The tintinnabulation of the names…

November 20, 2012 Leave a comment

Have you ever wondered about the sheer power of naming something?

I’ll draw an analogy. Imagine you have a totally blank slate… let’s say you’re out in the middle of the desert. Then you pound in a stick of rebar, basically putting a stake in the ground. Consider this the first point. From here on out, you can define all future stakes and other objects by their relation to this initial stake. By distance from, color of (darker than, lighter than…), bigger, smaller, the comparisons abound.

So what happens when you name something? First, think about what happens without a name. You have to use other characteristics to identify it, often creating that same comparison. When you coin the name, it creates a symbol by which that entire group of characteristics can be identified. And often, from then on, anything which has a similar set of properties might remind you of the initial name.

If this is all true, then it follows that not only does naming something often cast a set of perceived properties, but it also grants a great deal of power to the entity which crafts the name. Think of two events from Genesis here: Adam naming the animals, using the power of language to name them, thus getting that element of control over them; and the Tower of Babel, where languages are scattered and nobody can communicate with anyone else, leaving God as the sole arbitrer of names.

I would argue this same idea applies to things like value systems. If you are a shopkeeper, you can name the price of an item, and thus control who can afford it (and whether it is sellable). You can also use names to judge things, comparing one writer to another, for example, either damning or praising. After all, what is language without comparison, and what is comparison without judgement?

If I can shine a white light through a prism and break it into the spectrum, I wonder if one could shine a metaphorical white light into your senses and break the noumena into elements of logic. Could it be, the a priori to a posteriori, as emotion to logic, as unConscious to Concious, as id to ego, as meaning to symbol?

Filed under names Tagged with , ,

Are you a Facebook snitch?

September 22, 2012 Leave a comment

Facebook tests prompt asking you to snitch on your friends who aren’t using their real name

This article has slowly been making the rounds, complete with a validating screenshot. The premise: you are surfing around on Facebook, and suddenly the site prompts you with a window displaying a picture of your friend and asking “Is this their real name?” You’re presented with several options, including the “I don’t want to answer” opt-out. Which do you choose?

To illustrate one of the reasons I dislike this entire practice, I will share a story from my past. Years ago when I was helping organize raves, one of the key lessons I learned was that if or when the police come to ask what’s going on, there are a few words you never mention, including “permit.” When you mention a specific word or phrase, it can trigger reactions and disrupt a set of assumptions someone might have been making. With the rave example, the natural response to “And of course we have our permits” might be “Why wouldn’t you have permits?” whereas before you mentioned that word, the police weren’t even thinking about that. In a sense, you have just taken two concepts which might not have been linked (“the rave” and “permits”) and created a relationship.

Jumping back to the Facebook example, I believe that when random Facebook users see a construct like this over and over again, not only does it create a relationship between “real names” (I call them “legal names”) and your ability to maintain a presence on their system, but it also sets up a dangerous Prisoner’s Dilemma like dynamic. As a Facebook user, not only are you forcefully introduced to the idea of a “real name” (as well as the obvious fact that everyone has a first and last name), then convinced this concept is totally valid, but you are also asked to join the forces of good in helping police people who are not “with it.” While this construct remains opt-in for now, it makes me start to wonder two things: will there be an eventual cost for people who refuse to play the game, and what is the likelihood that a friend will “rat you out” regardless of whether your name is, to them, “real” or not?

Given that there has been at least one study showing that forcibly linking someone’s online profile on a website to the name approved to them by their government has little to no impact on the “quality” of data produced, it should make people begin to wonder not only who Facebook’s customers (not users) are and why they might be insisting on standards like these, but what lengths Facebook is willing to go to to ensure they meet their standards.

Filed under names, nymwars Tagged with ,