Category: Digital Culture

Sunday Thought Exercise – M.A.D.ness or no?

18th Century German illustration of Moloch.

I know it’s a day to relax, enjoy a late-morning cup of coffee, and perhaps forget about the troubles of the world, so I hope you’ll forgive me for asking you to think about nuclear weapons.  This article from 2009 has stuck with me ever since I first read it.  Not only is it an interesting analysis of global stability vis a vis nuclear proliferation, but it raises a sociological or philosophical question or two.

In short, the fact remains that, while we view atomic weapons as terrible things, no two nuclear-armed countries have ever gone to war, not even conventional war, since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In grade school, we learned the somewhat counter-intuitive concept of Mutually Assured Destruction with regard to the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but as Jonathan Tepperman points out in his article, the principle has worked globally for over sixty years. Rather than support or criticize Tepperman’s article, I find myself asking the science fiction writer’s question.  Assuming we take the oft-used premise of an alien civilization analyzing the human race as a whole, what does this global, atomic stalemate say about us?  Does it imply that we must invent machines that supersede own humanity, even to the extent that we must hold a gun to our own heads to make ourselves behave?  

Why do I ask on this particular blog?  Because the relationship between Man and his machines is part of examining the “digital utopia.” For those who don’t follow these issues, the ideas, politics, and sensibilities of many leaders in Silicon Valley extend way beyond the matter of how to get more gadgets and apps into our hands. As we experience a period of upheaval in many political, economic, and social systems, there is an unmistakably technocratic drumbeat out there to which the next generation is plugged in  and tapping its feet.  This is a subject that will be examined in detail in future posts, but for now I invite your responses to the above question.

Can cyber borders really be closed?

Photo by Peter Austin. http://www.peteraustin.co.uk/

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the Iranian government is laying the foundation for a national intranet that would replace Iranian citizens’ access to the world wide web.  Iranians already have limited access to high speeds and certain social media sites, but this infrastructure would give the government even greater control to filter out western influence, to squelch and monitor internal dissent, and presumably to guard against western cyber attacks like Stuxnet on its nuclear program.  One very interesting note in the article also predicts that a byproduct of building this intranet would be knowledge that would improve Iran’s capability to launch cyber attacks as well as defend against them.

Once again, a move by an oppressive regime should give those of us in free societies who too often cry censorship a moment to reflect on what censorship really looks like.  But it will be interesting to watch whether or not the Iranian government pursues this program and what its effects will ultimately be.  By most accounts, the citizens of Iran are among the most pro-Western, pro-democratic, and highly educated people in the Middle East.  So, will closing off access work for the government, or will it intensify the seething desire for regime change?  It is my bias that free speech is like weeds, that it tends to find a way through the cracks, but as always, I want to hear from you.

A Healthy Case of Logophilia: Are Dictionaries Democratic?

English lexicographer Jonathon Green offers this well-reasoned article criticizing crowd sourcing for dictionaries under the thesis “dictionaries are not democratic.”  As a confirmed word snob and English language fetishist, I have to say that I generally agree.

To study and love the English language is to accept and even celebrate that it is and always has been the most mutable language in human history.  The properties that make English so hard to learn for the foreign student are exactly those traits we logophiles find so attractive. I believe good writing, beyond clarity of intent, is about two things:  sound and connotation.  For the student of English, it’s enough to acquire the denotation of a word like grumpy, but the serious writer will spend more than a little effort considering the contextual appropriateness of prickly, testy, waspish, churlish, or irascible.  This is both the joy and the mania of the medium.

So, one might assume that if embracing the ephemeral nature of English is part of   loving the language, then the rapid mutations of digital-age neologisms would be eagerly accepted as well.  For some, I’m sure this is the case, and it’s true that fleeting colloquialisms are always fun when they add color and spice to everyday parlance.  But the professional communicator also wants his language moored to something a bit more firm, which is why I believe Mr. Green makes a good case for lexicographers beyond mere job security.

Take the word I used above, logophile.  I knew such a word existed, but writing this at dawn and half a coffee short, I couldn’t think of it. One thing Web searching offers that a dictionary does not is a means to stumble about with half words and phrases in search of the target.  While doing exactly this, I found wordophile, cited in Meriam-Webster’s online urban dictionary.  Wordophile is sort of fun sounding, so why not choose it over logophile?  In the context of this piece, the correct choice for me is the word that has more solid roots in the language, whereas I might use wordophile in a more casual or flippant circumstance.

The question of professional vs amateur lexicography feels anachronistically futile in a world where many college educators are happy to receive papers using whole English words at all rather than the truncated form of Tweetish.  Still, Mr. Green and his ilk are guardians of something more profound than dusty and heavy stacks of paper.  When language is stretched too thin and too rapidly, vagueness becomes the norm in all communication.  We see this in corporate and political shorthand all the time — two worlds where speaking without saying anything is often a purposeful strategy.

In the next podcast I’ll be posting, writer Jeffrey Turrentine refers to one downside of the Web as its being a tool for achieving “epistemic closure.” There is nothing particularly new about the observation that the Web offers the user evidence for whatever bias — political, scientific, historic, social — he brings to the keyboard, but when we combine this phenomenon with too much democratization of language itself, I believe we ultimately serve anti-democratic interests who too easily manipulate the masses through the fog of an unbound lexicon.