'Surf's up!': Personal Information Accessories and Metaphors of the Beach,

Pleasure and the Individual.

Elaine Lally, School of Cultural Histories and Futures, University of Western Sydney

e.lally@uws.edu.au

Metaphors relating information technology to the beach have been in use for several years: the clearest example being the expression 'surfing' the net. Computer hardware and software companies have frequently taken up this metaphor in their marketing efforts: Apple, for example, has used the slogan 'Surfer's Paradise' in their iMac advertising. This paper will trace how these representations are related to broader trends in the symbolic associations of information technology. Technological commodities have long been represented in ways which emphasise expressions of individuality, but during the 1990s substantial efforts were made to represent them in ways which democratised or domesticated them. Personal computers, in particular, were represented as a kind of 'information appliance' for the home, which could be linked to the Internet as a kind of 'information utility' (a metaphor which is itself a domestication of earlier ideas of the information superhighway). With this understanding of the technology now well established, the emphasis has again returned to the potential of these objects to resonate with individualised and bodily pleasures. A proliferation of what might be thought of as 'information accessories' is appearing, with an aestheticised appeal to erotic and sensory modes of experience rather than the rationality and utlitiarian appeal accompanying other technological modes.