While the dominant metaphors for computer networking seem to be dying out, both physiological and urban metaphors retain a small but growing following. These metaphors are in no way unique to the most recent "new media." They are appealing because of their capacity to describe and perhaps model the increasingly complex patterns associated with communications networks in a parsimonious way.

The Mythography of the 'New Frontier' explores the political and social consequences of conceptualizing cyberspace as a frontier--a metaphorization than implies a very particular set of symbols and icons centering on notions of conquest, flexibility, individualism, democracy, and profit. My goal in this paper is to make the hidden assumptions of this metaphor apparent by unearthing both historical and present-day conditions of our mythic and geographic frontiers.

[The complete text of David Sholle's paper is available.]

The argument of this paper is that both academic and political/economic discourses on the information society are tied to the instrumental projects of developing a technological infrastructure and instituting economic practices for controlling the exchange of informational products. As such, they operate with a conception of information that brackets its meaning, while allowing "information as meaning" to remain as an unspoken background that seeps into its discourse. An analysis of information science and economics will show that "information" is defined as nonsemantic discrete bits flowing across space and then directed and stored. This substantiates information as the object of control.