A revised version of this paper appeared as: "Conceptual Blending on the Information Highway: How do metaphorical inferences work?" in Discourse and Perspective In Cognitive Linguistics, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997.

1. Introduction: CYBERSPACE and the CYBERFUTURE

I like to think of myself as someone who sits on the curb of the info-highway, bemusedly watching all the traffic whiz by--and also as someone who occasionally darts out into the traffic to pick up interesting litter. I frame my paper in these terms because I believe we can learn a lot by examining the linguistic litter thrown off in the actual conversation about technology policy in the United States. In this paper I will begin by offering some of the rich and complex examples I have collected from the news media, then turn to some of the actual policy statements by political figures such as U.S. Vicepresident Gore, paying particular attention to how metaphors shape both science policy and the critiques of science policy made by political rivals. The examples in this paper were all originally drawn from the internet, but are available in both electronic and print form.

I will discuss these examples using some recent theoretical tools developed in cognitive semantics: conceptual metaphors and their mappings, embodied image schemas, metaphorical inference diagrams, and conceptual blending. First, I will explain what a conceptual (metaphor) mapping is in discussing the INTERNET IS A HIGHWAY (INFORMATION HIGHWAY) metaphor system. However, not every portion of the highway domain maps across to the information domain, and some of the parts that do map across may not map across well. I argue that the conceptual mapping is not purely arbitrary but is constrained by embodied image schemas and by internal coherence with other elements of the conceptual mapping. Next, I will examine metaphorical inferences in narratives using several long quotes from Gore's speech. In the United States for example, the Clinton-Gore administration has argued that the U.S. economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s was fueled by the federal commitment to plan and build the interstate highway system, and a similar economic boom would result from a federal commitment to plan and build the information highway. I diagram how each step of this inference is metaphorically mapped from the source domain (transportation highway policy) to the target domain (information infrastructure policy), presenting the metaphorical inferences as parallel knowledge structures.

The wide acceptance of these examples of metaphorical reasoning about U.S. information policy raise general questions 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? In this paper, I claim that metaphorical inferences produce a kind of conceptual blending which takes place between the domains, motivating changes in the world to fit our metaphorical understanding. I conclude that the conceptual blending proposed by Gore and criticized by his critics is constitutive of contemporary U.S. information policy and is transforming the future.

2. The difference between CYBERSPACE and the CYBERFUTURE

The INTERNET IS A HIGHWAY (INFORMATION HIGHWAY) metaphor is without a doubt a wildly successful metaphor, so much so that the phrase information highway is in danger of becoming a cliché. Here are a few initial examples of the metaphor, all of which are direct quotations from news reports and news headlines:

1. Prime minister rides the info-highway
2. White House counts two million cybertourists
3. Potholes along the information highway: if this is the highway, I'd rather hitchhike along a country road
4. AT&T stalled on the info-highway
5. Clearing the roadblocks on japan's information highway
6. Congress suffers wreck on info highway
7. Billions parked on the info-highway--Rep. Jack Fields (R-Texas), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance, thinks industry will respond to telecom reform with billions of dollars in investment: "I'm convinced that the people we talked with have tens of billions of dollars parked on the side of information superhighway waiting for us to pass a piece of legislation to give definition and certainty."
8. Ride sharing on the infobahn-A leading technology merger and acquisition firm sees more convergence in the future. As big business seeks to enter the third wave, it will be looking for easy ways to hitch a ride on the information superhighway: "If Blockbuster can be acquired for $7.9 billion by Viacom, that says that anybody can be a target."
9. CELLULAR: It's still a bumpy highway for data

Most of us typically think of the information highway as something which allows us to move in space, such as allows us to visit--albeit virtually--the White House. I call this the CYBERSPACE case of the INFORMATION HIGHWAY metaphor because we envision ourselves and our computers as traveling through space to another destination. Sometimes we travel to obtain information along the fiber-optic roadways of the internet; at other times we take joyrides without a particular destination in mind. But making full sense of many examples of the metaphor requires a second, slightly different version of the metaphor. Few people realize that there are actually two distinct INFORMATION HIGHWAY metaphors, but when the subsequent article discusses both problems with cellular modems and problems with government regulation, we might realize that the word "bumpy" in example (9) is a pun as it is meaningful in two distinct but related cases of the INFORMATION HIGHWAY metaphor system. The word "bumpy" can refer either to the fact that the cellular transmission of data is still error-prone compared to cabled transmission, or it can refer to the Federal Communications Commission regulatory hurdles companies face in building a cellular information highway in the United States. The former understanding rests on the CYBERSPACE case of the metaphor: errors in data transmission are technological obstacles (bumps) between us and our destinations on the information highway.

