Pressing the Reset button

From a movie review of the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale.

I don’t know why after so many lousy James Bond pictures I always look forward to the next… Like most people, I bonded with Bond when he was Sean Connery… Roger Moore made Bond old-boy and arch… Timothy Dalton was peevish… Pierce Brosnan grew on me but never…

“Casino Royale” presses the reset button… The ingredients are reshuffled to catch you off-guard.

Another example of how clicking a button onscreen becomes a metaphor for a real-life thing. “Pushing the reset button” means to start over, never mind, can I have a do over?

The metaphor is coming full circle. Where buttons onscreen were originally metaphors for physical buttons, the functions of onscreen buttons are now becoming metaphors for moments in our daily lives. We use onscreen buttons so much, they are intertwined with our daily lives. The split between physical and digital is breaking down.

A similar example is Rewind. When something goes bad, “can I rewind that?” or “let’s rewind.” Desiring to do something over in life is nothing new, but using a tape metaphor to describe it is.

There’s also Undo. Of course Undo was already a word prior to the computer, but it’s use in casual conversation to mean “let’s go back and try that again” must have increased dramatically since its inclusion in the Macintosh lexicon. BJ Fogg discusses this in his “Why Simplicity Matters” talk, given at WebVisions 2005 and probably elsewhere. The notion that we are thinking in computer terms when in the real world. He mentions that just after a car crash, the first thing he thought of was “command-Z.”

Digital and analog are blending. How we conceptualize the two are merging. That is the power of the metaphor. I bet that if the original onscreen metaphors weren’t so strong (desktop, trash can, undo, file, folder), they wouldn’t be coming back to reinforce and expand their original daily meanings.