# 04｜From Window to Windows - Why Metaphor Matters in Digital World By [Rhei's Diary](https://paragraph.com/@elixirrr) · 2022-05-26 --- Introduction ------------ A metaphor is not just rhetoric but an invisible web that underlies the way we speak and think. It allows us to give structure to abstract concept by using knowledge of familiar experience. From the traditional window to computer operation system, the way people communicate and interact with outside world has dramatically changed. In a metaphorical way, this essay starts from the ancient Chinese character of window, illustrates how historically window invites people to connect with nature, body and people, and how it lost its metaphorical meaning in today’s digital interface, which leads to fragmentation and depthlessness of language, loss of connection and endangered identity. By discussing the evolvement of mnemonic medium and its relationship between language, image and memory, the essay intends to evoke readers’ reconsideration of the possibility of languages and tradition that may help people find a balance between the digitally mediated life and the original one. Window as metaphor ------------------ The oldest representation of window in Chinese hieroglyph is a circle with three little curled bars in it. By looking at what we call window today, we may speculate that windows in ancient times are holes covered by tree branches or outlets through which a swirl passes. It seems that the basic function of windows has not changed much in time: to let air and light in. Interestingly, the word has a similar root in English. The Oxford dictionary tells us that window is from Old Norse vindauga, literally meaning “wind eye”. And before that the Anglo-Saxons words were éagthyrl, literally “eye hole”, and éagduru, literally “eye door” (Cresswell, 2010). There is an old saying goes “the eyes are the window to the soul”. By using this proverb, children are taught to keep their eyes clean while adults are taught to keep their mind clean. It also indicates the profound relationship between window, body and emotion. Driven by fear we stay indoors and driven by curiosity we open the window. When windows are shut, we are in dark; when eyes are shut, we are in dream. It is through window that neighbors greet, thieves sneak in, lovers elope, Snow White gets the poisonous apple. Window does not only give us a view of outside world, but also allows communication and interaction between people and nature. In a beautiful prose written by Qian Zhongshu (1941), a window “entices the wind and sun to come in so that the house can capture a part of spring” (Tam, 2012). Therefore, people can enjoy nature at home instead of looking for it outdoors. As a traditional and indispensable part of enclosed spaces, of dwellings, of home, window opens the door for air, senses and messages which mediates the private and public space as well as balance our desire of settling and adventure. Metaphor as window ------------------ Before everything was given a shape in written words, myths and stories were passing around by words of mouth, accompanied by music and dance. One’s memory was embodied in his presence and performance. Before the written history, another method was invented by ancestors to record ordinary things and events by tying knots in ropes. The ropes were made of colored materials such as fibers and wool yarns; the knots were made in different ways in different sizes and positions on strings. Khipu, a Quechua word meaning “knot”, is a counting system used in Inca empire. With a primary cord and parallel strings hung from it, khipus could have more than eight million combinations (Schmidt & dos Santos, 2017). From a single rope to a net-like curtain, khipus embodied the expanded range of human experience (more assets were being collected and controlled) as well as the emergence of order and arrangement (a numeration system emerged). Knots were used as a mnemonic medium that people encode and decode information by watching, touching and counting. By using the same codes, memories were shared among different tribes. But these tactile-sense related experience gradually disappear in ideography as in Chinese characters. The earliest version of characters was made by capturing and emphasizing the features of things of nature. In Shang dynasty, a wizard would communicate with gods and carve characters on surface of animal bones to record the oracle and process of divination before important activities were held. Characters were mysterious because they evoke images, and that is the same way people locate events in memory. Unlike phonetic script, a traditional Chinese character can represent complicated and abstract relationships between things and human. Take “door (mén)” for example, the ancient character means two opposite-opened doors, composed by two “door (hù)”s which refer to households, and