In what I call the CYBERFUTURE case of the metaphor, the information highway is a road through time rather than through space. In this case the information highway is a road leading into the future down which we (as persons, as corporations, as nations) must travel. If a person, corporate or national entity does not build and drive on this information highway then it, like AT&T in example (4), will remain hopelessly stalled on the way to the future and become a backward nation, corporation or person. At the end of the cyberfuture's information highway lie visions of technological utopias: for the U.S. Democrats, new job creation rivaling the new job creation during the construction of the interstate highway system; for the U.S. Republicans, the unregulated sale of information-as-goods which comprises the marketplace of ideas. Just as the bumps on the road through cyberspace are the technological glitches which slow our travel on the information highway between one computer and another, bumps on the road through the cyberfuture are the regulatory hurdles standing between us and information nirvana.

As another example of these dual metaphor systems, consider the two different ways in which something can be just around the corner on the information highway. In the CYBERSPACE version, this expression can mean that the right information is never much further than a few mouse clicks away (providing one knows where to look) but in the CYBERFUTURE version saying that something is just around the corner usually means that the something--e.g., digital movies-on-demand or interactive television--will be available soon. In the former usage we highlight the proximity of the goods (information), but in the latter usage we highlight the proximity (or obstacles) to new services in the near future.

These dual metaphors are so intertwined in our experience that they are often confounded. In part this confounding is due to the fact that although the two cases are distinct metaphor systems, they can be deliberately blended together by skillful politicians and other media voices because the two systems frequently cohere in their metaphorical entailments. However, the two cases do not always cohere in every entailment and, as I will argue in section 6, these differences shape much of the debate over U.S. information science policy.

3. Mapping the INFORMATION HIGHWAY

From these examples I can begin working out some preliminary conceptual mappings for the dual INFORMATION HIGHWAY metaphors. A conceptual mapping is given as a list of the correspondences operative between the source and target domains of a metaphor. However, the conceptual mapping of a metaphor is more than a mere list of corresponding words; it is also a claim about a dynamic and flexible set of activation patterns in the brain (Damasio 1995, Edelman 1992). The use of arrows to link the source domain elements to the target domain symbolizes the active and dynamic character of the conceptual mapping in virtue of which a metaphor is a process of thought, not a fixture of language. As Lakoff (1993, p. 208) puts it, metaphors are "not just a matter of language, but of thought and reason. The language is secondary. The mapping is primary in that it sanctions the use of source domain language and inference patterns for target domain concepts." In a conceptual mapping, the initial or ontological correspondences between domains serve as a springboard for mapping inferential relations and entailments between the domains (Gentner & Gentner 1983 and Lakoff 1993). After mapping the major features of the terrain in the dual systems, I discuss further evidence for these mappings from the information policy debate.

But before proceeding I want to consider the objection that the science of metaphors and mappings is fuzzy, arbitrary and so lacking in rigor as to be unfalsifiable. However, as cognitive semanticists are describing dynamic processes which change over time, some fuzziness is inevitable--because change is an intrinsic part of the phenomena. Human beings are continually learning, re-evaluating and modifying their metaphors and their conceptual mappings at all times. Nonetheless, I think there are important strategies which minimize this degree of fuzziness. One important way is to acknowledge that some elements in the mapping are more stable than others; thus, mappings typically try to present the most stable portions of the metaphor first. Another source of fuzziness often results from the fact that some elements of the source domain map equally well to more than one item in the target (for example, vehicles may map to the computer, the operating system, or a particular software application). However, we can describe the pressures which constrain how multivalent mappings are resolved; most dramatically, they are typically constrained by how other important elements of the mapping are instantiated in a particular case (Spellman, Ullman and Holyoak 1993). Thus if vehicle maps to computer, the engine will typically map to the operating system and the steering wheel to the software application. Thus, the important point to remember about conceptual mappings is that they are necessarily constraint-based descriptions of dynamic systems rather than formal logic-based descriptions of discrete-state systems. That is, metaphor systems are necessarily indeterminate but not necessarily unpredictable. As with the mathematics of chaotic systems, we may not predict exactly where the drop of water will fall or to what element of the target certain elements of the source will map, but we can offer a description of the range of possible targets. Finally, it is possible to get a conceptual mapping clearly wrong in at least two ways: first, the mapping between the elements may be unsupported by the evidence--I have seen no evidence supporting a mapping between vehicles and the internet's cabling; second, the metaphor may be stated at the wrong level of generality.

