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