Meaningful Technologies

Front matter

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Part 1. Metaphors, Technology, and Meaning 1. Metaphors

Part I]. Foundations

Part IIl. Digital Metaphors in the World 7. Mediating the World

8. Metaphorical Foundations: Touching Is Selection

9. Mediating Relationships: Social Media vii

10. Mediating Communication: Texting 11. Mediating Memory: Photos and Videos

12. Mediating the Self: Smartphones

Part IV. Metaphors Are Changing the World 13. When Metaphors Fail

14. Who Is in Charge?

Conclusion

Appendix A Appendix B Notes

184 190

207 209 213 216

226 241

245 259 263 289

Member Institution Acknowledgments

Lever Press is a joint venture. This work was made possible by the generous support of Lever Press member libraries from the following institutions:

Amherst College

Berea College

Bowdoin College

Carleton College

Central Washington University

Claremont Graduate University

Claremont McKenna College

Clark Atlanta University

College of Saint Benedict & Saint John’s University

The College of Wooster

Davidson College

Denison University

DePauw University

Grinnell College

Hamilton College

Harvey Mudd College

Hollins University lowa State University Keck Graduate Institute Knox College

Lafayette College Macalester College Middlebury College Morehouse College Norwich University Penn State University Pitzer College

Smith College

Spelman College Susquehanna University vi

Swarthmore College Trinity University JCLA Library c

Union College

= niversity of Puget Sound

Gc niversity of San Francisco

Cc niversity of Vermont

Ursinus College Vassar College Washington and Lee University Whitman College Whittier College Whitworth University Willamette University Williams College

MEMBER INSTITUTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgments

To my wife Rachel, who inspires me every day, and my kids, Kira and Zander, the best family 1 could ever hope for. To Crystal Hall and Pamela Fletcher for helping make DCS real. And to Fernando, who somehow has managed to make writing a book joyful.- Eric Chown

To Vanessa, Mateus, Filipe, and Beatriz, springs of meaning to my life. To Crystal Hall and George Taylor for their support, solicitude, and friendship. To Eric, an outstanding mentor and fantastic companion in this book journey.- Fernando Nascimento

When it comes to technology, we as a society are obsessed with what is new, what it can do, and who made it. The press is full of stories about the latest gadgets and larger-than-life figures of the tech industry, such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. Look a bit further and you will find worries about tech’s impact on individuals—digital addiction, digital depression, the digital divide, etc.—or on society, especially with regard to artificial intelligence. These are all important issues, and they are all connected to elements of the story in this book. But on their own, all of them miss some of the more subtle, but nevertheless profound, changes that tech is bringing. This book is not about the revolutionary things tech is enabling nor about the singular figures leading the industry. Instead, it is about how technology is shaping how we understand and experience the world, rewiring basic concepts such as friendship, conversation, and memory. To understand this, it is important not just to look at any given technology in terms of its starting point or its end point, but instead at its long-term cycle. Mobile technology, more than any technology before it, exists in a constant and quick cycle of refinements and user feedback, greatly accelerating not only the development of products, but also the ways those products affect us. Further, it is the nature of digital technology to accelerate these processes even more as our phones constantly intrude on many of our lives, with notifications and reminders pressing us to engage. This book examines digital technologies from a sharply different perspective than the valuable critical contributions that describe and explain digital technologies primarily through their economic, social, and political effects. Instead, we focus on the meanings and cognitive structures that we will show are profoundly altered through digital technologies. Digital technologies not only produce new tools and social structures, but they produce new meanings; they change how we see things. Like creative metaphors that make us see one thing through the lens of another, we argue that digital artifacts create and reconfigure meanings and cognitive structures through the use of metaphorical processes.

At the center of the change produced by digital technologies is inevitably a metaphor. As we shall see, metaphors in technology allow developers to take esoteric concepts and make them meaningful to people. Once they have made that connection in people’s minds, e.g., that following someone on social media is a form of friendship or that texting someone is a kind of conversation, then the process of the technology changing how users think has surely begun. Thus, as text messaging has evolved over the years since its clumsy beginnings, so too, in parallel, has our notion of what it means to hold a conversation with someone. For many of today’s teenagers, for example, a “conversation” is more likely to be held by text than it is face-to-face. And for those teenagers, every time their phone buzzes with a notification of a new message from a friend, that cognitive change is reinforced. Meanwhile, there is a parallel story unfolding, one of people without access to such technology, whose understanding of the world is increasingly different from those with access.

