Rebecca D Reeve's Blog

Douglas Kellner, the Philosophy Chair of Education at UCLA, lectured at McGill this Thursday on the ‘Metaphors of Cyberspace’.

Kellner named four major influences in creating the internet: 1) Military 2) Big Business (IBM, Xerox, Apple) 3) University research 4) Hacker culture.

These groups have necessarily shaped the way we talk about the internet. For example, computing language is filled with militaristic terms such as “erase”, “abort”, “delete”, and “spam”. He observed that metaphors for new objects are pulled from familiar objects, such as the idea of Home, which result in relatable terms like “homepage”, “MySpace”, and “YouTube”, names that put the focus on the personal and immediate surroundings. The Work environment creates language like “desktop”, “mailboxes”, “trash”, “files” etc.

Given my research interests in BlackBerry, I was particularly intrigued by the Nature metaphor, which he argued was used to soften and blur the boundaries between nature and technology, thereby naturalizing it. Companies like Apple and Microsoft (MS fits in here because of the ’soft’, which is natural and sensuous) use the nature metaphor, as do products like BlackBerry and Mac, and terms like ‘virus’, ‘bugs’, ‘mouse’, ’surfing’, and fishing’.

Travel was another metaphor Kellner touched on, claiming the term ‘information superhighway’ was particularly problematic for Bill Gates because a highway implied a FREEway, and so, Microsoft made a move toward a different language that didn’t create an expectation of a free lunch.

And this is why metaphors matters…

Language enables what one can conceptualize. The metaphors you use limit and enable certain discourses. Kellner cited Stuart Hall who said “a metaphor is a serious thing, it informs one’s practice”, and Derrida who said “a metaphor is never innocent.” The tremendous influence metaphors can wield in public and private discussion is why it’s necessary to get out ahead of the trend and define your own terms.. There are plenty of people/companies/ideologues that have a vested interest in defining a dialogue in a certain manner and once a certain way of talking about an object has been established it’s very difficult to break the mould and view it from outside that frame of reference. The Democrats face this problem, in that they’ve been reduced (in many instances) to being a reactionary party, rather than a party that defines the issues they want to pursue.

One of the most interesting comments was a brief aside toward the end of the lecture when Kellner noted that modernity was characterized by the big businesses and infrastructure of the industrial age which have masculine overtones, and that postmodernity (if that’s what we’re still in) is characterized by smaller and more personal infrastructure of the information age which is more feminized (big frames vs. sleek laptops). Postmodernity as feminine.

After Kellner’s lecture I checked back in on a blog I keep track of and in Sept the writer had referenced a lecturer at the Industrial Designers Society of America who said the future of computing needs will be facilitated by more intuitive and human interfaces.  The same lecturer was also encouraging designers to become more “sensually sensitive” and to reconcile the design of digital interfaces with basic human cognition and intuition. Intuition, sensual, sensitive, reconciliation… is it possible the future of cyberspace is female gendered?