As We May Speak:
Metaphors, Conceptual
Blends, and Usability
Charles Hannon
channon@washjeff.edu | Washington & Jefferson College.
[1] For a treatment of
blends as a design
principle, see Manuel
Imaz and David Benyon.
Designing with Blends:
Conceptual Foundations
of Human-Computer
Interaction and
Software Engineering.
Cambridge: MIT Press,
2007.
May + June 2009
[ 2] Fauconnier, G. and
M. Turner. The Way
We Think: Conceptual
Blending and the Mind’s
Hidden Complexities.
New York: Basic Books,
2002.
In 2006 Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens
infamously described the
Internet as a “series of tubes.”
He spoke in opposition to the
concept of network neutrality,
instead supporting the argument that large cable and telecommunications companies
should be allowed to charge a
premium to Amazon, Netflix,
eBay, and other Internet businesses that require reliable
Internet service. His comments
quickly went “viral” and he was
mocked by Jon Stewart, Stephen
Colbert, and many others.
Ironically, “tubes” is not a bad
metaphor for some aspects of
the Internet. Experts often use
“pipes” to describe connections
between computers and routers,
and liken different pipes’ diameters to the varieties of network
bandwidth. As we all know, this
is how simple metaphors work:
We use a familiar or shared
concept (pipes) to help our listeners understand something
new (bandwidth).
What got Stevens into trouble
was relying on the metaphor
for further details about how
information moves across the
Internet. His comments demonstrate his understanding of
the pipes metaphor, but they
reveal no grasp of the concept
of a data packet or the process
of packet switching. He said
(rightly) that “the Internet is not
something that you just dump
something on. It’s not a big truck.
It’s a series of tubes.” And then
(wrongly), “if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled,
and if they are filled, when you
put your message in, it gets in
line and it’s going to be delayed
by anyone that puts into that
tube enormous amounts of material.” As an example, Stevens
referred to an email (he called
it an “Internet”) that allegedly
took several days to reach his
office. He seemed unaware that
the principle of network neutrality, against which he was arguing, would eliminate network
bias and ensure that everyone’s
“Internet” got delivered equitably.
But what was most frustrating
to many of us listening to these
remarks was the knowledge that
one more metaphor would have
helped the senator immensely:
the postal metaphor, according to which Internet traffic is
broken into a numbered series
of “envelopes,” sent down that
series of tubes, and reassembled
in the correct order once delivered to our computers.
Conceptual blend theory can
help explain what went wrong
for Stevens [1]. Whereas the
common definition of metaphor
suggests a single input source
that helps explain the target
(pipes help explain bandwidth),
the theory of blends holds that
figurative language draws from
multiple input sources to create a new, blended space. The
blended space selectively borrows properties from each input
source to create new meaning.
An example in the work of Mark
Turner and Gilles Fauconnier
describes a newspaper account
of a catamaran in 1993 that was
trying to beat a San Francisco
to Boston sailing record set by a
clipper in 1853 [ 2]. The newspaper reported that as it went to
press, the catamaran was “barely
maintaining a 4.5-day lead” over
the clipper. This is an example
of a blend because it presents
something that never existed
(a race between the catamaran
and the clipper), and it does so
by selectively borrowing properties from each of the two inputs
(from 1853 and from 1993). It
also recruits structure from
the frame of a “race” that never
occurred; the frame is perfectly
understandable to the reader
because of prior experiences
with such contests. The theory
of blends helps us understand
that when we use metaphor
to convey meaning, we often
are dealing with multiple input