The ten worst tech neologisms
New-minted weasel words
Earlier this year, I picked my top ten new tech words for The Guardian to mark the publication of my new book, Netymology. Tech etymologies are a rich, strange field, and one that provokes unlikely passions; hence this exploration of the underbelly of my earlier enthusiasm. It’s a subjective list, but I defy you to read it without shuddering at least once.
(i) Phablet: Bigger than a smartphone, smaller than a tablet and surely one of the most unpleasing hybrids in recent linguistic history, the phablet is a moist compromise of a word deserving swift abandonment. As lexicographer and linguist Ben Zimmer notes, in comparison to other techy “ph” coinages (phreaking, phishing) it lacks both wit and elegance — not to mention sounding much too much like “flab” and “phlegm” for comfort.
(ii) Gamification: I’ve long been an advocate of studying and learning lessons from video games — which is why the word “gamification” strikes a certain horror into my heart. Not because there aren’t great insights to be taken from games for improving everything from education to social participation, but because gamification often implies a simple, crude series of mechanisms stuck artificially onto an activity in an effort to make it engaging. Building brilliant games is an expert, architectural process. “Gamifying” something is, sadly, more often a kind of wishful hand-waving than a realisation of play’s possibilities. Its failures and over-promises threaten to cripple a wonderful field (and don’t get started on “edutainment”).
(iii) To unlike: The young verbs of binary or “reversible” vocabulary surround us online: to friend and unfriend, to like and unlike, to follow and unfollow, to favourite and unfavourite. They’re a form of expression that perfectly echoes the information structures underpinning them. Everything is measurable, customisable and personalised — so long as you only feel one of two ways. It’s a form of reduction that’s insidious precisely because it’s powerful. How much easier constantly to like and to unlike whatever is onscreen than to take the time to articulate what you truly feel, or commit yourself beyond a mouse click.
(iv) Ecosystem: Is your life locked into Apple’s ecosystem of apps, the Amazon media ecosystem, or perhaps Google’s? Most of us belong to at least one — and the weasel word “ecosystem” perfectly embodies a message we would do well to ignore. In biology, looking at complex natural systems as a whole makes excellent sense. When applied to technology, though, it implies that technology itself is a kind of second nature to be inhabited rather than critiqued; and that what we’re using is the result of natural evolutionary processes rather than profitable firms’ partial objectives. It’s not that the analogy is without merit. Worse, it has considerable merit — and this very merit invites uncritical acceptance, not to mention a gamut of other pseudo-natural coinages (“media is the air we breathe…”)
(v) Frape: What do you call it if you accidentally leave your social media profile logged in, and someone else takes advantage by deleting or wildly altering your data, or posting obscene messages? Whatever you do, try to avoid the wretched portmanteau “frape”. Short for “Facebook rape”, it manages simultaneously to trivialize a horrific real-world crime and be nasty in its own right. Shocking labels are, sometimes, witty and apposite. At other times, though, they’re more like pointing a finger at a friend’s bloodied body while giggling.
(vi) n00b: Gaming and hacking culture boast one of the most marvellously inventive of all tech lexicons — and one obsessed with status. Although debased by popular usage, to be truly “l33t” — that is, to be an elite member of the tribe, feared and admired by your peers — was once a badge of great online honour. Sadly, the top of most hierarchies relishes deprecating its underclass, a group known online as noobs/n00bs. Derived from the US military slang “newbie”, it describes anyone inexperienced enough not to know what’s going on, and comes tinged with a particularly geeky mix of contempt and arrogance. Not a word likely to inculcate generosity, tolerance or learning.
(vii) Curation : It’s insufficiently dignified, today, for many people to say that they’re simply “choosing” or “selecting” content that they like online. That doesn’t sound creative or skilled enough. Instead, if you string together a few images from Flickr, or drum up a handful of links from Google, you’re “curating content” — as if you were assembling an art gallery based on years of expertise, or demonstrating your exquisite taste to connoisseurs. Except, of course, you’re doing neither. You’re just looking a few things up, pointing towards them, and pretending this makes you creative.
(viii) Cloud: Clouds are fluffy, weightless things. They bring rain. They’re natural, and can have silver linings even when they’re stormy. What they don’t even slightly resemble is bunker-like air-conditioned buildings filled with rack upon rack of humming servers, generating at immense cooling and electrical cost the stuff of every online search and scrap of data. “Cloud storage” and “cloud computing” are lovely phrases, but they’re lovely precisely because they obfuscate the reality they claim to describe. Should we care about this, or worry that bad language can lead to bad thinking? Given that some people apparently believe that bad weather affects cloud computing, yes. Be afraid.
(ix) Freemium: Free stuff is good, and premium stuff is great. Hence “freemium”: a combination of the two that must surely be marvellous! It describes the practice of allowing people to use a basic product for free, and then charging them for advanced features. All of which is very well. Except that, lurking beneath the letters, lies a business model that at its worst involves getting as many people as possible to install your free software — and then milking the most vulnerable, gullible or irresponsible through endless small charges and virtual purchases. Not everyone does this, of course. For those that do, though, “freemium” is a smokescreen for deeply dubious practices.
(x) Eyeballs: How many “eyeballs” does your website attract per day? If you’re in the business of selling online advertising, this has been a key question since before the dot com boom. It’s not people you’re interested in as such, you see. It’s “people” as the systems you’re working with understand them: gazing eyeballs; fingers tapping at keyboards and jabbing at screens. There’s a metaphorical dismembering going on in this kind of language that I find disturbing, not least because of the questions it doesn’t allow us to ask: what might be good, or best, for the embodied human being whose clicks you’re measuring? What isn’t being measured when you mistake two eyeballs for a mind?
A version of this piece first appeared on The Good Web Guide