A mapping of the CYBERSPACE case, in which we envision ourselves as traveling through cyberspace along the cable-highways in search of information-goods, is given in Figure 1. The most stable elements of the mapping are given first. For example, the strong visual similarities between highways and cables makes it a particularly stable element of the metaphor; visual similarities such as these are part of what Mark Johnson (1987, p. 29) means by his term "image-schematic structure." An image schema--defined as a recurrent motor or visual pattern common to the activities of bodily experience--typically underlies each mapping (or cluster of mappings) in the metaphor. However image schemas are not just visual, but embodied; they invoke bodily experiences which stretch across multiple sensory modalities. In fact, these other modalities can be so strong that the metaphor can be extended to cover cases where no visual information is present. As an example consider the case of the information skyway: not only do the snarl of cables connecting the various computers, peripherals, etc. which comprise the information highway system visually resemble the snarl of freeways, arterials, collector roads and residential streets which make up the asphalt highway system, but our experiential knowledge of the highways as that which carries goods is so strong that we find it relatively easy to conceive of non-physical highways such as satellite transmission links and broadcast TV (i.e., the information skyway). This non-visual extension of the highway element seems intuitive because the first three elements of the mapping cohere tightly together. If cyberspace is the intangible space in which information-goods travel, then the fleeting and ephemeral pathways of a satellite link can be a highway as real for information as an asphalt highway is for cars, trucks, and tangible goods. Thus I have used the more abstract term "transmission pathways" rather than "cables" because the mapping of highway is underlaid by the image schema of a path.

A mapping of the CYBERFUTURE case is given in figure 2. In this system, the highway maps to a road stretching off into the horizon, where the road is the information highway and the horizon is the future. Though these information highways can still lead us to places in space, their most important function is the destination to which they lead in time--a society transformed by information technology. Traveling along this information highway is moving into the future; thus motion in space is refigured as motion in time. We are on a journey into the future in which various new technologies provide us with our vehicles and in which the quality and amount of information available fuels our rate of travel. The other elements of the mapping are refigured to accommodate these shifts, especially that of the role of information. Instead of transporting information as goods, in this system the technologies transport human beings as goods--people, nations and corporations--into the future. Rather than focusing on the user's understanding of the internet, this case is centered on the telecommunication experts' understanding of the internet as fueling social change. In the cyberfuture the driver's seat is occupied by the expert instead of the user (though the journey will supposedly transform the passengers into drivers and the users into experts).

Having set out the basic structure of the dual mappings, I now turn to discussing how metaphorical reasoning shapes social policy. I will begin by illustrating how Gore's use of the information highway metaphor shapes reasoning about science policy and then discuss how some critical responses are also shaped by the dual cases of the metaphor. I will conclude by examining what it means for metaphors to be constitutive of social policy.

4. Metaphorical reasoning and social policy: How metaphorical inferences work

When U.S. Vice President Gore announced the Clinton administration's National Information Infrastructure initiative in December of 1993, he exploited both versions of the INFORMATION HIGHWAY metaphor. Analyzing his speech illustrates how reasoning about social policy is being shaped by the information highway metaphor. Consider the following excerpts from his speech:

10. It used to be that nations were more or less successful in their competition with other nations depending upon the kind of transportation infrastructure they had. Nations with deep water ports did better than nations unable to exploit the technology of ocean transportation. After World War II, when tens of millions of American families bought automobiles, we found our network of two-lane highways completely inadequate. We built a network of interstate highways. And that contributed enormously to our economic dominance around the world.
    Today, commerce rolls not just on asphalt highways but along information highways. And tens of millions of American families and businesses now use computers and find that the 2-lane information pathways built for telephone service are no longer adequate....
    This kind of growth will create thousands of jobs in the communications industry.

