Tobias Leingruber, Essay, February 2010

Metaphor Museum

To understand what “The Web” is, people always came up with metaphors. In the 90’s the internet was called “Cyberspace”, the “Information Super Highway”, or more recently “Web 2.0″ or “The Cloud”.
Olia Lialina writes 2005 in her essay “The Vernacular Web“:

“[..] The Internet was the future, it was bringing us into new dimensions, closer to other galaxies. [..] Space wallpapers made the Internet look special. This was obviously a space with a mission that other media could never accomplish.”

The metaphor “Cyberspace” and it’s space wall papers are long gone, expect some fossils and glitter remakes that survived through myspace.com. The internet is no longer science fiction, it became standard like water and electricity.

Another metaphor that‘s long gone is the “information superhighway”. Many “internet surfers” might remember it‘s fellow metaphors like the slogan “This website is under construction” or animated construction workers, hammering on web pages. A legit descendant of the “Under Construction” signs came with the “Web 2.0″ metaphor, a very technical one - The “Beta” Button. Both symbols say the same: “We have a vision, and what you see is a work in progress.”

Surfing is out, the waves are gone

A metaphor, still sitting in our heads since the early days of the world wide web is to “Surf the web”. It describes the user‘s activity while accessing the web. “Surfing” draws a picture of a cool person, doing something quite stylish and spectacular.

Surfing as a metaphor also might have made sense because just like a real surfer has to wait in the water to finally catch a good wave, the 90s internet user would have to be very patient while waiting for the slow modem to load the next webpage.

We‘re not in the 90s anymore, there‘s high speed internet, and the beautiful metaphor of surfing the web is slowly fading out. Not because the flashy surf board graphics aren‘t hip anymore, surfing just didn‘t fit the technological advanced “Web 2.0″ theme anymore.

The dominant way to find and access new content shifted from web rings to search engines like Google or Yahoo. The “Web Rings” we used to surf on, don‘t exist anymore, we “browse the web” through search engines. Websites seem to be perfectly sorted and indexed, everything is in order. We browse the internet like we browse records in a record store.
In 2002, Henry Jenkins, book writer and department director at M.I.T., wrote:

“Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution.”

On a blog about “Car Metaphors” Olia Lialina mentioned that this metaphor doesn‘t quite work, since for people living in a mountain region (like me), snowboarding really isn‘t more extreme than surfing.
Well, let me give it another shot!

Skateboarders and Hackers

More recently, with the rise of open source web browsers, something has evolved again. Open source web browsers like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome allow you to influence the way you access websites. Through additional software, called add-ons or extensions, based on the web browser client, you can completely rearrange the way you experience the internet.
Users no longer have to access information like the architect or designer of the web service wants them to. You want a black background on google.com? Change it to black. You don‘t want to see any online advertisements anymore? Install an ad blocking extension to your browser and they are gone. The owners of that website might not like it, but there‘s not much they can do about it. They could temporarily disable your code by making it technically more difficult to access their content, but since hackers love those kind of challenges, they‘ll always a solution.

I‘m a street skateboarder, and street skateboarders, just like street artists, see amazing opportunities in public space while others might see nothing but boring concrete. Skaters are on a mission, and they have style. The streets belong to them. When you skate the streets, you use public architecture in ways the creators didn‘t expect it to be used, and a lot of times don‘t want you to.
A boring hand rail suddenly becomes part of an art performance, when a skater jumps and grinds it. The message of advertisements in the streets can get turned around completely just by adding a sticker saying “You don‘t need it” or “Available online for free“.

Picture by Evan Roth

Since those actions don‘t match the “normal person‘s” behavior pattern, or are “against the rules”, sometimes skaters get into trouble with security officers. Getting banned from a space in public is not going to stop a skater from hitting that spot one more time with a badass kickflip though.

Some people enjoy watching this and start hanging out on the streets with the skaters, something they might not have done without those artists shredding public architecture. Random people even applaud for the rare and amazing stunts they might see.
In the end street skating, street art and internet art are art in public space, the internet being a virtual one.
If you enjoy grabbing a skateboard to hit the streets and turn public space upside down, you might as well grab some browser code and SKATE THE WEB.