THE

INTERNET AS A WAY OF SEEING

1. Id like to take a trip back to Annette Markhams paper, Metaphors of Internet
a. Written 2003, shes revisiting this in Estonia at AOIR this year
b. In the paper, she discusses four ways the internet tends to get conceptualized: as
tool, place, way of being
i. Examples of internet as tool: terms like conduit, container, engine, web
ii. Examples of internet as place: terms like highway, frontier, community
iii. Examples of internet as being: terms like netizen, online
shopper/dater/student, gamer, YouTuber, etc
c. When asked, people tend to hierarchize internet first as a tool, last as a way of
being. For Markham, this hierarchy should be reversed: before using a tool or
inhabiting a place, we first establish who we are (to a carpenter, everything
looks like a nail.)

2. Internet as a Way of Seeing
a. I want to suggest another metaphor: internet as a way of seeing
b. Positive examples of this metaphor: I get to see what is available/look for what
is want there/watch other people live/keep tabs on my kids/see how my friends
are doing,
c. Negative examples: The internet is full of voyeurs and narcissists.
3. Seeing predates Being
a. Even before it had images, the internet as a way of seeing predated the internet
way of being, if only because to understand ourselves as an I we needed to
first see and then separate ourselves from both objects (that technology;
those prompts) and what we took to be the presence of other humans (a
you I can situate against a me)
b. For infants with functional eyes, the time this happens is known as the mirror
stage.
c. The Turing test can be understood as a mirror test of sorts. The user must
establish whether they are talking to a living human through a terminal. They do
that by setting up a series of questions that allow them to parse the difference
between themselves, a machine and another human.
4. From Vision to Seeing to Visuality to Being
a. The movement from vision to seeing to visuality (Nicholas Mirzoeffs term for
socially sanctioned views on what seeing means) t might be mapped out as
follows:


STATE of QUALITY of QUESTIONS IN THE MIND
mind mind (conscious or not) LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTIONS
Vision Sensory No questions (pre-cognitive state) Pre-linguistic
Seeing - No questions (supra-cognitive
Affective Experiential state) Words like I am and I feel appear
Seeing-
Intuitive Evaluative Is this a threat (to my body)? Words like my gut appear
Seeing- What do I think this is? (beyond Words its like and its not like
Cognitive Comparative sense experience) appear
Does my thinking make (social) Words like obviously and
Visuality Rational sense? paradoxically appear
Being Abstract How do I explain this to others? Words like this is appear

5. Digital technologies changed how seeing is experienced in number of ways. Here are
two:
a. Auditory seeing
i. An experience where vision and hearing feels comingled
ii. It is worth noting that early American legal decisions about the internet
protect it from broadcast censorship rules specifically because it is
experienced as a place of speech, which is protected under the US First
Amendment.
iii. Tech that brings on auditory seeing: instant messaging technologies,
conversation threads, reaction buttons, embeddable still and video
images
b. Haptic seeing
i. An experience where vision and touch feel comingled
ii. Tech that has brought on haptic seeing: the clickable cursor, the
hyperlink, the touch screen interface, the smart phone
6. Its worth noting that this new experience of transferring sensory perception around
vision is how many disabled users have operated for years. Examples:
i. for those without limb control, haptic tech exists that uses eye blinking as
a hand to grasp, move on screen material
ii. for those without vision, adaptive technologies read material out loud to
the viewer, including screen and other navigation cues. And of course,
there is also haptic visuality in the form of Braille and other hand-based
technologies.
iii. For those who cannot hear, visual text and images have always
substituted for speech. And, of course, there is sign language, varies by
geography, written language conventions, and sometimes by racial
affliations.