11. To understand what new systems we must create though, we must first understand how the information marketplace of the future will operate.
    One helpful way is to think of the National Information Infrastructure as a network of highways -- much like the Interstates begun in the '50s.
    These are highways carrying information rather than people or goods. And I'm not talking about just one eight-lane turnpike. I mean a collection of Interstates and feeder roads made up of different materials in the same way that roads can be concrete or macadam -- or gravel.
    Some highways will be made up of fiber optics. Others will be built out of coaxial or wireless.
    But -- a key point -- they must be and will be two way roads.
    These highways will be wider than today's technology permits. This is important because a television program contains more information than a telephone conversation; and because new uses of video and voice and computers will consist of even more information moving at even faster speeds. These are the computer equivalent of wide loads. They need wide roads. And these roads must go in both directions.

I have quoted extensive passages from Gore's speech for two reasons. First, I argue in this section that Gore's use of the information highway metaphor extends the mappings of both the CYBERSPACE and the CYBERFUTURE metaphor systems in a manner which has meaningful (and controversial) implications for social policy. I aim to show how metaphorical extensions rely on the inferential structure of the source domain to sanction the projection of a parallel inference in the target domain. While such inferences often go a little awry due to slight but significant incongruities between the domains, a careful working out of the differences in the inferences engendered by the metaphor can still produce useful knowledge. This process of working out incongruities in domains in political rhetoric and legislative defintions is strong evidence for the claim metaphors can come to constitute social policy. Second, I will argue in the next section Gore's speech is a remarkably successful conceptual blend of the CYBERSPACE and CYBERFUTURE metaphor systems, and in generating a blend works many of the incongruous entailments between the two systems. Finally, this conceptual blend has been so successful as to provoke considerable criticism, which I will discuss in the penultimate section of this paper.

In example (10) Gore explains that in the future nations will be more or less economically successful according to how sophisticated their information infrastructure is, arguing that contemporary "commerce rolls not just on asphalt highways but along information highways." Consider how this metaphor draws on the CYBERSPACE version of the metaphor: information highways are conceptualized as transmission pathways carrying commercial goods. Next, Gore extends the metaphor: "And tens of millions of American families and businesses now use computers and find that the 2-lane information pathways built for telephone service are no longer adequate..." Why does Gore highlight the "width" of a highway? Width is an element of the source domain which does not seem to map well to the target. After all, anyone familiar with cabling knows that there is no necessary connection between the width of a cable and the amount of information it carries; for example, thick-wire ethernet cable carries less information than thin-wire ethernet cable. However, in characterizing phone cables as both two-lane highways and inadequate to meet demand, Gore draws on our mundane understanding of how narrow two-lane asphalt highways become choked with traffic as the demand for travel grows. Just as the width of an asphalt highway is proportional to the amount of traffic it can carry, the width of the information highway needs to be proportional to the amount of informational traffic it will carry. Presumably if the existing highway (whether asphalt or phone cables) is too narrow to meet the demand, the highway must be widened to accommodate the traffic.

That is precisely what Gore proceeds to argue. In the final paragraph of example (11) Gore elaborates on the need for wider information highways. He spells out the source of the demand for wider highways: "This is important because a television program contains more information than a telephone conversation; and because new uses of video and voice and computers will consist of even more information moving at even faster speeds." These new video and voice applications require so much more information to be transmitted quickly that he argues that they are "the computer equivalent of wide loads. They need wide roads." Wide loads, he points out, need wide roads; hence we need to plan to widen the information highway.

I have developed a schema for diagramming metaphorical inferences which makes explaining how metaphorical reasoning works much more straightforward (Rohrer 1995). In figure 3 I have both diagrammed Gore's inference and presented the general form of the schema. On the left side of the parallel lines is the source domain inference, and on the right side is the inference which parallels it. The things known about the source domain are listed on the left side with their corresponding metaphorical projection listed on the right. The conclusions to the metaphorical inference--the non-metaphorically entailed understanding and the metaphorically entailed understandings--are listed below horizontal bar. In this particular case, in the source domain we know that conventional highways carry goods, that wider highways can carry more and larger loads of goods, and that vehicles which transport larger loads of goods need wider roads. From those premises Gore implicitly draws a practical conclusion about needing to build wider highways in order to carry these goods, but his explicit conclusion is that we should transfer this reasoning about information policy: namely, that we should build a wider information highway. While it is tempting to argue with Gore's reasoning (and I have many examples of people who do), the important point is that the metaphor is constitutive of social policy by providing the policy with the model within which the reasoning about the meaning of the policy takes place. The schema illustrates this point by diagramming how metaphorical inferences produce parallel knowledge structures.

