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The Shock of the New, The Echoes of the Past

My friend Wolfgang Allen sent me an interesting email this morning:

Have you noticed that "set top box" is a doubly obsolete phrase?

Whenever people in the media speak of the digital t.v. converters (that will soon prevent millions of old people from ever watching t.v. again) they call them "set top boxes". For one thing there t.v. "sets" went out in the 50's. most has been integrated since then. Unless you consider a television with an integrated tuner that is not being used because it is hooked up to a cable box to be part of a "set" when paired with said cable box.

Also, most televisions have no top to speak of these days. I suppose you could duct tape a digital converter to the top.

If you haven’t been following the whole digital TV switcheroo, you may be surprised to discover that almost a third of TV stations are planning on switching over this week , with the rest following later in the year. You may also be surprised to find out that the “set top boxes” that will allow ordinary folks to watch the new digital TV are a bit hard to come by , meaning that potentially millions of people are going to suddenly find themselves without TV.

I could opine about the horrific way this whole thing was handled and how it will probably affect a disproportionate number of lower-income people who can’t afford cable and satellite and how it’s going to affect advertising but I won’t. Plenty of others have done that. No, what really fascinated me about Wolfgang’s message was thinking about all those words that we still use for technology that doesn’t exist anymore.

Many of us still talk about “taping” programs even though we know our DVRs actually record things to hard drives. Many of us probably have parents (or grandparents) who still refer to their refrigerators as an “icebox.” We still think about buying audio recordings at “record stores,” though you’d be hard-pressed to find a store that sells vinyl records outside of specialty places catering to audiophiles or DJs. Besides, a lot of DJs now use CDs for “scratching” even though a needle never comes anywhere close to the surface of their shiny discs.

Telephone technology seems particularly resistant to changing language. Most of us still talk about “dialing” a phone, though it’s hard to remember what it was like to actually move a physical dial around with an index finger. Our phones “ring,” but our “rings” sound more like electronic beeps than the sound of a clapper hitting a bell (unless you’ve downloaded a “retro” “ringtone” that samples an old phone bell sound). Even though we spend more and more time talking on our mobile phones, we still refer to people being on the non-existent “line.”

Even though computers haven’t been with us nearly as long, we still use terms today that don’t make a lot of sense anymore. Radio announcers still urge us to “log on” to websites as if we have to go back to a command line in order to visit a web site. While we still refer to the top page of a web site as a “homepage,” few of us are thinking about the days when people put up personal “homepages” that greeted them when they started their browsers. In fact, the word “page” itself seems pretty archaic when “pages” don’t exist for us to “page through” but are generated (for the most part) by databases serving us content some of us still read on our “terminals.”

Other anachronistic words still tenuously cling to our everyday speech about technology. While few of us own clocks with mechanical innards that make noise, we still refer to clocks “ticking” to mark the time. We “snap” pictures with our digital cameras even though there’s no shutter to “snap” (though many make a reasonable facsimile of the sound to remind us of what we’re doing). We “video” our kids, though it be tough to spot a camera with a video tape in it at most birthday parties. And we still refer to “shorthand,” though most of us couldn’t describe what real shorthand looks like (or, crazier yet, take our own shorthand notes).

I wonder what words we’ll cling to as we move forward. Will we still refer to recording a show as “tivo-ing” something after TiVo the company is long gone? Will we still refer to the Washington Post and New York Times as “newspapers” long after they’ve stopped being printed on paper? Will academics still write “papers” in a world where their words never actually get printed? We will still “fax” documents after the last fax machine (formerly “telecopier”) is gone? Will we speak of “editions” when printed books are a thing of the past? Indeed, will we still be reading “books” when they’re delivered electronically? We will still “file” our “files” in “folders” on our “desktops” when their analog equivalents are long forgotten?

Language has a way of changing far more quickly than most of us notice. Remember “webzines” before “blogs” came on the scene? Remember when linked texts online were referred to as “hypermedia?” Who uses the whole phrase “world wide web” anymore without irony or “electronic mail?” Even the most common operating system in the world – Microsoft Windows—sounds somewhat anachronistic in a world where having little square areas we can move around on our computer screens isn’t such a big deal anymore.

Perhaps using obsolete words for new technology is a way for us to nostalgically blunt our fear of the new. By making that link to the past those of us who have to weather change are able to feel more comfortable. “The kids” may have no idea what the reference is, but to them it doesn’t matter: a word’s a word and it just gets assimilated as quickly as all the other words that pop into and out-of our culture and our language. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned here by those who develop new technology: innovate, yes…but give us something to hold on to so we don’t feel swept away by change we can’t control.

Labels: digital tv, language, set top box