An article by Danah Boyd about the shortcomings of analysing pieces of software as metaphors for more traditional things in acrophenia rang bells with me. Some of the features and processes of our online University are explained as metaphors for a ‘Rea…

nice article by danah boyd over at Salon in response to a NYTimes article about bloggers getting credentialed press passes to the DNC (note that this article will expire behind the NYTimes costwalls soon. i am with doc searls – let’s tear down the w…

Blogging has terrified mainstream media for a while now. Journalists want to know if blogs are going to degrade their profession, open up new possibilities or otherwise challenge their authority. This also means that whenever the press writes about blo…

Blogging has terrified mainstream media for a while now. Journalists want to know if blogs are going to degrade their profession, open up new possibilities or otherwise challenge their authority. This also means that whenever the press writes about blo…

Blogging has terrified mainstream media for a while now. Journalists want to know if blogs are going to degrade their profession, open up new possibilities or otherwise challenge their authority. This also means that whenever the press writes about blo…

This was going to be a comment on a post at Read/Write Web on analyzing Bloglines statistics, but it was getting way too long, and, in part, I thought it might make for a better post than a comment.
You can’t trust statistics
There are decent nu…

Danah Boyd says blogging is trapped in a metaphor: My frustration with academics, press and conference organizers exists because the primary way to handle these new technologies is to address them in metaphoric terms. This perspective comes from a dist…

Danah Boyd says blogging is trapped in a metaphor: My frustration with academics, press and conference organizers exists because the primary way to handle these new technologies is to address them in metaphoric terms. This perspective comes from a dist…

Danah Boyd says blogging is trapped in a metaphor: My frustration with academics, press and conference organizers exists because the primary way to handle these new technologies is to address them in metaphoric terms. This perspective comes from a dist…

To put the most positive spin on it, the breakdown of metaphor is a sign of new understanding. It will be interesting to see how the terminology changes over the next three years to reflect this – I doubt we’ll be talking about blogs in the same way in five years.

Still, the mix of metaphors has been as aspect of the net for a while – ten years ago people were “surfing” for “pages” via “the information superhighway.” The subjective sense of innovation in new media can be a bit like the tendency of each generation to believe it was the first to invent good sex.

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What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. — Nietzsche