5. Conceptual blending on the information highway: Gore's vision of the cyberfuture

The previous explanation of Gore's use of the INFORMATION HIGHWAY metaphor is, however, only half of the story, as I have been deliberately oversimplifying matters by presenting an analysis of the speech solely in terms of the CYBERSPACE version of the metaphor. The CYBERSPACE dual is the static side of the information highway metaphor system, hiding the dynamic transformative power of the information highway as an agent of social change. In contrast, the CYBERFUTURE metaphor system foregrounds the power of information technology to transform our lives as time passes and we proceed down the information highway into the cyberfuture. The CYBERFUTURE dual is the dynamic figure to the static ground of the CYBERSPACE dual. Gore uses the dual cases to complement and balance one another as he articulates his vision of the cyberfuture. This kind of combination of two metaphor systems is one type of conceptual blend as Turner and Fauconnier (1995) describe them. In a conceptual blend a mapping of one mental space into another--for example, when we say that the first-place yacht in a transatlantic sailing match is currently fifteen hours ahead of last year's race, we superimpose the position of the yacht from previous years onto the current race, creating a conceptual blend of the two mental spaces which makes the comparison possible. Gore's speech blends the imagery of the CYBERSPACE system together with the imagery of the CYBERFUTURE system into a coherent information policy.

Probably no part of Gore's speech has drawn more criticism than his vision of the cyberfuture, because Gore uses the language of traveling into the future on the information highway to emphasize that the federal government should play a significant policy-making role in developing the national information infrastructure--a position highly unpopular with the internet's largely anti-government libertarian constituency. In the opening paragraph of (10) Gore makes four basic points about the source domain: first, that nations have historically been more or less successful depending on their transportation infrastructure; second, that postwar social forces fueled a rising consumer demand for automobiles in the U.S.; third, that the extant U.S. network of two-lane highways was inadequate to meet the increased demand; and fourth, that the U.S. pursued a purposeful national transportation policy to build an interstate highway system which contributed to U.S. economic success around the world. In the second paragraph of (11) Gore refigures those four points when he introduces the CYBERSPACE case by remarking "Today, commerce rolls not just on asphalt highways but along information highways." This statement compels us to consider how the four points about highways have implications for the target domain. Gore even maps the third point across for us in his subsequent point about many Americans finding that the existing telecommunications network is already inadequate to meet demand.

After a long (and omitted herein) litany of examples illustrating how information technology is improving lives and spurring economic growth, Gore uses the CYBERFUTURE case to articulate the impetus behind the National Information Infrastructure proposal:

12. But the biggest impact may be in other industrial sectors where those technologies will help American companies compete better and smarter in the global economy. Today, more than ever, businesses run on information .... If we do not move decisively to ensure that America has the information infrastructure we need every business and consumer in America will suffer. What obstacles lie ahead in the rush to the future?

Example (12) illustrates how Gore skillfully blends the CYBERSPACE to the CYBERFUTURE version of the metaphor. Gore has previously set up a mental space in which we imagine information as commercial goods traveling along information highways to us and to other people, the image established by examples (10) and (11). In a second mental space of the CYBERFUTURE we imagine that we are moving along the information highway and moving into the future, in vehicles (businesses) which are fueled by information. To conclude that governmental action is necessary to plan the information highway, Gore blends these two spaces together into a third integrated conceptual space.

In example (12) Gore establishes a blended space in which moving along the information highway means acting to ensure that the infrastructure of the information highway is built to take us to the right place in the future, one which will ensure both that the U.S. economy will remain strong in a global economy and that U.S. consumers will maintain a high standard of living due to the ability of the information highway to bring us quality goods on demand. If we do not move along the cyberfuture's information highway, our cyberspace economy will suffer. To move decisively into the future would be to debate and enact a national information policy, which would presumably clear away some of the regulatory obstacles which lie ahead on the cyberfuture's information highway. In the blended space, movement on the highway is simultaneously both building the information highway's pathways (CYBERSPACE) and travelling on the information highway's road into the future (CYBERFUTURE). Gore concludes in (13) that the federal government needs to lead the way in supplying the principles which shape the information marketplace of the future:

13. That's what the future will look like -- say, in ten or fifteen years. But how do we get from here to there? This is the key question for the government. It is during the transition period that the most complexity exists and that government involvement is the most important.