character “door (mén)” shares a same structural component with character “hearing (wén)”, inside which there is a “ear (ěr)”, indicating unlike walls, doors can allow sound to be heard. Therefore, functioning like bricks, Chinese characters were shaped and reshaped, used and reused, moved and removed, dismantled and reconstituted, combined with different phonetic components, transforming with rise and fall of dynasties, being read, written, spoken and listened by people who are connected by them. Meanwhile, as territory was expanded by a united nation, language also expanded abstract space in people’s mind. By writing they grasp their thoughts and by reading they see others’ lives. The enriched and stabilized memory of history and personal practices generated fertile soil for symbols and analogies, which led to proliferation of implicit relationships between subjects and objects. Thus, characters were no more confined to a two-dimensional representation on surface but encoded with energy which could lead to a chain reaction to enlarge the space of abstraction. A large and flexible reference system had been built by combining and appropriating each character in different way. Assigned with new meanings by time, words can change context and create new viewpoint thus give new expressions of stories. Besides, the succinct and elusive metaphors concealed in ancient poetry as well as in modern literature have largely protected the safety and creativity of writers. Additionally, when a foreign object is looking for a place in different context, metaphor also plays an important role to settle it in new environment. When mechanical watches and clocks were first introduced to China, there were no corresponding words to refer to each part of the timepiece. Escapement, a mechanism used to provide periodic impulses to the pendulum or balance wheel, was translated as “qin zong”, literally “capture and indulge”, more referred as a stratagem in war in the past, meaning “allow somebody more latitude first to keep a tighter rein on him afterwards”. And the English word “escapement” could also be traced back to Old French eschaper, based on medieval Latin ex-“out” and cappa-“cloak” (Cresswell, 2010). Compared with Chinese, words and phrases in English are organized in a linear order, following a stronger logic. On the other hand, it makes dissection easier, providing writers with more possibilities to play with the structure and sculpt space in pages. Masters of metaphors are good at making collages of connections woven between lines and invite readers to take adventure in the rabbit hole of imagination. Serbian novelist Milorad Pavić divides arts into “reversible” and “nonreversible”. The “reversible” arts enable people approach to the work in their own way, change their perspective according their own preference (Pavić, 1998). Trying to make the on-way road literature reversible, he makes his lexicon novel Dictionary of the Khazars end differently according to the alphabet of different languages; his second novel Landscape painted with Tea ends in various way depending on whether the novel is read by a male or female, vertically or horizontally (Pavić, 1998). By changing the form of novel, he increases the role of readers in the process of creating. Literacy has made communication more efficient and breaks the limitation of geography and time. Accordingly, it demands time and concentration to receive and comprehend information; needs translation from language to language which requires shared life experience and empathy; evokes responsibility and imagination to omit, include and reconstruct memories before finding an accurate way to represent it. Metaphor, exists more than a wordplay but helps us concrete our embodied experience, drive us to interact with our inner mind as well as connects human in a profound way. “Windows” and “Cloud” --------------------- Windows, as referred in dictionary, was recorded in 1974 as “a framed area on a screen for viewing information” (Cresswell, 2010). In 1985 Microsoft released the first version of Windows operating system. Since then, people are getting used to process information by interacting with computer system on a vertical desktop, living in the digital world by constantly open and close different “windows”. Connected to the World Wide Web, “windows” appear to be burst with limitless amount of texts, photos, videos, people, products. However, these “windows” are opaque, flattened, different sized and overlapped. Between each “window” there are no visible connections, and content framed is isolated. More like a pile of papers, the interface fails to function like a new medium which could have revolutionized the way people perceive and think, or even fails to replace the book, which “represents the minimum technology with the maximum interaction” as Asimov claimed. American computer scientist Alan Kay