THEMA IM FOKUS

How metaphors shape the digital society

Cloud, Big Data, Piracy, Virus are common terms in the debates about digital technologies. At the same time they are methaphors that originate from other fields than technology. What normative or political baggage do they therefore carry? How does this vocabulary shape the emerging digital society? In the series of articles on the Politics of Metaphors different authors analyse the assumptions and meanings of metaphors in the digital era.

Articles in this dossier

The platform as pizza: towards a taxonomy of platforms

The ‘platform’ metaphor is at once inevitable and misleading. What’s more, we no longer regard it a metaphor. Following Tarleton Gillespie’s proposal to complement the discourse with other images, José van Dijck picks up the challenge playfully and comes up with another term. What she suggests sounds a little odd in the first place. However, when we ask ourselves what…

5. October 2017

The Platform Metaphor, Revisited

The most successful internet businesses are based on the idea of offering a platform. Author Tarleton Gillespie discusses the hidden meaning of this popular and widely accepted metaphor and reveals how it serves businesses. Dossier: How metaphors shape the digital society Sometimes a metaphor settles into everyday use so comfortably, it can be picked back up to extend its meaning…

24. August 2017

Sharing – from ploughshares to file sharing and beyond

The metaphor of sharing is central to the workings of social media and indeed to computer-mediated communication in its broadest sense. Online sharing includes posting statuses, photos and videos; it includes tweeting and blogging; it also includes sending information (a file, someone’s contact details) through email or a messaging service such as WhatsApp. So central is sharing to our digital…

11. July 2017

Who benefits from the so-called New Media Revolution?

The new media revolution is a common metaphor that is often used to describe the contemporary communications ecosystem. This essay investigates how it influences the way individuals, groups and policy makers interpret their mediated reality. Researchers Noam Tirosh and Amit Schejter claim that while Google, Facebook and other conglomerates describe the contemporary media ecosystem as free and revolutionary in essence, they…

13. June 2017

AI – A Metaphor or the seed of personality of machines in a digitised society?

Is artificial intelligence a metaphor, or can machines be intelligent in the same way human beings are? This has been a contested question ever since the concept was developed. While the so-called weak AI thesis has treated it as a metaphor, the strong AI thesis does take intelligence literally. The answer to this question might point to the future role…

17. May 2017

Imagining the Digital Society – Metaphors from the Past and Present

The current rapid social and technological change is giving rise to enormous uncertainties – and a great need for explanations and sense-making. How do we understand the digital society? When we talk about the future that we cannot know and the present that we do not understand, we cannot but use the conceptual apparatus of the past – with normative,…

15. May 2017