Metaphors of the virtual: how ordinary people frame what the internet is

This article explores how experiences of the virtual are metaphorically articulated in people’s narratives of these experiences. It analyses a database of 171 responses by UK adults of all ages and backgrounds to establish how they used metaphor to frame their experiences online, at a time when the internet was increasingly becoming a platform for living everyday life. The article finds that respondents used a multiplicity of metaphoric frames simultaneously, some of them well established and conventionalised in discourse, and some newer. Although there is evidence of a new way of metaphorically framing the virtual as a way of experiencing the everyday, this had not yet replaced conventionalised metaphors in the data, but co-existed with them. The article argues that a slow shift in discourse patterns may be taking place alongside a shift in experience, whereby the role of technology in mediating the everyday is gradually becoming invisible.