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January 27, 2006

Protect Your System Against Viruses

It isn't that we don't appreciate metaphors

In the interest of fighting flu season (and the attendant absenteeism that negatively impacts productivity and allows key milestones to slip), the powers that be around the office have launched an internal awareness campaign to encourage employees to take steps to prevent sickness and the transmission thereof. Things like little Purel in your mailbox with notes attached. And, of course, some posters in the hallways.

The posters show two soapy entwined hands splashing around beneath a faucet and read, in a nod and a wink to the target audience, "Protect Your System Against Viruses." Get it! Protect your system (you!) against viruses (the biological version of computer viruses!). That is, they use a metaphor in order to explain the object/ idea that was the basis of that metaphor.

A couple things here:

(1) Is there some fancy figure of speech for this? Something like aporia or metalepsis?

(2) Let's take a moment to pause and celebrate the virus as Western Culture's most compelling and dominant metaphor/ meme of the past 20 years. (I'd feel more clever about pointing that out if Neal Stephenson hadn't written a totally sweet novel about it 15 years ago.)

(3) I think something like this just gets lost in the wash at a technology company because the whole thing is usually a metaphor. The pace of innovation in technology and engineering is surely outstripping the ability of the language to keep pace, so we use familiar ideas to describe unfamiliar things. I don't mean to state the obvious; just trying to come up with a reasonable (where "reasonable" = "less snarky and adolescent") explanation for the poster.

Posted by thatkid at January 27, 2006 10:41 PM under ThatKid

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