I know I’ve heard multiple people–therapists and others–say this, but trying to Google it only yields responses about internet addiction.

“Going offline”

…meaning taking a break (not from the literal internet, just from thinking), shutting down, quieting.

I don’t know if this is a mixed metaphor or not. I’ve heard people give it both positive and negative connotations, but more frequently negative ones–like your brain panicking and shutting down (note: “shutting down” is a much better metaphor for the negative version of taking a break from thinking). Assigning negative connotations makes sense in that no one wants to be forced offline, but competes with the idea that literally going offline is something that most therapists would probably endorse. If that’s the case–that leaving the internet is positive for the mind–then the metaphor should have positive connotations.

…I’m very tired. Going offline.

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I checked out about 8 books on epidemiology and illness from the library and have been working my way through them (in general the ones about infectious and zoonotic diseases are the most interesting). Most recently I finished The End of Illness, which I didn’t feel particularly strongly about–too prescriptive to hold my interest, but not devoid of interesting content.

Near the end of the book the author writes, “…sleep acts like a built-in technology app for our brains, cleaning out old files and prepping us to upload new ones.” 

Is that really what an app does? It sounds more like a defragging program or a hard-drive cleaner. I kind of expected him to go on to say that digestion is like an app, or breathing, or something–not that any of those make much sense, but what device has only ONE app?–but instead he moves to talking about how we need breaks from our technological devices (except our sleep “app” of course).

In reading about disease and the brain and body, the two most common analogies I see are

immune system fighting disease = a military fighting enemy invaders

and

the brain = a computer hard drive

The epidemiology book that I most thoroughly enjoyed discusses the limitations/inaccuracies of the “war” metaphor for disease. I would like to see something similar for the “hard drive” metaphor of the brain. It’s not an inaccurate analogy; it’s just become so embedded that we don’t notice potential flaws in it.

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When I first bought a smartphone two-ish years ago, I found myself playing Angry Birds/Candy Crush/Alphabetty Saga during waiting moments–standing in line, on the subway, while waiting for someone to meet me–the typical. Maybe reaching for a positive spin, I always thought of it as 

This week’s technology metaphor: Defragmenting my day. 

But if I give it more thought, it’s not a very precise metaphor. Defragging a hard drive consists of getting rid of those interstitial spaces and jagged files edges that take up more space than they should. If I were really able to defrag my day, I would be able to use all of that redeemed time in one gulp, rather than filling it with something else. I’m making use of that time–poor use, one might argue, but use regardless–by putting something in it, but I’m not combining it. I don’t have two hours of bonus time at the end of each day.

So maybe I need to revisit this. It seems that it’s more like caulking my day, or frosting the open spaces of my day, but then those aren’t technological. And I do love categories. 

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It can be a struggle to find a technology metaphor that ISN’T referring to some aspect of the human brain (although there’s always, well, “the web”). Not that this is surprising–the correlation between brain and hard drive is pretty blatant–but I would love to come across a technology metaphor that referred to something completely outside of humans and their processes…

This week’s is a little bit of a cheat, because it’s two related metaphors that I heard spoken by different people. Imagine that they’re linked with something less binding than a semi-colon but more binding than juxtaposition: “When you meditate, you increase your bandwidth” and “When you play the game and earn points, it’s an endorphin ping.”

Question to consider: did “bandwidth” and “ping” have meanings outside of technology, before computers took those terms over? Ping, certainly. Bandwidth, I’m not sure. But it’s likely that both were, in a sense, metaphorical when they were first applied to technology. Now they’re metaphorical again in the opposite direction.

A DOUBLE METAPHOR! (Please imagine that shouted by Tim Curry as Wadsworth in Clue).

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Comment from last week: “I don’t know, technology metaphors–particularly that yoga one–strike me as desperate and insecure. Yoga has its own thing going, did we really need that metaphor to grasp what she was talking about?”

Need? No. But I think that drawing the comparison to refreshing a website says something different about the function of downward facing dog than the teacher would have communicated if she had been more straightforward. People sometimes think of down dog as a resting pose, and her metaphor made me consider it as less of a static position and more of a reset.

I’m intrigued by the idea of insecure and desperate metaphors. Do you think of all metaphors as such? You could say no metaphor is ever really necessary, but they enhance language, and when done well, cause us to reexamine the familiar in a different way. Or was it just this metaphor that struck you as desperate and insecure (personification? Or do you mean the teacher seems insecure and desperate?)? I can see how it might seem like she was pandering, thinking that we would relate better to technology than to something like “Use downward dog as a way to leave the previous poses behind and start over,” (though I don’t think she was being overly pat–it sounded like something she’d just thought of).

Now that I’m thinking about it excessively, you could make the argument that down dog is like a screensaver. And I saw an amazing, possibly accidental metaphor about a screensaver the other day…but it’s not mine to share.

This week’s technology metaphor–let’s stick with the theme–also comes from a yoga teacher (different one): “Don’t panic and forget to breathe. I can see you all thinking “When is this pose going to be over?” like you’re the spinning wheel of death that you get on a frozen Mac.”

I always think of it as the spinning pie, I will say.

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One of my favorite things about technology is that new inventions, processes, and objects can be exploited for metaphor. Even if you believe there’s truly nothing new to be thought or said, you have a better shot (shot: a word that through the ages could be used in analogies relating to bows and arrows, guns, golf, basketball, photography, and on into the future) at originality if your comparison involves something that hasn’t been in existence for long.

I’ve started to collect metaphors (and similes–but technically I think they’re a subclass of metaphor) about technology as I hear them or think of them.

This week’s technology metaphor comes from a yoga teacher instructing the class into a pose that serves as a slight break from the motion of vinyasa flow: “Everyone take a downward dog whenever you need a moment–it’s like hitting the refresh button for your practice.” 

Many of the metaphors I’ve encountered so far use terminology to relate to areas that seem almost diametrically opposed to technology–yoga, meditation, therapy.

If you have a technology metaphor you’d like to send out into the world, email me at claire@clairedunnington.com, or post in the comments.

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