The Evolution of the Web Browser: The Global Village Outgrown

Abstract

In TRON: Legacy, a grizzled Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) explains the virtual world he’s been trapped in for 20 years as “The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways?” Flynn undertakes a vital thought experiment: he is trying to understand the ways that the Internet not only stores information but how that information gets from point to point within its system. His struggles in coming up with a correct metaphor mirror various authors’ and film directors’ attempts to take what is the abstract nonspace of the digital world and relay it into a familiar and concrete object and/or process. A great number of the visual metaphors the films in this chapter use are built first on syntactical/poetic metaphors from novels. While Flynn calls the Internet “a grid,” John Brunner’s 1977 novel The Shockwave Rider gives it the imagery of a “data-net,” building off of Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock (1970). Both these images (grid/net) highlight the interconnected nature of the technology, but in relatively simple and flat ways; the descriptions don’t really capture the dynamic and multidimensional nature of cyberspace. A great number of other theorists point to early cyberpunk author William Gibson’s Neuromancer (as discussed in chapter 1) as one of the first to imagine the space with a more complex and vibrant structuring; N. Katherine Hayles also highlights Neal Stephenson’s description in Snow Crash (1993), in which he describes the Metaverse as a persistent and large urban space, intercut by a long highway.