Netymology: From Apps to Zombies: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World
Netymology: From Apps to Zombies: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World
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Overview
Composed of 100 bite-sized entries of 400 to 600 words each, Netymology weaves together stories, etymologies and analyses around digital culture's transformation, and creation, of words.
Tom Chatfield presents a kaleidoscopic, thought-provoking tour through the buried roots of some of the digital age's most common terms: from the @ and Apple symbols, to HTML and Trojan horses, to the twisted histories of new forms of slang, memes, text messages and gaming terms.
There's also discussion of the trends behind digital words, and of the ways language itself is being shaped by new forces - and revelations about how these forces are, in turn, reshaping us.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781780879949 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quercus Publishing |
| Publication date: | 03/28/2013 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Tom Chatfield is a freelance author, consultant, game writer and theorist. His first book FUN INC. was published worldwide in 2010. Tom has done design, writing and consultancy work for games and media companies, including Google, Mind Candy, VCCP, Preloaded, Grex, Red Glasses and Intervox. He has spoken widely on technology, media and gaming at forums including TED Global, the Cannes Lions Festival, the House of Commons, RSA, ICA and the World IT Congress. A former senior editor at Prospect magazine, he has a doctorate from St. John's College, Oxford, and writes widely in the national press, including for the Observer, Independent, Sunday Times, Wired, New Statesman, Evening Standard and Times Literary Supplement, and the site Boing Boing.
Read an Excerpt
It’s easy to forget that, for most of its existence, the English word ‘computer’ referred not to machines, but to people who performed calculations. First used in the seventeenth century, the term arrived via French from the Latin computare, meaning to count or add up.Computare itself derived from the combination of the words com, meaning ‘with’, and putare, which originally meant ‘to prune’ in the sense of trimming something down to size, and which came to imply ‘reckoning’ by analogy with mentally pruning something down to a manageable estimate.
Long before eminent Victorians like Charles Babbage had even dreamed of calculating machines, human computing had been vital to such feats as the ancient Egyptians’ understanding of the motion of the stars and planets, with mathematicians like Ptolemy laboriously determining their paths (he also managed to calculate pi accurately to the equivalent of three decimal places: no mean feat for the first century AD).
As mathematics developed, the opportunities for elaborate and useful calculations increased – not least through the development of tables of logarithms, the first of which were compiled by English mathematician Henry Briggs in 1617. Such tables immensely simplified the complex calculations vital to tasks like navigation and astronomy by providing pre-calculated lists of the ratios between different large numbers – but whose construction required immense feats of human calculation both by mathematicians and increasingly necessary groups of trained assistants.
Even as recently as the Second World War, when Alan Turing and his fellows were establishing the revolutionary foundations of modern computing, the word ‘computers’ still referred to dedicated human teams of experts – like those working around Turing at Bletchley Park in England.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it wasn’t until 1946 that the word ‘computer’ itself was used to refer to an ‘automatic electronic device’. This was, of course, only the beginning; and since then both the sense and the compound forms of the word have multiplied vastly. From ‘microcomputers’ to ‘personal computers’ and, more recently, ‘tablet computers’, we live in an age defined by Turing’s digital children.
It’s important to remember, though, just how recently machines surpassed men and women in the computation stakes. As late as the 1960s, teams of hundreds of trained human computers housed in dedicated offices were still being used to produce tables of numbers: a procedure that the first half of the twentieth century saw honed to a fine art, with leading mathematicians specializing inbreaking down complex problems into easily repeatable steps.
It’s a sign of how fast and entirely times have changed since then that human computation is almost forgotten. And yet, in different forms, its principles remain alive in the twenty-first century – not least under the young banner of ‘crowdsourcing’, a word coined in 2006 in an article for Wired magazine by writer Jeff Howe to describe the outsourcing of a task to a large, scattered group of people.
