Panic computing: The viral metaphor and computer technology

feelings and intangible processes concrete. In doing so, the metaphor shapes perception, identity and experience, going beyond the original association by evoking a host of multiple meanings (Clatts and Mutchler, 1989: 106-7). As Geertz has argued, '[i]n metaphor one h a s . . , a stratification of meaning, in which an incongruity of sense on one level produces an influx of significance on another' (1973: 210). The present analysis examines in detail the stratification of meaning THE VIRAL METAPHOR AND COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY 557 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ I n g e n t a C o n t e n t D i s t r i b u t i o n P s y P r e s s T i t l e s ] A t : 1 6 : 0 3 8 M a y 2 0 1 1 evident in the widespread and largely unquestioned adoption of the viral metaphor to describe computer technology malfunction in popular texts. It is argued that the viral metaphor used in the context of computer technology draws upon a constellation of discourses concerning body boundaries, erotic pleasure, morality, invasion, disease and destruction. In what follows, the meanings of the term 'virus' in the medical context, the symbiotic relationship between body and computer metaphorical systems, the symbolic danger of viruses, the seductiveness of the human/computer , Self/Other relationship and the cultural crisis around issues of bodies, technologies and sexualities at the fin de milldnnium are discussed to illuminate the ambivalent relationship of humans with computer technology in late capitalist societies. Viruses and the computer corpus The word 'virus' has a particular cultural resonance in an epoch obsessed with health, cleanliness and bodily integrity, in which the entry of viruses into the body is viewed as invasion by microscopic alien and contaminating beings intent on causing mayhem. We commonly assign personalities to viruses. In lay discourses on illness, people tend to confuse viruses and bacteria, lumping them together as 'germs', which are viewed as 'living, invisible, malevolent entities . . . amoral in their selection of victims, but once they attack they can only cause harm. There are no "good" Germs or 'normal Germs; all Germs are bad' (Helman, 1978: 118-19). To counter this attack, as Cindy Patton points out, bodies are visualized as being 'filled with tiny defending armies whose mission [is] to return the "self" to the precarious balance of health' (Patton, 1990: 60). The immune system is commonly described in popular and medical texts as mount ing a 'defence' or 'siege' against 'murderous' viruses or bacteria which are 'fought ' , 'attacked' or 'killed' by white blood cells, drugs or surgical procedures (Martin, 1990; Montgomery, 1991). This military discourse, redolent with images of physical aggression, has become routine and standardized to the point where its metaphorical origins are erased: it is now a 'dead' metaphor (Montgomery, 1991: 350). Yet biological viruses are primitive, insensate entities which do not have so much as a nervous system in the way of intelligence, and certainly do not possess motivation, the desire for retribution, cunning, evil, skills in strategic planning or even a survival instinct. The medical/scientific definition of a biological virus describes it as a minute particle, invisible to the human eye, which has a liminal status in terms of its classification as a living object because it is unviable unless attached to the living cell of an organism. Biological viruses are invisibly transmissible between individuals via contact with body fluids or tiny air droplets. Viruses are parasitic; a viral particle cannot produce its own energy and contains only nucleic acid. Yet once the virus enters a living cell, the cell becomes devoted to supporting the growth, development and reproduction of its unwelcome guest. On the prosaic level of meaning, it is clear that a biological virus, in its 558 CULTURAL STUDIES D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ I n g e n t a C o n t e n t D i s t r i b u t i o n P s y P r e s s T i t l e s ] A t : 1 6 : 0 3 8 M a y 2 0 1 1 need for living cells, cannot have any effect upon computer technology. The viral metaphor has been adopted in computing terminology to express the meanings of rapid spread and invisible invasion of an entity that is able to reproduce itself and causes malfunctioning on the systemic level. It is telling that this alternative use has been so readily accepted that at least one Australian medical journal has featured articles on computer viruses devoted to making explicit the similarities between biological viruses and computer viruses (Dawes, 1992a, 1992b). Just as the immune system is described in terms of military imagery, popular accounts of computer viruses commonly employ the terminology of war to conceptualize the struggle between technological order and chaos. In Australian press reports the computer virus was described as an 'invader', which 'attacks' and 'destroys' (Canberra Times, 6 March 1992), to