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How is the Internet Like A Swarm of Hollering Bicyclists?
Trying to find a useful metaphor for online social norms
What is a good metaphor for the internet? Is it a crowded party? A farmer’s market, a collection of billboards, a TV station, or the hackneyed “Town Square”?
A sea teeming with letters in bottles? A hungry beast that must be fed?
A firehose of information? A hive-mind?
A honeycomb of echo chambers?
Each of these metaphors rings true in some ways but doesn’t capture the full weirdness and enormity of the internet. Your experience of it, no doubt, depends on which websites you gravitate toward and how you use them.
Are you in a crowd or alone at your desk?
I have been thinking about the experience of writing and creating on the internet, and how best to wrap my head around my own experience of it. The context shifts and morphs in a way I can’t quite grip.
Writing or even commenting online feels extremely social, even over-stimulating (like a loud party). Everyone’s talking at once, and you have to filter out most of it to find anything you’re interested in.