Since our main goal in this work is to examine how technology is changing how we think, we will examine the very concept of meaning, as well as the cognitive mechanisms involved in making it. Crucial to all of this is the role that metaphor plays in how we learn new ideas and how we communicate. The book is born of an interdisciplinary collaboration between a philosopher and a cognitive scientist, both of whom are steeped in technology. As such we will bring elements from both of these areas to bear on the ideas in this text. However, our goal is that any educated person with an interest in how technology is changing how we think should be able to understand the arguments in the book. Since the technologies that our book is primarily interested in come out of the mobile phone industry, many of our examples draw from that industry, including the phone itself. Telephones, and our relationships to them, are still evolving more than one hundred years after their invention.

There is a romantic popular notion that helps reveal the public’s fixation on how new technologies and inventions are created. The image, probably dating back to at least Thomas Edison, dubbed “the wizard of Menlo Park,” is of a solitary genius, wearing a white coat, hard at work in his lab who is suddenly struck with inspiration. Our hero may even mark the moment by shouting “Eureka!” In this romanticized—and sexist—view of innovation, new technologies are the product of inspiration, often springing fully formed into someone's consciousness. The symbol of such an event is a light bulb. Further, the greatness of this innovation is so self-evident to the public that it is an immediate sensation. The reality, of course, rarely matches this imaginary scene. Even the lightbulb, the iconic symbol of inspiration, has a long lineage predating Edison’s work. Edison himself, and notably a team of researchers, tested more than three thousand designs before submitting a patent.’ This imagery is a kind of metaphor itself and the source of a great deal of power in terms of its role in setting expectations. For example, in 1957 surveys showed that people stereotypically believed that a scientist “is a man who wears a white coat and works in a laboratory.”* Such metaphors are still going strong today, constantly reinforced in various media, and apply to many of the areas covered in this book. As we shall see, such metaphors are powerful because they can subconsciously change how

Figure 1. An iconic metaphor, with a twist, suggesting sudden inspiration. The lightbulb metaphor is so powerful that innumerable variations can easily be found on the internet. In turn, having the idea come from a woman of color is in opposition to the metaphorical idea of “male genius.” (Figure by Kira Chown)

people behave, e.g., young girls may be less likely to pursue science because they do not fit this metaphorical image.

When a technology is created its developers have a choice in terms of the metaphor that they will use to describe it. As with the image of the lone scientist in a white coat, such metaphors frame the way that people will see the technology and influence how they react to it. Metaphors are not just about technology; they are the main and most important way that we understand technologies. A good metaphor can help make a technology a success, while a poor one can hinder its use and development.

In examining the relationship between metaphor and technology, we must first start with a working definition of what we mean by technology. As we will see later, in chapter six, carefully defining categories is a fraught endeavor, and so, despite some reservations about this particular definition, we employ a working definition:

Eric Schatzberg’s description of technology as “a set of practices humans use to transform the material world, practices involved in creating and using material things.”* We also find it productive to complement Schatzberg’s broad definition with Luciano Floridi’s practical intuition of technological artifacts, which relies on the notion of “in-betweenness.”> A window is between you and the outside world and is thus a technology. A saw is between you and the wood you want to cut and so too is a technology, etc. There is a hierarchy to this, as well; a hammer is between you and the nail you want to drive into wood, and thus a technology can be between you and another technology. What we like about this particular notion of technology is that it captures the fact that technologies are mediators of experience. While Floridi’s examples emphasize the practical aspect of technological mediators, we will analyze the cognitive and interpretative dimensions of these mediations. We should immediately note that popular notions of technology, and indeed this particular definition, focus on technologies that exist in the physical world, but many of the cases we describe in this book deal with software technologies that are only made manifest through other technologies, generally mobile phones.°

Since much of our book deals with mobile technology, and specifically technologies that are “enabled” by smartphones, we will start with the example of telephones, and we will weave metaphors relating to telephones of all kinds throughout the book. This concept of “enabling” is crucial to our discussion of technology and to understand how technologies come to be. The idea was brilliantly laid out in the PBS television show and companion book Connections.’ Each episode of the show began with a historical event, generally hundreds of years prior, and subsequently traced a series of connections back to some product in the modern world. The links in the chains of connections can be seen as technologies in their own right and/or as enablers giving rise to the ultimate invention or product.

Thus, there is a predominantly technical process of developing artifacts and architectures that allows certain features of new technologies to be implemented. These processes often take place in public and private research institutions and focus on developing what we call “enablers.” In the case of the original telephone, the coding of audio signals as electrical pulses and the infrastructure for transmission of such signals are among the basic technology enablers.

