Description
Book SynopsisWhat 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, offering a richly textured glimpse of how the internet has both disappeared and at the same time, has fundamentally transformed everyday
Trade Review
“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
“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 It is both a historical document and an exploration of possible futures.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
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Table – Acknowledgments – Introducing the Metaphors of the Internet – Annette N. Markham: Ways of Being in the Digital Age – Katrin Tiidenberg: A Wormhole, a Home, an Unavoidable Place. Introduction to "Metaphors of the Internet" – Kevin Driscoll: Losing Your Internet: Narratives of Decline among Long-Time Users – Ways of Doing – Nadia Hakim-Fernández: Workplace-Making among Mobile Freelancers – Jeff Thompson: Turker Computers – Tijana Hirsch: Migration of Self – Whitney Phillips: Pinball Machines, Cardboard Cutouts, and Private Parties: Three Metaphors for Conceptualizing Memetic Spread – Katrin Tiidenberg: ‘Instagrammable’ as a Metaphor for Looking and Showing in Visual Social Media – Crystal Abidin: Growing Up and Growing Old on the Internet: Influencer Life Courses and the Internet as Home – Andee Baker: Remixing the Music Fan Experience: Rock Concerts in Person and Online – Cathy Fowley: Chronotope – Anette Grønning: Ecologies for Connecting across Generations – Priya C. Kumar: The Unavoidable Place: How Parents Manage the Socially Mediated Visibility of Their Young Children Ways of Becoming – Son Vivienne: Trans-being – Craig Hamilton/Sarah Raine: Popular Music Reception: Tools of Future-Making, Spaces, and Possibilities of Being – Maria Schreiber/Patricia Prieto-Blanco: Co-becoming Hybrid Entities through Collaboration – Interview with Artist Cristina Nuñez – Katie Warfield: Trans-constituting Place Online – Ways of Being With – Tobias Raun: Facebook as a Wormhole between Life and Death – xtine burrough: A Vigil for Some Bodies – Sarah Schorr/Winnie Soon: Screenshooting Life Online: Two Artworks – Daisy Pignetti: Hurricane Season: Annual Assessments of Loss – Theresa M. Senft: Complicating the Internet as a Way of Being: The Case of Cloud Intimacy – Annette N. Markham: Echolocating the Digital Self – Whose Internet? Whose Metaphors? – Carmel Vaisman: Metaphoric Meltdowns: Debates over the Meaning of Blogging on Israblog – Jessa Lingel: Political Ideologies of Online Spaces: Anarchist Models for Boundary Making – Polina Kolozaridi/Anna Shchetvina/Katrin Tiidenberg: No Country for IT-Men: Post-Soviet Internet Metaphors of Who and How Interacts with the Internet – Ryan M. Milner: Remixed into Existence: Life Online as The Internet Comes of Age – References – About the Authors – Index
