I’m doing a reading this Sunday that’s organized around the theme of technology…so I’m HOARDING all my metaphors for then! Or you might say I’m bookmarking them…but that would be fairly uninspired. Let’s say I’m dropping a pin on each one. Is that one of those metaphors that has bounced back (PINGED BACK) and forth from analog to technological back to analog? That is, did people literally stick pins in things that they wanted to remember, and that led to the Google maps… Read more »
Posts Tagged: technology metaphor
Technology Metaphor of the Week // 09
The other night one of my roommates was complaining (rightfully!) about auto-play videos on news sites. I was in the other room so I didn’t see if it was an auto-play video that actually showed the news, or an ad. Either way, it’s intrusive, and according to what I’ve read, not going to disappear no matter how much we bemoan it. A few days later my other roommate went to a website to try to find information about internet rates… Read more »
Technology Metaphor of the Week // 08
From the brilliant Andre 3000: “If you got riches you got glitches. If you got glitches in your life computer turn it off and then reboot and then you’re back on” (from “Millionaire” with Kelis)
Technology Metaphor of the Week // 07
A sampling of how this week’s technology metaphor, “Leveling up,” (birthplace: video games) is used across genres…. “Leveling Up: Career Advancement for Software Developers” “Leveling up. Getting even with your friends in terms of the blood alcohol level.” “In order to level up you need to work out for an hour a day, save a quarter of your paycheck, and read a book a week.” Urban Dictionary tells me it’s also used as a reference to tripping on mushrooms, and that that’s a wink… Read more »
Technology metaphor of the week // 06
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… Read more »
Technology Metaphor of the Week // 05
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… Read more »
Technology Metaphor Of The Week // 04
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… Read more »
Technology Metaphor of the Week // 03
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… Read more »
Technology Metaphor of the Week // 02
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… Read more »
Technology Metaphor of the Week // 01
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… Read more »
