Core Post 5 [Laurel]

I found Dr. McPherson’s article a great reminder of the ways in which our familiarity with televisual viewing practices structure our experience of the internet. It’s an interesting reminder that our understanding of and experiences of “old” media will always influence the ways that we approach “new” media, whether it be through continuities or differences. Of course, as the article stresses, we shouldn’t take for granted “the seemingly natural links being forged between television and the internet by”—notably— “companies” already involved in the current models of broadcast and television (McPherson 200). On the other hand, it seems natural that new media (in this case the internet) would be approached, not as an entirely new or unknown object, but with interpretive and navigation strategies brought from familiar media (such as television).
I am also intrigued by the idea of temporality as a structuring mode of experience on the web. Though the internet often is presented as an eternal database, archive, or warehouse of data, we also know that data accessed over the internet can be ephemeral. While on the one hand it is true that those photos sent over Snapchat never truly disappear, it’s also true that entire websites, like news archives, can disappear overnight. Websites can update to add or remove information, leaving no trace of the page as it existed before. (These are probably the two most common reasons that the Wayback Machine gets used). Nevertheless, even as data might disappear, the architecture that our explorations of the web build around the data remain. Dr. McPherson presciently, and still relevantly, reminds us that “as we roam the web, the computer remembers where we’ve been” (202), a process that can be both helpful and deeply chilling. It’s helpful that my browser auto-completes the address of that half-remembered website; it’s terrifying that my paths through the internet are maintained, and can be accessed by anyone with the right skills.
The temporal connections between the impression of “liveness” and the fact that “community on the web ... is as much about meeting times as meeting places” (203) is also extremely evocative. It is likely most visible through social platforms, from forums (to a lesser extent) to hyper-time-sensitive social media platforms like Twitter. If you aren’t “online” during those explosions of Twitter conversations, for example, it’s difficult to reconstruct, or even to join the conversation, after the moment of explosion has passed. The social aspect disappears, though the tweets might remain. (“Disappears” might be a strong word—of course conversation is still possible—however, consider the temporal difference between a Twitter conversation thread and the comments underneath a post on Livejournal.) Tumblr is similar; the constant feed of reblogged content means that the user’s experience of the site and of content is very much rooted in the particular moment of encounter. Popular Tumblr users will often “reblog” posts twice: once in their daytime, for those in the same and neighbouring time zones, and once at an approximately 12-hour time shift, for those in distant time zones. The fact that this is done at all indicates an understanding of the ways that, as Nash is quoted saying, “temporality connects our bodies to the computer” (203) and how the metaphors we use to structure our experiences on the internet are constructed temporally as much as they are spatially.