The Internet and the Information Superhighway: Metaphors of the Internet, the Global Town Square, and the Science of the Informative Future
“Almost anything about the internet is going to have metaphors that help you understand it, because otherwise it’s formless,” Cohen says. They will all have political implications.
“Big data” is often referred to as a torrent, a flood, or an ocean — a natural resource that must be harnessed. A professor at the Swinburne University of Technology fears a metaphor obscures the fact that most of the data is created by users.
But ethereal, obfuscating metaphors persist. The cloud traces back to the way network engineers used unknown networks to represent their systems. 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 deliberately vague, so you do not know where your data is located. It is in stark contrast to remote server, which are huge, loud, and need a lot of energy.
Compare cyberspace to the other major metaphor of the ’90s: 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’s a big state-funded infrastructure project that will facilitate commerce, not an anarchic frontier. The New York Times compares the railroad to the frontier in a 1993 article. The “metaphor 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,” write professors Cornelius Puschmann and Jean Burgess.
She says Facebook is a metaphor. It uses the analogy of the freshman lookbook. Any connection is described using friendship as a metaphor. 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. Anyone can be heard, which is why the other is called a global town square.
This metaphor, too, has political implications, as the information scientist Peter Lyman points out. If the internet is considered a highway by the government, it should regulate what people do on it. The information superhighway is designed for moving and selling information and not for copying and distributing it, as it is now understood as intellectual property.
Cyberspace still has anarchic associations, but these days the term only comes up in conversations about securing it. Government officials are pretty much the only people using it unironically. The President declared that cyberspace was real in 2009, as he announced a new cybersecurity effort. The former Prime Minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, spoke at the Conference on Cyberspace in London and stated that there will be no dark spaces for dark acts.
Where Do These Metaphors Come From? An Example of a Computer-Based System for Described Information and User Interface Design (with an Emphasis on User Experience)
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society is studying interface design, and the author says that most of the things you do online are metaphors. Information is formless and the metaphors we use to describe it are powerful because they tell people how a service should be used. Software metaphors can be both verbal and visual. Email is a very entrenched example. We were locked into a system of folders as a result of the mail metaphor. An email can exist in multiple categories, and as she says, it would break the metaphor if it were not in one category.
When I wrote about this web surfing competition, it got me thinking about different metaphors for the internet. Surfing was an artifact from the time when people used terms like ‘information super highway’ and ‘Cyberspace’ unironically. Where did these metaphors come from? Have any persisted, and have new ones taken their place?