Windows, strings, cloud, threads, trolls, files, superhighway, packets, assets, link, hub, mail, address, library, anchor, backbone, cookie, transfer, footprint, redundancy…
Frontier, homesteading, superhighway, consensual hallucination, library, shopping mall, village square, world brain…The list of metaphors for describing the Internet and related technologies is a long one. Which of these have become part of the everyday language and which now come as a surprise can be revealing of age, national and disciplinary cultures. (Wyatt, 2021: 406)
The digital arena is awash with metaphors and this has fascinated me for some time. It has informed my approach to some of my work and has often proved useful as I attempt to explain to others what I am doing. Characterising a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) as akin to a game of cops and robbers, or forgers passing fakes past art dealers has helped me try and visualise what’s happening during a particular machine learning process as well as explaining it to others. I am not unaware of the implications of these metaphors and how they could be regarded as negative or conflict laden. What happens conceptually if I describe this process as an adult and child trying to draw something and a curator (who only wants adult drawings) deciding without knowing the artist which drawings will be displayed?
I have been collecting these metaphors for some years, partly because they intrigued me and partly because they inform how some of my projects have developed. Titles like Digital Remains have been directly informed by my thinking around digital metaphors.
…metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.(Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 8)
Metaphors are ‘a way of thinking and a way of seeing.’ (Morgan, 1986: 12) They have a liberating capacity enabled both conceptually and linguistically. Metaphors can be positive in several ways:
- Seeing the world afresh
- Supporting learning and the attainment of new knowledge
- Experimentation and investigation
I appreciate that there have been critiques of a metaphorical perspective, particularly as a research method. The main area of criticism also applies to much of the social sciences in that metaphors are imprecise and interpretative. It is hard to measure their effectiveness as they are figurative and to a certain extent based on consensus. They can also be ‘pushed too far’ without recognition of their limitations. (Grant and Oswick, 1996:5)
It is useful to recognise the possibilities and difficulties of taking a metaphoric approach. It seems they have the capacity to conceal or reveal and this is particularly the case in relation to the digital. Notions of the ‘cloud’ have come to obfuscate the ownership, power dynamics, physical infrastructure and resource exploitation involved in connected computing. The use of the cloud metaphor implies an immaterial and benign infrastructure that is at best misleading.
I have already touched on the importance of language in my previous blog on anthropomorphising technology, and looking at the impact of digital metaphors, both positive and negative, reinforces this for me. It is something I am mindful of as my own work in the digital field develops.
…a hunk of metal in space is not a library, and a huge, privately owned technical system is not a fluffy cloud. (Wyatt, 2021)
References
GRANT, D. & OSWICK, C. 1996. Metaphor and Organizations, SAGE Publications. LAKOFF, G. & JOHNSON, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. MORGAN, G. 1986. Images of organization, Sage. WYATT, S. 2021. Metaphors in critical Internet and digital media studies. New Media & Society, 23, 406-416.