∗Translated by Thomson, Graeme.Google Scholar

1. On computer counterculture see Woolley, Benjamin, Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992.Google Scholar

2. The study forms part of a national project, with 40% funding from MURST, co-ordinated by Bovone, Laura, on ‘La produzione culturale in Italia: soggetti, professioni, filiere’, in particular the section on ‘Discorsi sociali, soggetti medial i e costruzione del sapere tecnologico: il caso della diffusione della cultura informatica e telematica in Italia’, co-ordinated by Fausto Colombo.Google Scholar

3. The model outlined by Marvin, Carolyn is indispensable here: When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, New York, 1988.Google Scholar

4. The literature on this question is now vast: see Patrice Flichy's bibliography in Une histoire de la communication moderne. Espace public et vie privée, La Découverte, Paris, 1990 and in L'Innovation technique, La Découverte, Paris, 1996.Google Scholar

5. On this point see for example the essays included in Colombo, Fausto (ed.), I persuasori non occulti, Lupetti, Milan, 1989; and Giaccardi, Chiara, I luoghi del quotidiano. Pubblicità e costruzione della realtà sociale, Franco Angeli, Milan, 1995. From a sociological perspective, on the role of cultural intermediaries in the advertising profession, see Bovone, Laura, Creare comunicazione. I nuovi intermediari di cultura a Milano, Franco Angeli, Milan, 1994.Google Scholar

6. On the notion of ‘cultural object’ see Griswold, Wendy, Cultures and Society in a Changing World, Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, 1994. I use ‘archaeology’ (following Foucault and Raymond Williams, notably the latter's Keywords, Fontana, Glasgow, 1976) in the sense of the reconstruction of the social and ideological meanings of key terms; I have in mind in particular Leo Marx's reflections on the term ‘technology’ and, in relation to digital technologies, a series of essays analysing the historicization of concepts such as interactivity. See Marx, Leo, ‘Technology: the emergence of a hazardous concept’, Social Research, 64, 3, 1997, pp. 965–89. For an example of the application of this approach to new technologies see Huhtamo, E., ‘From cybernation to interaction: contribution to an archaeology of interactivity’, in Lunenfeld, Peter (ed.), The Digital Dialectic, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2000, pp. 97–110.Google Scholar

7. In this sense the standardized use of an initial capital letter in the word Internet functions as a marker of its singularity in relation to the multiplicity of technologies, contents and social practices configured by production and consumption.Google Scholar

8. For a picture of new communications technologies in Italy in this period see Pucci, E. (ed.), L'industria della comunicazione in Italia 1994–1995, Fondazione Rosselli, Istituto di Economia dei Media, La Rosa, Turin, 1996. On online newspapers see Pasquali, Francesca, ‘I giornali online’, Problemi dell'informazione, 23, 1, March 1998, pp. 109–23, and Scifo, Barbara, ‘Una ricerca sul giornale elettronico. Verso un nuovo statuto dell'informazione’, Aggiornamenti sociali, 49, 7–8, 1998, pp. 597–604; these two articles document the online presence of the major national and international publications in these years.Google Scholar

9. The exact figures are 12,866,000 visits in October 2000 (Source: Nielsen Net-Ratings). Though most research institutes agree with this figure, it should be borne in mind that numbers of access points does not equal the number of users since with free Internet access there may be more access points than users, because the single user has more than one access available to them. Indeed Nielsen themselves are quick to point out that out of 12 million people online only 5 million actually surf the Internet, while a European Information Technology Observatory (EITO) report estimates that the number of Internet users in Italy in 2001 stands at around 5.5 million. The more optimistic, by contrast, maintain that, as with copies of newspapers, each access point may imply more than one user.Google Scholar

10. Incisive on the metaphorical weave of discourse on the Internet are the essays by Rovatti, Zoletto and Schiaccitano in the special issue of Aut aut about the Internet (289–90, January–April 1999).Google Scholar

11. The debate on metaphor and how it works is extensive; for a useful synthesis see Eco, Umberto, Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggi o, Einaudi, Turin, 1984. The recourse to metaphor is extremely common during periods of technological innovation when it is used as a means of conceptualizing technology and prefiguring its future uses. On the epistemological importance attributed to metaphor and its related narrative processes by current discourse on science and technology see Biagioli, Mario (ed.), The Science Studies Reader, Routledge, London, 1999. It should also be considered how the processes of metaphorization, as well as creating a framework of intelligibility, also activate a series of preconceptions, expectations and imaginary formations implicit in the metaphor itself. On the semio-pragmatic and ideological value of metaphor see Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980.Google Scholar

12. Marvin, , When Old Technologies Were New.Google Scholar

13. See Pavel, Thomas G., Fictional Worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986.Google Scholar

14. These three tensions recur for example in several campaigns for Tiscali and IBM as well as in campaigns for service providers and in more institutional advertisements such as those for Telecom Italia.Google Scholar

15. On the difference between these two concepts, particularly in terms of culture and social circulation, see Sfez, Lucien, Critique de la communication, Seuil, Paris, 1988; Breton, Philippe and Proulx, Serge, L'Explosion de la communication. Naissance d'une nouvelle idéologie, La Découverte, Paris, 1991; Breton, Philippe, L'Utopie de la communication, La Découverte, Paris, 1992; Armand Mattelart, L'Invention de la communication, La Découverte, Paris, 1993.Google Scholar

