Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity(122 Digital Formations)

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.

About the Author :
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 better 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 deplatforming 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.

Review :
"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 "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