#essay, October 28, 2024
by Anya
In studies of network imaginaries and internet myths (Bory 2020, Flichy 2007), a strong emphasis is usually placed on the identification of those imaginaries and tracing their histories: cyberspace, electronic frontier, Web2, et cetera – the list can vary a little – but the methodological principle stays more or less the same. What seems to be less central to this field of studies, but nevertheless emerges here and there, is a focus on the role of particular forms of writing, speaking, or visualising that mediate the meaning-making of the internet.
One of such forms received most of the attention ― a metaphor. From a cyberspace to a cloud, metaphors are noticeably present in internet history, and thus become an easy entry point to the critique of oversimplified imaginaries. Studying archives of Wired, Sally Wyatt (2004) maps out metaphors employed by internet visionaries―repeating, universalist themes conveyed through metaphors that guide understanding of the Internet’s role and future: revolution, evolution, salvation, progress, universalism, and the “American dream.” She describes them as euphoric and questions “the desirability of the promotion of a single, globalising technological development”. Annette Markham (2003) points out how confusion in communication about the early internet arose, because of the three different root metaphors: a tool, a place, and a way of being. If copyright regulators talk about the internet as a space, but engineers refer to it as a tool, miscommunication can happen.
In her book “Transcoding the Digital”, Marianne van den Boomen (2014) makes an interesting shift of focus: she shows us how in analysis of internet metaphors we can look not only into a group of particular metaphors, but also study a metaphor as a literary device, explore its power as a semantical tool, use it to criticise the limits of metaphor-usage to describe the internet, and also describes what happens when metaphors start being used to design interfaces, and icons, and other coded objects (and not just written or spoken language). Boomen argues that material semiotics of digital interfaces organise ways of reading, referring, and interpreting, and it also configures social and cultural praxis. The core idea of her approach is that different digital entities work as “sign-tool objects”; such objects combine both the possibility of carrying meanings and features of material tools. As signs, digital objects have a specific visual or textual form, rhetoric and cultural meaning. As tools, they can be manipulated and used, and they have their effect, they change something or transform themselves.
Using Marianne van den Boomen as an inspiration, I am wondering: what will change in our approaches to history and theory of network imaginaries if we focus not just on the content of narratives, myths, and metaphors, but on the form? Beyond metaphors and myths, there are so many ― dashboards, stock images, schemes, scientific illustrations, prototypes, posters, et cetera. Can we write a history of forms that historically mediate our network imaginaries*? What becomes popular and what stays on the periphery? What stabilises the convenient simplifications and what helps to break out of them? And the question that is most curious for me as a person working between internet history, literary studies and (German) media studies: can we speak at all about certain affordances or mediating power of forms? And how can we do it without violating all that we know about the social construction of technologies and their diversity of interpretation and usage?
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The concept of imagination and its constraints
The question of to what extent our imagination is limited by the repertoire of available forms of expression was a central question for continental philosophy in the 1980s and resulted in multiple approaches to what was called social imaginaries. In post-war Europe philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricœur simultaneously critique Marx and Engel’s idea that imagination is dependent on material (economical) infrastructures. The critical point is that “the social imaginary is not derivative from but inextricably implicated in the very nature of human activity. Human activity does not exist apart from the social imaginary. The social imaginary is in that sense constitutive of social reality.” (summarised by George H. Taylor, 2019, x).
So, there is no total dependency of our imagination on economics**. But imagination is a process of conceptual structuring (in contrast to just pure sensory impression if we even can speak of one). This is shaped by the forms of signification that we have, e.g. language. This is also where terminologically we can roughly distinguish between “imagination” and “imaginary” (before more narrow distinctions and theories come into play, like STI): imagination is a process, and imaginary is the result of it, already organised by particular (probably diverse) forms of expression.
Interesting, that Ricœur praises metaphors when he speaks about imagination and novelty (1975). Seeing imagination is a work of re-interpreting the material we already have within cultural history and language, he looks at metaphors as tools to make connections between different domains of meaning, and thus, to reach new meanings. An interesting paradox: on the one hand, metaphors are praised for being a tool for radical imagination, on the other (in internet history and STS) ― as semantical devices that create and stabilise biases. This is where I see the role of forms that we use to create imaginaries: they both allow us to do new things and constrain us.