Even if they are fascinating in themselves, we won't focus on these basic technology enablers in this book. Our main interest will be in technologies that pass one key criteria: they should be immediately recognized by their users as creating new possibilities for them to perceive and/or act in the world. The act of converting audio to electric pulses, for example, is not immediately perceived by a user making a phone call in a way that they would understand. Thus, technologies depend not only on enablers, but also on meaning. Coding audio signals into electrical pulses is a technical achievement, one crucial to telephones, but it is essentially hidden from the people who use telephones. By contrast, a mobile phone is both an enabler, in that it allows for the development of new technologies that build on it, and a full-fledged technology in the sense we are talking about here, in that it mediates numerous human experiences. When enablers are not thought of in a way that assigns new meanings to our lives, they remain mere artifacts of scientific progress, not of practical interest to the greater public. The transition from basic scientific research to technology, at least in the sense that we mean here, comes from a semantic leap where new meaning is created through its usage in the world.

Just as technologies are not created from thin air, neither are the new meanings created by technologies. With technologies, creation relies on enablers, preexisting innovations with their own history. We argue that the new meanings brought by technologies are also not created out of whole cloth, but rather by what could be termed “cognitive enablers.” These are the other meanings that already exist in the semantic universe of a given society. But what cognitive process is linked to this semantic innovation? How does it work, and how is it structured? Our supposition is that the semantic innovation process of new technologies can be understood in terms of the way we create metaphors. Metaphors act as a paradigm for semantic innovation in language. In this book we will explore how this process illuminates the way technological innovations happen in the digital world, and how it is often ignored or overlooked in comparison to the development technology of enablers.

When it comes to digital and computational technologies, there is already a substantial and rich base of enablers, the result of decades of development stemming from the computer revolution. This means that discussions of the development of new technologies in this sphere can focus squarely on semantic innovations. Enablers such as low-cost LCD panels may be worthy of discussion in their own right, but there is no way in which they are important with regard to, for example, the development of social networks.

Returning to our telephone example, it took an effort of creative imagination to bring two distinct conceptual entities together in the creation of a new concept, and therefore a new way of understanding the world. There is a large semantic gap between copper wires and electric shocks and the concept of human conversation, a gap that needs to be overcome for enablers to enter users’ semantic universe and, therefore, to be understood and used.

The telephone was born as a metaphor for “conversation.” Imagine a universe in which it wasn’t, and instead prospective users were given a set of explanations about coding audio into electronic pulses, and how these pulses could be transmitted over wires, and later turned back into sounds. None of those things would have been meaningful or particularly interesting to the average person in the nineteenth century, who probably would have stopped paying attention. Instead, these details were abstracted away, and the telephone was presented as a way to hold a conversation with someone who was somewhere else. This is simple and easy to grasp, relying on concepts that we all share—that we know what conversations are and that conversations normally take place between people who are close together. As Katzenbach and Larsson put it, “imagining the future is always mobilizing the past.”

In his classic book The Design of Everyday Things, psychologist

Don Norman noted that:

Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding. Discoverability: Is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible and where and how to perform them? Understanding: What does it all mean? How is the product supposed to be used? What do all the different controls and settings mean?’

In other words, for a product to be successful, it is of paramount importance that it make sense to its intended audience. In this book we are primarily concerned with technologies that are intended for the public at large, and thus need to be easily understood by people in general. This places a number of constraints on developers, generally requiring their products to be simple to grasp. This means that new products inevitably need to be cast in terms of things that everyone already understands; as we shall see, the primary vehicle for communicating about these new products is metaphor.

The set of cultural and fundamental knowledge that a person or group of people has before encountering a new technology is what we will call their “semantic horizon”, roughly a combination of their experience and their knowledge." This semantic universe can be implicitly and explicitly used by innovators, primarily through metaphor, to help give meaning to new technologies, ultimately easing the integration of the new products into the user’s understanding of the world. The result is that new technologies that do this successfully are far more likely to be useful because they are far more likely to be used.

In conversation or when reading, a metaphor like “time is a beggar” is an “impertinent predication” that needs to be solved in order to make sense. One might wonder, for example, what features that time has in common with beggars, or vice versa. The metaphor only makes sense once we can work out the connections between the metaphor’s tenor, in this case “time,” and its vehicle, in this case “beggar.”" As Norman alluded to, to be effective, technological metaphors cannot be quite so impertinent; they should be easily transparent to nearly everyone. For example, when we tell someone “l am going to talk to my mother on the phone,” and the friend knows that our mother is eight thousand kilometers away, the friend’s understanding relies on how using phones expands, modifies, and builds on the concept of “conversation.”

