Metaphors as constraint
June 30, 2004
danah boyd says blogging is trapped in a metaphor. That made me think the following. (97E)
I've started thinking of metaphors as limiting rather than freeing structures in the use, design and development of new technologies. (97F)
They can provide useful points of entry for understanding, but unless shrugged off after the initial entry they can be constraining because consciously and subconsciously we try to match our behaviors with the metaphor. (97G)
This causes constraints which are present in the "real world" from which the metaphor was taken to be represented in the "artifact world" even when there's no particular limit in place causing the constraint. (97H)
In some situations, etiquette for example, that's a good thing, but in other cases it's not: for example having "stuff" (including people) in multiple locations breaks many metaphors but there's nothing preventing it and it is certainly advantageous. (97I)
Comments
One useful tip I've picked up concerns the direction of metaphor, taking you from the old to the new, rather than reducing the emergent to what you already know. Ie, it's more productive to say the old is like the new, because it recasts the familiar in a new light, rather thanthe new is like the old, which shuts down your thinking inside the box you already inhabit, and so you don't learn anything. (97N)
This is how the analogy of being can be generative, and how binding, which redefines the context of its constituent parts, can be autopoeisis. (97O)