Early praise for Metaphors of Internet
“The Internet has disappeared. This exceptional book brings it back into focus—through richly illustrated histories, artworks, and reflections. It is both a historical document and an exploration of possible futures. On top of that, Annette and Katrin have given us a profoundly inspirational glimpse of what truly creative scholarship looks like.”
Mark Deuze,
Professor of Journalism and Media Culture,
University of Amsterdam, author of Media Life
“Metaphors of the Internet is an extraordinary book, which zooms from the early days of cyberspace to the present moment to ask how we might conceptualise what the internet is, feels and means. Curated by the fabulous duo of Annette Markham and Katrin Tiidenberg this book presents a new vision and mode of encountering the internet in everyday lives and biographies. It presents an at once collective and carefully crafted, but also deeply personalised and reflexive, series of metaphors and stories through which the internet and life can be conceptualised as part of the same world. It invites us to acknowledge and contemplate anew how our own and others’ lives are entangled in the creativity and politics of everyday environments, that are never not digital. Metaphors of the Internet is essential, fascinating and accessible reading for anyone from any academic or practice-based discipline who is interested in understanding the internet.”
Sarah Pink,
Professor of Design and Emerging Technologies,
Monash University,
author of Situating Everyday Life: Practices and Places and
Doing Sensory Ethnography
“What language will internet research speak in the years to come? Read this innovative collection and find out what you will be thinking about, researching, and dreaming about, when you talk technology. A fun and forward thinking patchwork of ideas weaved together by scholars known for being ahead of their time.”
Zizi Papacharissi
Professor and Head of Communication,
Professor of Political Science,
University of Illinois at Chicago
Metaphors of Internet
Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity
Edited by
Annette N. Markham and
Katrin Tiidenberg
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Markham, Annette N., editor. | Tiidenberg, Katrin, editor.
Title: Metaphors of internet: ways of being in the age of ubiquity /
edited by Annette N. Markham and Katrin Tiidenberg.
Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2020.
Series: Digital formations, vol. 122 | ISSN 1526-3169
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019059859 | ISBN 978-1-4331-7449-0 (hardback: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4331-7450-6 (paperback: alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4331-7451-3 (ebook pdf)
ISBN 978-1-4331-7452-0 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4331-7453-7 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Internet—Social aspects. | Internet—Terminology.
Classification: LCC HM851 .M466 2020 (print) | LCC HM851 (ebook) |
DDC 302.23/1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059859
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059860
DOI 10.3726/b16196
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.
© 2020 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
About the editors
Annette N. Markham (Professor of Media & Communication at RMIT University) is a pioneering researcher of digital culture. Her foundational ethnographic studies of mediated identities and lived experience through the Internet is well represented in her first book, Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space. She is a globally recognized expert on rethinking frameworks for research practice in digitally saturated contexts, as well as her work around ethics of care and impact needed for building bett er futures in algorithmic societies. Markham is founder and director of Future Making Research Consortium and STEEM: Center for the Study of Technological, Ethical, and Emerging Methods.
Katrin Tiidenberg (Professor of Visual Culture & Social Media at Tallinn University) is a digital sociologist and author of Sex and Social Media (with Emily van der Nagel), Selfies: Why We Love (and Hate) Them, and Body and Soul on the Internet: Making Sense of Social Media (in Estonian). She is currently writing and publishing on the deplatf orming of sex on social media, visual social media practices, and digital research ethics. Tiidenberg is on the Executive Board of the Association of Internet Researchers and the Estonian Young Academy of Sciences.
About the book
“This exceptional book brings the internet back into focus—through richly illustrated histories, artworks, and reflections. Annett e and Katrin have given us a profoundly inspirational glimpse of what truly creative scholarship looks like.”
—Mark Deuze, author of Media Life
“An extraordinary book, which zooms from the early days of cyberspace to the present moment to ask what the internet is, feels and means. Metaphors of Internet is essential, fascinating and accessible reading.”
—Sarah Pink, author of Doing Sensory Ethnography
What happens when the internet is absorbed into everyday life? How do we make sense of something that is invisible but still so central? A group of digital culture experts address these questions in Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity.
Twenty years ago, the internet was imagined as standing apart from humans. Metaphorically it was a frontier to explore, a virtual world to experiment in, an ultra-high-speed information superhighway. Many popular metaphors have fallen out of use, while new ones arise all the time. Today we speak of data lakes, clouds and AI. The essays and artwork in this book evoke the mundane, the visceral, and the transformative potential of the internet by exploring the currently dominant metaphors. Together they tell a story of kaleidoscopic diversity of how we experience the internet, off ering a richly textured glimpse of how the internet has both disappeared and at the same time, has fundamentally transformed everyday social customs, work, and life, death, politics, and embodiment.
This eBook can be cited
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book.