Packets and metaphor
Posted on March 01, 2002 @ 09:57 in Research
Fascinating stuff in Hafner & Lyon's Where Wizards Stay Up Late. One of the things that I'm very interested in is how language and metaphor shape the world we live in and the ways we live by (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). When Hafner & Lyon describe the origins of packet-switching, they recount the story of American Paul Baran, who first developed the idea of a real-time store-and-foreward system for sending blocks of data over a shared line. Baran jokingly called it "hot potato routing" and
[a]s the term "hot potato" suggests, no sooner did a message block enter a node than it was tossed out the door again as quickly as possible. If the best outgoing path was busy - or blown to bits - the message block was automatically sent out over the next best route, and so forth. (Hafner & Lyon, 1996: 62)
On the other side of the Atlantic, unaware of Baran's efforts, Donald Davies was working on a similar scheme, but Davies realized that naming the system properly could very much contribute to the acceptance of then fairly radical ideas, and he settled on the name "packet-switching".
Davies' choice of the word "packet" was very deliberate. "I thought it was important to have a new word for one of the short pieces of data which traveled separately," he explained. "This would make it easier to talk about them." There were plenty of other possibilities - block, unit, section, segment, frame. "I hit on the word packet," he said, "in the sense of small package." Before settling on the word, he asked two linguists form a research team in his lab to confirm that there were cognates in other languages. When they reported back that it was a good choice, he fixed on it. Packet-switching. It was precise, economic, and very British. And it was far easier on the ear than Baran's [official terminology] "distributed adaptive message block switching." Davies met Baran for the first time several years later. He told Baran that he had been throroughly embarrassed to hear of Baran's work after he had finished his own, but then added, "Well, you may have got there first, but I got the name." (Hafner & Lyon, 1996: 67)
And getting the name right is so very important, because as Davies notes, it makes it easier to talk and think about. Calling those series of electronic pulses "packets" imbues them with metaphorical qualities of fysical objects: the stuff we're used to handling in our everyday world. Talking about them as "packets" makes it possible to imagine uses and ways of treating them in particular ways that directly relate to the connotations of the word. Making understanding things easier is the work of metaphor, but we should remain vigilant about unintended effects of using a particular metaphors, because by the same token that a metaphor brings to light certain aspects that enable us to meaningfully interact with or act on a certain phenomenon, it obscures other facets that might be equally important. No light without shadow and as we know it's easy to overlook those things in the shadows when the stuff in the light shines so brightly.
(Hafner, Katie & Matthew Lyon (1996) Where Wizards Stay Up Late. The Origins of the Internet. New York: Touchstone, 1998;
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)
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