Metaphors of the Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity

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, offering 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. Cover 1 Contents 9 List of Figures and Table 13 Acknowledgments 19 Section 1: Introducing the Metaphors of the Internet 21 Chapter One: Ways of Being in the Digital Age (annette n. markham) 23 Chapter Two: A Wormhole, a Home, an Unavoidable Place. Introduction to “Metaphors of the Internet” (katrin tiidenberg) 33 Chapter Three: Losing Your Internet: Narratives of Decline among Long-Time Users (kevin driscoll) 45 Section 2: Ways of Doing 53 Chapter Four: Workplace-Making among Mobile Freelancers (nadia hakim-fernández) 55 Chapter Five: Turker Computers (jeff thompson) 67 Chapter Six: Migration of Self (tijana hirsch) 75 Chapter Seven: Pinball Machines, Cardboard Cutouts, and Private Parties: Three Metaphors for Conceptualizing Memetic Spread (whitney phillips) 79 Chapter Eight: ‘Instagrammable’ as a Metaphor for Looking and Showing in Visual Social Media (katrin tiidenberg) 85 Section 3: Ways of Relating 93 Chapter Nine: Growing Up and Growing Old on the Internet: Influencer Life Courses and the Internet as Home (crystal abidin) 95 Chapter Ten: Remixing the Music Fan Experience: Rock Concerts in Person and Online (andee baker) 105 Chapter Eleven: Chronotope (cathy fowley) 111 Chapter Twelve: Ecologies for Connecting across Generations (anette grønning) 117 Chapter Thirteen: The Unavoidable Place: How Parents Manage the Socially Mediated Visibility of their Young Children (priya c. kumar) 127 Section 4: Ways of Becoming 133 Chapter Fourteen: Trans-being (son vivienne) 135 Chapter Fifteen: Popular Music Reception: Tools of Future-Making, Spaces, and Possibilities of Being (craig hamilton and sarah raine) 145 Chapter Sixteen: Co-becoming Hybrid Entities through Collaboration (maria schreiber and patricia prieto-blanco) 155 Chapter Seventeen: Interview with Artist Cristina Nuñez 165 Chapter Eighteen: Trans-constituting Place Online (katie warfield) 171 Section 5: Ways of Being With 179 Chapter Nineteen: Facebook as a Wormhole between Life and Death (tobias raun) 181 Chapter Twenty: A Vigil for Some Bodies (xtine burrough) 189 Chapter Twenty-One: Screenshooting Life Online: Two Artworks (sarah schorr and winnie soon) 195 Chapter Twenty-Two: Hurricane Season: Annual Assessments of Loss (daisy pignetti) 203 Chapter Twenty-Three: Complicating the Internet as a Way of Being: The Case of Cloud Intimacy (theresa m. senft) 211 Chapter Twenty-Four: Echolocating the Digital Self (annette n. markham) 217 Section 6: Whose Internet? Whose Metaphors? 221 Chapter Twenty-Five: Metaphoric Meltdowns: Debates over the Meaning of Blogging on Israblog (carmel vaisman) 223 Chapter Twenty-Six: Political Ideologies of Online Spaces: Anarchist Models for Boundary Making (jessa lingel) 235 Chapter Twenty-Seven: No Country for IT-Men: Post-Soviet Internet Metaphors of Who and How Interacts with the Internet (polina kolozaridi, anna shchetvina, and katrin tiidenberg) 241 Chapter Twenty-Eight: Remixed into Existence: Life Online as the Internet Comes of Age (ryan m. milner) 253 References 265 About the Authors 281 Index 289 "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 artworks 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 social customs, work, and life, death, politics, and embodiment"-- Provided by publisher