of our lifeworld ? Or do we still think of the internet as a place or a tool? How do we experience the internet in an era when, for all intents and purposes, it disappears?
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Starting with the (deceptively) simple premise that the way we talk about certain things shapes the way we think about them, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) remain foundational in helping us understand how metaphors function conceptually to not only reflect but construct our experience of reality. If we say “Annette is a lion” or “the internet is a frontier,” the comparison of terms builds or promotes a particular meaning. The term being defined (Annette, internet) is connected to the supposedly more known term (lion, frontier). Pride, fierceness, or a bushy golden mane become lion-esque reference points to help us explain what Annette is like. If we and the reader have in mind the same sort of lion, this can help us find common ground or common understanding about Annette. These characteristics may not be obvious every time we think of Annette, but according to metaphor theory, if the comparison sticks, it will work under the surface not only to reflect, but to influence how we think about her. This transference of meaning is also a translation; important insights about one object are transferred or transposed to the other. This process highlights certain aspects of the described phenomena, but simultaneously obscures others.
What is highlighted and obscured in the metaphors we use for the internet? What if we never use the frontier metaphor directly, but just say, “It’s the law of the wild in the Internet?” Are different interest groups partial to particular metaphors?
The rhetoric used and strategically circulated by internet intermediaries and other corporate providers serves its own ideological, political and economic purposes. Nicholas John (2017) has written about the term “sharing” as central to how social media is articulated. In everyday discourse, sharing has multiple, mostly positive connotations (fair distribution, emotionally open communication). These connotations are appropriated by for-profit companies like Facebook and more recently Uber or Airbnb. Calling the practices they want people and organizations to engage in on their platforms—the same practices that generate the value for their business models—sharing, allows the platform owners to make their products and services seem like a natural continuation of the utopian, communal, gift-economy based project of the early internet. Tarleton Gillespie (2017) has argued that the term “platform,” which social media companies incorporated into their internal and marketing discourse circa 2010, allowed YouTube and Facebook to ignore the word’s computational connotations, and instead draw on older meanings from architecture and politics (platform as a structure from which to speak or act). As Gillespie explains, “calling themselves platforms promised users an open playing field for free and unencumbered participation, promised advertisers a wide space in which to link their products to popular content, and promised regulators that they were a fair and impartial conduit for user activity” (np). Brett Frischmann (2018) similarly critiqued the obfuscated connotations of metaphors like “cloud” and “smart.” He says that “cloud” attempts to blackbox the fact that it is merely “someone else’s computer.” Calling it that would obviously raise more eyebrows ←15 | 16→and invite anxieties about data security, privacy and surveillance, which is not useful for service providers. “Smart,” for Frischmann (2018), conflates different forms of intelligence—smart as wise and learned, versus smart as based on computational analysis of personal (and/or sensor) data. This conflation makes it difficult for us to notice that sometimes we do not actually need a piece of technology to operate with our personal data, and that we would, in fact, much prefer for it to be “dumb,” leaving us the agency and responsibility to use it wisely.
Many popular metaphors about the internet have thrived and dwindled over the past three decades. We used to talk about cyberspace and the electronic frontier, then the surfable web, then networked publics, platforms, clouds and the internet of things. Some have fallen out of use, but as Josh Dzieza (2014) aptly points out, even those that might now sound slightly ridiculous, continue to shape discussions of particular spaces on, or functions of the internet. He uses “town square” and “superhighway” as examples. The first used to describe the internet as a whole, but is today often applied to Twitter, in particular when the speaker wants to highlight that Twitter is a public sphere of sorts. The second has transformed into a language of fast and slow lanes within the debates surrounding net neutrality (Dzieza, 2014). This aligns with what other metaphor theorists have argued: that the most powerful metaphors are actually those that are no longer obvious as comparisons, but because they are embedded in our deep structures of meaning, they provide a root system upon which newer metaphors build.
There have been various ways of clustering the metaphors of the internet. Alongside Annette’s 1998 framework of the internet as a set of tools, some kind of place, or a way of being, Josh Meyrowitz (1998) encapsulated communication media as vessels/conduits, language, and environment. Marianne van den Boomen (2014) writes about material, processing, transmission, and storage metaphors of new media. Denis Jamet’s 2010 analysis of French and English words for verbs around internet use laid out a framework of movement or motion (going on, getting off, and surfing the internet). The most recent Wikipedia entry on internet metaphors divides them into social metaphors (i.e. ones that emphasize community and togetherness), functional metaphors (indicative of how the internet should be used), and visual metaphors (how the internet is visualized, mostly through a partial network of connected nodes) (Wikipedia, 2019). The effort to identify and critically analyze the metaphors we use to encapsulate the experience and use of digital media is important because, as Annette noted in 2003, the more concrete the preferred metaphors for the internet are, the more they construct walls of meaning around us: “reifying a box that we will be asking ourselves to think outside of in the future” (Markham, 2003, p. 1). We see these boxes everywhere: metaphors like virus, backdoor, and cloud have encouraged particular imaginaries about what parts of the internet look like or how they work. “Piracy,” a common metaphor for file sharing outside sanctioned networks invokes images ←16 | 17→of deliberate nonconformity and a culture of violence and thievery, which hardly encapsulates the everyday activity of file sharing between friends. What do we imagine, when we are told that data is the “new oil?” Such discourse matters. Each term we use invites different moral assessment and regulation. The use of particular frames has significant impact and implications, far beyond simply using a metaphor to explain how the internet works in a general conversation (cf. Katzenbach & Larsson, 2017; Wyatt, 2004).
a wormhole, a home, an unavoidable place?
This book contributes to ongoing conversations about metaphors by focusing on how and whether Annette’s original framework of “tool, place and way of being” still captures the essence of how people make sense of the internet in their everyday lives and work. Through short vignettes, longer essays, artworks, interviews and academic studies, the collaborators share granular details of lived experiences in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Spain, Israel, Russia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Denmark and Austria. The pieces describe all manner of activities, including blogging, forum posting, image sharing, history telling, music and live video streaming, meme remixing, searching, status updating, mapping, filesharing, video chatting and cloud syncing. Some authors tell their own stories, while others share their informants’ stories of mourning, migration, childbirth, trauma, transition, family, vulnerability and activism on, in and with the internet. These are stories about life, but they are also stories about the internet. About how the internet is part of life, how it makes life better, easier, or is described as an intrusion. For our collaborators and their informants the internet is inescapable and boring, necessary and magical, grand and mundane.
“Metaphors of internet” is packed with lived experience and varied modes of finding and expressing meaning about an internet that is viscerally relevant. The pieces, despite being written for an academic book, evoke both the mundanity and shocking transformative potential of the internet in the age of ubiquity. Through images, vignettes, poetry, and dialogues, the chapters bring life to theories so often used to analyze the internet. This vitality was nurtured through a long and arduous process of collectively composing and curating the book. Making a monumental effort towards our vision to build a