The "here" and "there" in example (13) are not simply spatializations of times, but refer to the status of currently ill-defined information legislation and an unbuilt information infrastructure ("here"), and to a future of better-defined information legislation and a built information infrastructure ("there"). Thus Gore blends the two versions of the INFORMATION HIGHWAY metaphor in order to argue for government involvement in planning both the building of the information highway is and the destination to which it will take us. Figure 4 diagrams the metaphorical inference in this blended space.

By introducing the proposed revisions to telecommunications law as embarking on a journey to implement a national information highway, Gore extends the metaphorical inference previously outlined into a vision of the future. This extended inference is diagrammed in figure 4. In this conceptual blend, our cultural understanding of how difficult journeys can transform the travelers is blended with our understanding of how our journey down the information highway into the future will transform our lives. In the blended space, successfully meeting the challenges of the cyberfuture becomes narratively mapped onto successfully completing a spiritual quest. Setting out a proposal for information policy is to embark on the journey, and the transformative potential of information is the potential of the journey to effect transformation of the national spirit. As the formation and the debate over information highway policy (the route of the journey) progresses, the society (the travelers) are transformed. However, since choosing the route involves both building the information highway and forming information policy, both the economy and the principles which govern it will be transformed. Building the information highway is both laying the conduits on which information travels and transforming the U.S. federal regulatory system to provide needed legislative definitions to adjudicate commercial transactions in the future. Since the information highway is both the means to and the end of its own construction, it is a particularly rich example of how metaphors constitute social policy. In Gore's blended space, the information highway is both figure and ground; we must travel the highway even as we build it.

6. Policing the Infobahn: CyberCrime From Software Piracy to Criminal Bureaucrats

Intellectual property, whether in printed or electronic form, is often subject to theft as it travels from author/publisher to end user. Such theft en route is typically called piracy. Protection from intellectual property piracy has grown substantially more difficult as reproducing information has become easier by various technological developments from the printing press to the photocopier to the computer. The concept software piracy shaped and still shapes most of the contemporary controversies about copyright law and intellectual property. However, while concerns about piracy continue, consider the shift in the identity of the criminals in the following set of examples culled from the media:

14. Finnish executives jailed for software piracy
15. Info highway needs policing: Copyright recommendations for the digital age
16. Trespassing on the internet: "I think intellectual property is more like land, and copyright violation is more like trespass. Even though you don't take anything away from the landowner when you trespass, most people understand and respect the laws that make it illegal. The real crime in copyright violation is not the making of the copies, it's the expropriation of the creator's right to control the creation," says the founder of ClariNet Communication Corp.
17. Highway cops: How federal regulation of the telecommunication industry limits potential growth for the information superhighway
18. Information highway robbery: Government regulation of cable industry impedes development of information superhighway, derails Bell Atlantic/TCI merger

In the examples (14) through (16) the criminals are those who steal information (i.e. hackers), but in (17) and (18) the criminals are those who block progress (i.e. government and other busybodies). This difference can be explained by considering how the CYBERSPACE and CYBERFUTURE metaphors have a figure-ground structure which engenders reversed metaphorical entailments about what constitutes cybercrimes.

The concept of software piracy is entailed by the CYBERSPACE version of the INFORMATION HIGHWAY metaphor. The logic engendered by the metaphor is straightforward: If information is a good, and the goods are being shipped to a destination for purchase, then the theft of the goods while en route to purchasers is an act of piracy. The goods (typically software programs) are hijacked and illegally distributed, thus depriving the creator of potential sales. Since software programs are easily copied, enforcement of software copyright law has tended to focus on those who widely distribute the pirated goods, either when repackaged for sale or when distributed over telecommunications networks such as the internet or electronic bulletin board services. Such criminals are dubbed software pirates.

The most important point about the CYBERSPACE system is not that software theft is understood as piracy; instead it is the way in which we conceptualize information which engenders the piracy entailment. In conceptualizing information as goods, information becomes an object which can be bought, sold, traded, and stolen. Like land, information becomes a kind of property-something which can be marked out, paced off, and bounded like land. Once information is defined as a property, the title to it can be traded as a commodity in much the same way as any other object. The CYBERSPACE understanding of information is precisely the one embedded in the tradition of intellectual property law. Eric Nee (1994) makes this issue plain in example (19):

19. Similarly, just as the assigning of private property rights to land and capital were critical for the First Wave and Second Wave economies to take off, so is the extension of property rights to the intellectual world necessary for the Third Wave to take off. Some on the utopian fringe believe that cyberspace will result in the end of intellectual property rights with all knowledge free and available, but all that would result from that approach would be the collapse of the system.

