O
F
V
IRUSES AND
V
ICTIMS
: F
RAMING THE
I
NTERNET
, 1988-1990 7
Results and Discussion
The content analysis shows that the top four metaphorical categories are
biological, crime, military, and benign (see Table 1 and Figure 1). Two kinds of
metaphors were particularly instrumental in bringing the Internet into the public
consciousness: ontological and personification. The ontological metaphor helps turn a
non-physical thing into an object that can act. The word “internet” prior to the Morris
case was part of the term “internet protocol,” that is, an agreed upon set of instructions or
rules for exchanging information among computers. Rules can be difficult to imagine, so
the media discourse helped to shift the meaning of “internet” from the abstract notion of
the protocol to the more concrete, easier-to-visualize network of supercomputers and
wires. The news coverage transformed the Internet from an agreement, a standard, a set
of practices to a thing that could be infected, attacked, and broken into.
Personification metaphors suggest not only human agency but also a range of
actions that the thing might take and a range of actions that humans might take in
responding to the metaphorical actions of the thing. The biological metaphors applied to
Morris’s program personified it, breathed life into it, and gave it the ability to act on its
own and respond to its own nature. For example, the news stories attributed to the virus
the ability to “infect,” “cripple,” and “paralyze” the network. The virus could also
“replicate” itself. Personification metaphors also attach moral implications to action.
Morris’s virus, for instance, was described as a “rogue” (dishonest) and as “insidious”
(treacherous). Through their entailments, the metaphors suggest human action against the
virus, such as the need to “eradicate” it, and human action relative to the network, such as
Convention