Castoriadis did not believe that imagination is entirely determined by language. Instead, he emphasised the concept of radical imagination, which is a creative and generative force beyond mere linguistic or functional determinations. He distinguished between two key aspects of imagination: the instituted imaginary, which is the collective societal framework shaped by norms, values, and language and the instituting imaginary, which is the creative, transformative potential that enables individuals and societies to transcend existing structures.
For Castoriadis, while language plays a crucial role in shaping how we experience and communicate social meanings, it does not fully determine the imaginative process. He argued that imagination exceeds language, allowing for the creation of new forms and meanings that cannot be fully contained within the boundaries of linguistic structures.
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Media forms determining the work of imagination
But to some extent imagination is determined. And probably not just by language. Vilém Flusser showed how the way we structure our imagination is shaped by media ― media in a broad media theoretical meaning, as an object external to our bodies that nevertheless filters and structures the way we sense and interact with the world. He focuses on the example of an alphabet and writing. Writing developed as a linear practice, linear through both space and time. The thought unfolds from one side of the page towards another, and to comprehend it we have to spend second after second, following each of the words in the chains of sentences (see Christoph Ernst’s comments on Flusser, 2023).
An “instrument law”, formulated by Abraham Kaplan, states: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding”. Despite the phrase being written in 1964, I can easily imagine it as a bitter sarcastic tweet of some Critical Media scholar. Taking this "formula" further, tech critic Neil Postman connects it to other media: “To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data”.
I would agree that artefacts that mediate our senses and interactions with the world can have the agency to push us to certain practices. But do media then fully determine our imagination? Is writing shaping us to the extent that we cannot think, read, or write non-linearly? Of course not. We have people with hammers who use them in bird sculptures for garden deco.
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Beyond determinism: experiments with forms
Focus on the power of forms that guide our understanding of networks and digital tech is not interesting just for history, but also for speculations on new imaginaries***. Speaking about tech imaginaries, we often encounter a bridge between research and political concerns. Especially with the enormous amount of critique of internet metaphors, myths, and network imaginaries, it can look as if another socio-technical regime is not imaginable. A great deal of anthropological work has been done to show how ways of seeing and using digital tech are diverse, much more diverse than we are sometimes ready to acknowledge, e.g. Why We Post research projects.
Yet, when it comes to big tech companies and their socio-technical imaginaries, even across different parts of the world there is a certain homogeneity. So, can we imagine the world beyond it? How? “To paraphrase Frederic Jameson on capitalism, it’s much easier to imagine how the world itself would end than to imagine the end of ‘the Internet.’”, says Evgeny Morozov (2013, p. 22). A bit dramatic, but he does capture this frustration of media theorists and critics (think the recent "Stuck on the Platform" by Geert Lovink) about shattered hopes and lack of reliable replacements for those. Search for alternative visions and policies happens simultaneously in a variety of ways, for example, in the history of national or local internet projects (on Socrates in Italy: Bory, 2020, on Minitel in France: Mailland and Driscoll, 2017), in the history of the web (in such social movements as the Yesterweb).
Media theory of the kind Vilém Flusser writes, illuminates that new imaginaries might be a matter of experimentation with other modes of writing. Or other forms of formulating and conveying ideas in general. If we stay with the alphabet and language as a medium, we can think of hypertextual experiments in books ("Dictionary of the Khazars" by Milorad Pavić) or online (Scott Rettberg’s "The Unknown"). Or we can switch to totally other media, like photography, an immersive theatrical play, or a Twitch stream. Beyond all the criticism towards the media and their potential determinism, there was also, of course, a lot of fascination with the promise of new, better ways to interact with the world. Within the history of the late XIX and through the whole XX century, we can find multiple instances when the search for new possibilities of imagining something was merged with a search for new media forms. For example, in The Democratic Surround (2013), communication historian Fred Turner follows a story of pre- and post-WWII attempts in the US to nurture democratic values and minimise risks of propaganda production by reimagining the media ecology. Former German Bauhaus designers combine forces with the US intellectuals to design spaces where information comes from multiple sources at once, giving people a possibility to compare them and come up with their own opinions.
