IN THE trade they're known as "surfing suits". Yes, those photographs where two or three managers from head office in Dublin put a surfboard under their arms, flop along to the nearest windswept beach, and smile for the photograph. A new Web site is being plugged.
Within the past two years this "surfing" metaphor and "the information superhighway" have become the two inescapable slogans not just of the computer industry, but of western capitalism as it unravels its digital destiny. These are the cliches of a million computing adverts, and the buzzwords of ministers' speeches and everyday speech.
It's easy to see why. After all, cars, superhighways and surfboards have special places in North American culture, from Route 66 to Bay watch. But are the planet's computer networks really like an American motorway system? Do we really surf the Internet? Or in fact do we click and peck and wander half aimlessly around it, in circles and tangents, and in frequently frustrating circumstances due to congested networks and broken connections?
Metaphors aren't always a bad thing. We need them to describe the space within computers, and the spaces between computers. These aren't like any real, physical space, so we resort to familiar, concrete experiences to make these more abstract, unfamiliar concepts more structured and understandable.
For artists and journalists and politicians alike, the ways we talk and think about the digital future involve problems of translation and representation. They are about "domesticating" unfamiliar technologies and making specialist areas or jargon more universal.
We need to be much more careful and thoughtful about the computing metaphors and similes we choose and use. The phrases we decide upon are seeping into daily consciousness, shaping the ways we think about the spaces inside computers and the spaces between them. They are doing more than that again: they are moulding the policy debates (or lack of them) which our society has about digital technologies. In this sense, the "surfing superhighway" metaphors aren't just lazy and inappropriate or frivolous or stupid - they could become downright dangerous.
Why? Because across the world, lawmakers are drawing up new rules about how cyberspace should handle various issues, from copyright and ownership to defamation and pornography. Judges are ruling in cases which are quickly becoming precedents. In turn, these people often rely on various metaphors to compare the new technologies with traditional and more familiar ones. These metaphors, in turn, will have a major effect in shaping the medium.
In a sense, then, as the media guru Marshall McLuhan might have put it if he were still alive, the medium is the metaphor.
Perhaps we should search for better metaphors, ones based on what we are really experiencing, as computer users on this side of the Atlantic, as judges, as law makers, teachers and citizens in the digital world, as it rapidly unfolds before us.