Iain A. Boal, an Irish social historian of science and technics, teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working on a book and film about charisma and healing in 17th-century Ireland and England. George Lakoff (b. 1941) is professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley. His books include (with Mark Johnson) Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1980); Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t (University of Chicago Press, 1995). This interview appeared in Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights, 1995), a collection of essays edited by Boal and James Brooks that offers, as they write in the preface, a critical view of technology and its associated "values, in our view, too often detrimental to a more human life."
George Lakoff’s "Conceptual Metaphors" Web site
Body, Brain, and Communication" (Composing Cyberspace p. 21) is not available
online.
1. What, in Lakoff’s view, are the major failures of the "conduit metaphor" for communication? Why does Lakoff believe that machines shouldn’t be called "intelligent"?
2. How do you think Lakoff’s ideas about the conduit metaphor and machine intelligence apply to information and communication technologies you’re familiar with, such as books, TV, the telephone, or computer communication through e-mail or the Internet?
3. Based on your understanding of (a) the latest multimedia technologies, such as computer graphics, animations, and sounds, or (b) the potential of virtual reality spaces (or a fictional virtual reality such as "Star Trek’s" holodeck), how might you construct an argument disputing Lakoff’s claims about the lack of emotion and bodily involvement when people use computers?
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