first drafts, they opened themselves up for comment and critique from the other authors. Because our goal was to create readable, evocative, and creative pieces that were also analytically rigorous, we relentlessly banged that drum every time we interacted with the drafts or engaged in conversation with our collaborators. We were somewhat amazed that they accepted this unconventional, radically open style of writing and engaging in ←17 | 18→peer review and further, embraced the level of intensity it involved. We are equally grateful for being allowed the great freedom to hands-on edit and remix the texts as they entered the final draft stages. Because of this dual process of multiple rounds of collective reviewing and dialogue on the one hand, and the close editing by Annette and I on the other, the book accomplishes two often incompatible aims: It offers a kaleidoscopic diversity of everyday experiences and articulations of the internet, and maintains a coherence and consistently high quality. This is a book, not a collection of disjointed chapters.
We’ve organized the book into six sections, titling them to emphasize how much the internet has become a way of being, the third metaphor in Annette’s original conceptual continuum. The introductory section lays out some core ideas. In addition to introducing the overall framework of the book and the authors (the piece you’re reading now), we include two chapters that highlight historical shifts in how we communicate about the internet, from astounding, marvelous and revolutionary to mundane, routine, and unremarkable. We opened the book with a short piece by Annette Markham, discussing some of the ways internet metaphors have changed over the years, both linguistically and in our everyday visual representations of the internet and our relationship with or in it. That piece helps situate the present book within a larger conversation that began in the mid-1990s about what the internet is, an ongoing definitional debate that frames how people will make sense of and interact with this core element (some would say backbone) of digital life. Annette raises a future-oriented question about which metaphors we want to use to reflect, and more importantly shape, our future experiences with digital technologies. Kevin Driscoll’s chapter analyzes how the small and privileged group of long-term internet users—those who’ve had steady access since 1997—make sense of and articulate how the internet has transformed. In his historical treatment, Kevin discusses how nostalgia and narratives of decline have the rhetorical power to “shape debates about Internet policy, technology and culture” (this volume, p. 28). His piece raises the question of how today’s mundane and ubiquitous internet could “inspire new senses of wonder, feelings of possibility, and sparkling visions of better tomorrows?” (this volume, p. 34).
Section 2, Ways of Doing, presents stories about the everyday performances and practices in and with the help of the internet. Despite the general argument that the internet has disappeared, at least as an obvious frame for experience and interaction, it—and its capacities and affordances—remain central to almost every aspect of contemporary living. The authors in this section highlight some of these capacities of the internet as a tool for getting things done. The two pieces by Nadia Hakim-Fernández and Jeff Thompson illustrate vividly how the capacities of networking enable geographic dispersion, and at the same time, create a reliance on the material means of production—there are machines with cables that require power and network connections. Nadia analyzes how becoming a mobile worker ←18 | 19→shifts how the internet is lived by mobile freelancers. Her stories surface the invisible luxury of both being connected (to a workplace) and disconnecting (from work), as mobile freelancers face challenges of making one’s own workplace at the intersections of wifi-connected cafes, computer configurations, devices that wear out or break, and networks of other gig workers. Jeff’s images of the physical workspaces of various Mechanical Turk workers around the world highlights the routine materiality of platform work. The images are even more striking when we compare the materiality of a microworker’s desktop to the shiny, hipster-coffee-shop vibe presented in advertisements or stock images of the gig economy. In the following two pieces, Tijana Hirsch and Whitney Phillips depict two very different ideas about what it means to create and connect information on social media networks. On the one hand, the availability of information and tips from new friends stabilize and ease Tijana’s participant’s efforts to migrate to a different country and try to be a good parent through challenging transitions. For her the internet, or specifically Facebook, is a tool for making migration and parenthood work. On the other hand, Whitney’s essay lays bare the chaotic ways that information ricochets through the internet as it is created, remixed, and taken up by stakeholders with radically different ambitions. We conclude this section with my own conceptual work on the micro processes of interactivity involved in looking and showing (through visual image sharing), to clarify how the capacities and affordances of the internet shape our performances of our selves. When we look beyond the fact of visual images, we can explore how the interactive performativity with and in the internet adds up to much more than the sum of its parts. In all, this section offers a nuanced exploration of why the intersection of the activities of the people and the capacities of the internet matter.
Section 3, Ways of Relating, focuses attention on being with others, and the relations that emerge as we interact with others through digital technologies, whether we call this “online” or not. Crystal Abidin’s analysis introduces us to the ways that people who spend a lot of time cultivating relationships through social media make sense of certain areas of the internet as home. As Crystal compares influencers’ activities in their old blogs to cleaning house or rearranging furniture, she vividly reminds us that for many, the internet provides a strong sense of place. In a similar vein, Andrea Baker provides a glimpse of how very early on, Rolling Stones fans created hybrid places for experiencing concerts, being with each other, and their own fandom. For the most part, the snippets of everyday life presented by the authors in this section depict a strong sense of belonging, camaraderie, and shared interest in being together and using the internet to enact and sustain significant parts of personal and familial relationships. Cathy Fowley’s piece offers a poignant pastiche of voices, hinting at meaningful conversations among women in a place that no longer exists: the Pink Place. Anette Grønning describes the seemingly mundane but powerfully connective ways the internet is woven into the ←19 | 20→ecology of the Danish families she studies. She builds on the concept of personal ecologies, where feedback is an important component of creating or identifying boundaries, albeit very interconnected ones. Priya Kumar’s piece addresses a different aspect of an ecological model for thinking about the digital contexts within which we build and maintain relationships. Building or maintaining relationships in the age of ubiquitous internet means grappling with complicated and often competing demands. While a parent might want to post many images of their children to keep family and friends apprised of their activities, this comes with a pressure of constantly sharing, shifting attention away from the self to focus on the profile of one’s child, even before birth. For her participants, various entities have different ideas about where the boundaries of self, personal life, or family life should be drawn. In this piece, readers can conclude the section wondering to what extent our personal ecologies are controllable, or at least, controlled by us, versus other stakeholders.
Section 4, Ways of Becoming, addresses the constantly changing, transitioning and transforming aspects of being ourselves and in the world. Although not all the authors in this section use the concept of becoming directly, each addresses aspects of transformation, or how the internet is entangled in the processes, practices and performances of selfhood in flux. We start this section with Son Vivienne’s chapter on trans-being. Relying on personal experience and research with gender-diverse storytellers, Son writes of the effects that using the internet and researching other people’s internet use has had on them. Son’s chapter follows their iterative and creative self-reinvention through social media and other forms of digital self-representation, and in the process, asks if “trans-being” can be posited as a new framework that constitutes both the ‘post-gender’ and “post-digital” facets of digital living. This piece demonstrates the visceral and deeply felt disconnections and reconnections of filtering, enacting, and articulating the self, for the self and for and with others. The discussion of what experimentation might mean to the potentiality of being continues in the following piece, where Craig Hamilton and Sarah Raine describe how tools, places, and ways of being intermingle in the experience of music streaming. They extend Markham’s framework by introducing the “potential of being” involved in using and
