Metaphors about cyberspace and cybersecurity have obscured as much as clarified, says a paper by Adriane Lapointe, a National Security Agency official currently a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In a paper published Sept. 9 by CSIS, Lapointe starts by questioning usage of the most prominent cyber metaphor, that of a "cyber ecosystem." The idea that cyberspace is a complexly interconnected environment with functional interdependencies isn't without appeal, but when so broadly defined as to include "people, electrons, and everything in between [it] is rather like the category 'things on earth.'" Lapointe says. "Useful as a label, but not likely to tell us anything very substantive about the relationship between any two members."

The ecosystem metaphor fails even harder when discussing cybersecurity, since the notion of a "healthy ecosystem" itself is a metaphor of human health placed onto ecologies, which are healthy so long as they are sustainable. "The idea that the ‘health' of cyberspace depends on the exclusion or suppression of selected members is not necessarily consistent with the notion of an ecosystem," Lapointe notes. Ecosystems are value neutral, and a stable predator population contributes to ecological stability.

"However happy it might make the gazelle, we don‘t imagine that we‘d make the savanna ecosystem ‘healthier'  by taking the lions out of the Serengeti," Lapointe writes.

Lapointe also takes on the metaphor of the Internet as a "global commons." Governments, particularly authoritarian ones, and companies that own and operate the Internet circumscribe users' freedom of choice and action. Even supposedly free information or services not infrequently require consumers to surrender personal information.

"When metaphors become nothing but labels, buzz words or catch phrases, they not only lose their power to provoke thought or offer insight, but in the worst cases allow us to refer to our subject without thinking precisely about what we mean," she concludes.

For more:
- download Lapointe's paper, "When Good Metaphors Go Bad: The Metaphoric 'Branding' of Cyberspace."

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