The television entered the living room, framing the cathode ray tube with wood—literally domesticating the technology as furniture in our homes. Early cinema echoed the proscenium arch of the theater as a remediated reference to the history of performance. Visual metaphors and skeuomorphism of legal pads, tape recorders, felt gaming tables create analog analogues to introduce digital interfaces of the computers in our pockets, and fall away as the devices become more familiar. The internet has inspired many different metaphors, and they reflect changes in how we think about it, attributing the promise of the internet with “revolution, evolution, salvation, progress, universalism, and the ‘American dream.’” Like data, we surf, drown, and dive into content on the internet as our media landscape changes.
Though metaphors reveal truths by association, metaphors can just as easily obscure and misrepresent. Metaphors prime us to take for granted the ways we think about things. Most of the metaphors we use to talk about data in popular culture make sense to technocratic corporations and their leaders, those building and disseminating information technologies, but they are fundamentally dehumanizing. It is no wonder individuals continue to believe that they have “nothing to hide” in the face of big data, because we do not have the cognitive context to grasp how behemoth corporations use data. The dominant industrial metaphors for data do not privilege the position of the individual. Instead, they take power away from the person to which the data refers and give it to those who have the tools to analyze and interpret data. Data then becomes obscured, specialized, and distanced.
We need a new framing of a personal, embodied relationship to data. Embodied metaphors have the potential to bring big data back down to a human scale and ground data in lived experience, which in turn, will help to advance the public’s investment, interpretation, and understanding of our relationship to our data.