... It's from a document called Information Technology and internet culture
The Internet is a magnet for many metaphors. It is cyberspace or the matrix, the ``information superhighway'' or infobahn or information hairball, a looking glass its users step through to meet others, a cosmopolitan city with tony and shady neighborhoods, a web that can withstand nuclear attack, electric Gaia or God, The World Wide Wait, connective tissue knitting us into a group mind, an organism or ``vivisystem,'' a petri dish for viruses, high seas for information pirates, a battleground for a war between encrypters and decrypters, eye candy for discrete consumers of a tsunami of pornography, a haven for vilified minorities and those who seek escape from stultifying real-world locales, a world encyclopedia or messy library or textbook or post office, chat "rooms" and schoolrooms and academic conferences, a vast playground or an office complex, a cash cow for the dot.coms, The Widow Maker, training wheels for new forms of delinquency practiced by script kiddies and warez d00des, a wild frontier with very little law and order, the glimmer in the eyes of virtual-reality creators, a workshop for Open Source programmers, a polling booth for the twenty-first century, a marketplace for mass speech, a jungle where children are prey, a public square or global village, a mall or concert hall, a stake for homesteaders, a safari for surfers, a commercial space much in need of zoning, the mother of all Swiss Army knives, a tool palette for artists, a lucid dream or magic, a telephone or newspaper or holodeck, a monster that has escaped DARPA's control, The Linux penguin, sliced bread, an addiction, the Grand Canyon, and on and on.
internet, communication, writing
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