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Abstract

I WROTE MY FIRST TECHNICALLY SPEAKING COLUMN WAY back in June 2002. How long ago was that? Long ago enough that some companies that seem now to have been around forever weren’t even gleams in their founders' eyes: Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, Twitter, YouTube. Friendster was trying to persuade people to do social networking; Internet Explorer 6 was the dominant Web browser; and people were getting excited about Swiss army phones that-O brave new world!-could do more than just make and receive phone calls. In 2002, we were so innocent. We thought the PDA was here to stay and that Wikipedia wouldn’t last. We didn't foresee Web 2.0 or filter bubbles. We knew nothing about the wisdom of the crowd or the convenience of the cloud. There was no clickbait or CAPTCHAs, no MOOCs. There had not yet been a single flash mob. Language is a cultural phenomenon, so new additions to the lexicon must be telling us something about new aspects of the culture. To that end, let's take a quick look at some words and phrases that first appeared in 2002. In that year, we coined caving (staying inside one's home as often as possible) and binge viewing (a period of excessive indulgence spent watching previously broadcast episodes of a TV show). We first used blogosphere (“the collection of all bloggers, blog sites, blog readers, and blog text”) and Googleverse (the products, services, and technologies belonging to or associated with Google and the Google search engine). We started using selfie (a photographic self-portrait, particularly one taken with the intent of posting it online) and microblogging (posting short thoughts and ideas to a personal blog). You can feel 2002 in these words, but they’re also pregnant with the years to come.