The conceptualization of information as goods (and as properties) relies on an understanding of information as fundamentally static; that is, as something definite which can either be packaged for sale or parceled out for sale.

No one denies that the peculiarly fluid quality of electronic information creates problems for understanding information as goods in the CYBERSPACE metaphor. Consider the situation of copyright law: The information available over the world wide web, for example, is copied every time it is accessed-posing peculiar problems for copyright laws geared to dealing with information encoded in tangible objects like books (or their CD-ROM editions). In fact, it is precisely problem areas such as this one which have motivated the intense debate about the CYBERFUTURE case as an alternative. For example, radical opponents (e.g. Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation) of copyright law as currently applied to software have charged that since the software pirate takes nothing tangible away from the creator, the piracy entailment of the CYBERSPACE metaphor is not only inappropriate but downright misleading about the role of the software pirate in bringing about the cyberfuture. In characterizing intellectual property crime as more like trespass on land than hijacking goods, example (18) seeks to offer a resolution from within the CYBERSPACE framework to this difficulty about what is taken away in an act of software piracy.

While it remains to be seen how workable a conception this retooled analogy will be, I believe this defense can only be successful as long as the terms of the debate are defined by the CYBERSPACE metaphor system. Furthermore, this resolution cannot be successful in the CYBERFUTURE system, because one cannot trespass on information if it is conceptualized as a dynamic substance (fuel) rather than as a static substance (land/goods). The static understanding of information in the CYBERSPACE system is anamethea to the radical utopians; they propose re-envisioning our intellectual property system around precisely those fluid qualities of information which are problematic to the CYBERSPACE system. In the CYBERFUTURE metaphor system, software pirates are no longer criminals but instead are the heroes who are bringing technological utopia closer.

The CYBERFUTURE system conceptualizes information as fundamentally a dynamic process undergoing constant change--that is, as a transformative force bringing about the future. In the CYBERFUTURE case of the INFORMATION HIGHWAY metaphor information is conceptualized as the fuel of the future. Nee's utopian fringe advocating the abolition of intellectual property are simply being true to the entailments of the CYBERFUTURE metaphor. The logic engendered by the metaphor is simple: If information is what fuels the rapid process of technological change, and if we both desire to be (and in fact are) on our way into the information age, then anyone or anything which impedes our motion toward that destination is blocking our right-of-way and slowing our progress. Just as with the shift from a stationary to a moving observer in the metaphors for time (Lakoff 1993; Johnson 1993), the shift from a static to a dynamic conceptualization of information reverses the metaphorical entailments about what constitutes crime on the information highway.

Whereas the primary criminal activity in CYBERSPACE is software piracy, the CYBERFUTURE view identifies the primary criminal activity as blocking the road to the future. Two possible sets of culprits are usually fingered: government bureaucrats and intellectual property lawyers. Government bureaucrats are seen as interfering with and slowing down the rush toward information nirvana by parasitically saddling the entrepreneurs and technologists with regulations designed to ensure public access and participation. Intellectual property law is seen as an attempt to privatize and make static the dynamic and transformative power of traveling the information highway by slowing down the rapid spread of information. For example, instead of envisioning intellectual property laws as protecting the property rights of the software programmer, in this conceptualization they fence out software programmers thereby depriving them of useful tools which they need to share as they build the information highway. Since both government regulations and intellectual property laws are perceived as unnecessary brakes on the rush to the technological utopia of the future, they are both criminal activities. In fact, instead of advocating the criminalization of copyright violation, some of the most radical techno-utopians argue that we should revere those hackers who "liberate quarantined information" (i.e., pirate software) when they do it in order to advance us on the road to techno-utopia. Like the gun-slinging outlaws who became town marshals in the mythology of the American West, in the mythology of the cyberfuture's electronic frontier the hackers become the law-givers, and the old law and order set is reconstituted as the criminals.

