ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the full spectrum of popular metaphors of the Internet, from emphasizing its borderless cartography to capturing browsing movements through its space. The 'leisure commons' metaphor articulates the core dimension of urban parks: these parks are marked for primarily non-instrumental social usage by the public. The Wild Wild Web, the Frontier, the Cloud, and the Electronic Ghetto are some of the metaphors that have played a part in evoking expectations and emotions as well as endorsing policy and practice. The focus on metaphor usage is not just to highlight and comprehend the novel aspects of the new media spaces but also to connect these disparate user-generated online spaces to a more coherent and multiplexed model. Hence, when critically examining the orientation of mapping metaphors for the Internet, it may serve as useful to identify the spatial framing's philosophical leaning.
