interesting x-post

Mike Cole (mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Thu, 10 Sep 1998 10:14:04 -0700 (PDT)

>From rre who-is-at lists.gseis.ucla.edu Wed Sep 9 21:23:56 1998
[There have been a few pieces circulating on the net recently about
phrases such as "My computer." Here's a piece on pronouns and interactivity
that Geoff Nunberg did as one of his regular lanugage features on
the radio program "Fresh Air" on NPR. It caputures, I think, a little
more of what is going on.--p]

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>From: nunberg who-is-at parc.xerox.com (Geoff Nunberg)

Every once in a while my eight-year-old daughter Sophie comes up to
me when I'm working and puts her arm around me in a transparently
insincere display of affection, then walks away giggling. I know
this trick, and as soon as she's gone, I pat my back looking for a
post-it that says something like "I'm a knucklehead." It's funny --
you'd think that pronoun "I" wouldn't mean anything if I didn't put
it there myself, but somehow it makes me implicit in the utterance.
She's visited a small indignity on me, and we both know it.

This is about the most powerful magic you can work with writing,
putting a first-person pronoun into somebody else's mouth. It was
probably no more than a couple of weeks after the invention of
cuneiform in Sumer five millennia ago that some scribe had the idea
of pressing the characters for "kick me" on a clay tablet and
fastening it to the back of the robes of some passing priest.

But the game didn't really come into its own until recent times, as
writing spread to every aspect of our lives. Buttons, t-shirts,
bumper stickers, magazine inserts, credit agreements -- all of them
full of first-person pronouns that other people have obligingly
fashioned for our use. "I heart SF." "My grandmother went to Hawaii
and all I got was this lousy t-shirt." "Bill me now." Most of these
we tack on more-or-less willingly, but some of them just come with
the job. You have to feel for those drivers who roll around all day
in company vans with stickers on the bumpers that say: "How am I
driving? Call 555-1234." It's just a sophisticated version of the
"kick me" game, where the object is to make the driver a party to
the message. I don't know who came up with this idea, but I'll give
you odds the word "ownership" came into the conversation somewhere.
As in, "McNally, we want you to feel a sense of ownership about your
turn signals." The people who design new technologies were quick to
catch on to this manoeuver. You log in to one of the Web index
services and there's a page labeled "my Yahoo" or "my Excite" where
you can set your own interest profile. You turn on your PC and you
see a little icon on Windows desktop that's labelled "my computer."
The first time I saw this I couldn't figure it out. Who did that
"my" refer to -- Bill Gates? It was a second before I realized it
was just Microsoft's way of trying to provide me with a proprietary
feeling about my file directories.

In a way this is the biggest breakthrough in pronoun control since
Sumer. It isn't like the "How am I driving?" bumper sticker, where
the company that owns the truck is talking through the driver's
voice to the other people on the road. Here you have Microsoft or
Yahoo supplying both ends of the conversation, referring to the user
with "my" at the same time they're referring to themselves with
"we." It's like watching a video game in demo mode, where the
software makes all your moves for you.

That's what a lot of interactivity seems to come down to, on-line or
off. It's the same story whether you're consulting a Web page,
filling out a customer satisfaction survey, or trying to find out
your Visa balance over a telephone voice menu. In the end the
channel is always a lot wider one way than the other: they download
pages, you upload clicks. Those first person pronouns may give the
illusion of conversation, but people are pretty jaded by now --
after all, they've been on to this game since they were eight.
However it's tricked out, it's still a menu-driven world. We aren't
deceived when a friendly waiter asks us how we want our salad.
We know that there are only three choices, Russian, French, or oil
and vinegar.