About the author
Deborah Lupton worked already in 1993 on the analogy between the communication of technology threats and of diseases, she presents us the analogy that is voluntary made between the computer and the body in a hygienic society where we tend to rely on centralized organisation to desinfect and sanitize our world. Since then the issue of scale and control.
Sources
- Panic computing: The viral metaphor and computer technology in Cultural Studies, 8:3, pp.556—568, ISSN 0950-2386
Panic computing: The viral metaphor and computer technology
The unproblematic use of the term ‘virus’ applied to technological artefacts, inspire ponderings on the wider implications of the viral metaphor. The choice of phraseology in textual accounts and talk, the discursive devices used, recurrent lexical patterns in describing things, events, groups or people is revealing of the latent ideological layer of meaning of such communications (van Dijk, 1990; Fowler, 1991). In particular, the intertextuality, or the ways in which texts selectively draw upon other texts, other cultural forms and discourses to create meaning, indicates the political and ideological functions of texts and delimits the boundaries within which topics may be discussed (Fairclough, 1992; Astroff and Nyberg, 1992). The nomination of a type of computer technology malfunction as a ‘virus’ is a highly significant and symbolic linguistic choice of metaphor, used to make certain connections between otherwise unassociated subjects and objects, to give meaning to unfamiliar events, to render abstract feelings and intangible processes concrete. In doing so, the metaphor shapes perception, identity and experience, going beyond the original association by evoking a host of multiple meanings (Clatts and Mutchler, 1989: 106-7). As Geertz has argued, ‘[i]n metaphor one has.., a stratification of meaning, in which an incongruity of sense on one level produces an influx of significance on another’ (1973: 210).
Viruses and the computer corpus
The present analysis examines in detail the stratification of meaning evident in the widespread and largely unquestioned adoption of the viral metaphor to describe computer technology malfunction in popular texts. It is argued that the viral metaphor used in the context of computer technology draws upon a constellation of discourses concerning body boundaries, erotic pleasure, morality, invasion, disease and destruction. In what follows, the meanings of the term ‘virus’ in the medical context, the symbiotic relationship between body and computer metaphorical systems, the symbolic danger of viruses, the seductiveness of the human/computer, Self/Other relationship and the cultural crisis around issues of bodies, technologies and sexualities at the fin de millénnium are discussed to illuminate the ambivalent relationship of humans with computer technology in late capitalist societies.
Morality and viral politics
There are no “good” Germs or ‘normal Germs; all Germs are bad’ (Helman, 1978: 118-19). To counter this attack, as Cindy Patton points out, bodies are visualized as being ‘filled with tiny defending armies whose mission [is] to return the “self” to the precarious balance of health’ (Patton, 1990: 60). The immune system is commonly described in popular and medical texts as mounting a ‘defence’ or ‘siege’ against ‘murderous’ viruses or bacteria which are ‘fought’, ‘attacked’ or ‘killed’ by white blood cells, drugs or surgical procedures (Martin, 1990; Montgomery, 1991). This military discourse, redolent with images of physical aggression, has become routine and standardized to the point where its metaphorical origins are erased: it is now a ‘dead’ metaphor (Montgomery, 1991: 350).
The seduction and terror of cyberspace
The viral metaphor has been adopted in computing terminology to express the meanings of rapid spread and invisible invasion of an entity that is able to reproduce itself and causes malfunctioning on the systemic level. It is telling that this alternative use has been so readily accepted that at least one Australian medical journal has featured articles on computer viruses devoted to making explicit the similarities between biological viruses and computer viruses (Dawes, 1992a, 1992b). Just as the immune system is described in terms of military imagery, popular accounts of computer viruses commonly employ the terminology of war to conceptualize the struggle between technological order and chaos. […] Ways of describing computer technology have both created new terminology which has entered the language and have drawn upon elements of older, more established lexical systems. In particular, drawing upon the centuries-old body/machine discourse, there has developed a symbiotic metaphorical relationship between computers and humans, in which computers have been anthropomorphized while humans have been portrayed as ‘organic computers’ (Berman, 1989: 7).The immune system is also commonly described as an information-processing system, communicating by means of hormones. By this imagery, there occurs ‘the transformation of the human subject into an object, a repository, or else a collision site, for various types of detectable and useable information’ (Montgomery, 1991: 383). Indeed, according to Haraway, bodies have conceptually become cyborgs (cyberneticorganisms), that is, ‘techno-organic, humanoid hybrids’ (Haraway, 1990:21), or compounds of machine and body theorized in terms of communications, for which disease may be conceptualized as ‘a subspecies of information malfunction or communications pathology’ (Haraway, 1989: 15).
The viral metaphor and technophobia
At the fin de millénnium, the body is a site of toxicity, contamination and catastrophe, subject to and needful of a high degree of surveillance and control. Kroker and Kroker (1988:10 ff.) term the contemporary obsession with clean bodily fluids as ‘Body McCarthyism’, an hysterical new temperance movement. […] ‘Panic Computing’ invokes ‘[t]he underlying moral imperative … You can’t trust your best friend’s software any more than you can trust his or her bodily fluids - safe software or no software at all!’ (Ross, 1991: 108). The insertion of an ‘infected’ disk, that is a ‘carrier’ of corruption, spells disaster for the integrity of the computer corpus. Just as people are exhorted to grill their sexual partners for details of their past intimate lives, so as to be ‘sure and safe’ before proceeding to exchange bodily fluids, so they are warned to verify the source and safety of the computer disks they insert into their PCs (Sontag, 1989: 167).