Someone on the Interaction Designers email list noted the divergence in pronunciation of RFIDs, which industry people tend to pronounce as an acronym (pronouncing each letter) and the parallel-universe term "Arphids" (sort of like running the pronunciation of the letters together to form a word)—this pronunciation is primarily being spread by Bruce Sterling in his extensive (and great) work on the social and cultural implications of the technology. (For the record, I was in the latter camp until I watched a video of Sterling riffing on Arphids, linked in this earlier post on Datacloud.)
Seems like a trivial issue, but (as the poster on the ID list noted) when you Google the two terms, it's like you're entering two different worlds: one filled with tech industry reps and manufacturers (the RFID cloud) and one filled with designers, writers, and social theorists. Specialized fields frequently construct articulations of terms that vary (sometimes wildly) with popular articulations of the same term—think "rhetoric," or "discourse," or, for that matter, "articulation"—but it's interesting to watch the emergence of differing articulations in two, slightly overlapping communities. And in this case, the worldviews and foundational assumptions in each group vary in significant ways that are actively competing over different versions of the future—in essentially different languages.
Google search on "RFIDs"
Google search on "arphids"
Sort of like people with different dialects of the same language: as the dialects diverge, communication among the dialects becomes more and more difficult.
[via Interaction Design list]
Posted by johndanseven at May 16, 2006 07:34 PM