What's in a metaphor? Being flippant about Mark Stefik's polemical anthology, Internet Dreams, you could say that it is a book about how the Internet and the information superhighway are not the same thing. The Internet is the name of choice for the "network of networks" that grew out of post-cold war military experiments with computer communication. The information superhighway, on the other hand, is a catchy soundbite that apparently first came to Al Gore back in the '70s but which the VP kept to himself until the early '90s, when he needed to sell the American public on the rather dry idea of a national information infrastructure.
It is generally assumed that the Internet is something we have now and the information superhighway is something we're heading towards. The implied point of Stefik's book is that we're actually moving in the other direction. The information superhighway is not future reality, but more a useful present-day metaphor which allows us to think about what a global computer communications network might be like.
Soon, however, we won't need that idea. We'll be happy to talk about the Internet on its own terms. It will be part of our lives, there on the table next to the telephone. But at the moment, for all its much-noted naffness, the contagious spread of i-way imagery only proves its usefulness. We still need concrete, familiar images to help us get a handle on the immaterial realm that crackles into life over the wires. Metaphors for the Internet - perhaps we shouldn't resist calling them "netaphors" - are useful and also rather interesting. They are like maps which simultaneously construct the territory they delineate.
However, Internet Dreams reminds us that we need to be self-conscious about using netaphors, aware of their shortcomings and implications. In the case of the information superhighway, Stefik sketches out the image's roots in the Gore family tradition - Al's dad was big on roads of the concrete variety - and the role of the highway in America's image of itself as a great power. The superhighway metaphor turns out to carry a great deal of political freight, a legacy of the publicly-funded, centrally-planned US interstate highway system.
Internet Dreams tells similar stories about other current Net metaphors. Stefik identifies four main images - the Net as digital library, the electronic marketplace, the digital world and the email metaphor - and pulls together a variety of essays with some kind of connection to his headings. Some readers might find the looseness of his selection rather slack, but the book's grab-bag openness is one of its main strengths. The book has prescient historical speculations about computer networks, such as Vannevar Bush's anticipation of hypertext in "As We May Think" and J. C. R. Licklider's theories about the library of the future, as well as hands-on accounts from the front line such as Laura Fillimore's interesting tale of her attempts to make money via The Online Bookstore. And it has standard academic techno history in the form of Scott D. N. Cook's debunking of technological determinism, and on-the-lam pop sociology like Julian Dibbell's account of the LambdaMOO rape.
That said, Internet Dreams could do with some tightening. The title of one of the four sections, "The Email Metaphor: the I-Way as Communications Medium", rankles. Surely the Net is not like a communications medium; it is a communications medium. And, predictably, that section is a little thin. It could have usefully been replaced by something on more out-there metaphors: the Net as organism, or as global mind, perhaps? Alternatively, the section on digital worlds could have been expanded to cover frontier imagery, the idea of the Net as territory to be conquered, or the numerous visions of Net neighbourhoods and digital town squares. It is interesting that Stefik's images all come together round the idea of space. The primary metaphorical act as far the Net is concerned seems to be agreeing to agree that there is some kind of "there" there.
Internet Dreams is most irritating in its turn away from politics into mystical psychobabble. Exposing the shortcomings of popular Net metaphors - picking apart the implications of the digital frontier image, for example - is a useful political act, something Stefik does rather well in his brief treatment of the information superhighway metaphor. However, for the most part, political analysis takes a back seat to hazy Jungian babble about "eternal verities". Depending on how many hits you've taken from the bong, you may find this kind of thing "heavy shit" or just plain heavy going.
Stefik's drift into Jung may be a kind of gentler version of the digital millenarianism espoused by the likes of Terence McKennna, one more appropriate to Stefik's background in corporate-funded research at Xerox PARC. However, his contention that the Net is the fulfilment of "ancient long-held dreams" and "deep rooted archetypes" often feels more like a sign of old school, '60s-style idealism. Stefik's emphasis on the mythological power of his chosen metaphors seems to be an attempt to guide us away from the unpleasant possibility that the Net might wind up being like television. If we create a Net designed to deliver "video on demand", Stefik concludes, it will not be technically capable of fulfilling our visions of digital libraries and virtual marketplaces.
If you extend the argument of Internet Dreams, it might appear that judiciously applied metaphors will help us build the Net we want, but eventually we will go beyond them. Still, the Net is a space where metaphors make up the real, where it is clear there is no reality other than representation. Without Net metaphors all you have is intangible zeros and ones. So there is no going beyond them, only deeper in. While we do this, Stefik's observations may prove useful. As he says, we need to maintain a flexibility towards the Net metaphors we use, to create a technology that will support numerous different types and hybrids. Currently, one Net metaphor doesn't exclude another. They can all apply, all at the same time. You pick and mix - whatever gets you through the Net, as it were. It would be a loss if one particular vision came to dominate: the Net would wind up a much smaller place.
Internet Dreams, by Mark Stefik: £17.50. MIT Press.
Jim McClellan is a contributing editor at The Face and i-D.