Cached: Decoding the Internet in Global Popular Culture

Introduction

>> 1 Introduction Humorist Dave Barry’s burlesque Dave Barry in Cyberspace provided mid1990s Americans with a how-to manual for participating in what was rapidly becoming the new and necessary—if intimidatingly foreign—technological experience: getting online. In it, he described the internet as global public and private network run by Jason, a hormonal thirteen-year-old. After signing up for a “user-friendly interface” with a company like America Online, you could do a variety of things, like “waste time in ways that you never before dreamed possible” and communicate with “millions of people all over the entire globe…many of whom are boring and stupid.” Should you accidentally type an incorrect character, Barry warned, “You will launch U.S. nuclear missiles against Norway.”1 Dave Barry’s comic vision of the internet worked because it played on the different yet overlapping ways the internet was understood in the United States in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The internet was conceptualized simultaneously (and often paradoxically ) as a state-sponsored war project, a toy for teenagers, an information superhighway, a virtual reality, a technology for sale and for selling, a major player in global capitalism, as well as a leading framework for comprehending both globalization and the nation’s future in it. Comprised of so many competing dreams and investments, the internet was, and continues to be, a major transforming component of life for much of the United States and, increasingly, the world. As internet use began to skyrocket between the 1980s and 2000s, news media, popular culture, and policymakers tried to make sense of the technology . In this period it was not obvious what the internet would be or what it would mean. A number of cultural sites and entities offered different visions of the technology. These representations were by no means univocal , but instead overlapped, contradicted, competed, and dovetailed with one another, sometimes simultaneously. Ultimately, these numerous imaginings 2 > 3 internet use gained popularity, two initially separate practices, “computing” and “the internet,” began to merge. This terminological melding signaled a conceptual collapse, as computing was increasingly imagined as networking and the computer apparatus was imagined primarily as a gateway to the internet. As the internet lost its body, in a sense, it became easier to imagine the internet as a deterritorialized space or experience rather than a product of hardware. In addition to the conceptual blurring between computing and networking , the cultural history of the internet has been characterized by terminological slippage of the words “internet” and “web.” These terms, which actually indicate different entities, blurred in 1990s news media and popular culture. The World Wide Web (“Web” or “WWW”), a site-linking hypertext system that operates on but is not equivalent to the internet, was developed in 1991 and has become virtually synonymous with the term “internet.”8 But the term “internet” first appeared in 1974 in reference to a technology that connected numerous networks. The root of the term, “Internet Protocol,” (IP) is a phrase used in combination with “Transmission Control Protocol” (TCP) to describe packet-switching, or the process through which computers transfer bits of information over networked wires.9 Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the technologically derived term “internet” became shorthand for all packet-switching or computer networking activities. This term coexisted with a variety of culturally derived terms like science fiction ’s “cyberspace,” and more academic terms for studying cultural formation online such as cyberia, digital-, techno-, cyborg-, and cyberpunk-culture.10 These terms reflect the variety of visions existing in disparate cultural locations that competed and mixed as they flowed through media representations and academic studies of the internet. For the purposes of this book I use terms as they were used in the period discussed. This is an attempt to curb presentism in favor of a historical specificity that reflects the particularities of thinking about the internet within each time period. That means, for instance, that what I refer to as “computer networking” in the first chapter, I call “the internet” in the remaining chapters . In addition, when shifts in terminology play important roles in conceptual shifts, I highlight those. For example, in 1990s news media reports and policy debates about the internet stopped using the term “computer-networks ” and started using terms such as “virtual reality,” “cyberspace,” “new frontier,” and “information superhighway.” Understanding these terminological fluctuations is vital to understanding how and why spatial metaphors dominated 1990s cultural and political visions of the internet...