Figures of speech: metaphors in the mobile phone literature

Scant attention has been paid to the use of figures of speech in describing mobile telephony and how it is used. While there are isolated cases, as yet there is no study of metaphor use across a larger corpus of mobile phone research. This paper addresses this gap by developing a preliminary survey, or mapping, of the use of metaphors and other discursive figures and tropes in the available literature on mobile phones. It does this by using metaphors in internet literature as a springboard for analysis, as a comparable communications medium. Both for their general role as communications technologies, and their specific historicized position as 'new media', and with their capacities increasingly overlapping, mobile phones and the internet form a useful counterpoint. The paper summarises the key findings from earlier work mapping and critiquing the use of metaphor in the critical and popular writing on the internet. It then compares and contrasts these internet-based metaphors against those in the mobile literature. The paper concludes with a discussion of the perils and the promise of metaphor use in writing on communications technologies.