Well, the terms "master" and "slave" do give me a bad feeling. I remember when I was in college, taking photography classes, and when we were working with studio lights, one of them was the "slave," because it wasn't hooked up to the camera, and its flashing was triggered only by the other light's flashing, not by the camera and its set exposure. I cringed, having to call it the "slave" then. On the other hand, either way the plugs are in a hierarchical relationship, so you're going to have domination and subordination whatever you call them.

Sometimes, though, I think that people spend too much time focusing on things like this and not, for example, racial profiling, unequal access to education based on race and class, and other forms of institutionalized racism that have more of an effect on the material conditions of people's lives.

CultureCat

When considering how much money this will cost indirectly to LA tax payers--depending on how far they push this, it has to have a direct affect on what vendors can supply to the county--then you are right. The increased cost that this may create could be used for addressing issues of unequal access to education. Or for more sensitity awareness training in other areas.

Funny you mentioned photography. I was thinking about that after I posted since I have a flash strobe slave unit at home.

Maybe we can replace these terms with "Stalin" for the Master and "Happy Worker" for the slave. }:)

My dad is an electrician, so I grew up hearing these terms. I was wondering about the "male" and "female" cables, though. As you know, a "male" end has prongs, whereas the "female" has holes for the prongs. Will this be the next to go?

When first I used a Mac on a network, I had a 100-page document I was completing when I did a dumb thing and the message "fatal error" came on the screen. I took "fatal" to mean "fatal"-- as in dead, gone, not coming back. Of course, I came to learn the message was the product of a language-impaired programmer. Same deal when The WELL forced us all to change our passwords after a hacker attack. I made just a minor change and the message came back "lousy password". Perhaps someone with a good sense of real-world language has critiqued the bad habits of software writers, but I haven't seen that critique. Of course, the "master-slave" metaphor is offensive. And I don't think it's just PCPC [personal computer political correctness]. It's often inept use of language in the first place by writers who don't imagine their audience as ordinary users who think first in ordinary language. I'd make them rewrite all the manuals and error messages keeping in mind how the language would read in ordinary contexts.

Offhand, I can think of suggesting that you look into the works of Cynthia Selfe (who observes that white-collar metaphors such as file, desktop, etc. seem to exclude blue-collar users who are more apt to think of their tools as parts of a workbench; she said that at an MLA conference in Toronto about 10 years ago, and at one point I knew where she ended up publishing that, but I can't put my finger on it), Sherry Turkle (who I think has a good discussion of the violence implicit in terms as "crash" "bomb" "abort" and "kill" [dating from the computer's development as a tool for war -- see Turkle and Seymour Papert, "Epistemological Pluralism: Styles and Voices Within the Computer Culture"]) and Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (which has a chapter in which a bunch of geeks go to a restaurant, and, if my memory serves, one suggests the pea soup, and another wonders P or !P (pea or not pea). This kind of wordplay features strongly in hacker humor and hacker culture). I read an early version of a chapter of Nick Montfort's "Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction," which described how MIT hacker culture informs the computer game Zork. Programmers are trained to think in the abstract, and they pursue their own version of sweetness and usefulness, which doesn't always resemble what a humanist would recognize as valuable. John refers to the inept use of language by writers -- but in fact the ones who, for instance, chose the action "drag a diskette icon to the trash can" to eject a floppy on a Mac, or who put the "turn off comptuer" menu option on the "Start" button on a Windows, are not writers -- aren't writers by training or profession. Earlier generations of comptuers didn't need user-friendly instructions because only hard-core geeks had access to them; that culture has persisted, it's true.

Dennis G. Jerz

Jerz's Literacy Weblog

I'd say it might be a little strong to use the term "language-impaired programmer." "Fatal error" is a pretty standard term that's been around for a long time, before there were MAC's and PC's. And it does mean "dead, done, not coming back" in the sense that the process or application that is running cannot recover from the error. However, it is a usability flaw in that the average user is unfamiliar with the discourse of computer science. Sort of like the hex code which accompanied Windows blue screens of death. Useless to the average user for understanding the problem that has occurred, but appropriate for the discourse of programming.

After all, theoretical computer science involves the study of Chomsky formal languages. So in the area of linguistics, many programmers are more knowledgeable than most English-types would assume.

you made me remember, dennis. one of the programs i had the most fun working on as an undergrad was a language parser. given an exisiting, finite vocabulary categorized by parts of speech, it would diagram any sentence which used that vocabulary. fun playing with language :)

then, for those that doubt that hackers like playing with language, try out this hacker lame speak generator.

