New Topographies: Mapping Metaphors for Digital Exploration and Interaction

This paper explores contemporary metaphoric usage invoked to describe interactions with digital media. The authors argue that such descriptions are indicative of positivist attempts to contain such interactions within the constraints of a reality bound by experiential knowledge outside of cyberspace or the virtual worlds it seeks to describe. Thus the authors suggest a metaphoric system or semiosis more closely aligned to both the experience of interaction and perhaps fundamentally more significant, the nature of the cognitive, psychological and physiological encounter.