Apples and pears: September 02, 1996 issue of New Thinking

September 02, 1996 New Thinking:
Apples and pears

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September 02, 1996

Apples and pears

By Gerry McGovern

Q: Which is the odd one out: apple, pear, apricot?
A: Pear. It’s not a computer.

The computer is a liquid thing that spreads and spreads, soaking into our business, life and culture. Language is a tool by which an emerging culture helps itself grow and define its separate identity. By which a culture protects its knowledge and secrets from those on the outside. By which a culture describes it own unique world.

Computer language is based on English, yes. But, like English -- and most other European languages, which were built on Latin -- it draws words from the English language to bring them into a new context.

Abort, artificial intelligence, backbone, bit, bleed, body, brain-damaged, bug, cell, child, clone, drive, dumb, generation, hacking, intelligent agent, learning, life cycle, memory, mouse, native language, neural network, noise, seed, sense, slug, tail, tree, turtle, virus, widow, worm.

It is interesting how computer language has grown by adapting words, but I think what is also interesting is many of the words it has borrowed. Words like ‘intelligence,’ ‘cell,’ ‘dumb,’ ‘memory,’ ‘virus;’ words which describe computer existence as if it were a life form.

Whether the choice of such words reflects an implicit acceptance that computers are an evolving life form is for another debate, but what is certainly evident is that computer language has a healthy appetite for words to describe its evolution and expansion.

With the Internet, computer language, and those who speak it, have found a house and sort of home. Now, the makers and the speakers can mix freely and settle down in cyberspace with their compatriots.

Did it ever strike you that in small but growing areas, a 13-year-old in Dublin might have more in common with a 13-year-old in New York, Tokyo, Munich, Sydney, than they have in common with their parents? Have you ever overheard your childrens’ conversations and wondered just what the hell they were talking about?

Historically, physical geography defined cultural formation and evolution. Rivers, mountains, seas and lakes, housed populations, which over time evolved into tribes, nations and cultures.

Physical geography will not be such a defining force in the digital age.

The questions become:

Whether cyberspace will encourage the evolution of a very diffused, uni-cultural human population?
Whether cultures have solidified to such a degree that they will continue in their present form even as their house of physical geography begins to dissolve?
Whether the present cultural/tribal landscape will begin to diffuse without its geography house, but that the tribal instinct will remain, and we will see the emergence of new tribes and cultures, living in virtual houses?

I feel that present culture will diffuse but not disintegrate. That people will belong to many tribes, share many allegiances. I think that the generation gap will widen, and that parents will have to learn hard to remain relevant to their children.

Apples and trees, bugs and viruses are changing words in a changing world. They have reshaped themselves with new meaning for a new age. We too need to learn to live like a chameleon, learn something of a new language every day.

Our words are changing and so must we.

Gerry McGovern

Next issue: Microscope and Kennedy
Previous issue: Nomads, squatters and settlers
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Our words are changing and so must we.