An earlier metaphor of the Internet was the information superhighway.
Internet metaphors provide users and researchers of the Internet a structure for understanding and communicating its various functions, uses, and experiences. An advantage of employing metaphors is that they permit individuals to visualize an abstract concept or phenomenon with which they have limited experience by comparing it with a concrete, well-understood concept such as physical movement through space. Metaphors to describe the Internet have been utilized since its creation and developed out of the need for the Internet to be understood by everyone when the goals and parameters of the Internet were still unclear. Metaphors helped to overcome the problems of the invisibility and intangibility of the Internet's infrastructure and to fill linguistic gaps where no literal expressions existed.
"Highways, webs, clouds, matrices, frontiers, railroads, tidal waves, libraries, shopping malls, and village squares are all examples of metaphors that have been used in discussions of the Internet."[1] Over time these metaphors have become embedded in cultural communications, subconsciously shaping the cognitive frameworks and perceptions of users who guide the Internet's future development.[2] Popular metaphors may also reflect the intentions of Internet designers or the views of government officials. Internet researchers tend to agree that popular metaphors should be re-examined often to determine if they accurately reflect the realities of the Internet, but many disagree on which metaphors are worth keeping and which ones should be left behind.
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Internetmetaphors provide users and researchers of the Internet a structure for understanding and communicating its various functions, uses, and experiences...
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(R-Alaska) to describe the Internet in the context of opposing network neutrality. On June 28, 2006, he used this metaphor to criticize a proposed amendment...
World portal Context collapse Globalization Information Revolution Internetmetaphors Wyndham Lewis's 'America and Cosmic Man (1948) and [James Joyce]'s...
in any language. Engineering portal Internet portal World portal Electronic publishing InternetmetaphorsInternet security Lists of websites Minitel Streaming...
similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are usually meant to create a likeness or an analogy.. Metaphors are often compared with other types of...
Internet or other communications networks. The Internet of things encompasses electronics, communication, and computer science engineering. "Internet...
environment. It is a type of virtual world popularized with the rise of the Internet. The term entered popular culture from science fiction and the arts but...
the Internet to describe events, people, activities, and interactions occurring offline; or otherwise not primarily through the medium of the Internet. It...
late 1970s." Of Gore's involvement in the then-developing Internet while in Congress, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have also noted: As far back...
having a single "inventor", the Internet was developed by many people over many years. The following people are Internet pioneers who have been recognized...
streaming services over the Internet. While streaming is most commonly associated with multimedia from a remote server over the Internet, it also includes offline...
and metaphors, and include a diverse base of applications. Some are supported by specialized software and others work on commonly accepted Internet protocols...
World War II. Others felt that this did not go far enough and used other metaphors such as Nebuchadnezzar and Tamerlane: Harold Denny of The New York Times...
during the 1960s. The Internet in the United States in turn provided the foundation for the worldwide Internet of today. Internet connections in the United...
discount Internet service provider. Netscape Communications wants you to forget all the highway metaphors you've ever heard about the Internet. Instead...
linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is thus a metaphor of paper pages bound together into a book. Each web page is identified...
IBM. Metaphor's David Liddle Speaks out on icons. InfoWorld Magazine. May 13, 1985. Retrieved March 7, 2012. Available for download at Internet Archive...
the internet, the term has taken on the meaning of getting lost in a topic or researching one topic and ending up in another. It has become a metaphor for...
and students. The water army metaphor refers to "the large number of people who are well organized to flood the Internet with purposeful comments and...
form that used to register a site with the Usenet mapping project, before Internet connectivity became commonplace for Usenet sites, included a field for...
(September 6, 2020). "Red pills and dog whistles: It is more than 'just the internet'". Aljazeera. Retrieved March 17, 2023. Madison, Caleb (December 13, 2021)...
achieve their goals". Criticism has been aimed at iOS depending on both internet connection (either WiFi or through iTunes) and a working SIM card upon...
as the Qing and Ming dynasties, Chinese netizens have used many other metaphors and references to enrich the discourse, such as comparing the Strait of...
Chinese internet users with "increasingly dynamic and sometimes surprising presence of an alternative political discourse: images, frames, metaphors and narratives...
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