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ОглавлениеWays of Being in the Digital Age
annette n. markham
Between 1995 and 1997, I conducted an ethnographic study of people who considered themselves “heavy users” of the internet. Representing only a small slice of lived experience in the early digital age, my participants taught me to move, emote, and build my identities in their own worlds. It was a time when terms like Virtual Reality and Cyberspace were used without irony. The creative use of text produced images, maps, and emotions. 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 vice president Al Gore, were promoting the concept of the internet as an information superhighway. Both 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:
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*** 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”
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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 us, like the water encompassing the fish on Mark Deuze’s book cover for Media Life (Figure 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.
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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.
