Metaphors reflecting and shaping the reality of the Internet: tool, place, way of being

As our metaphorical conceptualizations of the term “Internet” become more concrete, walls of meaning are constructed around us, reifying a “box” that we will be asking ourselves to think outside of in the future. As scholars working along the cutting edges of Information and Communication Technologies, we are partially responsible for shaping what the Internet (substitute your own preferred word here) means in real terms to real people. It behooves us at this juncture of Internet Studies to step back and consider the manner in which scholars, policy makers, and designers are, through their linguistic practices, building knowledge about new communication technologies. By doing so, we can begin to interrogate both the possibilities and limitations imposed on invention and practice within these meaning structures. This paper offers the first step of this reflection by explicating three distinctive and interrelated metaphor categories that shape our conceptualizations of Internet related technologies. These three metaphors; Internet as Tool, Internet as Place, and Internet as Way of Being, though not mutually exclusive, both invoke and foster divergent ways of making sense of computer-mediated communication (Markham, 1998). As a continuum of sensemaking, this framework appears not only in user discourse but also in pop culture depictions of new communication technologies, advertising, news media, scholarly works, and software and web designer discourse.