Abstract. Metaphors are used to describe the Internet, comparing it to a ‘library’, a ‘highway’, a ‘web’, stating that it brings us ‘closer ’ and applying various other notions of distance, shape, size, movement, orientation and navigation to it. I describe the metaphoric process and its spatiotemporal aspects, and argue that, in order to explain its dynamics, a framework based on processes with variable identities is preferable to one of static entities with fixed attributes. 1