Internet metaphors provide users and researchers of the Internet a structure for understanding and communicating its various functions, uses, and experiences. An advantage of employing metaphors is that they permit individuals to visualize an abstract concept or phenomenon with which they have limited experience by comparing it with a concrete, well-understood concept such as physical movement through space. Metaphors to describe the Internet have been utilized since its creation and developed out of the need for the Internet to be understood by everyone when the goals and parameters of the Internet were still unclear. Metaphors helped to overcome the problems of the invisibility and intangibility of the Internet's infrastructure and to fill linguistic gaps where no literal expressions existed.
"Highways, webs, clouds, matrices, frontiers, railroads, tidal waves, libraries, shopping malls, and village squares are all examples of metaphors that have been used in discussions of the Internet." Over time these metaphors have become embedded in cultural communications, subconsciously shaping the cognitive frameworks and perceptions of users who guide the Internet's future development. Popular metaphors may also reflect the intentions of Internet designers or the views of government officials. Internet researchers tend to agree that popular metaphors should be re-examined often to determine if they accurately reflect the realities of the Internet, but many disagree on which metaphors are worth keeping and which ones should be left behind.
Overview Internet metaphors guide future action and perception of the Internet's capabilities on an individual and societal level. Internet metaphors are contestable and sometimes may present political, educational, and cognitive issues.Johnston, R. (2009). Salvation or destruction: Metaphors of the Internet. First Monday, 14(4). Retrieved June 20, 2014. Tensions between producer and user, commercial and non-commercial interests, and uncertainty regarding privacy all influence the shape these metaphors take.
Common Internet metaphors such as the information superhighway are often criticized for failing to adequately reflect the reality of the Internet as they emphasize the speed of information transmission over the communal and relationship building aspects of the Internet.Markham, A. N. (2003, October). Metaphors reflecting and shaping the reality of the internet: Tool, place, way of being. In Association of Internet Researchers conference, Montreal, Canada. Internet researchers from a variety of disciplines are engaged in the analysis of metaphors across many domains in order to reveal their impact on user perception and determine which metaphors are best suited for conceptualizing the Internet. Results of this research have become the focus of a popular debate on which metaphors should be applied in political, educational, and commercial settings as well as which aspects of the Internet remain unaccounted for with current metaphors, limiting the scope of users understanding.
Metaphors of the Internet often reveal the intentions of designers and industry spokespeople. "For instance, those who use metaphors of consumption and shopping malls will devote resources to developing secure exchange mechanisms. Broadcasting metaphors carry with them assumptions about the nature of interactions between audiences and content providers that are more passive than those suggested by interactive game metaphors and applications. Computer security experts deploy metaphors that invoke fear, anxiety, and apocalyptic threat" (Wyatt, 2004, p. 244).Wyatt, S. (2004). Danger! Metaphors at work in economics, geophysiology, and the Internet. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 29(2), 242-261. The extent to which the Internet is understood across individuals and groups determines their ability to navigate and build Web sites and social networks, attend online school, send e-mail, and a variety of other functions. Internet metaphors provide a comprehensive picture of the Internet as a whole as well as describe and explain the various tools, purposes, and protocols that regulate the use of these communication technologies.Rudestam, K. E., & Schoenholtz-Read, J. (2010). Handbook of online learning: innovations in higher education and corporate training (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.
Without the use of metaphors the concept of the Internet is abstract and its infrastructure difficult to comprehend.Dodge, M. (2008). Understanding Cyberspace Cartographies: A Critical Analysis of Internet Infrastructure Mapping. (Doctoral Dissertation). Retrieved from http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/thesis/chap_4.pdf When it was introduced, the Internet created a linguistic gap as no literal expressions existed to define its functions and properties. Internet metaphors arose out of this predicament so that it could be adequately described and explained to the public. Essentially all language now used to communicate about the Internet is of a metaphorical nature, although users are often unaware of this reality because it is embedded in a cultural context that is widely accepted. There are several types of metaphors that serve various purposes and can range from describing the nature of online relationships, modeling the Internet visually, to the specific functions of the Internet as a tool. Each metaphor has implications for the experience and understanding of the Internet by its users and tends to emphasize some aspects of the Internet over others. Some metaphors emphasize space (Matlock, Castro, Fleming, Gann, & Maglio, 2014).
