Metaphors of Internet. Группа авторов
book is a collaborative effort of all the contributors, who spent more than two years working together in Google docs to draft, critique, and revise their pieces. This is not an easy process and their persistence, patience, and willingness to be part of this experiment is remarkable. For this, we thank our fellow curators and co-authors: Andee Baker, Anette Grønning, Anna Shchetvina, Carmel L. Vaisman, Cathy Fowley, Craig Hamilton, Cristina Nuñez, Crystal Abidin, Daisy Pignetti, Jeff Thompson, Jessa Lingel, Katie Warfield, Kevin Driscoll, Maria Schreiber, Nadia Hakim-Fernández, Patricia Prieto-Blanco, Polina Kolozaridi, Priya C. Kumar, Ryan Milner, Sarah Raine, Sarah Schorr, Son Vivienne, Terri Senft, Tijana Hirsch, Tobias Raun, Whitney Phillips, xtine burrough, Winnie Soon.
Annette: Speaking from my own perspective on the project, I admit I enjoyed the creative process much more than the management required to bring this volume to fruition. I liked tinkering with the order of chapters, the titles of various sections, the wording of authors’ sentences. I cherished the gift of editing the other authors’ texts to build what we hope reads as a strong cohesion across the chapters. In this meandering and playful curating process, I cannot begin to express my deep appreciation for Katrin’s continuous work to keep the project moving toward completion. Without her alternately fierce and gentle pressure, I would still be tweaking and fussing with the details of each of the contribution. Katrin skillfully managed the personalities, the logistics, and me. She is a brilliant scholar and a ←xv | xvi→true pleasure to work with. I consider myself one of the lucky few who get to work with her.
Katrin: Annette is the bravest scholar I have ever worked with—a pioneer, an innovator, an inspiration. She has the inimitable capacity to propose just-shy-of-outrageous ideas as a legitimate plan and the charisma to mobilize people around those ideas. Working with her is a transformative experience, an adventure and a privilege. Without Annette, I would not have dared to ask our collaborators for the trust needed for, nor taken on the monumental task of closely editing and remixing nearly 30 chapters after they had already gone through a rigorous and creative process of co-creation. Yet this is what we did, and this is what our amazing collaborators allowed us to do. I am so grateful to have been a part of this book and to have had the chance to learn so much from co-editing it with Annette.
We also thank the editorial team at Peter Lang, the Digital Formations series editor Steve Jones, The Cultural Transformations Research Programme at Aarhus University for their wonderful writing retreats, and the community of AoIR, the Association of Internet Researchers, who made space for this work in various conferences along the way.
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Steve Jones
General Editor
Vol. 122
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Introducing the Metaphors of the Internet
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Ways 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