What I’m looking for is what I’ve recently heard called the Garman treshhold in Norway; the level at which explaining computers in metaphors becomes impossible. However, looking it up online I can’t find any source for the “Garman treshhold.”
It’s to mean the point in a discussion with a layman where you have to cease trying to explain what you’re doing because it’ll destroy whatever metaphor you were trying to stretch it into and your customer/help-seeker doesn’t have the pre-requisite technical or theoretical knowledge to be able to follow your reasoning.
To clarify, I’ve only heard “Garman treshhold” in conversations. I doubt it would have been a recognized term in computing, more along the lines of internet meme.
The more I look at your description, the more it reminds me of ‘metaphor shear’, which was coined by Neal Stephenson for his essay “In The Beginning Was The Command Line”, which has always been freely available online by the wishes of the author. It means that all metaphors eventually degrade, sometimes quite suddenly, and you’re forced to confront the fact reality is different from your expectations; he uses the example of documents and word processing programs, but it applies to just about everything average people use computers for.
This was stated somewhat differently by Joel Spolsky as “The Law of Leaky Abstractions”, which is less about a catastrophic intrusion of reality and more about all the non-catastrophic ways abstractions break down all the time.
