"Will the rest-areas on the information highway be clean and sanitary? Will we fund the public schools and libraries to serve as public info-transit systems, providing on-ramps to the information highway for the economically and geographically disadvantaged?" Those of us in the United States, at least, have recently become all too familiar with the "INFORMATION HIGHWAY" rhetoric and hyperbole surrounding the Clinton-Gore proposal to build a National Information Infrastructure. In this presentation I will set out the conceptual mapping of the "INTERNET AS HIGHWAY" ("INFORMATION HIGHWAY") metaphor system and illustrate how social policy is shaped by metaphorical reasoning. For instance, the Clinton-Gore administration has argued that the U.S. economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s was fueled by massive federal investment in the interstate highway system, and a similar economic boom would result from from federal investment in the Information Highway. I will diagram how each step of this inference is metaphorically mapped from the source domain (highway policy) to the target domain (information infrastructure policy), presenting the metaphorical inferences as parallel knowledge structures.
But not every portion of the the highway domain maps across to the information domain÷there will be no "rest-areas" on the information highway, let alone "clean and sanitary" ones÷and some of the parts that do map across may not map across well. For example, critics of the administration have observed that the jobs created by the information highway economic boom are likely to be substantially skilled; the "road crews" of the information highway will be composed of high-tech, not low-tech, workers. Another particularly salient difference between the information infrastructure and conventional highways is that accessing the information highway requires computer facilities lacking in many poorer communities. To address this criticism, the National Information Infrastructure initiative now mandates funding for public schools and libraries throughout the country to serve as "public transportation systems" to provide low- cost "on-ramps" to the information highway. The wide acceptance of these examples of metaphorical reasoning about U.S. technology policy raise a general question about social policy: Are metaphors constitutive (as Lakoff and Johnson suggest) of social policy? If so, then how can cognitive semantics account for parts of the source domain which don't map well or at all? How can cognitive semantics account for the differences between domains which seem to motivate revisions to social policy? At the conclusion of the talk, I will outline three approaches to answering these questions about policy revisions: first, claiming that there is a literal core to each domain in the physical world which is not constituted metaphorically; second, claiming that they result solely from conflicts between different metaphor systems (such as between the "INFORMATION HIGHWAY" and the "INTERNET AS WEB" metaphor systems); and third, claiming that metaphorical inferences produce a kind of conceptual blending which takes place between domains, motivating changes in the world to fit our metaphorical understanding.
(c) Tim Rohrer
A draft version of the paper is now online