overview telecoms print still image film sound broadcast power railways highways impacts bodies metaphors statistics

metaphors This page is under construction. As a starting point for considering metaphors of the internet we recommend Mark Stefik's Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths & Metaphors (Cambridge, MIT Press 97) and Philip Agre's perceptive 1998 First Monday article on The Internet & Public Discourse.  Agre notes that most legal systems have had difficulty addressing the net because incompatible precedents based on a multiplicity of existing media (post, telephone, railroad, power network, newspaper, street corner, etc) seem to apply. The net "frustrates these traditional analogies because it is really a meta-medium: a set of layered services that make it easy to construct new media with almost any properties one likes. Despite this great flexibility, however, the dynamics of technical standards are emerging as a potentially conservative force." Agre accordingly sketches four models: the net as a communications medium, a computer system, discourse, and a set of standards. Ruth Palmquist's 1996 paper The search for an Internet metaphor: a comparison of literatures, the paper by Lee Ratzan on Making sense of the Web: a metaphorical approach and a 1998 paper on Identity Infrastructure & the Extended Individual are also of interest in assessing fashions in characterising the net.  For the moment we've highlighted particular metaphors below. Frontier - building on the great theme in US rhetoric (and generally ignoring the state's role in building the frontier) Highway or Railway - particularly favoured by politicians ('Infobahn', 'Information SuperHighway') Town Hall or Civic Square Library  - The Internet as a digital library, a notion fostered by projects to place all of ‘the great works’ online (eg Project Gutenberg) and in vogue from the late 80s to mid 90s Television - a metaphor prevalent in the same period, with concern about content (the US V-Chip debate spilling over as online censorship proposals; criticism that there are 5 million rather than 500 channels and none worth watching) and images of viewer passivity. Channel surfing gave us web surfing. Much of the rhetoric about push technology with its notion of channels and subscription to channels comes explicitly from tv marketing Printing Press - favoured by neo-jeffersonians, building on early adoption of email  Mall -  an image of particular power in the mid to late 90s, with expectations that the web would become a global marketplace. One writer extended the image by talking of the web as an Information Flea Market: there's a price for admission, you're free to browse, stalls are independently operated  and of varying quality. "And some of the people on the Internet are like some of the people at a flea market" Gateway - popular among web designers and educators who characterise the web as providing users with experiences rather than just content. Also favoured by VR proponents, online gambling, and virtual communities.    next page  (statistics)