describes what we have today as “a wonderful bike with training wheels on”, while nobody is trying to take them off because nobody knows they are on (Kay,1995). Our views are being multiplied at the risk of losing our points. Thanks to the convenience of cut and paste, data are moving freely in the computer-simulated space, along with the disappearance of authors, traces and contexts. It also increases challenges for reading and writing. The unavoidable inaccurate and misleading content may demand more efforts to unearth the source and search for confirming evidence in the deluge of digital information (Braasch, Braten, Strømsø, Anmarkrud, & Ferguson, 2013, as cited in Singer & Alexander, 2017). In addition, with the fast speed and ease of access, our attention, activities as well as thinking are easily interrupted and shifted, which makes it more difficult to process digital content analytically. Moreover, we are becoming alien to our languages. Not only because every time when forgetting a spelling of word, we are more inclined to look for help from input method rather than dictionary, but languages are becoming homogenized and developing their meanings on the surface rather than in depth. English keeps dominating internet languages, which has 25.2% of internet users worldwide (“Internet world users by language”, 2019). Emoji already has its own dictionary online. Every day, at least six billion emoji are sent across the major social media platforms and 72% of young adults prefer using emoji to express emotion rather than words alone (Hauser, 2019). Because facial expressions are ambiguous and capricious, new sets of emoji are continually being created to satisfy the need, which makes nonverbal expressions more complicated and strayed from the original meaning. In addition, the difference between devices and platforms would cause misinterpretation between the sender and the recipient due to the different display of emoticon. Contradictorily, the literal ones, which count for the majority of emojis, are much less used than the vague ones, according to the founder of Emojipedia’s senior lexicographer (Hauser, 2019). When individuals are generalized as users, our relationship with the interface has changed. As a writer one knows how to write on paper with words in mind, but as a user one may not sure if the paper can allow him to write down whatever he want, if the written words would be shown as what he expected, or if he can keep the paper at a safe place. Both the material and language of the new medium turn to be unfamiliar to us. Have we become more powerful? Probably not. Sometimes when advertisements start to pollute the window you are not able to draw the curtain. While we are encouraged to share life stories on social platforms, we are producing data for corporations at the expense of time and privacy. The global information network decentralized power of knowledge but also caused new marginalization. It is estimated that 80% of the content on Wikipedia is created and maintained by people from North America and Europe and that only 10% of editors are female (Sengupta, Bouterse, & Allmann, 2018). Now when you search “cloud” online, you will get a webpage with images of cloud as well as hyperlinks to cloud storage products. “Cloud”, unlike the natural one, is consisting of a mass of data which stores our memory. In his short story The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (2013), Ted Chiang reconsiders the relationship between technology, memory and identity. Historically, we have been using mnemonic media from books to search engines for semantic memory, the knowledge of general facts. But we have resisted to externalize our episodic memory, which is our personal experience. It is not only because it takes efforts to write down the memory by ourselves but subconsciously we regard episodic memories as an integral part of our identities. Everyone is constantly rewriting his past to construct a new self. However, we are facing the situation today that as the semantic memory is going to be rapidly and totally aided by the digital memory prostheses, our personal stories are also becoming monotonous and flattened, which makes metaphorical thinking less impossible. When the whole world is moving close to our eyes, the distance and time for abstraction and internalization is disappearing. Metaphor has lost its vitality in digital world. We have lost the soil of imagination because we are straying away from life. Then someday if the “window” moved into our mind, would we still need our eyes, or will it replace our mind’s eye? Do we still dream? Metaphor as new light --------------------- The idea of “hacking” is actually simple to illustrate: on NDS there’s a game called Scribblenauts, where kids can sketch out arbitrary concepts and it would automagically manifest in game. So a kid growing up reading ancient Hellenic