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).
