1.8).
The phrase used by Sarah Pink, Debora Lanzeni, and Elisenda Ardevol in their 2016 book Digital Materialities is that the digital and material are “entwined.” For many years, the STS community has carried forward Donna Haraway’s image of ←10 | 11→the cat’s cradle to emphasize this “entanglement” of human, nonhuman, more than human. For me, the Arab Spring events and Japanese earthquake in 2011 highlighted how most of the world had become “digitally-saturated,” and I still use this adjective phrase as a way to try to articulate how the internet is interwoven in our everyday lives.
metaphors of the internet
For me, this book you read now and perhaps even hold in your hands (not likely) will also be a document of its time. It is written at a time when the internet has disappeared. Who knows when this happened? Maybe it was the moment when Facebook became so prominent as a form of networked sociality globally that many users would claim they didn’t use the internet, only Facebook (Samarajiva, 2012). Maybe it was the moment when Samsung advertised its Galaxy SII in 2011, proclaiming that everything we need to be the master of our universe lives in their revolutionary new phone. Maybe it was much earlier, when Google presented us with the epitome of the transparent portal to (all) information: a vanilla screen with nothing but the google logo and a search box.
What new metaphors are suitable in these times? Wherever and whenever the internet as a frame of reference disappeared, the resulting Gestalt (or feeling, or way of being) is just life. The internet is just there, like electricity fifty years after it became common. For those who are very privileged, it’s like oxygen. Even if a person doesn’t have ready or easy access to the internet, it is not absent from their worldview, it’s merely not accessible enough to fulfill their present needs. Within this way of being, metaphors such as tool and place still have relevance. And other metaphors emerge. The collaborators in this book find they are much more situated, nuanced, and understated, since the frame itself is no longer the topic of interest. Rather, what is available or possible takes center stage. This book, then, is about how we experience life because of the unique confluence of digital communication, a globally networked internet, within the continuous development of social media platforms, machine learning, automation, recommendation systems, and other technologically mediating forces (or agents or actants) in our daily lives that we live in different local conditions. For many of the collaborators of this project, the internet is not something to focus on, but it is something we all see through, live through. Whatever else these experiences are, they are tacit enactments of the internet in a time when it has become a taken for granted as a global way of being.
←11 | 12→←12 | 13→
1 By ‘our’ or ‘we’, I mean to generalize across academics, pop culture authors, filmmakers, developers, and enthusiastic users situated in the midst of the internet revolution of the early 1990s. And primarily in the English-speaking West.
A Wormhole, a Home, an Unavoidable Place. Introduction to “Metaphors of the Internet”
katrin tiidenberg
Late in December of 2016, Annette Markham and I invited scholars, artists and activists to work with us on a project that would generate a set of stories about how the internet is experienced by people as we near 2020. This was driven by three shared impulses. The first was personal—I had joined Annette at Aarhus University for a postdoc and we wanted to produce something big and meaningful together to celebrate our collaboration. The second impulse is probably best called ethnographic. We felt the need to push back against, or rather complicate with lived experience, the growing bundle of academic narratives of the internet becoming domesticated (Haddon, 2006), ubiquitous (Bechmann & Lomborg, 2014), even disappearing into a post-internet condition (Olson, 2011). The internet seems only a caveat in these more complicated imaginaries of inextricable entanglements of computation, networked communication technology, environment, capitalism and human experience. It’s not that we disagree with these claims. It is more that within the specific contexts of pervasiveness, the internet continues to be experienced, utilized, built, hacked, resisted, felt, imagined and articulated in a myriad of ways by different people, in different settings, for different purposes. And these small stories of the everyday internet matter. The grand stories of the social, ethical, political and economic dimensions of today’s internet are comprised of, accepted or resisted based on people’s small stories.
Finally, our third impulse can perhaps be called celebratory or even expansionist. Or both. We workshopped a couple of chapters of Annette’s 1998 book Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space with masters level students. ←13 | 14→We discussed embodiment, desire, writing and imagination—everything we had previously talked about in the context of social media platforms, visual interaction apps and smart devices that the students use—in the context of the text-based interactions of IRCs, MUDs and MOOs of the 1990s. On one hand, students’ reactions to the text showed us the continuing force of everyday narratives and ethnographic craft that Life Online so brilliantly foregrounds. On the other hand, their reactions brought into vivid relief the surprising changes and perhaps even more surprising, the consistencies in how people make sense of the internet over all this time. In 1998, Annette gathered the more dominant internet metaphors into three categories—metaphors of the internet as a tool, metaphors of the internet as a place, and metaphors of the internet as a way of being. Twenty years later, these still organize people’s articulations of the internet well enough. But they coexist with a new rhetoric for making sense of one’s networked experience (cf. Tiidenberg et al., 2017 for an analysis of auto-ethnographies by young people making sense of their own experiences of social media). Occasionally, this coexistence of old and new metaphors is contradictory. A clear transition from old to new cannot be argued and would be an oversimplification. So our third reason for working on this book was to collect stories of “life online” twenty years later. These stories celebrate the endurance of the metaphors of the internet as a tool, a place, and a way of being even when it is ubiquitous, and expand the metaphoric approach by showing the evolution and mutation of how the internet is being made sense of. Most importantly, these metaphors—old and new—that we claim shape and constrain how the internet is experienced and articulated today, are entirely empirical. Our collective claims of their relevance emerge from people’s lives.
metaphors
Twenty years ago, the Internet was imagined as standing apart from humans; a frontier to explore, a virtual world to experiment with embodiment, and an ultra-high-speed information superhighway. Now, we hardly use the term internet. We don’t even “go online.” Instead, we chat, tweet, snap, friend, share, and post. We worry about the way algorithms polarize us. News and information, both accurate and fake, streams to us through various feeds. We might worry about how recommendation systems, machine learning, algorithms, largely conflated as “Artificial Intelligence,” are more and more involved in filtering information, thus resulting in us living in what is often metaphorically called echo chambers or filter bubbles (cf. Bruns 2019 for a critique of the terms).
Has
