Social Transformations of the Internet

The starting point for our project are new developments in the ongoing digital interpenetration of contemporary culture. The digitalization of social texts and mediated information implies a corresponding textualizing and socializing construction of digital media technology, particularly Internet. This intensifyying dual tendency has now brought Internet as a social and cultural phenomenon into what may be termed the Third Phase. Phase I was characterized by a complicated, command-based interface, alphanumeric information, and use confined to very small groups. Phase II dawned with the introduction of WWW in 1991 and that system’s take-off in 1993, which generated widespread interest in Internet among commercial actors. The interface was improved and made significantly more user-friendly through the introduction of graphic conventions. New forms of communication such as IRC and Internet radio became available, but WWW was still one of several standards of Internet functionality. Use of Internet spread from Academia to innovators in the fields of education and commerce and industry. Our aim is to identify, examine, and understand the basic features of what we perceive to be a third phase in Internet’s development. Textual and social interpenetration has attained new levels: simple, integrated interfaces vis–à–vis a universe of media, applications and modes of communication, threedimensionality and multilinearity, seamless links to storage media like CD-ROM, etc., an explosive penetration to new sectors of society and spheres of cultural praxis, including opinion-formation, artistic expression, household use and advertising. In this phase, it is quite apparent that Internet – hand in hand with new modes of textual presentation – has become a dominant set of communcation media used within and between all the central spheres of society. This fact politicizes and socializes Internet in ways which vary, depending on the sectors in question. Internet is perceived less as a technology and more as a phenomenon consisting of constantly metamorphosing patterns of communication and information. Although we, too, find ourselves speaking of “Internet and society”, we do not find the distinction or suggested relationship very fruitful. In the following we distinguish rather between ways of handling the dimensions of time and space, both socially and textually. Socially, this is expressed in the diversity Internet-mediated communication displays in different sectors (politics, art, the family, mass media), each of which has its own temporal logic and spatial metaphors. The textual expression is narrative, with genuinely new forms of hypertextuality, multilinearity and three-dimensionality. Our project seeks to compare the impact of Internet on treatments of time and space in social and textual contexts.