O
F
V
IRUSES AND
V
ICTIMS
: F
RAMING THE
I
NTERNET
, 1988-1990 6
decisions/polices), and appeals to principle (moral arguments).
We conducted a content analysis of news articles appearing in three different
newspapers in the Lexis/Nexis Major Papers index: the New York Times, the Washington
Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Editorials, letters to the editor, and commentaries were
excluded. All of the resulting 81 news stories included the terms “internet” and “Morris.”
(Only three additional news stories in the period under study contained the term
“internet” without “Morris.” These were not part of the study.) The 81 news stories fall
within a period beginning in November 1988, when the first mention of “internet”
appears, and ending in June 1990, when Morris was sentenced. An initial review of the
stories revealed eight categories of metaphor: biological, military, crime, accident,
science, benign, transportation, and other. During the systematic analysis of the stories,
each metaphorical reference pertaining to the Morris incident was counted. Stories may
have exhibited more than one metaphor. Metaphorical references to other issues were
excluded. We also looked for two kinds of agency in the stories: references to Morris as
the primary actor (i.e., “Morris released the virus”) and references to the virus acting
autonomously (i.e., “the virus copied itself”). Each reference was counted, and stories
may have exhibited both types of agency. Catchphrases, depictions, roots, consequences,
and appeals to principle were also recorded, although these were not quantified.
1
1
These figures represent a search of the Lexis-Nexis major newspapers database. Some of the hits
represent subjects with no connection to the computer network, i.e., a banking enterprise. When the
keyword “internet” was originally searched for on the Lexis-Nexis database in 1996, no entries appeared
prior to 1988. However, Lexis-Nexis has since modified its database and now many stories about Internet-
related topics, such as electronic banking and child pornography, include “internet” as a search term, even
though the term does not appear in the text of the stories, the gist of the stories is not related to the Internet,
and the “Internet” label for the computer network was not widely used by the public at the time the stories
were written. So, while it is accurate to say that the term “Internet” did not appear in the Lexis-Nexis major
newspapers database prior to 1988 in 1996, anyone doing a cursory search of the database today would find
contradictory evidence. This kind of “retrospective labeling” of historical documents poses challenges to
historical researchers.
Convention