When I wrote about this\u00a0web surfing competition<\/a>, it got me thinking about different metaphors for the internet. Surfing seemed like an odd one, an artifact from a very particular time in the mid-1990s when people used terms like \u201cinformation superhighway\u201d and \u201ccyberspace\u201d unironically. Where did these metaphors come from, and where did they go? Have any persisted, and have new ones taken their place?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The more I read, the more it seemed that these old metaphors hadn\u2019t died out at all, though their meanings had changed. No one says \u201cinformation superhighway\u201d anymore, but whenever anyone explains net neutrality, they do so in terms of fast lanes and tolls. Twitter is a \u201ctown square,\u201d a metaphor that was once used for the internet as a whole. These old metaphors had been joined by a few new ones: I have a feeling that \u201cthe cloud\u201d will soon feel as dated as \u201ccyberspace.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cInformation is fairly formless, so almost everything we do online we do with some kind of metaphor,\u201d says Judith Donath, who studies interface design at Harvard\u2019s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Moreover, because information is formless, the metaphors we use to describe it are particularly powerful \u2014 they\u2019re what gives it form, telling people how a service ought to be used. Software metaphors can be both verbal and visual. Donath cites email as a particularly entrenched example. The mail metaphor made sense initially but locked us into a cumbersome system of folders. There\u2019s no reason an email couldn\u2019t exist in multiple categories, as in some sort of tagging system, other than that it would \u201cbreak the metaphor,\u201d she says, which is what Google eventually did with Gmail.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The 1990s saw a boom in sweeping metaphors for the entire internet, mostly because it was a time when people who were very excited about the internet were trying to explain it to people who didn\u2019t understand it at all. That\u2019s when you get your \u201cinternet superhighways,\u201d \u201cinfobahns,\u201d \u201cglobal villages,\u201d and \u201ccoffee houses with a thousand rooms.\u201d But these metaphors weren\u2019t simply clumsy attempts at communicating what the internet was \u2014 implicit in each of them was a vision of what the internet ought to be.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Take \u201ccyberspace,\u201d the founding spatial metaphor popularized by William Gibson in 1984\u2019s Neuromancer<\/em>. Going online wasn\u2019t just sitting down at your computer and transmitting signals through a network; it was jacking into another dimension, leaving your physical body behind and entering a utopian space of pure information, one that was typically visualized as buildings literally constructed from neon data. Cyberspace became the chosen metaphor of the libertarian and countercultural strains of the early internet. As the media began to drum up internet panic, it became a scary place, full of cybercriminals cybersexing, but it was still an alternate dimension of total freedom.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n These days, \u201ccyberspace\u201d still has these anarchic associations, but now the term only comes up in conversations about securing it. Government officials are pretty much the only people using it unironically. \u201cCyberspace is real,\u201d\u00a0then-President Barack Obama declared<\/a>\u00a0in 2009, announcing a new cybersecurity effort. \u201cThere will be no dark spaces for dark acts any more,\u201d said Carl Bildt, the former prime minister of Sweden, at the\u00a02011 London Conference on Cyberspace<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Compare cyberspace to the other major metaphor of the \u201990s: the information superhighway. Al Gore popularized the term as he pushed for the expansion of a national computer network, at the time used mostly for research. The highway was the perfect metaphor: it\u2019s a big state-funded infrastructure project that will facilitate commerce, not an anarchic frontier. Like the railroad, which this 1993\u00a0article from The New York Times<\/em><\/a> compares it to, it will conquer and develop the frontier. The \u201cmetaphor of the Internet as the information superhighway was chosen deliberately to demonstrate the utility and everyday nature of the Internet over the utopian vision of cyberspace that had informed its early development,\u201d write professors\u00a0Cornelius Puschmann and Jean Burgess<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This metaphor, too, has political implications, as the information scientist\u00a0Peter Lyman<\/a>\u00a0points out. If the internet is a highway, then that implies the government should regulate what people do on it. The highway is also designed for moving private property to market, implying that the information superhighway is for moving and selling information, now understood primarily as intellectual property \u2014 not for freely copying and distributing data.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Interestingly, the highway metaphor has also flipped. Where cyberspace is used to describe a place that governments must bring under control, the information highway is invoked by activists trying to keep it free.\u00a0Wu<\/a>, who coined the term \u201cnet neutrality,\u201d used an extended highway metaphor in 2006 to explain why people should care. Since then, fast lanes, slow lanes, and tolls have become the default language of the net neutrality debate, at least among those who support it. What started as a metaphor for regulation and markets ended up as a symbol of freedom.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When I started looking into metaphors, I thought I\u2019d mostly be chronicling antiquated terms. I was surprised to find it still alive in the net neutrality debate. I was even more surprised when Donath pointed me toward all the other \u2014 newer \u2014 metaphors that might not initially seem metaphorical.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Facebook itself is a metaphor, she says. It uses the analogy of the freshman lookbook. It uses friendship as a metaphor to describe any connection. It uses a newspaper to describe its feed of events, which creates a tacit expectation that, like a newspaper editorial board, it will curate what you see. Twitter, on the other hand, is a \u201cglobal town square\u201d where anyone can be heard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSo much of the internet has been branded,\u201d says professor Julie Cohen, \u201cwhat\u2019s interesting now is what different brands end up with as metaphors.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The internet is everywhere now, so it\u2019s harder to use totalizing metaphors that describe it as a separate space. The division between physical space and the internet posited by \u201ccyberspace\u201d \u2014\u00a0digital dualism<\/a>, as Nathan Jurgenson calls it \u2014 was always dubious, but it\u2019s especially hard to maintain when you use Google Maps, Yelp, Uber, and other apps to navigate and interact with the world. People stumbling into things while looking at their phones is both a measure of them being \u201celsewhere\u201d and a measure of how present the internet is in the physical world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But ethereal, obfuscating metaphors persist. The\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s Rebecca Rosen<\/a>\u00a0traces \u201cthe cloud\u201d back to the way early network engineers symbolized the unknown networks their systems hooked into. Largely thanks to Amazon, which launched its Elastic Compute Cloud service in 2006, the term is now used to describe any remote data storage and computing. The cloud is weightless and intentionally vague: your data is up there somewhere, in a better place, where you can forget about it. It\u2019s in sharp contrast to the\u00a0industrial reality<\/a>\u00a0of remote servers, which are gigantic,\u00a0loud<\/a>, and require tremendous amounts of energy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cBig data\u201d is often referred to as a torrent, a flood, or an ocean \u2014 a natural resource that must be harnessed. Rowan Wilken, a professor at the Swinburne University of Technology, worries that the metaphor obscures the fact that this data is often created by users.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAlmost anything about the internet is going to have metaphors that help you understand it, because otherwise it\u2019s formless,\u201d Cohen says. \u201cAnd they\u2019ll all have political implications.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nFrom the web to virtual villages<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
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Cyberspace and a series of tubes<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
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Clouds and town squares<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
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