metaphors

I'm interested in the metaphors that shape our digital environments largely because I teach students who have only known the abstracted versions of those metaphors. They don't know why the "save" button on their word processor looks like a floppy disk. They haven't thought about the materiality that underpins "cut," "paste," home, or "desktop." And that's not their fault—abstraction is a regular part of technological development (see Bolter and Grusin).