Information Metaphors

That’s the trouble with metaphors. You try to understand something by comparing it to a known. But what if the something is quite unlike anything you know?

That’s how information metaphors leave me. They offer only an awkward glimpse of what information feels like.

Most recently this happened when I read what danah boyd called a “crib” of a talk she presented at the Web 2.0 Expo. I highly recommend her article. It’s wonderfully evocative, full of ideas that made me pause and think.

But, at least for me, danah’s information metaphors miss the mark. Here’s a quote from her article Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media.

As of late, we’ve been talking a lot about content streams, streams of information. This metaphor is powerful. The idea is that you’re living inside the stream: adding to it, consuming it, redirecting it. The stream metaphor is about reaching flow. It’s also about restructuring the ways in which information flows in modern society.

Flows and streams connote uni-directionality and time’s arrow. I can throw a twig into a canyon creek and watch it flow downstream and disappear to me forever.

Information isn’t like that. It’s more ambient, more pervasive, more elusive, sometimes dim, sometimes bright, sometimes stationary, often unobservable without the right lenses. If anything it’s more like the night sky than a flow or a stream, only discoverable with the telescope’s equivalent.

But even the night sky breaks down as an information metaphor. It misses a vital essence. We, including we the turtles and we the stones, are information. There is no metaphor for that.