Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (96 page)

It’s another matter, though, when the discrepancies involve central aspects of the familiar category; the naïve analogy can then give rise to serious confusions. For instance, at one time Apple systems required users who wished to eject a disk to drag its icon into the trash. Many users balked at doing so: it struck them that there was a fair chance that taking such an action would delete all the data on the disk. The analogy behind this reaction was so natural and irrepressible that even experienced users couldn’t help but feel a twinge of uncertainty when dragging their disk into the trash, as if this operation, no matter how many times they’d done it before, was still just a tiny bit risky: “Uh-oh… Could it be that this time all my files will get erased and will be lost forever?” It’s as if they were imagining that the computer itself was thinking by analogy, and that it might get confused like a human and, by error, throw all the disk’s contents away. (“Oops! Sorry about that! I got a little distracted and when I saw you’d dragged the disk’s icon into the trash, I just tossed everything on it out. Silly me! I’d forgotten that for disks I’m not supposed to do that, but should just eject them.”)

In light of this common fear, should one infer that Apple’s user-interface designers suffered from a fleeting “senior moment” when they decided that dragging the disk icon into the trash was the natural way to say, “Please eject the disk”? Not really. They were simply presuming that users would easily jump to a higher level of abstraction than
obliteration
when they dragged the disk icon into the trash — say, to a concept such as
getting rid of something no longer relevant.
However, as it turned out, this presumption overestimated the typical user’s mental fluidity. When the designers finally realized this, they removed the ambiguity in subsequent versions. Nowadays, whenever the icon for a disk is brought near the wastebasket icon, the latter magically mutates into a different icon denoting ejection rather than destruction.

Another striking example of the failure of a naïve analogy involves the virtual desktop. Usually, the hard disk is represented as sitting
on
the desktop (or possibly in the workspace, which is itself on the desktop). But the fact of the matter is that all the data in memory are stored on the hard disk, and this includes the entire desktop. There is thus an apparent paradox, with the disk being
on
the desktop and the desktop being
inside
the disk. What sense does it make for A to be on top of B, while B is at the same time inside A? This shows that at times naïve analogies cannot fully do the job they were intended to do. To be sure, we humans can live with small inconsistencies on our computers just as we do in life in general, but sometimes this little paradox does cause genuine confusion, as when a user wants to locate the desktop in the computer’s memory. Interface designers, after recognizing the possible confusion due to this naïve analogy, eventually made a patch. Today the hard disk is no longer shown as being located
on
the desktop; instead, it is simply accessible through it. Still, it took designers some twenty years to take care of this small problem.

Not all naïve analogies designed to help people use computers more easily are rooted in pre-computer experiences, because today computers are familiar enough that some of their best-known properties can themselves be exploited as sources for naïve analogies. Indeed, something that was once understood only by analogy can eventually become familiar enough that it can act in turn as the source for new analogies. This happens not only with technological devices, but in all aspects of life. For example, sound waves, which were first understood by analogy to water waves, became in turn, many centuries later, the analogical basis for understanding light waves.

The world of computers is thus starting to yield sources for its own analogies. For example, the notion of a
floppy disk
, which for many years was the standard device on which one saved all one’s files, was originally understood by analogy to a vinyl record. But once floppies had become familiar to all computer users, thanks to their widespread use in the 1980s and 1990s, they became the source for new analogies. And thus even today, the icon that stands for saving a file is frequently a stylized picture of a floppy. This is ironic, since writing a file onto a floppy disk is almost unheard of today; floppies have long since been supplanted by internal and external hard disks, CDs and DVDs, flash drives, and so forth (each of these, after a brief day in the sun, gave way to newer technologies). Although the floppy-disk icon is still found in some software, it is a remnant of a bygone era — a bit like the stylized pictures of ancient bicycles with huge front wheels that were sometimes used, not too long ago, to indicate bike lanes in the U.S. — and it’s a safe bet that this icon will soon go the way of floppies themselves. As the objects themselves are no longer around, the concept of
floppy disk
is approaching extinction. Children who see the square icon don’t know where it comes from, and the recent tendency is to make the icon for file-saving look like a hard disk instead.

Because of their constant and increasing presence in our lives, computers and related technologies have recently turned into a rich source of categories that, through their great familiarity to us, can serve as rich new sources for analogies. This is a curious twist, since computers, for most of their brief existence, have standardly been explained through analogies to phenomena in the physical world, but today, the reverse is happening: that is, physical things are coming to be described through analogies to phenomena in the world of digital technology. For example, a recent television ad for an SUV crowed, “Think of it as a search engine helping you to browse the real world!” Who would have predicted such a reversal of roles? This tendency will surely increase, ushering in unpredictable changes in society.