As this example shows, technological metaphors fundamentally alter cognitive models and meaning. A new set of associations is created and incorporated into our cognitive models when a given technology becomes common in any social group. For example, the idea that conversations took place face-to-face was deeply associated with the concept of “conversation” when the telephone was developed. Once telephones became pervasive, it was no longer required that conversations take place in person, and thus the association between “in person” and “conversation” was necessarily diminished. A linguistic sign of this change is that, when we plan future conversations, we need to specify how they will take place, as in “let’s talk in person,” or “let’s talk over the phone” and now “let’s talk over Zoom.” The changes that metaphors make on our mental models can have all kinds of consequences, both good and bad. Among them is the fact that metaphors often attribute agency when none exists. For example, studies of the stock market have shown that common stock metaphors like “the NASDAQ climbed higher” or “the NASDAQ dropped off a cliff” attribute agency in the first case and a lack of agency in the second to what otherwise might be seen as random fluctuations. This matters because the agency carries with it the expectation that the change will continue.” Thus, the choice of metaphors in such a case can affect how people behave after being exposed to them. Other changes to our mental models have to do with the associations the metaphor brings. For example, returning to our iconic light bulb, researchers found that subjects exposed to an illuminated light bulb performed better at solving problems requiring insight than those exposed to shaded bulbs.” The studies were carefully constructed to show that it was not the presence of light that made a difference, but an actual illuminated light bulb. This is taken as evidence that the metaphor primes the portion of the brain involved in insight, leading to improved task performance—because we associate light bulbs with creativity, seeing a light bulb temporarily makes us more creative!

Metaphors used to explain technology modify our understanding of the world, it is important to remember that technology also creates new social groups. People who participate in social networks and people who don’t. People who have access to smartphones, high-speed internet, and the like, and people who don't. We will argue in this book that one aspect of technologies enabled by smartphones is that their impact on cognition is accelerated and heightened. As a result, the differences between groups that use or do not use a particular technology are growing quickly as their models of the world are diverging.

Adopting new technologies has important repercussions since the ability of potential users to understand the purpose of a new artifact depends on how it relates to their individual models of the world. This situation can be framed as one in which experts need to teach novices about their area of expertise. As Stephen Kaplan noted in an examination of such situations, in many cases where experts try to teach novices the result is frustration on both sides due to the different ways the two groups perceive the domain in question. Things that have become blindingly obvious to experts may be opaque to novices. As Kaplan puts it, “if one sees the world very differently from the way others see it and counts on others to see as we do, the consequences can be unfortunate.” This is central to this book in two ways. First, one of the challenges of creating a successful new technology is bridging this gap through the use of metaphor. Second, the groups that use specific technologies and those that do not will end up seeing the world very differently, just as in Kaplan’s quote, and thus unfortunate consequences are almost inevitable.

Meanwhile, when a technology fails to make a connection to the public it is likely to fail no matter how useful it might be. An example of this is QR codes, a technology that frequently comes up when doing nearly any variation of an internet search for “biggest technology failures.” The first problem that QR codes have is that there isn’t an easy metaphor that explains what they are for. The best we can do is something like “QR codes are images that are hyperlinks.” This is relatively accurate but does not give any sense of why they might be useful. QR codes also fail Norman’s design rules. Looking at QR codes gives no sense whatsoever of what they do, nor does it help to understand their functionality. With the growing emphasis on privacy, this obscurity can also make users very uneasy about what will happen when they scan a code. Indeed, QR codes are purposefully designed this way so that they can be integrated into camera apps without interfering with normal picture taking. QR codes continue to exist and have steadily grown in usage because they are in fact a useful technology that solves an important problem, especially for those who understand their technical side, but they have never found their way into the public’s imagination."

As people incorporate the use of a particular technology into their daily lives, the technology affects that group’s semantic horizon. Technology that was born of a metaphor becomes part of the common lexicon and alters the meaning of the metaphorical “vehicle.” Thus, the telephone that is born as a metaphor for

“talking” (one can talk over the phone) changes the associations of “talking” so that the verb “talk” can also be used to mean a distant communication.

For users of a new technology, such as the telephone, the device spurs the creation of a new semantic entity, or category. This new entity in turn uses metaphor to leverage another set of prior experiences to help understand it, e.g., when the telephone was invented, its usefulness could be sold to people on the basis of their understanding of conversations and the limitations on how conversations had previously worked. Once they had a telephone, however, the device became a new semantic entity for them, one centered around the actual experience of using real telephones. This experience is crucial to our story because experience is a key driver for learning and altering our semantic horizons.