Popular culture Common recurring themes regarding the Internet appear in popular media and reflect pervasive cultural attitudes and perceptions. Although other models and constructed metaphors of the Internet found in scholarly research and theoretical frameworks may be more accurate sources on the effects of the Internet, mass media messages in popular culture are more likely to influence how people think about and interact with the Internet.Baym, N. K. (2010). Personal connections in the digital age. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
The very first metaphor to describe the Internet was the World Wide Web, proposed in 1989. However, uncertainty surrounding the structure and properties of the Internet was apparent in the newspapers of the 1990s that presented a vast array of contradicting visual models to explain the Internet. Spatial constructs were utilized to make the Internet appear as a tangible entity placed within a familiar geographical context. A popular metaphor adopted around the same time was cyberspace, coined by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer to describe the world of computers and the society that gathers around them.
Howard Rheingold, an Internet enthusiast of the 1990s, propagated the metaphor of virtual communities and offered a vivid description of the Internet as "...a place for conversation or publication, like a giant coffee-house with a thousand rooms; it is also a world-wide digital version of the Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park, an unedited collection of letters to the editor, a floating flea market, a huge vanity publisher, and a collection of every odd-special interest group in the world" (Rheingold 1993, p. 130).
In 1991, Al Gore's choice to use the information superhighway as a metaphor shifted perceptions of the Internet as a communal enterprise to an economic model that emphasized the speed of information transmission. While this metaphor can still be found in popular culture, it has generally been dropped in favor of other metaphors due to its limited interpretation of other aspects of the Internet such as social networks. The most common types of metaphors in usage today relate to either social or functional aspects of the Internet or representations of its infrastructure through visual metaphors and models.
Social metaphors
Internet metaphors frequently arise from social exchanges and processes that occur online and incorporate common terms that describe offline social activities and realities. These metaphors often point to the fundamental elements that make up social interactions, even though online interactions differ in significant ways from face-to-face communication. Therefore, social metaphors tend to communicate more about the values of society rather than the technology of the Internet itself.
Metaphors such as the electronic neighborhood and virtual community point to ways in which individuals connect to others and build relationships by joining a social network. Global village is another metaphor that evokes the imagery of closeness and interconnectedness that might be found in a small village, but is applied to the worldwide community of Internet users. However, the global village metaphor has been criticized for suggesting that the entire world is connected by the Internet as the continued existence of social divides prevent many individuals from accessing the Internet.
The electronic frontier metaphor conceptualizes the Internet as a vast unexplored territory, a source of new resources, and a place to forge new social and business connections. Similar to the American ideology of the Western Frontier, the electronic frontier invokes the image of a better future to come through new opportunities afforded by the Internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit digital rights group that adopted the use of this metaphor to denote their dedication to the protection of personal freedoms and fair use within the digital landscape. Social metaphors and their pervasive influence indicate the increasing importance placed on social interaction on the Internet.
Functional metaphors Functional metaphors of the Internet shape our understanding of the medium itself and give us clues as to how we should actually use the Internet and interpret its infrastructure for design and policy making. These exist at the level of the Internet as a whole, at the level of a website, and the level of individual pages. The majority of these types of metaphors are based on the concept of various spaces and physical places; therefore, most are considered spatial metaphors. However, this aspect should not be considered the only defining feature of a functional metaphor as social metaphors are often spatial in nature.
Cyberspace is the most widely used spatial metaphor of the Internet and the implications of its use can be seen in the Oxford English Dictionary definition, which denotes cyberspace as a space within whose boundaries digital communications take place.Bittarello, M. B. (2010). Spatial Metaphors describing the Internet and religious Websites: sacred Space and sacred Place. Observatorio (OBS*), 3(4). The implications of this spatial metaphor in discourse on law can be seen in instances where the application of traditional laws governing real property are applied to Internet spaces.Lemley, M. A. (2003). Place and cyberspace. California Law Review, 521–542. However, arguments against this type of ruling have claimed that the Internet is a borderless space, which should not be subject to the laws applied to places. Others have argued that the Internet is in fact a real space not sealed from the real world and can be zoned, trespassed upon, or divided up into holdings like real property.Graham, M. (2013). "Geography/Internet: Ethereal Alternate Dimensions of Cyberspace or Grounded Augmented Realities?" The Geographical Journal, 179, 177-182.Blavin, J. H., & Cohen, L. G. (2002). Gore, Gibson, and Goldsmith: "The Evolution of Internet Metaphors in Law and Commentary" Harv. JL & Tech., 16, 265.