Metaphors everywhere?

Definition: the word metaphor itself is a metaphor, coming from a Greek word meaning to "transfer" or "carry across." metaphors "carry" meaning from one word, image, or idea to another.

Every new theory or invention needs to be sustained by a preexisting concept. This concept is used to conform the new metaphor that defines the novelty, Following some examples are presented.

The meme metaphor: Meme is similar to "idea," but not all ideas are memes. A passing idea which you do not communicate to others, or one which fails to take root in others, falls short of being a meme. The important part of the "meme about memes" is that memes are subject to adaptive evolutionary forces similar to those that select for genes. Heir variation is subject to selection in the environment provided by human minds, communication channels, and the vast collection of cooperating and competing memes that make up human culture. The analogy is remarkably close.

The Black Swan metaphor: Nassim Taleb said that from the knowledge management viewpoint, his book isn’t about what we know, or about what we know we don’t know, but rather is a book that focuses attention on the un- or ill-conceived, on what we don’t know we don’t know, Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “unknown unknowns.” and prepare and position ourselves for them, so that we live in a state that is more robust relative to their possible occurrence and impact.

The Stream metaphor: The Stream is what the Web is thinking and doing, right now. It's our collective stream of Consciousness. The Stream is the dynamic activity of the Web, unfolding over time. It is the conversations, the live streams of audio and video, the changes to Web sites that are happening, the ideas and trends -- the memes -- that are rippling across millions of Web pages, applications, and minds,

The Twitter metaphor: Twitter is like a huge cocktail party with:
Following and Followers: you can say you invited people to the party when you followed them. People who are not online now have not arrived at the party. But like all good parties, there are party crasher who also appear but were not invited.
Timeline: full of many individual conversations, and skimming the timeline is like walking through the room, eavesdropping on conversations as you walk past people.
Replies:. are like walking up to someone, and using their name to start a new conversation, or turning to include someone new by using their name.

The Metaphor cognitive function metaphor: Pinker sees human intelligence itself as consisting of a repertoire of concepts -- such as objects, space, time, causation and intention -- which are useful in a social, knowledge-intensive species, whose evolution you can well imagine, and a process of metaphorical abstraction that allows us to bleach these concepts of their original conceptual content -- space, time and force -- and apply them to new abstract domains, therefore allowing a species that evolved to deal with rocks and tools and animals to conceptualize mathematics, physics, law and other abstract domains.
He said that verbs, for example – to cause, to make, to go – can be seen as an alphabet of the basic concepts with which we’re born. He said we comprehend more complexity through metaphor – or simple comparisons. We weren’t born with ideas about physics, chess and love affairs, but probably with a smaller stock of ideas like cause and go and make and goal, and metaphor allows us to co-opt simple concrete thoughts to deal with complex abstract situations.

"The logic of the emotional mind is associative; it takes elements that symbolize a reality, or trigger a memory of it, to be the same as that reality. That is why similes, metaphors and images speak directly to the emotional mind. ... If the emotional mind follows this logic and it's rules, with one element standing for another, things need not necessarily be defined by their objective identity: what matters is how they are perceived; things are as they seem. ... Indeed, in emotional life, identities can be like a hologram in the sense that a single part evokes a whole. " - Goleman