ABSTRACT
This introduction sets out the context for the book; a study of what will be referred to as the postinternet art and online culture of the 2010s. It offers a definition of the neologism ‘postinternet’, its origins and theoretical context, and proposes that postinternet can be understood as a ‘structure of feeling’ attentive to the developments of the internet in the last two decades, a period in which I suggest it became easier to imagine the end of the world, than it is to imagine a world without the internet. In the process, the introduction compares the recent imaginary of the internet with those before, namely the ‘cyber-utopian’ imaginary of the 1990s, when the internet was felt to hold a nascent revolutionary and emancipatory potential. In contrast to this cyber-utopianism, it claims that postinternet art and online culture reflects and encourages an apprehension of the internet as an apparatus of power and Control.
