Metaphors That Mislead Us: User, Audience, Visitor, Shopper?

"I Am" photo by Allison Felus, cc-by (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wrestlingentropy/405308094/)

The metaphors we use to describe digital technology end up misleading us.

We attempt to understand new technologies by bringing the context of previous experiences and hoping to find relevant analogies, but those analogies often carry other unintended meanings and can obscure possibilities.

For example, we think of the urls our browsers request as:

• Sites we visit (geographic / spatial metaphor, as in cyberspace)
• Pages we read (publishing / media metaphor, as in web publishing or content management)
• Applications we use (software metaphor – as in web applications)
• Communities we join and interact with (sociological metaphor, as in online community management)
• Stores we browse and shop (retail metaphor)

In turn, this means we think of the people who interact with our digital experiences as visitors, readers, users, members, and shoppers. These get all mixed together in actual usage, and there are complexities in each. (In social networking, for example, we also think of each user/member as a node in a network – drawing on a shared mathematics concept which underlies computer networking, social networking, and graph theory).

The challenge is how to use these metaphors to understand the new experiences while being careful not to let them constrict our thinking about what is possible.

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Publishing in the Age of the Assembled Web

The spring of 2009 has been a difficult one for publishers – newspapers especially – in the U.S., with many sizable metropolitan papers moving to online only, closing, or facing the possibility of closing. It’s lead many to wonder (again) what the future holds for publishers – whose value has arguably been derived from information scarcity – in the age of information ubiquity.

What should newspaper publishers, and other content-centered businesses, do? How should publishing evolve to accommodate the tremendous shift in publishing power represented by the fact that every internet user has a technical capability to create and distribute content never before seen? How should they adapt to the assembled web, in which users expect to interact with content in contexts they choose, rather than in contexts publishers control?

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Summer Reading List

Updated 5/31/08 – Like The Wealth of Networks, Two of these books are also available online: Two Bits and The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It.

Here’s my summer reading list. Tell me what I’m missing.

• The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky
• Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World, by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu
• Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, by Chris Kelty
• Designing For the Social Web: Voices That Matter, by Joshua Porter

It’s a bit heavy, I know, but this is the kind of stuff I find interesting.

What are you reading this summer? What key new text have I left out?