From identifying the contents of complex photographs to answering fuzzy questions or identifying poorly printed words, there remain plenty of tasks in a digital age that people are still better at than electronic computers. We may not call it ‘human computation’ any more, but the tactical deployment of massed brainpower to solve some problems remains more potent than ever.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 Selfie Consciousness 5
2 #WhyDoWeDoThis? 8
3 Transistor (Not Iotatron) 11
4 Emoji and Emoticons 14
5 Computers 17
6 Signs of Our Times: @ and 20
7 Marking Up 23
8 Myths and Monsters 26
9 Speak, Memory 28
10 Why Wiki? 30
11 Buffed-Up Gamers 32
12 Very, Very Big and Very, Very Small 34
13 The Names of Domains 37
14 Rise of the Robots 40
15 Cyber-Everything 43
16 Three-Letter Words 46
17 Everyone's an Avatar 49
18 On Memes 51
19 Hacking Through the Net 54
20 Do You Grok It? 57
21 Sock Puppets and Astroturf 60
22 Bluetooth 63
23 The Cupertino Effect 65
24 The Scunthorpe Problem 68
25 The Coming of the Geeks 71
26 Beware of the Troll 74
27 Bitten by Bugs 77
28 Bits, Bytes and Other Delights 80
29 Twinks, Twinked, and Twinking 83
30 Talking Less About Trees 85
31 ZOMGs, LOLZ 88
32 Lifehacking 90
33 The Multitasking Illusion 93
34 The Streisand Effect 96
35 Acute Cyberchondria 99
36 Casting the Media Net 102
37 Bionic Beings and Better 105
38 Technological Singularities 108
39 Google and Very Big Numbers 111
40 Status Anxiety 114
41 The Zombie Computing Apocalypse 117
42 To Pwn and Be Pwned 120
43 Learning to Speak 133 122
44 Getting Cyber-Sexy 124
45 Slacktivism and the Pajamahadeen 127
46 Gamification and the Art of Persuasion 129
47 Sousveillance 132
48 Phishing, Phreaking and Phriends 135
49 Spamming for Victory 138
50 Gurus and Evangelists 141
51 CamelCase 144
52 The Blogosphere and Twitterverse 147
53 Phat Loot and In-Game Grinding 150
54 Meta- 153
55 TL;DR 156
56 Apps 159
57 Fanboys and Girls 162
58 Welcome to the Guild 165
59 Facepalms and *Acting Out* 168
60 Finding Work as a Mechanical Turk 171
61 Geocaching 174
62 The Beasts of Baidu 177
63 Snowclones 179
64 Typosquatting 182
65 Egosurfing and Googlegangers 185
66 Infovores, Digerati and Hikikomori 187
67 Planking, Owling and Horsemanning 190
68 Unfriend, Unfavorite (and Friends) 193
69 Sneakernets and Meatspace 196
70 Going Viral 198
71 Dyson Spheres and Digital Dreams 201
72 Welcome to Teh Interwebs 204
73 On Good Authority 206
74 A World of Hardware 209
75 Darknets, Mysterious Onions, and Bitcoins 212
76 Nets, Webs and Capital Letters 215
77 Praying to Isidore and Tweeting the Pope 218
78 QWERTY and Dvorak 221
79 Apples Are the Only Fruit 224
80 Eponymous Branding 226
81 Mice, Mouses and Grafacons 228
82 Meh 230
83 Learn Olbanian! 232
84 Booting and Rebooting 235
85 Cookie Monsters 237
86 Going Digitally Native 240
87 Netiquette and Netizens 243
88 The Names of the Games 246
89 Flash Crowds, Mobs, and the Slashdot Effect 249
90 Godwin's Law 252
91 From Beta to Alpha to Golden Master 254
92 Mothers and Daughters, Masters and Slaves 256
93 Bit Rot 258
94 Nonprinting Characters 260
95 Wise Web Wizards 262
96 Disk Drives 265
97 Easter Eggs 268
98 Why Digital? 273
99 Filing Away Our Data 275
100 Artificial Intelligence and Hiring Tests 276
… and Finally 279
Acknowledgments 281
Select Bibliography and Further Reading 283
Notes and References 285
Index 299