential, and actual. Lived. Even as the internet has disappeared, our actual social realities are constructed not just through how we use the internet but also how we rely on it, and what we expect, which in large part emerges from the imaginaries we’re using to frame the situation in the first place.
How swiftly different metaphorical frames come and go. Looking back, I believe we were experiencing something that accompanies any historical technological advancement; shocked out of our typical frames for understanding human interaction, we were compelled to confront existential questions of what it means to be, and be with. Goffman’s work in Frame Analysis (1974) usefully articulates how anomalous events in a situation can create frame breaks, whereby the invisible structuring processes of our lives are disrupted. At these moments, the boundaries we use to encapsulate and delimit these situations are revealed. The internet did this in many ways.
The metaphors we use to frame our experiences of the internet (then and now) matter; in that they can construct both the enabling and limiting features of our technologies. These frames spread through everyday terminologies and visual imageries. What we called surfing, we now call sharing. What was once cyberspace and The Net are now platforms. What we once called online or networked is now IOT and smart. All of these are metaphors, but we might be less likely to notice them as such, because this is how dominant metaphors work - as infrastructures of.
Beyond language, the technologies or materialities themselves function metaphorically, as Carmel Vaisman discusses later in this book. What shifts in our ←9 | 10→thinking when we move from a mode of clicking or pushing buttons, to swiping across screens with our fingertips, and then to positioning screens in front of our faces, aligning our physicality with an invisible grid that confirms a matching digital and physical identity or conversely, enables us to morph our image into something different? Perhaps as many of the works in this book will emphasize, the internet is simultaneously a tool and a way of being. It is materiality and digitality combined, but more, an extension or prosthesis of one or more of our senses, as McLuhan would say of any medium. We are creatures that adapt to our tools, but also vice versa—and in the words of my colleagues writing the future history of machine vision (Rettberg et al., 2019),
a clear argument is to be made that technologies have predetermined human thought ever since the first stone axe shaped a human hand, or symbolic articulations shaped the human face.
We live now in the age of ubiquity, where the internet is by many experienced as a way of being, a point driven home by the central role of digital media in life, work, exercise, virus tracing, obtaining essentials during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.
If we depict this ubiquity visually, we often see digital information superimposed over materiality, which conveys a sense of invisible, always-on presence of the internet in our everyday lives (Figure 1.7). Far from being separate from us, it encompasses
