We Delude Ourselves with Metaphors About the Internet

We are beholden to countless Internet fantasies: It's quicker than the speed fo ligth; it appears and dissolves at whim; it's guarded by big strapping men friendly to our own interests and hostile to the interests of others; it's magical, evanescent, as portable as our own bodies and imaginations; it looks like a swirling hypercoller tie-dyed video game. These are, of course, also common fantasies about capitalism. But the ultimate fantasy of being online, echoed in much writing about the Internet, is existential: that it's a place where you are never alone. And yet, by definition, the experience of the Internet is an isolated one. The search demands solitude while promising to eradicate it.

Notes:

An excellent essay on the numerous metaphors we use to describe the Internet, how commercials make it seem like a fun, happy place, full of friends, when in reality it isolates us. Movies portray it as an exciting, dynamic place, while in reality we spend hours sitting still, in non-ergonomically sound positions... the model of solitude and boredom.

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Concepts:
History of the Internet (0.915043): dbpedia
Internet (0.644805): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Das Model (0.640171): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Fantasy (0.625214): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Writing (0.611512): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Debut albums (0.603261): dbpedia
World Wide Web (0.586845): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Freedom of information (0.582277): dbpedia

 What Does the Internet Look Like?
Periodicals>Journal Article:  Smallwood, Christine (2010), What Does the Internet Look Like?, The Baffler Literary Magazine, Vol 2, No. 01, Chicago, IL, Retrieved on -0001-11-30