Word: metaphors
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That overstates the case, but there's something to what Levy says. The crux of his argument is that the Mac moved computer users into the realm of metaphor. By making the internal workings of a machine as cozy as a living room, the Macintosh allowed people to feel at ease in cyberspace, that "ephemeral territory perched on the lip of math and firmament," as Levy describes it, or, more simply, "the place where my information lives...
...central metaphor of the Mac is the desktop. Like a typical office, the Macintosh screen is filled with folders, documents and stacks of paper. There is even a trash can for throwing things away. Rather than having to memorize ^ abstract commands like A: INSTALL, Macintosh users simply point and click...
...Macintosh, the medium is the metaphor, and users begin to think not in words but in symbols. Paint programs come equipped with electronic pencils, paint buckets, spray cans and erasers. Desktop-publishing programs come with electronic scissors and pasteboards. Photographs are processed in electronic darkrooms; digital movies are spliced in electronic videotape editors...
...mice. Ironically, Microsoft's Bill Gates, whose company owned the operating system at the heart of the IBM-PC, was plotting all the while to shift the entire market to the Mac way of doing things. Today, two-thirds of the computers that use Apple's desktop metaphor are made by the company's competitors...
There is more to a computer than its metaphor, of course. Charles Piller, author of The Fail-Safe Society, argues that it was the PC itself, not the so- called user interface, that drove the computer revolution. "The automobile altered society in fundamental ways," says Piller. "The automatic transmission did not." But it is not always clear where metaphor ends and reality begins. Linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest in Metaphors We Live By that when people accept a metaphor like "argument is war," with such attendant expressions as "attack a position" and "indefensible," it actually changes how they...