‘You have to come into the world’: Transition, Emotion and Being in Narratives of Life with the Internet

This paper explores the relation between internet technologies and social change with reference to the narratives of ordinary internet-users living in Melbourne, Australia. The argument developed here draws attention to the interviewee's imaginaries of being-in-the-world under internet-related change; imaginaries which are, at times, marked by a language of emotional and bodily transition. This framing of life with the internet suggests that its technologies are not merely the means by which people gain access to information, advice, services and social interaction; they appear to mobilise questions of being and at the same time offer themselves as the means for establishing ‘beingness’, to borrow a term from Valerie Walkerdine (2010) . This emphasis on being in accounts of internet-related change also suggests the exercise of narrative subjectification through internet technologies or, in other terms, the internet-related ‘technologisation’ of narrative practices.