Kafka vs. Orwell: Metaphors About Electronic Privacy

Eric_Grimm writes "Carl Kaplan of the New York Times has done an interesting story on a draft law review article (click the "download paper" icon for a PDF version) relating to the metaphors that should be employed to assist legislators in understanding the personal data protection or "electronic privacy" debate currently raging in Congress and state legislatures. Both Kaplan's story and the law review article are well worth a read."

Comments

I like metaphors.

[DoorFrame]

But how is it possible to live in a world without metaphors?

Ok, sure, metaphors simplify the situation. I'm sure that everybody who reads the New York Times (and most of the people who read slashdot minus the Natalie Portman/grits/Goatsex contingent) is a fairly intelligent person. With that it mind, even the extremely intelligent will not be able to fully grasp and articulate all the intricasies of the privacy battle today. The situation is simply too complex and too fluid in order to explain coherantly. Would you really want someone to go through a forty five minutes introductory speech everytime someone wanted to discuss a point of privacy? Of course not.

This is why we have metaphors. We use them as a cognative shortcut. We can't possible go through the world and understand everything about so in order to allow ourselves to have any opinion at all about most things we accept and utilize these metaphors. To most people (at least most people who read Slashdot and the New York Times) saying the phrase "Big Brother" is not simply referencing a metaphor. We instantly begin to reference everything we know about Big Brother, 1984, Winston Smith, George Orwell, fascism, totalitarianism, distopias and everything else. We combine it into a single phrase: "Big Brother" but it's really just a very large collections of concept from a fictional world that are combined with our experiences in the real world in order to make sense of everything.

Eh, whatever, I like metaphors.