Metaphor mania: The Internet is …

The Internet is the information superhighway.

The Internet is like a vast uncatalogued library.

The Internet is a series of tubes.

The Internet is like Joey Bishop.

It's fitting that one of the most complex technological developments in human history merits a diverse set of metaphors - good and bad - to describe it, but you have to draw the line somewhere. (Joey Bishop?)

View our slideshow of other lame, worn out, or just plain annoying metaphors from high tech

Some remain useful for their simple descriptiveness: the Internet is a network of networks. Others are ill-conceived, go astray, become so tired that they are no longer useful or miss the mark entirely.

The phrase information superhighway was effective the first time it was used and probably for the next several thousand times.

Video artist Nam June Paik claims to have coined the metaphor "information superhighway" back in 1974, and the term was more famously applied to the Internet in the 1990s, notably by then-Vice President Al Gore. 

But with overuse it has become just words and spawned an equally tired subset of metaphors - roadkill on the superhighway, detours off the superhighway, Sunday drivers on the superhighway and on and on. Shockingly, even Network World writers have used the metaphor, as seen here, here and here. Specific technologies glommed onto the term as well. Broadband Internet access, for instance, was a way to avoid traffic jams on the onramp to the superhighway.

More recently, U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska described the Internet as a series of tubes, like the pneumatic tubes that used to whip memos around office buildings and factories a century ago. 

Stevens said: "And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled, and if they are filled, when you put your message in it gets in line, and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

His effort was widely ridiculed as uninformed, but others try to explain the Internet, seriously or otherwise, using a range of comparisons.

"The Internet is like alcohol in some sense," says technology commentator Esther Dyson. "It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect."

Or the economics of the Internet can be compared to gold fever. "The Internet is like a gold-rush; the only people making money are those who sell the pans," says Will Hobbs of the Internet Underground Music Archive.

An AT&T researcher even wrote a paper about why the Internet is like Microsoft. "A detailed look suggests that the Internet is succeeding largely for the same reasons that led the PC to dominate the mainframe, and are responsible for the success of Microsoft," says researcher Andrew Odlyzko. "Like the PC, the Internet offers an irresistible bargain to a crucial constituency, namely developers, while managing to conceal the burden it places on users."