Re: <nettime> the usage of network

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>]

It's marketoid-speak, naming things after wishful thinking, after the promised
result, to make them more sellable. In case of businesses purporting to enable
people to connect, it makes marketing sense to call their customers
collectively with the name that suggests that they already *have* connected, as
to entice more audience and newcomers, who hope that they will "connect",
become a part ("20,334,344 alreaady connected"), and eventually get laid.

The actual network part of social networking part probably consists of a very
sparce matrix of two or few member sets.

> It seems to me that I hear more and more people using the word network to
> describe groups of things that aren't necessarilly organized as networks.
> This seems especially true of people using the phrase
> "social network" who are often just talking about
> groups of people which may have little or no interconnection.
> 
> I'm no expert on this (or anything else), and I've no desire to police
> language. I just wonder if the word will mean something quite different
> to most people by the end of my life. That's likely just what words do.
> 
> -Jon


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