It isn't a clock spring. Clock springs are for airbag cars, and have a defining characteristic of being able to be destroyed by turning the wheel too far.
*puts on automotive engineer hat*
Or more specifically, a clockspring is effectively a cable reel whose neutral position is half un-reeled. As you turn, it either reels or unreels cable; there is enough cable to get you lock to lock but more than that, well, rips the cable.
As for the name, it's called a clockspring because the internal construction visually mimicks a wound up "ribbon" spring, which was used in a lot of clocks back in the day.
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As mentioned above, what was pictured is the brush portion of a slip ring. Slip rings use circular contacts and sprung brushes to allow electrical contact through a rotating axis.
Slip rings aren't used for airbags, mainly for reliability reasons. Slip rings are notorious failure points (especially discreet brush ones like in the picture), and while good enough for a horn and other steering wheel switches, are too failure prone for a safety device such as an airbag.
Clocksprings, on the other hand, are far more reliable as there are no brushes to wear out and go bad. The internal wires can fail and a botched steering column job can result in it getting ripped, but otherwise, they don't wear out.
Another concern is the mode of failure; with slip rings the contacts can carbonize and short to each other when worn. In the case of a horn, worst case your horn gets stuck, a fuse blows, or the switches on the steering wheel don't work right. In the case of an airbag, worst case is a short to another circuit which has a path to battery/ground; in which case the airbag could detenate randomly and/or when a switch is hit... especially with older air bags, you can see why having an airbag go off when you honk the horn might become a nasty lawsuit. While a designer can choose the order of the contacts to minimize this, given the state of disrepair some vehicles enter when they get old, the potential still exists.
Closkprings are encased in plastic (no path to ground), so the only way for a short would be for two wires to split at the same point and make contact, which outside of botched repair work is extremely unlikely. Just to be safe, some clocksprings jacket the airbag wires separately as extra protection.