And the most recent manifestos turn to online formats, either totally changing their usual shape. Manifesto writers turn to experiments with rich and interactive media (like Xenofeminism: Politics of alienation). Or to the usage of software and protocols beyond the paradigmatic ones (like the Gopher manifesto). All those examples are driven by an urge to find a new medium that will challenge some paradigmatic ideas of the present. And cyberfeminism turns to a different form of writing ― speculative fabulations ― to try and tip into more unexpected ways of imagining technosocial configurations.
And yet, we should not get too excited by placing too much hope on new forms or new media for imagination. The fascination with a promise of new media that will “unblock” our imagination has its fair share of critique. Commenting on a contraversial book by Barbook (2007), Ernst and Schröter (2021) claim that “the real question we have to ask is not which specific “new” media will appear in the future but why the future of society and future ways of life that were promised to us in the form of “new media”. Especially, given the fact that many of the promises of social change have never come true or taken shapes that people could not predict back then.
It is interesting to find such research instances where two usually separate fields of inquiry collide: one concerned with the question “how does media influence our imagination?” and another with the question “How do we make sense of media by forming imaginaries of them?”. Bringing them together, we can think in both temporal directions. Firstly, this can give us new perspectives on the history of network imaginaries (as a history of forms and their role in giving imaginaries their shape, making them structured and “handy”). Secondly, we can think about the role of new, experimental forms of talking about the networks, in order to find radically alternative, new perspectives on the imaginaries of the future of the networked society.
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Disagree with something from the article? Have a comment? Want to write a response on this essay for our blog?
Write me! anya.shchetvina *at* posteo *dot* net.
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References
Boomen, v. d. M. (2014). Transcoding the Digital: How Metaphors Matter in New Media. Institute for Networked Cultures, Amsterdam.
Ernst, C. (2023). On (Techno)-Imagination, Schemata and Media. Preliminary Remarks. Navigationen: Tech|Demo, 23(2), 17-28.
Ernst, C. & Schröter, J. (2021). Media futures: Theory and aesthetics. Springer Nature.
Flichy, P. (2007). The internet imaginaire. The MIT Press.
Markham, A. (2003). Metaphors reflecting and shaping the reality of the Internet: Tool, place, way of being. Paper presented at the conference of the International Association of Internet Researchers in Toronto, Canada, October 2003. Available from: http://markham.internetinquiry.org/writing/MarkhamTPW.pdf
Morozov, E. (2013). To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. Public Affairs.
Ricœur, P. (1975). The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language. Routledge.
Taylor, G. H. (2019). Foreword In: Adams, S., Smith J.C.A. (Eds.) Social Imaginaries Critical Interventions. Rowman & Littlefield International.
Turner, F. (2013). The Democratic Surround. Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. The University of Chicago Press.
Mailland, J., Driscoll, K. (2017). Minitel Welcome to the Internet. The MIT Press.
Jasanoff, S. & Kim, S. H. (2015). Future imperfect: Science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. In S. Jasanoff & S. H. Kim (Eds.), Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power (pp. 1-33). University of Chicago Press.
Wyatt, S. (2004). Danger! Metaphors at Work in Economics, Geophysiology, and the Internet. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 29(2), 242-261.
Winston, B. (2002). Media, technology and society: A history: From the telegraph to the Internet. Routledge.
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Notes and comments
* Reading the draft of the article, Nathalie Fridzema notes that imaginaries are performative and also impact the material forms that we choose. I would say, a very fair point!
** Again, while reading the draft, Egor Efremov comments: “I keep thinking of examples of how the lack of imaginaries (why this technology is needed) or some ‘threatening imaginary’ stalled the development of some technologies - and constantly wonder if the stoppage was purely technological/economic, and not related to imagination. For example, was the development of Pavel Schilling's electric telegraph in 1820-1830s stalled because of the Russian Imperial House's fear of the ‘free flow of ideas’, or was it just an underdeveloped design? When the German Siemens & Halske came to the Russian Empire in 1850s with a more technically successful and cheaper telegraph design, everything suddenly changed. And of course we have an example of anarchist ideas like blockchain mutating due to some mixture of failed metaphors and wild economic processes."
*** Nathalie notices that it can also help us see beyond conventional US-focused internet history.