Digital Media Metaphors: A Critical Introduction

Bringing together leading scholars from media studies and digital sociology, this edited volume provides a comprehensive introduction to digital media metaphors, unpacking their power and limitations.

Digital technologies have reshaped our way of life. To grasp their dynamics and implications, people often rely on metaphors to provide a shared frame of reference. Scholars, journalists, tech companies, and policymakers alike speak of digital clouds, bubbles, frontiers, platforms, trolls, and rabbit holes. Some of these metaphors distort the workings of the digital realm and neglect key consequences. This collection, structured in three parts, explores metaphors across digital infrastructures, content, and users. Within these parts, each chapter examines a specific metaphor that has become near-ubiquitous in public debate. Doing so, the book engages not only with the technological, but also the social, political, and environmental implications of digital technologies and relations.

This unique collection will interest students and scholars of digital media and the broader fields of media and communication studies, sociology, and science and technology studies.

Johan Farkas is Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He is author of Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood (Routledge, 2019).

Marcus Maloney is Assistant Professor in Sociology at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. His most recent book is Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming: Analysing Reddit's r/gaming Community (2019).