16. Stefik, Mark, Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996. Stefik notes how Internet discourse makes use of four principal metaphors : the information superhighway, e-mail (though this cannot really be considered an Internet metaphor), the digital librory and the virtual shopping mall. The importance of metaphor in the comprehension and diffusion of the Internet is also highlighted by Gozzi, Raymond Jr., The Power of Metaphor in the Age of Electronic Media, Hampton Press, Cresskill, New Jersey, 1998, and Hine, Christine, Virtual Ethnography, Sage, London, 2000. Hine shows not only how metaphor works to model the Internet but also how it operates in the everyday practices of web users. On the ideological implications of this mode of construction see Formenti, Carlo, Incantati dalla rete. Immaginari, utopie e conflitti nell'epoca di Internet, Milan, Cortina, 2000.Google Scholar

17. Epistemological malleability and mythological functioning (in terms of the framework outlined by Roland Barthes in Mythologies, Seuil, Paris, 1957) are highlighted in Neveu, E., Une Societé de communications? Montchréstien, Paris, 1994.Google Scholar

18. It is evident that the highlighting of each of the tensions listed or of one or other of their poles is also a response to the positioning needs of the different companies. However, this is not my concern here, since what interests me primarily is the image of the Internet that these campaigns help to spread within the social body.Google Scholar

19. On heterotopia see Foucault, Michel, ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics, 16, 1, 1986, pp. 22–7. For an analysis of the concept see Hetherington, Kevin, The Badlands of Modernity. Heterotopia and Social Ordering, Routledge, London, 1997. Alterity has been indicated as the basic theme underlying the metaphorical uses of the term ‘net’. See for example Jacques Derrida's paper at the 1985 conference Les Immatériaux: ‘Network: “General interaction”. Connection, thus bond, obligation. Commonly expressed by the representation of “threads”: texture, text, skein, genealogy, tree. Without a recognized or visible central point? Another “semantic field”, though linked to the first through the non-manifestation of the central subject: clandestinity, hiddenness, partitioned, compartmentalized (cloisonné) resistance, the crypt, the secret, privacy, conspiracy, irredentist dissociation: you and I, plots. The postmodern seems to hold equally to both these definitions of the network. Its concept perhaps dissociates itself from the very idea of dissociation’, in ‘Gettare la rete’, monographic issue of Aut out, January–April 1999, p. 219.Google Scholar

20. This aspect of resistance is also highlighted in several areas of the discussion on the Internet. Whether it can be reconciled with the corporate identities of companies operating on the Internet is obviously a matter open to debate.Google Scholar

21. The Tiscali advertisement shown in Figure 6 employs the highway metaphor in a parodic On the Road style. It shows a smiling nun at the wheel of a Volkswagen Beetle decked in 1960s counterculture symbols. One of the levels of allusion here is to the American computer counterculture, which began in the 1960s to rise up against the corporate and military uses of computer technology (and against IBM in particular as the company most closely identified with these uses), proposing instead a personal, emancipatory use of IT. But the advertisement also involves a self-conscious play on advertising history by taking as its central icon the VW Beetle. In the 1960s the American campaigns for the Beetle had revolutionized car marketing (a sector which at the symbolic level had come to stand for consumer society as a whole) by abandoning the conventional opposition between institutional, technological progress and social tradition and basing the product's appeal instead on personalization, anti-conformism and youth culture. See on this Frank, Thomas, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997.Google Scholar

22. ‘[T]he difference with regard to the great nineteenth-century narratives of technological change … is above all … a difference of temporality. In nineteenth-century ideologies, technological processes and progress were projected into a future yet to be constructed; they belonged to the sphere of blueprints. By contrast, in interpretations of the “digital revolution” currently in circulation the great change is presented substantially as something which has already taken place; it is projected into a recent past. Although its consequences have not yet fully unfolded … there is still a widespread conviction that we are living through a great collective rite of passage, and that in some way the outcome has already been decided.’ Ortoleva, Peppino, ‘Presentazione. Archeologia dell'oggi’, in Featherstone, Mike and Burrows, Roger (eds), Tecnologia e cultura virtuale. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk, Franco Angeli, Milan, 1999, p. 7–8 (translation of Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, Sage, London, 1995).Google Scholar

23. The question formulated by Telecom, ‘What kind of future do you want?’, as well as Blu's payoff slogan ‘the future that wasn't there before’, both illustrate the pervasive use of the predictive mode through the activation of the audience at an optative level.Google Scholar

24. The resurgence of the body in terms of representation and the use of organic metaphors in the construction of a technological imaginary (see for example Blu's baby trademark which foregrounds the idea of fecundativ e and generative capacity) is a particularly interesting phenomenon, in contrast with the predominant simulacralization of the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, as many cultural and gender studies-based books on technology have shown, this return is also highly significant in terms of ideology. I am thinking in particular, irrespective of their differences, of the approaches of Haraway, Donna, Hayles, Katherine and Keller, Evelyn Fox.Google Scholar

25. As I have already said, however, the study is not yet finished. The next step will be to compare the imaginaries constructed or interpellated by advertising (a classic case of an institutional cultural intermediary) with the imaginaries of some of the informal mediators responsible for the spread of Internet literacy (this has been demonstrated by a series of empirical studies on the evolution of computer literacy in Italy from PCs to the Internet). In particular the aim will be to investigate the ways in which these imaginaries are localized in Italy and the Italian media system, since so far our analysis of the construction of the Internet imaginary has not been strongly rooted in the specific context of Italy and it has not made much reference to traditional media systems.Google Scholar