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IRUSES AND
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ICTIMS
: F
RAMING THE
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NTERNET
, 1988-1990 9
The properties of the ontological metaphor in particular enabled the crime frame.
Morris’s crime is hard to imagine; all that comes to mind is a young man hunched over a
computer terminal. As the media repeatedly observed, Morris took nothing and no one
was physically harmed. In a sense, all Morris did was set things in motion. Yet, the crime
metaphor was important in understanding Morris’s actions. It presented the Internet as
something that could be victimized, something that could be broken into and vandalized.
In the process, much of the responsibility for the “crime” was shifted from Morris to the
virus itself. In the 81 news stories analyzed for this study, the references to the virus
acting autonomously (i.e., “the virus copied itself,” “the virus entered”) numbered 212,
compared with 136 references to Morris as the primary actor.
The virus was also framed in military terms, with the virus “attacking,”
“invading,” and “infiltrating” computer systems. This frame may be explained in part
because the virus entered a number of computer systems used by the military, among
them the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The Los Angeles Times,
in particular, emphasized the military frame, even though the threat of the virus to
military information was probably nil. “Nuclear weapons and the ‘Star Wars’ defense
system are designed at Livermore,” the Times reporter wrote in the second paragraph of
the initial virus story, “but information about those projects is kept in supercomputers that
are physically and electronically separate from other computers at the laboratory”
(Maugh II, 1988). The military frame, like the crime frame, favors simple formulations of
good vs. bad, us vs. them. It also presents the technology as an ideological battleground, a
prize to be taken from the enemy (in this case, computer hackers) in a titanic struggle.
Military metaphors suggest a larger battleground than crime metaphors and imply the
Convention