AKMA is back riding on an old, cantankerous nag. Nope, not Dick Cheney. He’s concerned that the spatial metaphor just isn’t apt when applied to “cyberspace.” He is, as always, right. Yet, I still manage to find something to argue about. I argue because I love, as either Don Rickles or Nietzsche said.

I share many of AKMA’s feelings about the inadequacy of spatiality as a way of talking about and understanding the Net. But, I’m still stuck on the point I tried to make waaaay back when AKMA first initiated a blogthread on this topic: Like it or not, space is the lead metaphor we (= English speaking culture) have come up with. In some ways it is terribly inapt, and it’s important to flush out those ways. E.g., when we “enter” a Web site, we aren’t making the same type of commitment as when we “enter” most real world spaces. But, I don’t think we have a choice about using space as a metaphor. We don’t get to throw out a metaphor that’s as pervasive as space is to cyberspace just because it’s inapt. After all, all metaphors are inapt. We await a poet to give us a better way of seeing and speaking. Language speaks us, as either Charlie McCarthy or Martin Heidegger said.

So, I really like the way AKMA is poking at the metaphor to remind us of what it obscures, but I do not think that we humans can engage in the project of coming up with a new metaphor any more than we can dig ourselves out of a hole.

Categories: Uncategorized dw