metaphors

As a starting point for considering metaphors of the internet we recommend Mark Stefik's Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths & Metaphors (Cambridge: MIT Press 97), Philip Agre's perceptive 1998 First Monday article on The Internet & Public Discourse and papers in The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 (Cambridge: MIT Press 98) edited by Mikael Hard & Andrew Jamison. 

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. Adam King's CSI paper Mapping the Unmappable: Visual Representations of the Internet as Social Constructions is an intelligent examination of images. There's an examination of legal metaphors in The 'Principles In Context' Approach To Internet Policymaking o 2000 Columbia Science & Technology Law Review, an article by Andrew Shapiro.

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). During the 1890s US historian Frederick Jackson Turner claimed that the western frontier (particularly lots of free land once the pesky injuns were disposed of) was the guarantor of democracy. Each migration westward in search of economic opportunity (or away from constraints) was an encounter with a new landscape that allowed settlers to re-create local government and social relationships. Ideology supposedly had a marginal effect because taming the land was an eminently practical task.

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.

Rialto - Geoffrey Nunberg's 1995 comment is worth quoting at length

when we talk about the net we invoke all the stock American heroes of the wide open spaces. You're a net surfer, you're a cowboy on the electronic frontier. You're standing on the bridge of your own private Enterprise about to boldly go where no one has ever gone before. Or you're a cyber-Kerouac cruising the information highway with the top down and the virtual wind in your hair.

The thing of it is that when you get on the net it really doesn't feel much like any of these. Well, maybe it's a little like surfing, but not like on the covers of the Beach Boys albums. It's like the kind of surfing I do, standing chest deep in the ocean clutching my boogie board and trying to peer over the waves coming in until one of them crashes over me, rolls me under and around, then deposits me on the beach a couple of dozen yards away spitting out water, with no idea of where I am or how I got there.

The metaphors for the net are all wrong. There's nothing less like the ocean, the cosmos, or the highway. There are no no vistas here, no expanses stretching out endlessly ahead of you. And there is no frontier, no place to go out there that someone else hasn't been before. The net has nothing to do with the wide-open spaces of the New World, and everything to do with the cramped, crooked cities of the old.

It's urban, close, interior. Forget about cyberspace; this is cyberville, cyberstadt, cyber-ciudad. You want a good metaphor for the internet, go to Venice in February. You thread your way down foggy streets and over bridges till you lose all sense of compass direction, and then all of a sudden you break into some glorious piazza. The rusty gate on the alley over there might open into a lush garden, and behind that might be a palazzo with long enfilades of rooms and galleries, but you can't see anything from the street. It's a place you get to know as an accumulation of paths and hidden passages, the way a woodsman knows the forest. A Venetian friend told me once that she knows no more pathetic sight than watching one of her neighbors trying to give some help to a tourist who holds out a map and asks how to get to the San Rocco. We Venetians have no idea how to read a map of our city, she said, all we know is how to get from A to B without getting our feet wet.

That's perfect for the Internet: the virtual Rialto. Except that Venice is too permanent -- you come back after 50 years and everything's right where it was when you left. Whereas on the internet addresses and connections change daily.

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