Interesting...The Commodore Amiga's GUI (which pre-dated Windows by a wide margin) was called "Workbench." I didn't realize I spent my youth on a blue-collar machine. Of course, that could explain my socialist leanings...:-)

This is an interesting discussion--all this talk about inappropriate button names, labels, etc., especially from the context of all the videogame theory I've been reading. One of the points made over and over in that literature is that function trumps form (for instance, when we play Super Mario II, we don't so much think about the story of the princess, Toad, etc., only their functions in the game). The "Princess" character could, in fact, only be a pink block and the game could still be played and enjoyed. (In theoretical terms, "graphical quality" is always a social construction; graphics at any but the most minimal level amount to ideology in a political context; what matters are the systems and the rules, not the 'symbolic representation' offered up by biased media to make things look good (or evil)).

I would apply this same principle to OS taxonomy. If you must press "START" to get to the "SHUT DOWN" button, does this really confuse anyone but the most neophyte of computer users? Most of the functions of a computer are operating system are hard to relate anyway; metaphors are only suggestive at best.

I would be happier if the buttons on my screen were replaced with numbers or symbols. Once one learns the functions of the various buttons, the langauge on them doesn't matter. Most standard icons can be renamed anyway (I once renamed every icon on my desktop to try to confuse my friends; none of them were confused for a moment. For instance, no one assumed the Briefcase was now a Recycle Bin just because I renamed it).

What I'm saying here is that the typical GUI metaphors are usually viewed only while the user is in a state of distraction anyway; the only people who seem to regard them "in themselves" are theorists. A better approach in my view would be to recognize the "lack" existing between the SYMBOL (i.e., the icon or button exists in the symbolic order), the IMAGINARY (i.e., whatever we imagine to be happening when we activate the button, or the system in which it exists, etc.), and the REAL (what's really happening inside the computer; all of those electrons bouncing around that none of us really understand!)

Remember those computers (Macs, I believe) whose frames were transparent? I remember the same thing with phones back in the 80s. The idea was that the "guts" of such machinery was delightful to look at (of course, the companies used more colored wiring and paneling to make them "cooler"). However, revealing the "inner workings" of these devices did not make them any more transparent; in fact, we probably felt even more awed by the machinery more than ever.

Remember those phones made to resemble cats, or shoes (Sports Illustrated made a big deal out of the shoe phone). Here is an example of technology using its form to obscure its function. However, at a logical level, it makes no more sense to make a phone "look like a phone" than it does to make one look like a shoe. Unless the form somehow impedes or inhibits the function, does it really matter? The "shoe" phone may confuse someone for a moment, but as soon as they realize "It's a phone" (have an epiphany; the form in this case represents an aporia), the mystery abates quite suddenly, and they can use the shoephone to make or receive calls.

In other words, we could make a "Theme" for our desktop that was purposefully "counter-intuitive," i.e., replacing the standard icons at random, renaming everything...For instance, the Recycle Bin with the Trashcan icon could become Twinkie with a picture of a guitar. Or, better yet, we could call it 00101 and provide a blue box for the icon. A user who encountered this could resolve the "mystery" by simply clicking on the box; the function would soon reveal itself.

In this scenario, the only "function" of the "forms" is that they be able to be as easily differentiated or grouped as possible. If every icon was the same, the "function" of the icon would be nullified.

The ideal GUI, then, would sport icons that were radically different from each other (probably more in terms of shape and color than size, since bulky icons would impair the function of the form). A name is not needed in this case. Once a user discovers the functions of all of the icons, he/she is able to use the desktop efficiently. Of course, there may be some confusion when the user forgets what certain things do, but through habit, these memory glitches will fade and soon the user will have no difficulties.

Perhaps the only purpose of a GUI is to provide some sort of metaphorical environment to help people see what they have trouble imagining. In this case, a "desktop theme" should not be merely a change of icons and names, but a change of metaphor. For instance, a "Space Theme" would need not only to change icons around, but translate each "function" into a form that would make sense from an astronomical perspective (Recycle Bin becomes a black hole, etc.)

Arguing that an icon and a name should refer directly to the function is much like the old argument that a word should have some intrinsic quality that binds it to the thing to which it refers. You don't need me to explain the problems with this old theory!

Let's deconstruct our desktops! (Perhaps we can begin with 'desktop,' since this term obviously has no logical relationship with its referent.)