"protecting content from metaphor shear
Authentica NetRecall
by Charlie Cho
March 2002
Creators and users of digital documents often suffer what author Neal
Stephenson dubbed "metaphor shear," the realization that an
established metaphor is unsuitable for the concept to which it refers.
Stephenson cites his experiences with word processors as a prime example:
When the power goes out, any unsaved text in a digital document is lost.
Traditional documents written with pen and paper have no such
problems.
Similarly, anyone who has bookmarked a Web page only to find the site
offline upon return, is a victim of metaphor shear. This sort of
impermanence is at odds with the traditional notion of a document as
something persistent, perhaps even intended for posterity.
A close comparison of digital documents with their analog counterparts
reveals numerous inconsistencies like this one.
For instance, while analog documents require some effort to duplicate
(even with a Xerox machine), digitized documents are copied constantly in
the course of normal use. Outdated copies can linger for an extremely
long time on backup tapes.
Metaphor shear becomes an even more extreme problem in situations when
digital documents replace physical ones in established rights management
procedures. Typically, these procedures involve sensitive or valuable
information, especially when the information's circulation must be
limited. For example, a company might require executives to stamp
indications like draft or confidential on certain papers, and those
papers must be shredded after use to preserve plausible deniability. In
addition, copyright and fair use laws were conceived and fine-tuned
during the paper age. It's for this reason, that digital rights
management has become so complex and expensive."More,(ad for
windows,rsa,crud.)
http://www.newarchitectmag.com/documents/s%3D2457/new1011397127626/
