The Words Of Computing

TechCrunch ran an interesting article about the nouns that our society uses to describe virtual world actions (Copy and Paste, the magnifying glass icon for zoom, streaming.) They wonder why we use outdated actions to represent computing functions and when we'll be comfortable using entirely new words to describe actions and nouns in the digital world. The whole article is interesting, but these sections sums up the point:

The simple fact is that there is a shared visual orthography in which some things are acknowledged worldwide, and this overpowers the logical suggestion to constantly update it. Many reading this would, 20 years ago, be unsure whether the icon represented saving or accessing the A: drive. Nowadays, many will never encounter portable storage in their life. Yet the diskette is firmly associated with saving changes, certainly more so than it is with removable media. So logic has nothing to do with it. Language has less to do with logic than it has to do with a shared interpretation of symbols. These symbols are widely used because they are widely understood, and they are widely understood because they are widely used... 

Maybe I lost you there. What I am saying is that every action we create in the virtual world has by necessity an analogue in the real world. And by common consent, to represent those actions we go back to certain shared experiences that will not be misinterpreted. Lately it’s been hydrological phenomena. Cloud storage. Bittorrent. Streaming. Thunderbolt, to an extent. A few of you may remember that Zunes squirted. NFC is data osmosis, though of course no one calls it that.

I also like the last point made in the article, which is that the most innovative changes in computing may be identified by the difficulty we'll have finding a good metaphor for them. If we can't easily assign a term from the physical world to it then we're stepping into new territory of action.

Perhaps this is all abstract hot air. But perhaps not.