This transnomination or metonymy has also " infected " the world of technology, where we use human, biological or other terms to name objects, programs, uses and situations , as is the case with the word in italics in this same paragraph." Infection " is a biological term.Male connectors, viruses, digital ecosystem...why do we use biological terms for technology?
Transnomination is easy between two elements with common features
One of the oldest technology transnominations used today is the name based on sexual parameters that do not have the ends of the cables.Yes, we have a USB " male "or an audio jack of 2.5" female "because we assign to the ends of the cables sexual characteristics based on our genitals.
It is clear that one is not going to leave a TV pregnant if you connect to your HDMI jack " female " an HDMI connector " male " such as the Chromecast.Your old TV with the coaxial socket of the antenna, or the wall and its Schuko plugs (below), have neither biological sex (they are not alive nor are organisms) nor social gender (because they lack identity).
That is, they don't need to be male or female , and we could have used words like hole or skewer to differentiate this type of system.However, we opted for the transnomination of the feminine or the masculine to adapt it to our genitals, due to its obvious resemblance of inwards and outwards , respectively.
And when it is neither the one nor the other, or does it have characteristics of both? There are several alternatives.On the one hand, you can use the biological term " hermaphrodite ", "which has both sexes" according to the SAR.But since this term is under discussion we can also use " tongue and groove ".
In English we have more wealth to name them, and the anchor that can be seen in the photograph below, and that is used to mechanically connect two train cars, can be called " androgynous " ( androgino), " genderless " (without gender), " sexless " (without sex), and in a less polemic way like " combo " (combination).
We put the anchor of two trains because it is easy to visualize from that perspective " genderless ", but we could have used the system asymmetric high technology hermaphrodite "connector of coupling spacecraft such as the Soyuz of the USSR, Russian Salyut or the Dragon of SpaceX.
Thus we adapt the biological terms to the world of technology
Although much of the known life is based on sexuality, many living forms have nothing to do with this method of reproduction, but with other concepts, such as " ecosystem ", which has ended up penetrating the world of technology with neologisms such as" ecosystem "digital .
The first ecosystems were formed by the same cyanobacteria that we want to teleport to Mars today.The latter are formed by startups technologies, partners , components, brands, operating systems, APIs...They are a system complex enough to form a habitat (from the Greek οἶκος , and Latinized eco-) that does not give rise to a living mega-structure globally.
And yet technology does form a worldwide structure that palpitates to some extent.Late all over the Earth.In the study Mapping the global Twitter heartbeat: The geography of Twitter , Leetaru et al.Consolidated the " heartbeat " of Twitter as a concept, even though the social network lacks a heart that acts as a mechanical bomb, nor does it have a fluid to take from one side to other.
The concept of " latency " network, which reports in milliseconds of the time it takes for a signal to go and return to a server, comes from the biological concept defined as the «time between stimulus and the response it produces ”, so that it is also a transnominated concept.
The digital metonyms that we adapt to biology
Precisely speaking of answer, the system of adapting a word to a new environment is bidirectional.In the same way that we have filled the digital world with biological concepts (and not so biological, as we will see continued), we have also filled our lives with digital concepts .
Thus, we compare our brain with a computer or " processor " when we try to explain it in neurology, and we say that these have more or less " memory " depending on how well (or how much) they store what we have previously saved.
We also use cyborg expressions such as «I'm running" without battery "» both when it is our cell phone that runs out of energy and when it is we who are tired.And, in the same way , we say that we are " connected " when our terminals have access to data via WiFi or 4G.
Other digital transnominations far from biology
Most of us, unfortunately, have heard of the viruses .As much of the biological viruses as of the computer " virus ".others are part of life, although they have an important weight in both ecosystems.There are several types of computer " virus " and, interestingly, some of them have metonymic names:
- " Worms ", which have the peculiarity of duplicating themselves (earthworms are hermaphrodites);
- " Trojans ", so called because it acts just like the Achaeans, Daans and Argives who hid inside the Trojan Horse of Homer's epic: going unnoticed and attacking when we let our guard down;
- " Bombs " logics, which, in the same way as physical pumps, act when they are activated by a stimulus.
The " sources " of the data and content have an important weight on the Internet and how the " network " is built, so as in the way we have " navigate " through it.But the sources, or origins of the data, have no relation to the springs that give them names and that make water sprout from the ground, nor the Internet It is physically navigable or has a mesh shape to catch fish, however, we use these names because we find a relationship between both concepts.
There are hundreds of other examples of how the language is permeable , and how the previous culture ends up giving rise to technological or scientific names.The name the physical particle " quark "comes from a poem by Joyce, and the" goldilocks zone "that makes life in the space of a fairy tale easier.
The biological terms give rise to transsominated digital and and technological concepts; and the digital world in turn ends up naming other concepts that have nothing to do with it.Language, in the information age, has changed more than ever, and intends to continue doing so.
Images | iStock/laremenko, iStock/nilsz, Daniel Schwen (CC BY-SA 4.0), iStock/dinosmichail
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