As I was trying to remember – and Google for – the term used to describe Digg, Reddit, and other such web sites – social bookmarking? collaborative flltering? – I came across an ad for Crowdsourcing: the book, which took me to Crowdsourcing the web site. And I started thinking about crowdsourcing: the word.
In my last post I referred, directly or indirectly to cityscape, web sites, newspapers, magazines, and coffee shops as communities. I applied the same word to disparate things to call attention to their similarities. We live in a world that is constantly trying to find differences.
Jumping the shark. You may know what it means. You may think you know what it means. (A discussion of prescriptivism vs. descriptivism in lexicography is outside the scope of my patience.) It refers to the moment that a tv show becomes creatively exhausted and can find novelty only in acts of ridiculousness that make it impossible to willingly suspend disbelief in the show’s premise.
The fourth Indiana Jones movie recently came out, and we have a new term, “nuking the fridge”, which refers to a scene in the movie where Indiana survives an atomic blast and is hurtled countless yards in the shelter of a refrigerator. (If I just spoiled the movie for you, I’m sorry. I haven’t seen the movie myself. Raiders of the Lost Ark was the only better-than-OK movie in the series.)
Is nuking the fridge different from jumping the shark different from sharking the nuke? I do not know. But all this conversation about verbing the noun got me thinking. Many terms, phrases, concepts come into existence because people want to claim credit for coining a phrase or calling attention to something that others haven’t seen – and labeled.
This doesn’t simply happen in the world of popular culture. It happens in other dens of irrelevance. Like the humanities. I was helping a friend write an abstract for a presentation she was giving, and she showed me a few written by other presenters. They were filled with attempts to coin terms and thus kick-start careers.
There’s nothing new with seeking attention through finding new differences, but we need to do more than analyze things until we find every difference between them. This dynamic needs to be counteracted by one that finds similarities.
