^ That is a photo I took during Kenny Million’s show at Bard College on Saturday. This is a post about Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Basically, technology scares me. As often as I refer to myself as a luddite, though, I do use the internet at least as much as everybody else I know. What I’m scared of isn’t the big, scary machines that could kill me, but the fact that the language of computer programmers is seeping into common vocabulary. Sapir and Whorf were interesting dudes who thought that language constituted thought. Reality is coded in language; whatever your native tongue(s) is or are, your life experiences are mediated through the schema of practice, action, and history, that led to the creation of that language. Wikipedia tells me that the dude who created the programming language Ruby was inspired by … science fiction?: “In a 2003 presentation at an open source convention, Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the programming language Ruby, said that one of his inspirations for developing the language was the science fiction novel Babel-17, based on the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis” - here (by the way, I always feel a little guilty citing Wikipedia, like I’m writing this for a class or something).   Technology scares me because as rad as I find novels like Babel-17, I’m down with science fiction being, erm, fiction. And if Sapir and Whorf were onto anything (and I think they were), science fiction is becoming some serious science non-fiction. Not in books, though - in the practice of, um, being TEH HUMANZ. Ah! Make it stop!  - EmMa-

^ That is a photo I took during Kenny Million’s show at Bard College on Saturday. This is a post about Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Basically, technology scares me. As often as I refer to myself as a luddite, though, I do use the internet at least as much as everybody else I know. What I’m scared of isn’t the big, scary machines that could kill me, but the fact that the language of computer programmers is seeping into common vocabulary. Sapir and Whorf were interesting dudes who thought that language constituted thought. Reality is coded in language; whatever your native tongue(s) is or are, your life experiences are mediated through the schema of practice, action, and history, that led to the creation of that language. Wikipedia tells me that the dude who created the programming language Ruby was inspired by … science fiction?: “In a 2003 presentation at an open source convention, Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the programming language Ruby, said that one of his inspirations for developing the language was the science fiction novel Babel-17, based on the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis” - here (by the way, I always feel a little guilty citing Wikipedia, like I’m writing this for a class or something).  

Technology scares me because as rad as I find novels like Babel-17, I’m down with science fiction being, erm, fiction. And if Sapir and Whorf were onto anything (and I think they were), science fiction is becoming some serious science non-fiction. Not in books, though - in the practice of, um, being TEH HUMANZ. Ah! Make it stop! 

- EmMa-

1 year ago  Notes (1)
  1. tinyspirits posted this