Since its very early days, metaphors have been used by various powerful social actors to try to convey what the Internet is and what it could be used for, now and in the future. In this short essay, I make a plea for critical scholars of the Internet and digital media to be simultaneously careful and imaginative in their own choice of metaphorical language. I revisit some of the early and recurring metaphors, such as frontier, highway and library, to illustrate the evocative power of metaphor. I then examine the more recent metaphors of cloud computing and (big) data flow to justify why it remains important to focus on metaphors. Scholars in critical and digital media studies not only need to deconstruct the metaphors of the powerful but they also need to contribute new metaphors and new ways of describing and thinking about the future.

自从成立之初，隐喻就被各种强大的社会行为者用来试图传达互联网的含义以及现在和将来的用途。在这篇简短的文章中，我恳请互联网和数字媒体的批评学者在自己选择隐喻语言时要同时谨慎和富于想象力。我回顾了一些早期和经常出现的隐喻，例如边疆，公路和图书馆，以说明隐喻的令人回味的力量。然后，我研究了较新的云计算隐喻和（大）数据流，以说明为什么集中于隐喻仍然很重要的原因。批判性和数字媒体研究的学者不仅需要解构强大人物的隐喻，而且还需要贡献新的隐喻以及描述和思考未来的新方法。