A metaphor can be a mighty powerful thing. And since this may well be the central theme of this whole column, I suppose that it's only fitting that it gets linked somewhere (if only slightly) off the beaten track.

Robert Adrian in Infobahn Blues (quite an old article by internet standards already, and though to my mind it's a classic, on the internet nobody, until now at least, has control over what's to become the canon) compares the metaphor of the “information superhighway” (credited to U.S. Vice President Al Gore) with that of “cyberspace”:

The Superhighway metaphor does not threaten the status quo or challenge the prevailing ideologies as did "Cyberspace", that other, earlier, name for the 'net coined by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Cyberspace has no highways or interchanges or even directions, it is just a vast universe of connections in a multi-dimensional data-field. You can get lost in Cyberspace, it is dark and threatening and infested with spikey-haired hackers with dirty fingernails and shabby hardware. Cyberspace is infinite, chaotic and scary, while Mr. Gore's Superhighway is finite, linear and very familiar - at least to suburban Americans, who are, after all, his constituents.

ecstatic. You read it not so much for what it says but for the links it shows you to other information.

The clear implication of this being that documents on the world wide web have as their primary function the promotion of an endless circulation in a looped space populated by detached signifiers. The hyperspace of hypertext as an architecture of redundant information?