As We May Speak

The title of this essay is a reference to Vannavar Bush's startlingly prescient 1945 essay in the Atlantic, "As We May Think". In that essay, Bush foresaw the personal computer, the importance of miniaturization, even the advent of Google Glass. He was essentially schooling the world on how we needed to change our way of thinking if we were to understand the computing (and physics) revolution that would occur after World War II.

I saw Bush's essay as a nice metaphor for my essay about metaphors. In this essay I'm interested in the metaphors we use to describe and explain technology, to ourselves and to others. I refer to conceptual blend theory to extend the common understanding of how metaphor works, and then try to a apply this as a lesson for communicating better with non-technophiles, politicians even, about the future of technology. I begin with a reference to Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens who, in 2006, infamously described the Internet as a “series of tubes.” He was speaking in opposition to the concept of network neutrality. I discuss the "internet-as-tubes" metaphor, and then refer to conceptual blend theory as a way perhaps to move the conversation beyond tubes.

Here is a small taste of the essay:

Blends can be seen as a conceptual space in which understanding does or does not occur. In describing the Internet as a series of tubes, Stevens created a blend that correctly highlighted the similarities of the tubes/pipes input domain, namely, the properties of length, diameter, joints, etc. He created appropriate structure for the blend by drawing upon a universal “conduit” frame in which information travels from one point to another. But he also applied inappropriate properties from the pipes input: for instance, the idea that pipes can be filled to bursting or clogging, or that they present a single path from A to B. His blend was overdetermined by the “pipes” input to the detriment of his overall understanding. (A similar phenomenon is evident in Stevens’s rhetorical question, “Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet?” “Personal Internet” may be a beautiful oxymoron, but it is also the result of a blend that is overdetermined by the “personal computer” input, itself an interesting blend). If we mocked Stevens’s comments, it is mainly because we have access to other inputs—many of them also blended constructs such as “World Wide Web,” “store-and-forward packet switching,” or “routers”—that help us better conceptualize how Internet traffic is managed.

More information about the essay is available here. You can read the official PDF of the full essay using the ACM authorizer service below.

Header image is from the original publication: Washington, D.C. Miss Helen Ringwald works with the pneumatic tubes through which messages are sent to branches in other parts of the city for delivery. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.