which companies must develop 'anti-viral strategies to counteract the threat of infection' (Australian Financial Review, 9 March 1992). In concert with this imagery, in several reports the viruses were assigned human qualities. They were personified as 'like a mugger hiding in an alley' (Canberra Times, 6 March 1992), as 'advertising themselves' (Sydney Morning Herald, 26 October 1991), as 'giving no warning when [they] struck' and being 'frighteningly efficient' and being able to 'change [their] form to evade searchers' (Sun Telegraph, 21 February 1993). In the Sydney Morning Herald article, some viruses were said to be 'smarter than others', and at least once in the text there was a slippage between the virus progenitors and the computer viruses themselves: 'Viruses are getting more devious and could be used for all sorts of criminal activity, including spying and fraud.' Such linguistic choices conform to the discourse in which computers are viewed as humanoid creatures. Another example is a recent advertisement for IBM computers appearing in Sydney newspapers that showed the new 'ThinkPad' model and used the headline, 'ITS MOTHER WAS A MAINFRAME. ITS FATHER WAS A MASERATI.' The blurb went on to assert that 'It's all in the genes, as they say. The ThinkPad range has all the power you'll n e e d . . , in one of the sleekest bodies around'. The language in these popular representations of computers underline the taken-for-granted acceptance of viewing computers as 'just like you and me'; friendly, helpful and human, even possessing parentage and heredity. Without the initial conceptualization of computers as living, humanoid beings, the computer virus would be a nonsensical conceit. Why do we find it appropriate to represent computers as if they were animate organisms, susceptible to illness and death? Like technologies, human bodies may themselves be viewed as socially inscribed, as the site at which competing discourses struggle for meaning, shaped by and constituting social relationships within a historical, cultural and political context (Turner, 1984). The adoption of viral discourse in the context of computer technology is only the latest in a series of metaphorical systems using human biology to conceptualize the workings of computers and vice versa. This metaphorical circle demonstrates the cultural resonance of the mechanical discourse which has been dominant in biomedicine since THE VIRAL METAPHOR AND COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY 559 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ I n g e n t a C o n t e n t D i s t r i b u t i o n P s y P r e s s T i t l e s ] A t : 1 6 : 0 3 8 M a y 2 0 1 1 the industrial revolution. The mechanical discourse adopts the language of technology in conceiving of the internal workings of the body as a combustion engine, or as a battery-driven machine. It includes the idea that individual parts of the body, like parts of a car, may 'fail' or stop working, and can sometimes be replaced (Turner, 1984; Martin, 1987; Stein, 1990). Hence the dominance of the technological imperative in biomedicine: the dependence upon the use of machinery to fix machinery. The routine employment of organ transplants and artificial organs or parts such as pacemakers, plastic joints and hearing aids in high technology medicine is both supported by and reinforces this discourse. Ways of describing computer technology have both created new terminology which has entered the language and have drawn upon elements of older, more established lexical systems. In particular, drawing upon the centuries-old body/machine discourse, there has developed a symbiotic metaphorical relationship between computers and humans, in which computers have been anthropomorphized while humans have been portrayed as 'organic computers' (Berman, 1989: 7). While the computer is said to have a 'memory', the human brain is commonly described as a computerized system working on a logic similar to the binary system used in computer technology, with the biological matter of the brain described as the 'hardware' and the brain's mental activity the 'software' (Nelkin and Tancredi, 1989: 16). The immune system is also commonly described as an information-processing system, communicating by means of hormones. By this imagery, there occurs 'the transformation of the human subject into an object, a repository, or else a collision site, for various types of detectable and useable information' (Montgomery, 1991: 383). Indeed, according to Haraway, bodies have conceptually become cyborgs (cybernetic organisms), that is, 'techno-organic, humanoid hybrids' (Haraway, 1990:21), or compounds of machine and body theorized in terms of communications, for which disease may be conceptualized as 'a subspecies of information malfunction or communications pathology' (Haraway, 1989: 15). Haraway (1988, 1990) argues that the cyborg undermines and destabilises traditional binary oppositions between nature/culture, masculinity/femininity and Self/Other, exposing their artificiality, rendering them blurred and indeterminat