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.
←23 | 24→←24 | 25→
Losing Your Internet: Narratives of Decline among Long-Time Users
kevin driscoll
Annette Markham’s Life Online (1998) documents an historical conjuncture in which the visibility of the Internet in popular culture outpaced hands-on access for most Americans. At the time that Markham was completing her fieldwork, approximately one-third of Americans reported using the Internet, most of whom were white, wealthy, highly educated, and male (Rainie, 2017). Yet, for half a decade, news and entertainment media had been saturated with stories of the Internet as a technical marvel, economic opportunity, social revolution, and moral threat (Schulte, 2013; Streeter, 2017). Every few months, the cover of Time magazine added a new dimension to the Internet story, from the “info highway” in 1993, to the “cyberporn” panic in 1995, dot-com “golden geeks” in 1996, and the “death of privacy” in 1997. Beyond these sensational headlines, friends and coworkers gossiped about relationships and romances forming online. Early users of the Internet were similarly enthusiastic and many shared a sense that computer-mediated communication might transform the social world. Even Markham described her initial observations of the internet and its growing user population as “astounding” and “extraordinary” (1998, pp. 16–17). At the turn of the century, the Internet seemed charged with unknown possibility.
Twenty years later, the structure of feeling that characterized early encounters with the Internet has changed. For millions of people, computer-mediated communication is now an unremarkable aspect of everyday life. In comparison to the fantastical multi-user environments that Markham described in 1998, typical uses of the internet in 2017 seem quite dull: reading the news, solving a crossword ←25 | 26→puzzle, shopping for household goods, or arranging meetings with coworkers. Furthermore, in popular media, the Internet seems to oscillate unpredictably from the mundane to the menacing. The same platform used to file income taxes is said to facilitate waves of terrorism, harassment, fraud, and propaganda. Returning to the Time archive, we find alarming cover stories about the “secret web where drugs, porn and murder hide online” in 2013 and a failed e-government initiative described as a “nightmare” in 2014. What is striking about these recent headlines, however, is how infrequently the Internet itself is an object of scrutiny. Unlike stories from the 1990s, the presence of the Internet in our homes is now taken-for-granted and the panic lies in its misuse or abuse.
Long-time users, the small group who have enjoyed continuous internet access since 1997, are in a unique position to reflect on the transformation of the Internet from ballyhoo to banality. While any American adult alive in the early 1990s would have been exposed to ideas and arguments about the Internet, only long-time users can compare these narratives with first-hand experience. Long-time users bore witness to several translations in the cultural position of the Internet: from voluntary to compulsory, peripheral to central, marvelous to mundane. For the long-time user, the interleaving of computer-mediated communication and human society is neither taken-for-granted nor natural. And while these transitions unfolded over the course of many years, long-time users are only occasionally prompted to reflect on the changes they have experienced. It is in these moments of self-reflection that we find clues regarding the changing meaning of metaphors over the past two decades.
This chapter focuses on discourses of nostalgia, loss, and decline among long-time users for whom the Internet of the 1990s became, in Markham’s analysis, “a way of being” (2003). Almost invariably, long-time users remember the early Internet as a kind of golden age, an electronic Eden in which anyone with a modem was free to play and experiment in relative safety. As one characteristic comment on an historical blog post reads, “[This] brings back some fond memories. [Back then,] the worst thing that would happen was that call waiting would knock me offline!” Undoubtedly, this nostalgia reflects an authentic longing for the excitement one felt standing on the threshold of cyberspace but it also obscures the substantial social barriers and material costs that prevented most people from sharing in that experience. To understand what is at stake in this tension between the nostalgia of long-time users and the on-going expansion and domestication of Internet access, this chapter examines both the contemporary accounts of Internet use captured by Markham in Life Online and the retrospective stories told by high-profile figures in the recent past. This comparison reveals the rhetorical power of narratives of decline to shape debates about Internet policy, technology, and culture. As we consider what it means to live online for another two decades, we must critically consider the stories that we tell about Internets of the past.
←26 | 27→
lost ways of being on the internet
The Internet of today is cheaper, faster and more widely accessible than at any point in the past. But these developments have been achieved through a process of continuous change. The Internet is made and re-made as various components are adopted and