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an open door to duplicate Morris’s actions. That is, innovations force society to
reexamine its values by juxtaposing the unknowns of the innovation with social norms.
We need to be careful in attributing particular effects to framing. Public opinion
surveys about the Internet at this stage do not exist. Nonetheless, there is an assumption
that framing, at the very least, positions how the public thinks about a new technology.
Wartella and Reeves (1985) have observed that the arrival of new media tend to engender
similar kinds of concerns in the public over the suspected effects of these media. Relative
to the Internet, the war/conflict and risk metaphors suggested that a “battle” was brewing
or underway and appropriate. The security risks posed by viruses and potential tampering
plus the association with the military may have created at least some justification for
limiting the freedoms on the Internet. With the Internet framed as a vehicle of deviance
for hackers, the press reinforced a policy perspective that favored control and regulation
over the freedom and openness that Internet pioneers advocated. The news media’s focus
on the deviance becomes an argument for bringing deviants into the norm by controlling
and reforming them and by controlling their means of action.
The language used to frame the early Internet made possible a range of public
policy actions. The biological frame of the virus, for instance, suggested the need for
“inoculation,” that is, preventive steps to prevent future viruses. Until the Morris incident,
prevention came in the form of the “hacker’s ethic,” a kind of self-policing among
sophisticated computer users. The accident metaphor suggested that the network was
beyond the control of even well-intentioned hackers. Once a mistake is introduced into a
biological system, the mistake is reproduced through the system at a rate beyond human
control. Together, these two metaphorical frames enabled more stringent protections.
Convention