Not every metaphor works

Paul, on December 26th, 2004 at 12:53 pm Said:

Yes, I do believe that the Web has seasons.
In the retail market, the web reflects the real world retail market, there are huge sales, and huge marketing campaigns directed at holiday buyers. Online stores, like their real world counter parts even offer special holiday gift wrapping, and even drop shipping so you don’t have to receive the item, and then ship it yourself. You also see the “long lines” in the form of products being back ordered and the like.

But the web also suffers from political seasons, such as the election that we just saw, and it definitely reflects the real world. We see trends like everywhere else.

It seems to me, contrary to what I expected before the internet took off, that the internet doesn’t necessarily drive our lives, but our lives drive the internet. It is merely a tool to make our world smaller, a lot like airplanes when they became vastly commercialized and available to the general public.

Joi Ito, on December 26th, 2004 at 4:54 pm Said:

The web is where metaphors go to get stretched until the die. You know… Bad metaphors loosely joined or whatever? ;-P

Happy Holidays.

McD, on December 26th, 2004 at 5:59 pm Said:

I see the web’s time scale more in terms of epochs…
the technology and capability of the
web evolves so rapidly that the changes are more
interesting than the patterns. It’s a compressed
evolution that shows no signs of abating.

Seasonal variations are overlayed on
these technological epochs and the seasonal variations
just mirror human time and our incredibly slow
rates of evolution that tend to make a human life
appear to follow a well worn track…

Humans have a tendency to seek patterns and
in this frame of reference we often miss the
compelling, unique events upon which the epochs
start and end.

The seasonal patterns of the web are trivial in
most cases but important to bean counters and
not so much to the dreamers that seek innovative
advances.
These dreamers live and create in a
constant season of change and possibility.

Happy New Year. I resolve to get more bandwidth.

Luca De Biase, on December 27th, 2004 at 4:04 am Said:

What are seasons anyway? While here in Verona the rain is cutting the last leaves from the tree that lives in front of me, in Southafrica – where I was some time ago – it is the perfect time to go swimming at the sea. If the web has seasons, then it has all seasons at the same time…

Exactly like our planet, by the way…

Happy seasons to everybody! Thanks to David for these beautiful pages. And have a wonderful New Year…

Shunyata, on December 27th, 2004 at 6:29 am Said:

The only place where I have actually noticed the seasons having an online effect is in website headers. Google and blogs are snowed down and painted in red and green when christmas comes.

As McD, I’m not sure if it goes any deeper than that.

Jason Dowdell, on December 27th, 2004 at 10:04 am Said:

Actually Dave, I’ve been thinking of a similar concept as of late. If there’s enough interest I’ll implement the plan but here’s the thought. There are so many metaphors out there using sports as their theme. I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of sporting metaphors I’ve never heard of before. Take that and combine it with a wikipedia / community blog approach and I was compelled to register the domain “sportaphors.com”.

I’m planning on letting users contribute metaphors based on sports. Who knows, maybe it’ll die a quiet death like most of my plans but perhaps it won’t, we’ll see. Any thoughts?

~jason

Dr. Bonzo, on December 29th, 2004 at 12:56 pm Said:

It’s not the Web, but … I remember back in the good ole days of Usenet when the arrival of September always meant an influx of netiquette-impaired undergraduates into the newsgroups.

That kind of effect probably doesn’t happen any more, of course, since those newbie freshmen have been webbing and AIMing for years already.

However, I wonder if, as a side-effect of the commercial cycle Paul cites, there is any kind of January up-tick in newbies to forums or pained requests on support sites, representing all those folks who got brand new PCs (“Complete with 1000 hours of free *** internet service!”) in the holiday gift-giving frenzy.