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ОглавлениеA 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 the internet been absorbed completely into the background 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 book collaboratively, our authors wrote their chapters in a shared space online. From the very 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 “hacking” music streaming services. As people manage the current and future impressions they give and give off of themselves as music listeners, they create experiences for their future selves. In the next piece, Maria Schreiber and Patricia Prieto-Blanco offer a deceptively straightforward case study of their own experiences of collaboration in various virtual co-working spaces. Their story offers intriguing conceptual thinking by showing how through everyday co-presence, they are actually co-becoming a new hybrid being—Maria+Patricia+internet. The process of becoming through and with socially-mediated photography of the self is poignantly discussed by artist Cristina Nuñez. In an interview with Kat and Annette, Cristina shares her path ←20 | 21→through physical, material, and digital experiences, raising important questions about the possibilities and challenges of becoming with technology. Finally, Katie Warfield uses the conceptual lenses of transgeography and feminist phenomenology to look at how young people regard their use of social media for self-presentation. She offers a series of what she calls “slippery” metaphors that help reorient our analytical gaze from people or individuals doing things, to the processes of becoming through, with, and in digital and material entanglements across and through geographies that are less about place and more about deeply contextual processes and meanings.
Section 5, Ways of Being With, is titled in homage to the notion that being is always relational and dialogic. R.D. Laing would explain that our identity cannot be abstracted from our identity-for-others, our identity-for ourselves, the identities we attribute to others, the identities we think they attribute to us, what we think they think we think, and so on (Markham, 1998, p. 215, citing Laing, 1969, p. 86). Distinct from the focus of section 3 on ways of relating with other people, this section focuses on how we make sense of ourselves, others, and the world through/by being with machines, the digital, and information, as facilitated by the internet. You could also say the pieces we’ve collected here explore how technologies mediate self, other, and relationality. We open with Tobias Raun’s study of how Facebook is experienced as a wormhole between life and death. Based on his conversations with Camilla, a woman whose mother and sister recently passed away, the chapter follows how a deceased person’s Facebook page is a portal, enabling a sense of closeness and presence that the gravesite does not. This emotional and eerie chapter is followed by a series of photos by xtine burrough entitled Vigil for Some Bodies. Each All Hallow’s Eve since 2015, xtine has paid Mechanical Turk workers 25 cents, not to conduct digital piece work as is typical, but to light a candle in remembrance of loved ones. The topic of presence, being with, and the digital/physicality of commemoration is entangled and juxtaposed in xtine’s images in ways that raise important questions about the centrality of the internet for everyday sensemaking. Sarah Schorr and Winnie Soon take up related questions, focusing on temporality, being with, and the reappearance of the unerasable in their artworks, Saving Screens and Unerasable Images, respectively. Building from and reframing the violent metaphorical associations involved in screenshooting, they discuss how the act of cut/copy/paste of the screenshot transitions from a tool of the internet era to a generative sensemaking practice where meanings and memories linger. Daisy Pignetti continues this contemplation of the internet’s capacities to revive and re-present information in the next chapter. Daisy relates the story of how her New Orleans childhood home, devastated in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina and subsequently razed to the ground, reappeared in 2010 on Google Maps’ Street View. This strange familiarity is one of being—not out of time, but in different layers of time, a consequence of the interconnections ←21 | 22→between physical referents, mapping technologies, social media activity, and episodes of nostalgia. Annette Markham offers a final brief essay for this section. She offers the metaphor of echolocation as a way of making sense of digital sociality. Comparing the various pings of our social media use to the practices of bats, whales, and dolphins to navigate through space, Annette suggests that through an always-on, always-available internet, people locate their social selves when they are responded to, relational processes that are only visible when the lack of response casts the self into existential doubt.
Our sixth and final section, Whose Internet? Whose Metaphors? collects pieces that address the rules, power hierarchies and boundaries in who gets to perceive the internet as theirs, who gets to make the dominant metaphors and what that may mean for imaginaries of the future internet. Carmel Vaisman’s chapter tells the history of a blogging platform where teenage girls lived, resisted, appropriated and finally submitted to platform owner’s and community manager’s tropes of what Israel’s blogging platform Israblog is—and more importantly, is not—for. Based on her analysis of the battles of meaning, Carmel suggests that as systems become more complex and bureaucratic, people naturalize certain technical constraints, accepting them as given. Jessa Lingel’s chapter offers a thought experiment to explore how some of the practices of anarchist groups online demonstrate a stronger democratic or collaborative mode than the automated, ill-functioning content moderation processes adopted by many social media giants. Inspired by anarchist communities she knows via her research and activist work, she offers a generative set of practices for managing online communities. In the following chapter, Polina Kolozaridi, Anna Shchetvina, and I offer a rare insight into Soviet and Post-Soviet understandings of the functionality, meaning and uses of the internet. By analyzing the metaphors used by Russia’s internet-pioneers, and contextualizing those within historical Soviet conceptualizations of the interconnections of technology and humans, we propose that different cultures create marked distinctions in what meaning is conveyed within the same root metaphor. Nuancing the metaphors of tool, place and way of being with historical Russian/Soviet connotations emphasizes not how technology is used by individuals, but rather how it participates in relations with collectives. This opens up new avenues to think about the future of the internet. We wrap up this section and the book as a whole with Ryan Milner’s chapter. In a sensitive, critical and self-aware analysis of his own early internet use, Ryan opens up the implications, blind spots and exclusions imbricated with the tone, practices and self-perceptions of the young, white, American men, who arrogantly called themselves “The Internet” in the early 2000s. Ryan analyzes that Internet through the metaphor of a “Remix Machine” that runs on a particular form of repurposing, creativity and irony. These practices of remix have become more accessible todiverse groups of internet users, but as Ryan says, the ghosts linger in the machine. As Ryan writes in his chapter, “If ‘just a joke’ ever requires, even ←22 | 23→‘ironically,’ trotting out the same dehumanizing stereotypes and characterizations that have been sampled time and again to write songs of oppression, then maybe the joke’s not funny,” (p. 253). He concludes with a call to use our tools to create a place premised on more diverse, more empowering voices.
Together, these chapters weave new and old metaphors into our understanding of what the internet means in an era when it has all but disappeared as an obvious frame for experience. This is what we mean by the subtitle of our book, Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity. The term “ubiquitous computing” is attributed to Mark Weiser (1991), who believed the best sort of computers were those that receded into the background and simply functioned without our noticing. Without getting into whether or not we agree with this valuation, we take the concept of ubiquity in the way our colleagues in the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) did when titling our 2004 annual conference “Ubiquity?” This conference challenged as well as explored the visibility and prevalence of the Internet as everywhere, all at once. The call for papers raised questions such as:
is the internet everywhere? How and where does the internet appear and act in technical, social, political, or cultural contexts? What does it mean to have access and who does and doesn’t have it? How does the presence of the internet affect individuals, communities, families, governments, societies and nation-states? What are the implications of ‘internet everywhere’? (excerpt from AoIR mailing list call for papers)
We believe Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity illustrates how these sorts of questions often get answered in ways that highlight one particular metaphorical frame over others. The pieces in this book can also help us understand that debates over meaning are not only longstanding, they are rarely recognized as debates in the first place. This is precisely because metaphors move from active or “live” where they startle us into making new sense of something, to dead, where they are still active but function at the deep structure of discourse to simply frame understanding and guide definitions. And of course, things change. New devices, platforms, and capacities come along. Conversations continue. Trends shift, and along with these, the meaning of the internet shifts as well. And while these frames may disappear over time and familiarity, the power of the imaginary remains an influence in how we act, with others, with our technologies.
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