Take the concept of
multitasking.
This was a clever invention of the 1960s allowing a computer to execute several distinct processes concurrently by breaking each process into tiny steps and doing a single step of process #1, then a step of process #2, and so on, thus interleaving the various processes so finely that, to all appearances, they are all
being carried out simultaneously. But in our lives today, the concept of
multitasking
is routinely applied to human beings and their activities. Thus, sentences like “As a single mom, believe me, I’m constantly multitasking!” and “Every morning on my way to work, I sip my mocha, yak on the phone, savor the scenery, and listen to music, all while driving my car — I’m such a multitasker!” are standard parlance. Indeed, the computer origin of the term has begun to fade out of view. Here are definitions of it taken from two dictionaries a couple of decades apart:

As this comparison shows, the term was purely technical in the 1980s, whereas today many people use it fluently for everyday activities, having no idea that it came from computer science or even has
any
technical application! There was a transition period where the analogical extension was explicitly felt by people who knew they were stretching the concept, but after a while, the stretching had been accomplished, and the term, stripped of its original technical connotations, entered the public lexicon.

Another computer term that has been imported into daily life is “to interface”, which originally meant adapting two pieces of hardware or software so that they would work together seamlessly, but which is now used in such nontechnical phrases as “The gay community needs to interface much more with the black community.”

The term “core dump” was used for decades to mean a printout of the entire contents of a computer’s main memory (once called “core”); this was a somewhat desperate measure that could help in pinpointing very recalcitrant bugs. But it was analogically extended to daily life, with the result that today nontechnical people say things like, “Sorry for going on and on so long — I didn’t mean to give you a brain dump!” What is preserved is the abstract idea of visibly or audibly outputting a huge amount of information that normally is invisibly stored in some kind of memory device.

Another computer concept that has recently enjoyed considerable popularity as the source of casual conversational analogies is
cut-and-paste.
Thus, a television newscaster describes a political candidate’s speeches as being “cut-and-pasted from her previous speeches”, a newspaper describes attempts to cut-and-paste Silicon Valley into various European countries, and a book reviewer criticizes a new book by saying, “This book is just a cut-and-paste of other books on the same subject; I learned nothing new from it.”

The notion of
debugging a computer program
is yet another fertile source of imagery for everyday life. Thus a salsa dancer says, “I’m working on debugging my Latin hip
motion — my hips always move in the wrong direction”, while a Chinese teacher says, “You really have got to debug your tones — they’re all mixed up!”

And finally, a few miscellaneous examples of the insidious manner whereby computer terminology worms its way into everyday discourse. One business executive confides to another: “I’d really like to have your input on this matter.” A medical-school student sighs: “Every so often, I just need to disconnect from this crazy routine.” An advertisement exhorts: “Reboot your brain with a caffeine nap!”

Taken together, these examples provide another pillar of support for the thesis of the first two chapters that word choices are made via analogies, and that word-choice analogies are usually (though not always) made unconsciously. Take the computer-science term “multitasking”, for instance. In the first few years of its existence, the idea of applying it to some kind of
human
behavior was a choice available only to computer-savvy people, and for them the computer-to-human analogical bridge was built with deliberateness and delight. Pushing a word’s range outwards is fun (because making inventive analogies is fun). Eventually, however, this extended sense of the term leaked, by osmosis, into the much broader community of non-computer-savvy people, and at that point, using the term didn’t require building an analogical bridge linking a human behavior to an arcane computational trick (after all, these speakers knew nothing of that trick); the analogical bridge was simply to
human
behaviors that had been labeled by the catchy new term. But no matter which set of speakers we focus on — technically savvy or technically non-savvy — we see that it’s always analogy in the driver’s seat, always analogy that is handing words to speakers, and often handing them words on such convenient silver platters that, to them, their word choices seem to have taken place instantly, naturally, effortlessly, and without any help from analogy-making. That silver platter was just magically
there.
Of course, that’s an illusion — just another case where the human mind, not surprisingly, fails to be aware of the seething activity constantly going on below the surface of its familiar linguistic behavior.

Sometimes it’s not the choice of a computer-oriented
word
that betrays the tendency of technical ideas to slip into everyday thinking, but simply a computer-oriented
habit
that unconsciously pops up and tries to insinuate itself into an unfamiliar new situation. After all, when one is constantly dealing with technology and using the Web on a day-in day-out basis, one can’t help starting to see this familiar old world with fresh new eyes. This can happen, for instance, when one is trying to find a favorite passage in a book. While randomly flipping through its pages, seeking the desired passage much like someone seeking a needle in a haystack, one can easily grow very frustrated, since one is painfully aware that if one only had an on-line version of the book, it would be a piece of cake to find the desired passage.

The following anecdotes illustrate the very human and very natural — indeed, irresistible — tendency for computer-based concepts to pop to mind in everyday situations as if they applied, when in fact they don’t apply at all (or at least not yet!).