It evokes the container metaphor of communication, in which we conceive of ideas as objects, sentences as containers, and communication as a kind of sending.

So the metaphor I'd like the use I can take from a story of a great idea that's quite recent a lot more recent than the 1650s.

And if there is an answer to that that happens outside the professional framework of journalism, it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class.

But we also use a very simple metaphor, the cat and the mouse game, to describe in the past 15 years the continuing fight between Chinese censorship, government censorship, the cat, and the Chinese Internet users. That means us, the mouse.

So to invoke another metaphor, if you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity I'm connected to you and you to her, on out endlessly into the distance this fabric is actually like an old fashioned American quilt, and it has patches on it happy and unhappy patches.