There is a history of metaphors for the internet

The Road Ahead: Metaphors of the Internet, their Political Implications, and the Concerns with Geometrical Overtones

When I started looking into metaphors, I thought I’d mostly be chronicling antiquated terms. I was surprised to see that it was in the net neutrality debate. I was even more surprised when Donath pointed me toward all the other — newer — metaphors that might not initially seem metaphorical.

“Big data” is a term that means a flood, an ocean or 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.

metaphors continue to be obfuscating The Atlantic’s Rebecca Rosen traces “the cloud” 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 is vastly different from the remote server world, where they are large, loud and require a lot of energy.

The information superhighway was a major metaphor of cyberspace. 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 metaphor is that it is a big state- funded infrastructure project that will facilitate commerce, not anarchic frontier. Like the railroad, which this 1993 article from The New York Times compares it to, it will conquer and develop the frontier. The motto of the Internet was chosen purposely to demonstrate the utility and everyday nature of the Internet over the utopian visions of cyberspace that had informed it’s early development.

Facebook itself is a metaphor, she says. The Freshman lookbook is used in the analogy. It uses friendship as a metaphor to describe any connection. It uses a newspaper to describe its events, which makes it sound like it will care about what you see. On the other hand, if you’re curious, it’s a global town square where anyone can be heard.

This metaphor, too, has political implications, as the information scientist Peter Lyman points out. The internet is a highway, so the government should regulate what happens on it. The highway is designed for moving private property to market, and it’s implied that the information superhighway is for intellectual property, not free copying and distributing data.

The term “cyberspace” still has associations, but now only comes up in conversations about securing it. Only the government officials use it unironically. “Cyberspace is real,” then-President Barack Obama declared in 2009, announcing a new cybersecurity effort. Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, said at the London Conference on Cyberspace that there would no longer be dark spaces for dark acts.

Metamatrix of Information: From Google to Yahoo, Twitter, and Other Social Media Metaptoms in the Age of Internet & Society

“Information is fairly formless, so almost everything we do online we do with some kind of metaphor,” says Judith Donath, who studies interface design at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. The metaphors used to describe information are powerful because they are what gives it form. Software metaphors can be either verbal or visual. Email is a particularly entrenched example. The mail metaphor made sense initially but locked us into a cumbersome system of folders. There’s no reason an email couldn’t exist in multiple categories, as in some sort of tagging system, other than that it would “break the metaphor,” she says, which is what Google eventually did with Gmail.

The more I read, the more it seemed that these old metaphors hadn’t died out at all, though their meanings had changed. No one says “information superhighway” anymore, but whenever anyone explains net neutrality, they do so in terms of fast lanes and tolls. Twitter is a “town square,” a metaphor that was once used for the internet as a whole. These old metaphors were joined by a few new ones, one of which is that “the cloud will soon feel as dated as “cyberspace.”