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Computing’s Countercultural Connection

June 9, 2005, 9:55 am

Today, computer science isn’t the most glamorous of studies. But the field once made surprisingly close bedfellows with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. In What the Dormouse Said, a new book that traces the roots of the personal computing industry, John Markoff points out that many of the pioneers of modern computing were closely linked with the counterculture of the 1960s. (American Scientist)

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7 Responses to Computing’s Countercultural Connection

russhunt - November 18, 2011 at 10:17 am

This _is_ the _Chronicle of Higher Education_, isn’t it? Not _USA Today_? Do we need to so archly be cute about whether anybody knows what “phenomenology” is?

More seriously, the Williams article has been important to me since it was written. What I find most fascinating, however; is that the list of the intentionally buried errors in it was never compiled, so you’re on your own finding them. It’s brilliance is that it demonstrates what its arguing, that most people never even notice the errors it slides past.

(I count four in that. Maybe there are some I missed.)

dank48 - November 18, 2011 at 12:36 pm

Thanks, Mr. Metcalf, for this stab from the past. I remember this article being passed around, in photocopied form, back when most desks were computer-free zones, at Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing–gone but not forgotten. It’s a bracing look at what some of us do for a living.

It occurs to me that the need some feel for an ultimate “authority” in such matters, whether it’s Strunk, White, Fowler, Zinsser, Evans, or whoever, is (ahem) not obviously unlike the need some feel for an ultimate “authority” in other matters, whether it’s the Torah, the New Testament, the Qur’an, or whatever. It seems to me that at some point one is in danger of going beyond the search for reliable guidance, which is reasonable enough, into the search for an excuse for not thinking at all.

It also has something to do with the will to power. The hardest kind of power to attain, of course, is power over oneself. Most of us settle for the easier, cheaper kind: power, of whatever kind, over others. We notice the speck of, say, “that”/”which” in others’ eyes and overlook the log of self-deluded perfectionism in our own.

In A Civil Tongue, his second book on language, Edwin Newman had the humility to quote a reader’s comment on a solecism he had committed in his first, Strictly Speaking. The reader cited his “She we have declared the winner . . .” as evidence not only that English was dying, but “that I would be in at the kill.” We need more of that attitude.

J. Everett R. - November 18, 2011 at 1:20 pm

My first experience with this article, and even before I’m finished, I’m thrilled to have found it. Perhaps Williams’s target overall, I think these ardent language critics he refers to assume they’re viewing language through a magnifying glass, but from the other side it comes off as a gilded monocle.

marklarson - November 18, 2011 at 3:49 pm

for more related “expertise” on usage errors, see: greattypohunt.com and a book by that title…

11274135 - November 18, 2011 at 6:12 pm

We miss Joe.

jeff_winger - November 21, 2011 at 9:41 am

Thank you.
You’ve done the world of CaGEd a treat service.

David Cantor - November 25, 2011 at 8:34 am

I would love to read the article, but only the first page is available to the general public.