Materialising the Virtual: a Critical History of Contemporary Popular Conceptions of the Internet

流行的英美对互联网的概念以其一致性而闻名：它被独特地构想为一个抽象的、非物质的、虚拟的空间。互联网的语言充满了这种概念的语言拟像，它认为互联网与现实本身截然不同：在线和“IRL”（在现实生活中）之间的广泛区别就是这种观点的症状，将互联网的虚幻与日常生活经验的真实明显分开。正如社会学家Nathan Jurgenson所描述的那样，互联网被认为是与物质现实不同的“其他地方”，他称之为“数字二元论”（2012）。这种区别进一步来自于一种价值判断，由此将相应的“真实”世界与非物质的网络世界区分开来。这一观点见证了一系列关于“数字二元论”的流行文学的发展，其中最引人注目的可能是雪莉·特克尔（Sherry Turkle）的《Alone Together》（2011），它建议人们远离虚拟的互联网，回归物质现实。这项拟议的研究旨在将互联网的概念化作为历史调查的主题，该调查将追踪技术概念的发展和增长，作为一个抽象的虚拟空间，目的是批评它。为了做到这一点，一个与互联网的物质概念的形成有关的发展中的工作体将被提取出来，并被动员起来形成一个反叙事，提供建立一个替代框架的手段，用于概念化互联网，与主流模型并置。

The popular Anglo-American conceptualisation of the internet is notable for its uniformity: it is singularly conceived of as an abstracted, immaterial, and virtual space. The language of the internet is saturated with the linguistic simulacra of this notion, which considers the internet as distinctly separate from reality itself: the widespread distinction between online and 'IRL' (In Real Life) is symptomatic of this, distinctly separating the supposed unreal of the internet from the real of everyday lived experience. As sociologist Nathan Jurgenson has described it, the internet is conceived of as an 'elsewhere' distinct from material reality, a notion he has termed 'digital dualism' (2012). This distinction further comes with a value judgement, whereby the consequential 'real' world is distinguished from an immaterial online. This view has seen the development of a body of popular literature on 'digital dualism,' perhaps most notably Sherry Turkle's 'Alone Together' (2011), which has suggested a turn away from the virtual internet and a return to material reality.This proposed research intends to address this conceptualisation of the internet as the subject of a historical enquiry which will trace the development and growth of the idea of the technology as an abstracted, virtual space with the intent of critiquing it. In order to do so, a developing body of work concerned with the formulation of a material conception the internet will be drawn from and mobilised to form a counter-narrative, providing the means of establishing an alternative framework for conceptualising the internet against which the dominant model might be juxtaposed.