In a used bookstore a few weekends ago I picked up Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil. The book purports to be "a concise but wide-ranging personal history of the internet." It's not bad, but neither is it particularly compelling. There's certainly some interesting stuff in here, one example is a bit about the origin of terms like "cyberspace" as well as some interesting early internet services like Echo (East Coast Hang Out), which was basically a supped up NYC BBS. Some interesting stories about Echo were featured and I'm definitely gonna try to read the book about it, Cyberville, when I get the chance. I'm not done the book yet but figured some travelers would be interested in some of its more compelling parts so I thought I'd cobble them together here in a thread and spare you from having read to a book that was clearly written for millennials who feel superior than their peers because they have copies of Zizek books -- which they have never read -- on their shelves.
I don't really have any super robust thoughts on this yet but curious what other people think. Have we lost that magic of ascending into cyperspace where we are in another world and if we have, does this have any serious effect on the conduct of good internet citizenship?
While I think McNeil's analysis about people referring to the internet as a singular identity is wrong, just as when we refer to "The French" or "The Chinese" people are not thinking about a singular identity in the way she uses the term, I do think she is right to identify a shift in the internet no longer feeling like a "place" for most people."People used to talk about the internet as a place. The information superhighway. A frontier. The internet was something to get on. Even the desktop metaphor was in turn clarifying, then confusing: it helped people understand how a personal computer organizes information, while it invited a user to think of the experience as three-dimensional and spatial. Now people talk about the internet as something to talk to; it is a someone. Even casually, people discuss the internet -- insentient, dumb -- as living, real. A friend or a foe. Something with eyes... Headlines like "What the Internet Thinks of this Week's Blockbuster Movie" or "The Internet Loves Alpacas" discuss collective reactions on social media platforms as if they were the opinions of an individual person... This metaphor reveals how emotionally present and invested people feel when they use the internet. A familiar but mysterious companion, the internet is seductive, idiosyncratic, unreliable, and contradictory, while it is also at your service and by your side. But when anthropomorphized, diverse and divergent communities of users are reduced to a single identity." pg17-18.
I think these two ideas together really resonate for me and the many days I spent endlessly shitposting on old forums like Gamefaqs. It wasn't like I was there in my family room on the computer, I was in another place altogether. While the idea of the internet as another place lives on, both in the notion of the metaverse and those who can still experience this metaphysical digital bliss or the fleeting moments I still have of it, McNeil is right that the majority of users no longer see the internet this way. Rather, for most people the internet is a bundle of very limited websites where one mostly engages with people you already know (IG, FB, etc.) or engage in incredibly bad faith ways (Twitter, where people just want to dunk on others who have different political opinions). I think the loss of thinking about the internet as a place, both in the sense of that digital bliss but also the necessity of taking on a certain behavior while you are in a foreign space, is part of the downfall of the internet."When William Gibson came up with 'cyberspace,' as a word and concept for the virtual worlds in his fiction, he wasn't just thinking about the destination through the screen, but the surface where a user's feet touched the ground. The idea came to him as he watched kids in an arcade, "so physically involved," he told The Paris Review, that it seemed that "what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine." Every time I read that Gibson quote, I am transported back to the physical space that was obliterated when I entered cyberspace: the white walls, the tan carpet under my feet, and the cumbersome beige box of a personal computer in front of me. The keys, a sierra of peaks and slopes, felt heavy and pressurized at every click; nothing like the uniform flat buttons I'm tapping as I write this. I shared that computer with the rest of my family. That is where I grew up: immobile and hunched over while resplendent in release, my feet there and my head elsewhere." pg 40.
I don't really have any super robust thoughts on this yet but curious what other people think. Have we lost that magic of ascending into cyperspace where we are in another world and if we have, does this have any serious effect on the conduct of good internet citizenship?