ABSTRACT
Part of my motive here is to think about cyberspace as, in Steve Jones’ (1999a: x) words, ‘a medium that intersects with everyday life in ways both strange and omnipresent’, and to attempt what’s seen by some writers as a difficult task: as James Costigan (1999: xviii) writes, ‘the Internet is often experienced but difficult to translate and express’. Later, he makes a point of central relevance to my argument here, when he writes that ‘[e]very user takes a slightly different approach to his or her use of the Internet, and each has
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because experience of cyberspace is enmeshed not only in the Web but also the webs of production and consumption and the webs of meaning and metaphor that we have already explored. Jones sums up the breadth of this agenda:
In regard to the Internet, it is not only important to understand audiences – people – and what they do with media, it is important to understand what audiences think they do, what creators and producers think audiences do and what they think audiences will do, what venture capitalists think about audiences and producers, what software and hardware makers think and do, and so on.
