The language of our emerging digital culture suggests adventure, daring, and unprecedented novelty, while we sit comfortably at our desks, alone, communing with our computer screens. Are we being taken in by our own metaphors?
David ThorburnDec 19, 2001
The World Wide Web is more than technology, more than modems, bandwidth, computers. It is a thing made of language and of history, a Web of Metaphor.
Of course, we view all new technologies through perspectives or metaphors that limit our understanding and obscure intrinsic qualities and possibilities. Nothing inherent in the internal combustion engine required that the first cars resemble horse-drawn carriages. That beginning was dictated by metaphor, by inherited notions of conveyance, by centuries of carts and wagons and palanquins. (My father, 92, remembers driving an early Ford whose elaborate leather dashboard was fitted with a pocket for the handle of a buggy whip.)
