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Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton
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2007-04-03
Framing the World: Social Engineering the Conventional WisdomI found another communique from Bartleby T. Scrivener in my in-box recently. Along with exchanging reminiscences of early Fortran work and assembly-language bugs, Bartleby offered this quotation: “Passing ... from one kind of name to another not only encourages the verbalist in his hopes of achieving science, but by virtue of tables, graphs, and abstract prose in the conclusion, he is also confirmed in the belief that the vague entity to which he gave a generic name does exist as a thing. Soon he sees all of life — all persons and their doings — at once vaguely and generically. In the end, by diffusion through newspapers and other print, the air of common day is colored and thickened by the presence of these supposed entities. The common man soon acquires a vocabulary in excess of his needs, thanks to which he is never at a loss for the wrong word. But meantime he has lost the habit of testing words and ideas by experience and is content to combine them like terms in algebra, without reference to the actual.” — Jacques Barzun, "The House of Intellect", 1959, p. 228 I have read the quotation several times and noticed that it has some hold on what I notice around me. I can’t explain that and I’m not sure what Bartleby’s intension was in sending this to me. I now see it in the constructs that arise in public debates, those that enliven our political lives and those that have more mundane qualities (such as banter about “open” anything). It also reminds me of conversations about framing conversations, whether the neo-con (such a concept itself) notion of commanding the terms of debate, or assertions about framing and FUD (that are, arguably, themselves exercises in framing and FUD). [Have you noticed how often we become what we are speaking out against when we are opposing or objecting to alleged conduct of others? We become examples of our own disdain.] I don’t think that Barzun is railing against all such constructions, but a particular manner by which empty ones become common currency and habitually used without content, only eager repetition. One that just came to my attention is Bob Sutor’s presumptively-used “vendor lock-in tax” tossed around as if it is something tangible and certain rather than speculation. So here I offer the “network dividend,” which I just invented to point out that any tax by the keeper of the network may be well worth it in terms of the network-effect dividend. And, of course, the network effect is itself a concept that doesn’t always fit completely, any more than lock-in (or lock-out). Next up, the “carbon tax,” the “mainframe glass-house tax,” the “attention tax,” and the “interoperability tax.” You pick. Yet notions such as civil rights, sexual harassment, and privacy invasion did not exist at all very long ago, and they are important in how we now seek to define ourselves and the norms of our civil society. There is a spectrum of these conceptions, and how much they are distanced from empty notions in particular usage may say more about what we favor and reject than any substance. So, what can be a rational approach here, wherever it is worthwhile to critically examine the notions we claim as believable and the existing concepts that might be corrupted and debased? For example, how do we address the potential for “identity” being used over-broadly to cover matters of identification and the identifiers used? It is probably too late to recalibrate the use of “identity theft” although it is fascinating to note that therein lurks the notion that we are our identification (sort of like me being my job or you being your hairdo). The problems of recovering from being impersonated are no less difficult, and the need to revoke some identifications and obtain others is no less challenging, but maybe it is not so freaky to talk about the dangers of impersonation and the artifacts used to accomplish it than “identity theft” as a fearsome threat on the sanctity of our persons, like the burglar who doesn’t flush the toilet. Maybe it is a matter of realizing that it is all made up. How it occurs as real can in some cases be a serious barrier to our recognizing the situation differently and possibly far more powerfully. It is also important to realize that some of these are mere sloganeering used as flags to wrap other not-so-patriotic agendas. All I can think of is that it is important to notice how much of what is passed around in our discourse is make-believe and that it is valuable to train ourselves to address William Kingdon Clifford’s challenge: “What right do you have to that belief?” Or as Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister put it in Waltzing with Bears, do you have a right to believe that based on available evidence? In this situation, hearsay is never admissible. Finally, although so many of our concepts are made up and certainly devoid of intrinsic meaning, the concepts we employ and appeal to in our public discourse do matter a great deal. There’s that most wonderful paradox of human existence and experience. Comments: Post a Comment |
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