Interestingly enough, once the new semantic field for a new technology is established, the field itself can function as a basis for further metaphors. Thus, for example, the mobile phone metaphor is born from the telephone, further removing restrictions on how conversations take place. A new technology can therefore enter the semantic field as a metaphor for a different technology.

It is interesting to note how Albert Borgmann’s idea of separation between means and ends of technology is pertinent to this example.” In our terms, “means” are what we are calling enablers. The mobile phone metaphor is solely about the ends of both technologies involved—landlines and mobile phones. The means have no obvious effect on the metaphorical understanding. Indeed, mobile phone enablers are substantially different from those for a landline telephone, and so “means” are virtually ignored with regard to the semantic field of the new metaphor. Again, for users such information is an unnecessary distraction, even if it is crucial for the developers of the technology.

Mobile phones are also indicative of how creative imagination can have a practical effect on new technological metaphors. A fictional precursor to mobile phones, the “communicator,” was popularized through the Star Trek television series, itself a kind of fictional testing ground that showcased the usefulness of such a technology and thus prepared potential users and developers for why they might want such a device. Viewers could indirectly experience, through the television program, how such devices could be useful. In practical terms, the Star Trek communicator inspired some models of early commercial mobile phones. The possibility that the metaphor of a technology might be created even before the enablers are actually available is yet another indication of the decoupling of means and ends, allowing the metaphor to be meaningful and fully understandable without the means being fully realized or taken into account for the resolution of the metaphor. Science fiction is full of such examples, e.g., lightsabers in Star Wars are easily understood as “laser swords,” even though the technology necessary to create such an item is currently well beyond our scientific understanding.

Donald A. Schön explores the example of a technology-related metaphor from the perspective of its engineering team. He develops the metaphor that “a paintbrush is a pump.” He says:

The researchers, who had begun by describing painting in a familiar way, entertained the description of a different, already-named process (pumping) as an alternative description of painting and that in their redescription of painting, both their perception of the phenomenon and the previous description of pumping were transformed."

This new way of seeing a paintbrush as a pump led researchers to new questions such as how the density and structure of the fibers of the paintbrush should be organized to better produce the pumping effect that ended up creating a set of technological inventions.

Jahnke has also explored how the creation of meaning is related to the innovation process. He argues that it plays a dialectical role with problem solving:

The point is that all the problem solving occurred within a process of seeking an evolving meaning. Interestingly, this experience corresponds with research in science and technology studies indicating that science and technology development is not as rational as it may seem. Imagination, metaphor, experiences, and other “irrational” thinking are necessary to coming up with new scientific concepts and innovations.”

Returning to science fiction, Orson Scott Card gives an example of the power of meaning and problem solving in his novel Ender’s Game. In the book a character describes how a faster-than-light communication device dubbed the “ansible” (after another science fiction device first described by Ursula K. Le Guin) was developed after encountering an alien species that could communicate that way. “We knew then that it was possible. To communicate faster than light. That was seventy years ago, and once we knew what could be done we did it.””°

The conversation metaphor did not stop evolving with the creation of mobile phones. Interestingly, though, the next steps of the metaphorical development were in software, not hardware. In the early 1990s when the Short Message Service (SMS) became available to customers, who now know it better by its colloquial name “texting,” the “conversation” metaphor moved from audio to text. We will examine this development in much greater detail in a subsequent chapter but mark its development here to note that computers have helped change the meaning of “technology” itself. While it is true that software like SMS currently requires physical enablers, there is no SMS device on a mobile phone, merely the software implementation of one. In this book we are mainly concerned with such digital technologies and metaphors. Thus, we might say that social networks are metaphors for relationships and that specific networks like Facebook or Tinder are themselves technologies. Given that previous technologies were physically embodied, this raises significant questions about the impact, if any, this has on the metaphors and the creation of semantic fields based on those metaphors and technologies. We will address these questions throughout the book.

Digital technologies are essentially related to metaphors, but digital metaphors are different from linguistic ones in important ways. Linguistic metaphors are passive, in the sense that the audience needs to choose to actively engage the world proposed by metaphor. Returning to the Shakespearean metaphor “time is a beggar,” the audience is unlikely to understand the metaphor without cognitive effort and without further engaging Shakespeare’s prose. Technological metaphors, on the other hand, are active (and often imposing) in the sense that they are realized in digital artifacts that are actively doing things, forcefully changing a user’s meaning horizon. Technological creators cannot generally afford to require their potential audience to wonder how the metaphor works; normally the selling point is that the usefulness of the technology is obvious at first glance. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is beloved in part because the meaning of his works is not superficially obvious and requires some thought on the part of the audience.