The CYBERFUTURE system motivates different responses to the problems of intellectual property rights. While in example (16) the founder of Clarinet Corp. argued that copyright violation of electronic property was better understood as trespass rather than piracy, John Perry Barlow (as quoted in Dyson, Gilder, Keyworth and Toffler, 1994) insighfully argues that the central issue is the conceptualization of electronic information as objects or properties, and that the real problem--how creators are to continue being paid for their work--can be within the CYBERFUTURE system if we conceive informational goods as performances:

20. One existing model for the future conveyance of intellectual property is real-time performance, a medium currently used only in theater, music, lectures, stand-up comedy and pedagogy. I believe the concept of performance will expand to include most of the information economy, from multi-casted soap operas to stock analysis. In these instances, commercial exchange will be more like ticket sales to a continuous show than the purchase of discrete bundles of that which is being shown.

Barlow's imaginative suggestions hinge on a dynamic conceptualization of information. Information is valuable only insofar as it fuels about transformation; hence what is needed is not better protection of the information from others but simply a way to pay information-creators based on the timeliness and usefulness of their information; presumably the more transformative the information, the more money the creator will make. Thus Barlow argues that if electronic information is different in kind from information which must be encoded in physical objects (books, CDs, celluloid, etc.), then intellectual property law must be radically reconceived with real-time performance as the normative conception of what constitutes a good The conceptualization of information as dynamic compels him to conclude not only that electronic information is in fact different in kind, but that the vision of the CYBERFUTURE requires that we must allow this difference to transform our reasoning about intellectual property.

Finally, proponents of the CYBERFUTURE system advocate that their vision of the cyberfuture is a historical inevitability, for the future will arrive and it will necessarily be different from the past. Like all utopian visions, it seeks to impress us not only with the quality of life in this idealized world, but with the inevitability of this idealized world. Thus information is conceptualized as a tidal wave of change which sweeps us along, or as a revolution which fundamentally alters our governmental institutions. Moreover, since proponents of this view see themselves as scientists and technologists responsible to natural law rather than human law, they see our arrival at a technological utopia as inevitable--a position perhaps best summed up by the old cliché "one doesn't argue with the laws of physics." The painful human dislocations caused by the onslaught of progress are regrettable but inevitable.

7. Conclusion

I have argued that different problems and solutions to those problems are figured prominently by each of the dual cases of the INFORMATION HIGHWAY metaphor system. The conceptual mappings of the metaphor system are resolved in accordance with the valency of key elements in the source domain, resulting in the two dual cases. These dual cases drive various metaphorical inferences which both set problems for and provide solutions to problems in information technology. Gore's highly successful conceptual blend of the dual metaphor systems traded on blending the building of the information highway's pathways with the power of information to fuel future social change, setting the stage for a complex metaphorical inference about the role and degree of governmental involvement in constrcuting this highway. Critics of Gore's conclusion argued that we should reject the blended space and the inferences engendered by the CYBERSPACE metaphor in favor of re-imagining intellectual property law using the dynamic conception of information as understood in the CYBERFUTURE system.

Finally, taken as a whole these examples of the debate over information policy in the U.S. serve to illustrate how metaphors can come be constitutive of a social policy. For example, both proposals concerning reimbursement for intellectual property illustrate how the debate over information policy is shaped by which version of the INFORMATION HIGHWAY system serves as the metaphorical ground. For Barlow and the many other critics of U.S. information technology policy who are dedicated to re-envisioning the future in a way consonant with a dynamic conceptualization of information, the information highway metaphor system is highly misleading-in no small part because they oppose Gore's use of a blended information highway metaphor to argue for a federal regulatory role in planning for the future. Successfully countering the success of Gore's blend requires offering an equally transformative view of their own.

Such a project may even require abandoning the INFORMATION HIGHWAY metaphor entirely and proposing radically different metaphors to prefigure the transition that the dynamic view of information produces; for example, Dyson, Gilder, Keyworth and Toffler (1994) propose that the internet is better understood as a bioelectronic environment:

21. More ecosystem than machine, cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment that is literally universal: It exists everywhere there are telephone wires, coaxial cables, fiber-optic lines or electromagnetic waves.
    This environment is "inhabited" by knowledge, including incorrect ideas, existing in electronic form. It is connected to the physical environment by portals which allow people to see what's inside, to put knowledge in, to alter it, and to take knowledge out. Some of these portals are one-way (e.g. television receivers and television transmitters); others are two-way (e.g. telephones, computer modems).

To highlight the dynamic character of information, the INTERNET AS ENVIRONMENT metaphor begins by postulating that electronic information is alive. It remains to be seen whether this metaphor or any other offering by administration critics will be able to supplant Gore's blend of the INFORMATION HIGHWAY metaphor as the dominant metaphor guiding U.S. information policy.

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