Metaphors

Metaphors are used all time to help to help us understand one thing in the context of another. Foe example, God is a bearded man in the sky, family is a tree, time is a clock.

Now some people might question the last one: the clock is not metaphor for time. Time really is minutes and seconds and hours.

But is it?

Before the clock was invented, no one though of time in these mathematically precise chunks. Even now when we experience time, some hours seem to zip by and some never seem to end. But the clock has become so synonymous with time that people think the clock is time.

Metaphor are supposed to represent things, but in our minds, we can accidentally mess up and see the metaphor as the thing itself.

This is why media is so powerful. Media is a metaphor for communication. The book is a metaphor for knowledge, music can be a metaphor for beauty, but media is so pervasive in our lives that we often mistake media as the thing that's being communicated. Whenever we watch a movie about love, it's a mere metaphor for love, but people end up thinking love just is this character's relationship. When we watch the news, it is a metaphor for knowledge, but many people now think the news just is knowledge or perhaps even the truth.

The dominant form of media in society shapes everything: how we communicate with each other, how we approach topics, and how we literally see the world. ”Perhaps you are familiar with the old adage that says: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We may extend that truism: To a person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data.” A new medium is not just an upgraded version of the old thing;