tragedies, would naturally wish that penning “the sacred river Alph” and a river would promptly appear. Then the kid grew up a bit and discovered programming can accurately project infantile omnipotence into a transitional zone. That's it. Shortly thereafter, the kid's primary caretakers - many uncles and aunts - formed families themselves and moved far away; the kid was born with severe ventricular septal defect and cannot travel at all, so the kid poured wailing into poetry. After a while, the kid had a discovery: as long as the poems rhyme on -P, such as TCP, UDP, IP, HTTP and XMPP, mysterious power would appear out of nowhere. So the kid first wrote closet drama, and later learned to compose huge verses based on multipart/mixed playwrights. Then the Age of Melodrama arrived; the scripts from the previous Age became publicly performed on the stages of Twitter and Facebook. Thus it came to pass that Real aunts and uncles are now registering into the kid's Imaginary zone conjured from sheer Symbolic power. (Tang, 2009) This is a personal story written on the blog of a Taiwanese programmer Tang Feng, after he created a coding language named PerlYuYan. It allows programs to be written in classical Chinese poetry by using the single-character property to disambiguate between keywords, so one may omit whitespaces much like in real Chinese writings. By looking at history, going back to where the digital world began and where our memory started, we are with the hope to reconnect the forgotten past to a poetic future, by our imagination. Conclusion ---------- We are thinking with metaphors unconsciously. As a method to understand the world, metaphors also expanded our imagination and reinvigorated language. The reality mediated by digital devices is making us forget the systematic way of thinking and lose our ability to create personal stories. By revaluing the power of metaphor we may find solutions to alienation in our real life. References ---------- Chiang, T. (2013). The Truth of Fact the Truth of Feeling. Subterranean Press, (Fall 2-13). Cresswell, J. (2010). Oxford dictionary of word origins. Oxford University Press. Hauser, M. (2019). PICTURING THE FUTURE: How a shadowy consortium controls the evolution of emoji. The New Republic, (11), 36. Retrieved from [http://search.ebscohost.com.ez.xjtlu.edu.cn/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgea&AN=edsgcl.606249270&site=eds-live&scope=site](http://search.ebscohost.com.ez.xjtlu.edu.cn/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgea&AN=edsgcl.606249270&site=eds-live&scope=site) “Internet world users by language” (2019). Retrieved December 12, 2019, from: [https://internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm](https://internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm) Kay, A. (1995). The closing panel at the 1995 Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium \[Online\]. Retrieved December 12, 2019, from [http://cs.brown.edu/memex/Bush\_Symposium\_Panels.html#Day 2 Panel](http://cs.brown.edu/memex/Bush_Symposium_Panels.html#Day%202%20Panel) Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from [http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat01010a&AN=xjtlu.0000779503&site=eds-live&scope=site](http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat01010a&AN=xjtlu.0000779503&site=eds-live&scope=site) Pavic, M. (1998). The Beginning and the end of Reading-the Beginning and the End of the Novel. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 18(2), 142. Qian, Z. S. (1941). Windows. In Tam, K. F. (2012). A Garden of One's Own: A Collection of Modern Chinese Essays, 1919–1949 (pp. 241-246). Chinese University Press. Schmidt, P., & dos Santos, J. L. (2017). The application of Inca khipu as an accountability and managerial control tool. Revista Brasileira de Gestão de Negócios, 19(66), 613–626. [https://doi.org/10.7819/rbgn.v0i0.3099](https://doi.org/10.7819/rbgn.v0i0.3099) Sengupta, A., Bouterse, S., & Allmann, K. (2018). Build an internet for, and from, us all. Nature, 563(7733), S147-S147. Singer, L. M., & Alexander, P. A. (2017). Reading Across Mediums: Effects of Reading Digital and Print Texts on Comprehension and Calibration. Journal of Experimental Education, 85(1), 155–172. [https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.2016.1143794](https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.2016.1143794) Tang, F. (2009). An Instance of Sinthome \[Online\]. Retrieved December 12, 2019, from [https://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/11/心慟凡例-an-instance-of-sinthome.html](https://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/11/%E5%BF%83%E6%85%9F%E5%87%A1%E4%BE%8B-an-instance-of-sinthome.html) \- \- \- 作者：阿尔 时间：2019年12月13日 --- *Originally published on [Rhei's Diary](https://paragraph.com/@elixirrr/04-from-window-to-windows-why-metaphor-matters-in-digital-world)*