The Internet as Discourse and the Scientist as Sociologist

This is indeed worth the read and provides not only a wonderful introduction to the semiotics of the web and the metaphors of everyday tech language, but provides a fascinating glimpse into how real innovators think - understanding a metaphor also allows us to unravel and question it and thereby understand how things can change.

Venkatesh Raju works at the Xerox Innovation Group where he leads "technology projects that aim to invent the future of documents and information work." He has worked as a post doc at Cornell's robotics lab on command and control systems for future battlefields. He (also) blogs, among other things on the Internet as a discourse and on the construction of meaning in interaction with the web - trained sociologists would be proud to write the way he does on discourse and metaphor. 

This man is a pleasure to read - a very erudite and thinking man, he writes with a fluid meta-style interweaving the technological, literary and philosophical sides of him in posts that are singularly attractive, structured (though he talks of how the hyperlink allows the construction of your own dissonant discourse) and forward looking. He is at home with the metaphysical poets (one cannot help noticing the analogy between his take on the hyperlink as facilitating dissonance in the reading experience and Donne's fantastic hyper-linking of the points of a compass or the latter's even more fantastic hyper-linking of  a mosquito to the nuptial bed - famed dissonance), with the theater of the absurd and with the cinema of Lynch. Here are a few gems to get you started on Raju:

"Click trails are texts whose coherence derives from your mind, but whose elements derive from multiple other minds"

"If there is no clickable hyperlink involved, you are just using the browser as a novel reading device."

Read his brilliant essay on "The Hyperlink as Metaphor" at his own blog and his take on how conceptual metaphors may inhibit Web Innovation at Mashable.com.